Interview with Vivante Health CEO Bill Snyder

The physical and mental toll of digestive diseases is often under-appreciated. Bill Snyder, CEO of Vivante Health shares how his  personal experiences fueled his mission to tackle digestive health head-on, leading him to launch innovative digital gut health programs through Vivante Health. 

Vivante is leveraging technology, data, and artificial intelligence  to revolutionize digestive healthcare. Vivante creates personalized care platforms by leveraging member-provided  and third-party data. The responsible application of AI, in particular, holds the promise of a seismic shift in patient care. 

Bill provides details on Vivante Health's impressive growth and unwavering commitment to elevate the digestive health of its members. Snyder’s leadership ethos, honed at Humana, has been instrumental in cultivating a strong leadership team at Vivante Health. With recent partnerships with health plans and self-insured employers, and a successful funding round under their belt, they have ambitious expansion plans on the horizon. 

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Host David E. Williams is president of healthcare strategy consulting firm Health Business Group.

Episodes through March 2025 were produced by Dafna Williams.

Transcript

0:00:11 - David Williams
Digestive disease is a major cost driver for employers. Abdominal pain is the top reason for ER admissions, GI conditions are the second biggest reason that people miss work, and the cost of care for a person with digestive disease is higher than for diabetes or treatment-resistant depression. His guest, bill Snyder, is CEO of Vivante Health, which offers the GI-thrived digital gut health program that improves care and saves money. Vivante must be doing something right, because they just raised a $31 million series B despite the tough funding environment. 

Hi everyone, I'm David Williams, president of Strategy Consulting Firm Health Business Group and host of the Health Biz podcast, a weekly show where I interview top health care leaders about their lives and careers. If you like this show, please subscribe and leave a review. Bill, welcome to the Health Biz podcast, david. Thanks so much for having me on. I appreciate being here. Yeah, it's my great pleasure. So let's talk a little bit about your background, your upbringing, before we get into talking about what you're doing today. What was your childhood like and any particular childhood influences that have stuck with you through your career. 

0:01:15 - Bill Snyder
Yeah, really good question. So I was born in Carlisle Massachusetts but really grew up in New Jersey to loving parents and had a great older brother and younger sister, and my parents were big influences for me. They always focused on both health so maintaining good physical and mental health, but also focusing on problem solving. So identifying big problems and figuring out how to fix them was kind of a big mantra in our household growing up. 

0:01:42 - David Williams
That sounds good. Now, how did you decide where to go to college and what was that experience like? 

0:01:48 - Bill Snyder
Yeah, so I went from New Jersey to Nashville, Tennessee, to Vanderbilt for my undergraduate degree. For me, I knew I wanted to go to a top tier school that was competitive but also had the opportunity to grow and take unique courses, and so that was an easy decision for me with Vanderbilt, and I really liked their focus on health care, because that was always something that I was interested in from an early age. 

0:02:13 - David Williams
And then did you work for a while before going to Kellogg, or was that straight out of college? 

0:02:17 - Bill Snyder
I did. I worked for a while. I actually did the leadership rotational program at Humana right out of college, and so I was able to really understand the business of health care and got exposed to kind of all facets of health care and then went back to get my MBA at Kellogg and I did that on the weekends, so did that program while I was still working at Humana. 

0:02:37 - David Williams
Got it. I saw you were at Humana for a dozen years, so what was the progression like there? 

0:02:42 - Bill Snyder
Yeah, Humana was a great organization to work with and I learned a lot, and for me my big thing was I'll go wherever the opportunity was, so I moved a lot with them. I was in Louisville, Austin, Texas, Chicago, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Tennessee, back to Chicago, all with Humana. And what was great is I really got to see different aspects of the health care ecosystem and really developed a lot there and learned a lot about things like working with providers, things like thinking about the mind of the member and the consumer and really trying to help fix health care. 

0:03:18 - David Williams
So you went from H to V, but not straight to Vivante, as I saw a Verta somewhere in the middle. What was Verta? 

