Enhancing Value-Based Care With Surgical ACOs w/ Caresyntax Co-Founder & CEO, Dennis Kogan | HealthBiz Briefs

Dennis Kogan (Co-Founder & CEO, Caresyntax) discusses how his company empowers surgeons and providers to improve patient outcomes, enhance operational efficiency, and increase profitability with data-driven surgery using AI, automation, and OR analytics.

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CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT DENNIS KOGAN
Dennis Kogan is a Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Caresyntax. He is a Co-Founder and serves as Managing Director & Managing Partner at surgical.ai. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon and Harvard Business School with degrees in information technology, finance, and business administration. He has more than 10 years of experience in financial and strategy consulting in the medical device and IT sectors. He possesses a keen awareness of the impact that new technologies can bring to surgical innovation. He has the vision to expand the CareSyntax product and operations to new heights and new markets.

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Transcript

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Surgery is expensive and the results are highly variable, yet it's rarely the focus of value -based care. Today's guest says the time is right to develop surgical ACOs. Is he right? And what will it take to get there? Welcome to Health Biz Briefs. I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group here with Dennis Kogan, co-founder and CEO of Care Syntax. The company enhances outcomes, efficiency and profit in surgery through AI, automation and analytics. Welcome, Dennis. Thank you, David. Why an accountable care organization for surgery? Surgical ACOs are a model that can help. bring outcomes to the next level, right? At the end of the day, an ACO construct is a way to bring surgeons, providers, and payers together around shared goals. It will enable these counterparties to have a holistic view of surgical quality, risk, and total costs. And we strongly believe as CareSyntex that there is a way to get to the next level of quality while reducing costs using these types of constructs. It sounds good. You know, I think everyone likes the idea of accountable. care being organized. So I hope that you're right on surgery because it's so often an ACO is just used for primary care, which has got a lot of burden on it. It's not necessarily well placed to make the difference that surgery is. So good luck with that. We'll check back. My next question is, what impact is artificial intelligence? What impact will it have on surgery and in what time frame? And is that different in surgery versus health care overall or? Is surgery a special case or is it just the same as what we're doing elsewhere? I don't think surgery is different in terms of having high potential for impact. There may be different use cases. Some of them are very short term. Surgery has a lot of unstructured content and data because it's a real time intervention. You can think about images, videos, medical device, telematics. So the short -term use case that CareSyndex also leverages is to be able to get assistance in structuring, automating, curating, and presenting the right data back to physicians and operational stakeholders and hospitals. And that's very helpful already because it allows you to consume valuable input during the episode. Strategically, there are more proprietary AI models that can be deployed to actually drive prescriptive recommendations around either capacity management or clinical risk stratification that can allow different decision making to take place. That is much more serious and much more mission critical. And so a little time is needed to flesh out these algorithms to have the right level of quality because obviously talking about quote unquote hallucinations, these are not acceptable. That being said, it's only a matter of time. Care Syntax operates around the world. It's really not a US -centered company the way so many other guests are on the show. What's the same versus what's different as you look at different markets? Well, what's same is the focus on improving quality of care for patients and safety of care of patients, especially in surgery being acute. In the US, there's a bit more focus on very different value -based care models. There's a lot more experimentation. as well as operational efficiency focus given a larger for -profit sector. In Europe, there's probably more of a focus on clinical quality and broader incremental changes around quality and safety, and also probably a little more of a monolithic approach given the involvement of governments in funding the health systems. However, at the end of the day, on both continents, physicians and other stakeholders in hospitals or ambulatory surgical centers. Everybody would like to leverage data to get more transparency, deliver safer and more efficient surgical care. Well, that's it for the latest version of the Health Biz Brief. If you like what you hear, check out my Health Biz podcast for a full length interview with Dennis about his life and career. Dennis Kogan, CEO of CareSyntax and co-founder. Thanks for joining me today on Health Biz Briefs. Thank you for having me, David.