The rising popularity of digital services, artificial intelligence, and weight loss drugs are paving the way for various concerns in the healthcare space. Yahoo Finance Senior Health Reporter Anjalee Khemlani spoke with some of the top health executives at the 2023 HLTH Conference in Las Vegas to gain insights into where these new frontiers for healthcare will lead and what that means for the patient experience.
Top interviews include:
0:35 — 1:48 Dr. Vineeta Agarwal, Andreessen Horowitz General Partner
2:09 — 3:17 Dr. Amy Abernathy, Verily Chief Medical Officer
3:41 — 5:40 Neil Lindsay, Amazon (AMZN) Health Services SVP
6:03 — 7:07 Dr. Patrick Carrol, Hims & Hers (HIMS) Chief Medical Officer
7:29 — 8:08 Dr. Jon Wigneswaran, Walmart (WMT) Chief Medical Officer
For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.
Video Transcript
[AUDIO LOGO]
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live. I'm senior health reporter Angela Khemlani. And I just came back from the health conference in Las Vegas, which has grown every year, signaling the importance that digital health and AI are going to be playing in our future health care. I spoke to a number of experts who told me that investors and founders are really struggling with trying to figure out where the next big bet is.
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To that end, Vineeta Agarwal, Andreessen Horowitz's general partner talked to me about the role that medical experts are going to play in that role. Listen to what she had to say.
VINEETA AGARWAL: We're looking at an overstretched health care workforce. I'm a primary care physician myself. The inbox volume that most providers today are receiving from patients who appropriately have an expectation that they will be heard and heard quickly is almost unmanageable. And yet when we look at our national statistics of number of providers per capita or health outcomes on that basis, we fall short. And we don't actually have numerically a provider shortage in this country.
And so we are left with this strange sort of situation and tale of two cities, so to speak, which is that we've got lots of providers and yet we're not achieving the health care outcomes and patient experiences that we want nor the cost reduction that we want. And so bridging those exact two worlds, we think of a host of provider enablement technologies like AI that can be a co-pilot to our providers, that can take administrative burden off of our providers plates, that can interface directly with patients in meaningful ways when providers otherwise wouldn't be able to. And all of those use cases we think are going to be powered by new and next generation AI models in a really impactful way.
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: But how this uncharted territory is going to be regulated by the federal government is still a big question that the industry is plagued with. And so I spoke with Amy Abernethy, the chief medical officer of Verily as well as a former FDA Principal Deputy Commissioner about just how the government has to take a look at that. Listen to what she had to say.
AMY ABERNETHY: FDA has been thinking about this and really trying to build its story of how they're thinking about it for a while now, for example, published an important paper in 2019 around their thinking in AI and ML capabilities. But some of the capabilities that we see now hitting the stage all across the health conference, right, have really started to accelerate the pace of being able to be brought into the health care space. And we're at this interesting place where FDA is trying to in real time develop the point of view of what regulation is going to look like while what I call the speeding train of all of the AI based software medical products are coming down towards this tiny tunnel of regulatory, capability, and scale. And it's to be an important time.
The last thing I'd say is as a tech developer, you know, I think about this from the perspective of, yes, in fact FDA does have the responsibility as a public health agency. And so how do we as tech innovators help with that story as opposed to be afraid of it.
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: But technology isn't the only thing changing health. We all know that Amazon is really making a move into this $4 trillion industry, stoking fears about how exactly it will disrupt the space and how it changes how we access care. I spoke about that with Neil Lindsey, the Senior Vice President of Amazon Health Services. Listen in.
NEIL LINDSAY: Well, our mission is not to disrupt anything. We don't go into anything with the idea that that's a goal. Our goal is to--
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: You should tell everyone that because they're all convinced you're going to disrupt it.
NEIL LINDSAY: Well, we don't have a magic wand. What we do is we look at what are the experiences that need to be improved that we can make a difference in. And know what we're good at is connecting the dots, connecting the dots between people as customers and humans to the products and services they need. We do that in a general sense.
And in health care, the need is the same, right? We need to connect the dots. Remembering also that 60% of everything we sell on Amazon is sold by a third party. So we don't need to do it all ourselves. No, we'll do things first party where we believe we can elevate the experience. So Amazon Pharmacy, One Medical, we believe are elevated experiences where we can take our expertise and make a difference.
When we-- in Amazon we often talk about selection, value, and convenience as key to making things easier. In health care, I've translated that to choice, convenience, and continuity of care, that choice is important because it gives customers agency. One of the things that in a retail environment, customers do have agency. They have informed choice.
Patients don't always feel like they have agency. They don't feel like they have choice. So we need to give them choice. Secondly is convenience. Convenience is key because if it's easy, people will engage. If they engage, they'll get better health outcomes. If they don't, they won't. And the problem is it's hard to engage right now.
If it takes three or four weeks to get an appointment, if you have to line up with 15 other people who are not feeling well at a pharmacy and wait 20 minutes to get your medications, it's not easy. People aren't going to do it. They're just going to not get well. And it's costing us a fortune as an economy.
So-- and then the final point is continuity of care. Ultimately, we all need and deserve that continuity of care that a service like One Medical provides. But to be clear, we're excited by wherever anyone gets their care. There is so much need in health care to make it easier, that we're working hard to do it in whatever way we can. And I celebrate anyone else who's making a difference in making it easier.
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Speaking of making it easier, Wegovy, Novo Nordisk's very popular weight loss drug has taken the world by storm, making a lot easier for people to lose weight. But Hims & Hers is a popular telehealth platform known for its discreet prescription packaging isn't buying into the frenzy. I spoke with the chief medical officer Dr. Patrick Carroll and here's what he explained about why.
PATRICK CARROLL: What we've realized though also with the GLP-1s and GIPs and a direct to consumer model, they're unaffordable. And quite honestly, the supply chain is a mess. Can you even access those? We have real doubts about that. And there are some side effects that are coming out that are concerning.
So we wanted to kind of wait, you know? Slow down a little bit on going right to GLP-1s and GIPs. And so what we decided to do is to bring in an expert to guide us through this bill. We brought in a guy, physician senior vice president of weight management, Craig Premack. He reports to me.
He's built weight management clinics in Arizona. He has experienced. He's a national leader in this. And Craig came to us and said, look, you don't have to double down on GLP-1s and GIPs. There are good generic medications if used appropriately and the appropriate dose, and bundle that with a great education program, that you can have a holistic offering in weight management that is effective and affordable.
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Affordability and Walmart. We know those two go hand in hand. Well, Walmart last week talked about these weight loss drugs and the potential impact on food sales. But I spoke with the chief medical officer Dr. Jon Wigeswaran about the long term effects and what other impacts they expect from these weight loss drugs. Listen in.
JON WIGESWARAN: If you're dealing with people that have significant obesity and they have a risk of a cardiac event and other cardiovascular events, then having medications that reduce weight are really important. So I think on one hand, it's a great option for patients. On the other hand, we're still learning as an industry what these meds are about. So I had a career in pharma before I came to Walmart. And when you have a new medication that you're applying across millions of people, they're going to be things that you don't know.
So I think all in all, great for patients. But I think what we're all trying to learn, and particularly here where we're seeing patients trying to be very cognizant, that we've got to learn more before we do more.
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: And while he didn't exactly address the claims about the impact to food sales we have heard in the past week that those claims may be a little bit overblown, still waiting for more details on the data that Walmart used. But all told, really an interesting field of AI, digital health, and other aspects of the health care system, making it much easier for us today as patients to access the health care system. We'll be keeping an eye on all that and more for the future, of course.