Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong has some big ideas in healthcare, like a vision of a fully connected ecosystem that truly empowers patients to make informed choices about their own care, aided by supercomputers to crunch all the data, including highly complex genomic information. And he’s not afraid to toot his own horn every once in a while.
“We’ve created the Google of genome mapping,” Soon-Shiong, the multibillionaire entrepreneur behind the still-somewhat-mysterious NantHealth and parent company NantWorks, said Monday at the American Telemedicine Association annual meeting in Los Angeles.
Soon-Shiong explained that as NantHealth builds out its Clinical Operating System — launched in February 2014 with $1 billion behind it — clinicians will be able to browse through an entire genome on a mobile device, through the cloud, and search base genomes to find specific abnormalities that might point to personalized treatments of cancer or other serious diseases. The goal, he said, is to reach “nirvana of coordinated delivery of care.”
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Soon-Shiong said that the future of healthcare is in predictive modeling, with technology that can measure physiology and pathology not just at the genetic level, but down to specific proteins.
That cannot happen, though, unless the industry addresses what he called the “chasm” of siloed data. “We can’t have medical bridges to nowhere where there’s no interoperability anywhere,” Soon-Shiong said. Payment mechanisms also need to change to encourage better outcomes, not more procedures, he added.
The idea behind the Clinical Operating System, or cOS, is to integrate every medical record of a given patient with financial, operational, lab, imaging, genomic and pharmacy data, as well as vital signs from wearable monitors. Culver City, Calif.-based NantHealth intends to capture most of this data, not just aggregate it from organizational health IT systems, Soon-Shiong said.
The renowned surgeon and researcher started showing off gadgets, first demonstrating GlowCaps, a smart pill bottle he acquired in 2011 and later rolled into NantHealth. His phone rang on stage to show that he opened the bottle during a predetermined window for taking a dosage. “We now know in real time if you’ve taken your medication,” Soon-Shiong said.
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Next, Soon-Shiong showed off a wireless appliance he called a “next-generation set-top box” to manage smart medical devices patients’ homes. “We’re working with Verizon as well as AT&T to deploy these boxes into the home,” Soon-Shiong reported.
After discussing and illustrating with video captured through a microscope how targeted therapies kill tumors, Soon-Shiong talked about how complex a disease cancer can be. “Every cancer cell has thousands of mutations, thousands of signatures,” he said.
With this in mind, NantHealth created a cloud-based supercomputing network to compress the time it takes to analyze a genome sequence and quickly identify each patient’s unique cancer antigen. NantHealth has claimed that its platform can crunch genome data in as little 47 seconds, though that figure has been disputed.
Soon-Shiong also previewed NantPorter, a forthcoming hard drive-sized device that stores patient records, including genomic data and medical images, and communicates over a blazing-fast wireless connection of as much as 6 gigabits per second. “Telemedicine of the future is the cloud in your pocket,” Soon-Shiong said.
While so many personal health records and other patient-controlled storage mechanisms have failed to excited consumers or clinicians, Soon-Shiong told MedCity News that the speed and comprehensiveness of NantPorter would sets this product apart. We will have more on that in a few days.
