This is Scott Becker
with the Beckers Healthcare Podcast.
I'm thrilled today to be joined by a
brilliant healthcare founder.
We're joined today by Eric Martin, and Eric's
the founder and the CEO of AgenTic Healthcare.
He's gonna talk to say about what they're
doing, what they're trying to solve,
the trends he's watching, and a lot more.
Eric, I know you've had a a a
spectacular
career. Can you tell us a little bit
about yourself, your background,
as well as AgenTic Healthcare?
Yeah. Thank you so much, Scott. Really appreciate
you having me on,
and I appreciate all of the, folks that
are, are tuning in. So,
I am a lifetime,
health care guy spanning large academic health systems,
large physician organization,
private equity backed health care companies,
and I've been a part of two different,
health tech venture capital funds.
I will tell you that I was a
very happy, health tech venture capitalist, and I
thought I would be doing that for the
rest of my professional life. But this opportunity
emerged,
and I think, you know, there are these
moments in time where
we kind of get the chills professionally.
And this was one of those times, and
I couldn't not
step in and,
and take advantage of the, of the opportunity.
So,
I'll give you a little bit of that
background. But first, I will say that during
the course of my professional career,
I would say the most important work that
I've done
is being kind of the unofficial
health care navigator
concierge
for thousands and thousands of patients
and families.
Whether I was doing that on behalf of
some provider organization
or simply as a private resource for people
that have had access to me,
yeah, I really came to appreciate
the unbelievable
complexity and
fragmentation and and often frustration of dealing with
The US health care system.
And that's very much kind of the backdrop
for what we are doing at, AgenTic Health
Care. So
a little bit about us. Let's just say
we're a very unusual
start up company.
We have been
quietly
building
some pretty serious deep tech,
and acquiring
the assets of other companies over the course
of the last eighteen months.
It all started,
back, with a meeting
I was having up at NVIDIA
headquarters,
and I had the pleasure,
and I will tell you this is close
to eighteen months ago.
I hardly knew what the word agentic
meant at that time.
NVIDIA
gave me a little bit of a behind
the scenes of what they were investing in
and what was possible
in the realm of building
AI agents
that would support
enterprise players in health care, health systems,
physician organizations,
health insurance companies, and the like, driving efficiency,
dealing with labor gaps,
and I do believe truly hoping to improve
the patient experience.
And in that session we had together,
we asked a question, what would it take
to bring that same level of AI
power
and put that into the hands of patients
and families.
Let them optimize the system
to their benefit, kind of put a wrapper
around all the component parts that make up
The US health care system
and create an army of agents
that could represent those patients,
get work done on their behalf, not just
provide recommendations, but actually do the work,
wait on hold for that representative at the
health plan, help navigate to the appropriate specialist
and the like.
And let's just say that the group was
excited about that vision,
understood the complexity, the challenges, and the like,
over the course of time.
The group of people and organizations,
that we were engaging in this conversation grew
to include people from government,
people from deep tech, and, of course, across
the health care ecosystem.
And,
last year, we decided to incorporate Adjentic health
care. We brought a very large engineering team
together.
And, again, we made, we made some some
acquisitions that,
make us
quickly a vertically integrated
organization.
So that's amazing. And and just so the
audience understands,
yes, you've been a health care investor,
but more than that, you've also worked at
UCLA
and several other health care institutions
in direct
in in in surgery
partners as well. Talk a bit about your
health care background too that weaves into what
you're doing too.
Absolutely. Happy to do that. So it goes
back, quite a long way. I cut my
teeth up at UC San Francisco, actually, in
the managed care department
and, really came to appreciate
the good and the bad of, managed care
and value based care initiatives, here in California
where I'm based.
Learned an incredible amount
and, then spent a lot of time on
the UCLA health campus.
Again, more work in managed care, international
medicine,
and the like, and then eventually moved over
to the cardiovascular
program
and had the great pleasure of working with
what we referred to as the advanced heart
team. So we ran the heart transplant, heart
failure, mechanical circulatory support program, and we had
a vision
for building what would be the greatest heart
institute in the Western United States. Not to
offend any of my friends at at UCLA,
and I still have many friends there.
