Dr. David Feinberg has served as president and CEO of Danville, Pennsylvania-based Geisinger since 2015. Previously, he was president of UCLA Health System, CEO of UCLA’s hospitals and associate vice chancellor of UCLA Health Sciences.
In a recent phone interview, he chatted about the Geisinger National Precision Health Initiative, the organization’s National Symposium and what’s on the horizon in 2018.
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This exchange has been lightly edited.
Telehealth has been a hot topic in 2017. What has Geisinger been up to in the space?
We’ve done a lot in telehealth. We have an eICU we’ve been operating for a number of years.
At the very other end, we do telepsychiatry and telederm. Because of our footprint, we were a pretty early adapter to telemedicine.
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With telehealth, I think the “tele” should drop off. It’s really just about providing care to people. Our real focus is on access to care. We don’t actually care about the way you access it as long as it’s convenient, easy and low-cost for you as our patient.
Geisinger launched the Geisinger National Precision Health Initiative earlier this year. What was the impetus behind the initiative, and what are its goals going forward?
That one we’re really excited about. Geisinger we think is a couple years ahead in taking pop health genomics and combining it with your EHR to predict what’s going to happen to somebody before it happens.
For our patients, we take a look at your whole exome sequence. We’re able to actually say, “You have this genetic mutation that’s put you at extremely high risk for breast cancer, colon cancer or a bad response to anesthesia.” When we looked at our whole population, it turned out about 4 percent of our people have one of these genetic mutations.
We then let your primary care doctor know. We also notify the patient that they should contact their primary care doctor. We’re also good at making sure the patient contacts the right people in their family so they can get the appropriate intervention. We’ve really saved people’s lives by doing this.
This has all been in partnership with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
We have this opportunity to take this nationally and say to other health systems, “Would you like to join us in this?”
This fall, Geisinger held its National Symposium, which featured various big-name speakers. What interesting insights came out of the event?
We think it was a really successful event. One of the best insights out of it was when we asked every speaker to answer a question: What was your defining moment of when you decided to go into healthcare?
To hear Secretary Clinton, Judy Faulkner, Zeke Emanuel and others talk, it was amazing. There were some themes, such as “I felt I needed to fix the system.” We tried to do it in a conversational style. It was a lot of fun.
If you could instantly solve one of healthcare’s problems, which would it be and why?
I would like to solve the waiting room. I think the waiting room is the worst thing in the world. It’s a concept of people having difficult access to care when they need it. No one’s gotten better in that waiting period.
We have a system that’s so designed around the provider that you wait for them. We need to design the system around that patient or that family. When I say eliminate the waiting room, I’m talking about completely flipping healthcare on its side so it’s really all about the patient and the family.
Every other industry has done it and it’s disrupted the incumbents. You can get a nice car to drive up in three minutes and meet you. With a Kindle, you can get a book in a second. Why aren’t we doing that in healthcare?
What’s on the horizon for Geisinger in 2018?
What we’d like to do in 2018 is this: We would like to do even better than what we’ve just talked about. We now have this ability to not only sequence your DNA, but to sequence your zip code or environment.
We have all this environmental information, genetic information and great IT system. We want to be able to say to our doctors and patients, “We’re going to do anticipatory medicine.” You’ll know your risk before anything happens. We’re going to know you better than Amazon knows you. We’re going to be your trusted guide in life.
Photo: nevarpp, Getty Images