For whatever reason, that that vision was not
able to be realized on that campus,
but I was able to
partner with my friends at Cedars Sinai
and build the Heart Institute there. I was
the inaugural
executive director of the Heart Institute at Cedars
Sinai,
and they are now among the top two
or three,
in the nation and and very proud of
the work that's done there clinically,
in the research realm and and, of course,
the teaching
mission being supported as well and really jumped
from there,
into the private equity world to help turn
around other health care systems, including the daughters
of charity,
and others and saw kind of the other
side of medicine. I had been in the
ivory tower academic institution,
and now I was seeing what it was
like out in community hospitals,
safety net hospitals,
FQHCs,
you know, a very different type of of,
care delivery,
incredibly important work.
But I think it gave me a really
deep appreciation
for the very different journeys
that our patients and their families
go on across
systems, across geographies, across the socioeconomic
spectrum.
And when we started building agentic health care,
a guiding principle for the team has been
that this
must work just as well for the rich
folks that have access to enormous resources
as much as it does for that single
mom living in a poor neighborhood
facing
more complexity and more challenge
than than, you know, most of us having
this conversation have ever had to tackle.
And,
we're incredibly
proud of the work we've done so far,
and I will say
publicly,
long term, we are committed to making sure
this is available to every
single American, and it's something that we're working
on with our our friends connected to government,
as well.
Thank you. Take a moment, Eric. What are
you most focused on and excited about this
year?
A year or so or eighteen months after
launch, were you most focused and excited this
year?
Yeah. You know,
I will tell you that,
you were just so proud of the team
of of people and organizations that have come
together
around
this, our ability to accelerate the development of
this platform. We've been
we were in this kind of euphoric bubble
of stealth mode where most people didn't know
what was going on. And and, Scott, I
will tell you, this is the first time
we're really speaking to a broad public audience
about what we're doing. And the timing is
perfect
because we are, in fact, about to kick
off
with a large publicly traded
company who will be giving this platform
to their employees
as a benefit.
And not only is it a benefit to
those individuals and their families,
but you can imagine the, and I will
say,
appropriate insights that we can provide back to
the organization
to help them with plan design, benefit design,
really drive efficiency,
and
create a workforce that's more engaged, healthier,
and, and I think cared for in a
way that they haven't been,
before. So incredibly
excited about that. I think we're very fortunate
that the stars are aligning
from a policy standpoint, from what we're seeing
from other kind of big tech companies
in putting a spotlight on consumer
driven health care.
We've talked about it for many, many, many,
many years. I think there have been small
examples
of success here and there,
but it's never come together. We've never had
the technology
at our disposal
to really do this at scale, and I
think we're finally there.
Thank you. Take a second, Eric. You've been
both an investor, but you've also been an
operator in health care and a leader in
health care.
What what advice would you give to emerging
leaders in health care as to how to
deal with artificial intelligence
and how to embrace it?
Fantastic question and,
something I've been spending my time speaking about
really across the country with health system leaders,
health plan leaders,
and the like.
First and foremost,
you gotta keep the patient experience at the
center of strategic decision.
I think some of us, me included, have
the luxury
of
having that be somewhat secondary as we tried
to make sure that we, you know, improved
margin and kept the doors open and made
sure that our programs could continue to build
and whatnot. And we counted on the frontline
teams, the physicians, the nurses, the administrative folks
to really deliver great
patient care down at the front lines. I
think now we really have to think about,
from an infrastructure standpoint,
how we change what we do. And a
part of that requires
leaders,
again, provider and payer,
to challenge some legacy assumptions
that were developed during this pre AI era.
I have been,
I guess, not surprised,
but I'm a little fearful
of what I'm seeing around the country, folks
not fully appreciating
what's coming.
The power of these AI technologies,
is so transformational.
I I just don't think that many organizations
are fully prepared.
And I, you know, I I beg these
these folks to make the investment, bring the
right people and organizations
together as partners, embrace those partnerships. And some
of those partners are gonna seem maybe a
little bit out of the box based on
what we used to do historically
operating these health systems.
But you you gotta become educated, and you
have to bring people and organizations
in who are focused
on delivering the kinds of outcomes
that are going to set up your health
system or your health plan for long term
success. I think those that don't,
are gonna be in some trouble.
Thank you. And and and what does that
look like? Would where do you see the
cascading use cases in AI?
Like, obviously, we're seeing it on the ambient
listening side. We're seeing it on particular analytics.
We're seeing it in revenue cycle.
We're seeing it in a lot of places.
Are there places where you see it transforming
clinical
care, and and where might be some of
those use cases that you expect to see?
Absolutely. And and you've highlighted, you know, the
the first
and
maybe most obvious use cases that have been
embraced.
We already have some good feedback from the
industry on ambient listening and what that means.
Certainly, RCM
always the first department
to take advantage of of new tech because
it's the lifeblood of these organizations.
There is going to be a a growing,
I think, recognition
of what happens
kind of in between the enterprise
representing AI
and the consumer
representing AI.
And there is a certain amount of magic
that can happen when those two
platforms
interact with each other in a coordinated,
in a fine tuned fashion.
I'll give you an example. I I can't
provide too many details, but we were speaking
with a particular,
you know, government
health program,
and we talked about what it meant
for a patient representing
AI agent
to reach out with a request, whether that
was to schedule an appointment, a question about
benefits,
to find out how they can get their
prescribed medication approved or whatnot.
And if the enterprise, that program had
appropriate kind of AI on the other side,
not only can the task
get taken care of
very, very quickly, I think there's a lot
of talk about in the tech world what
we refer to as AI agent to AI
agent protocol.
That when these AI agents meet in the
cloud,
they will understand each other and and be
very, very efficient.
In health care, we're taking it a step
further, and this is a part of what
we're building our platform around. And that is
when, let's say, miss Jones reaches out
to her health system,
And the health system says, oh, we understand
in the moment that miss Jones needs to
have something taken care of.
But that's the same miss Jones who we've
been reaching out to
to talk about her medication adherence, the fact
that she's got an overdue colonoscopy,
the fact that maybe she's got an outstanding
claim.
And there is an opportunity in this moment
when you have these AI representatives, what we
refer to, by the way, as AI advocates,
representing that patient.
That information can be passed from the enterprise
to the patient
in a way that can be translated,
organized, presented at the right time at a
time when we know that patient is engaged,
and the value that can be driven through
that kind of interaction
is incredibly powerful. We've been testing this, again,
somewhat quietly behind the scenes
with small cohorts,
and the
feedback has just been remarkable on both sides
of the house.
So to answer your question more directly,
these institutions
need to move beyond
kind of the individual
functions of ambient listening and some RCM solutions
and really start looking about being a participant
in this, what I refer to as this
action layer
that is now going to kind of wrap
the legacy systems that we've historically been interacting
with as health system leaders, as health plan
leaders, as employers,
and the like.
Fantastic.
Eric, again, AgenTic Healthcare.
Tell me the exact name of the company.
Do I have that right, AgenTic Healthcare?
You have said it, perfectly. And, again, we're
a little bit of an unusual
young company. AgenTic Healthcare
is the parent organization we created.
The patient representing
AI agent platform is actually called Teleport Health,
and that is what we are initially launching
with a series of large employers.
And, ultimately, we'll get this out to all
consumers.
And then we've made acquisitions
of two other companies,
one called Cellfy,
one called TripleBlind.
Cellfy
actually has technology
that lives behind the firewalls of many of
the health information exchanges
in The United States and is the creator
of the Cures Gateway,
named after the twenty first century Cures Act,
giving patients the right to claim
their longitudinal health record. And you can imagine
if we have the ability to bring in
the longitudinal health record for every one of
our members, for every one of our patients,
the ability for the AI
advocate
to be proactive to optimize things on behalf
of the patient,
is supercharged.
So we were really excited to be able
to make that acquisition.
And then triple blind, I won't spend too
much time on. It's a deep tech encryption
technology that provides privacy
beyond HIPAA. We it allows for multiparty compute
without the need for traditional de identification
with greater privacy, greater security,
than seen before. And some very large institutions
and the US government had been involved in,
in its development. So, again, we were just
incredibly fortunate to be in a position to
bring
those assets into Agenstic Healthcare, creating this vertical
integration
and getting us ready to do what we
do at scale and do it in a
safe fashion.
Yeah. Absolutely fascinating. Eric, I wanna thank you
for joining us today in the Becker's Healthcare
podcast.
Congratulations
on what you're doing and continue good luck,
and we're all sort of watching
the cascading transformation of health care through AI,
so it'll be fascinating to watch and keep
an eye on. Thank you so much for
joining us.
Thank you so much, Scott, and really looking
forward to interacting more with you and all
of the folks that I know listen to
your podcast. Those are the partners that are
gonna make this happen.
Thank you so much.