0:03:25 - Bill Snyder
Yeah, so Verta is a great organization who works with individuals who suffer from type 2 diabetes, and so they're now based in Denver, but we're based in San Francisco at the time and so I went to that organization, was a early employee there and helped commercialize the solution and really spent a lot of time on the health plans and developing relationships with health plans and developing the products to work within the healthcare ecosystem and and so great great team there who I still keep in touch with today. We're doing great things. 

0:03:59 - David Williams
Oh, that's good. So then you were had, you know, like the big company. It's more of a startup. And then on to Vivante health and I wonder how did you get interested in the company? It was just a one of those LinkedIn things where the recruiter said that's like the perfect match and you get to go, or how Is what was the evolution like? 

0:04:13 - Bill Snyder
Yeah, so the the evolution of the business is pretty unique. I was recruited to a prior company from some some investors and I was very interested in the GI space from family members and friends who I had suffered, seen suffer from chronic digestive conditions, and so I worked with this previous organization that was focused on digestive and also looking at a couple other areas, and we actually I Founded a new company in 2021 and bought out the assets of the previous company of Vivante, and so that was kind of the transition. So this is the this new Vivantee. I found it in 2021, but but the interest in the GI space had really been about the big scale, the problem, the opportunity and the patient experience that I had witnessed firsthand with loved ones who had been through these conditions. I saw that had an impact on their physical health, their mental health and their emotional well-being. So I knew that this was a big problem, that that I knew that we could positively impact so was the? 

0:05:18 - David Williams
Was the kind of the sequence that you knew people that had these digestive issues. You've helped them then you then you discovered, hey, well, that's actually a big Industry, or was it that you had that happening on one side? You're looking at opportunities on the other and you realized, hey, there's actually a crossover of these. Like where was the realization from? Because it's not the most obvious, even though you know now we laid out the statistics, but it's like not the first thing that comes to people's mind typically. 

0:05:40 - Bill Snyder
Yeah, no way. That is a good question. It was definitely the crossover. So the, the previous organization that I had joined, the founder, had seen, hey, this is a massive problem by the numbers perspective and, and then for me, I knew that this was an area that I was really interested in, wanted to focus on, and so it was kind of a really, really solid match from a timing perspective. And then during the evolution of that organization, which which brought me to founding the new vivante in 2021 and buying out the remaining assets of the previous company, I think the idea was, hey, there's something that we can do in a different way new mission, new vision, new team, new product and that's really what we launched in 21 with the fact, with our series a, with the backing of some great investors, and that's really where we got Hyper-focused and we're able to really grow this organization, impact the lives of a lot of people across the country. 

0:06:37 - David Williams
She was really exciting gut health is pretty broad in terms of the types of conditions and some of them range from just like a mild, occasional in the way it's, to really life-changing, even life-ending, and I know it's often an issue for those of the most serious conditions to actually get it diagnosed properly At the beginning. And I'm wondering you know how you think about the range of conditions that you deal with or how to think about that landscape in general for gut? 

0:07:05 - Bill Snyder
health. Yeah, I think that's a really important point and, dave, you also mentioned kind of the fact that not everyone knows how big of a problem this is in terms of scope, and I think part of that is, historically, when large organizations or health plans were looking through their claim sets, they had CPT subgroupers for different condition sets, and digestive health covers really broad categories, just like you said. So those costs would be broken up into different subbuckets and so they were never aggregated together where people would say, hey, this is really flashing red and is a really, really big spend. Now that's changing and people are understanding like boy. There's this big grouping of digestive conditions and it does make up a really big outsized portion of our spend, and so that includes things like ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, irritable bowel syndrome, GERD, but it's also a lot of claims that are driven from people that might be symptomatic but not yet diagnosed, and so that's a really key part of the solution that we built, because we do take an all comers approach. 

We work with organizations and sometimes they say, hey, are we going to work with those that are diagnosed? And yes, we absolutely will. But we also have this big patient population that are suffering in silence, that are in pain. They have all these, these symptoms, but they aren't able to get a diagnosis for one reason or another. Sometimes it's access issues, sometimes it's difficult to go in and talk about some of the things that are happening. Sometimes it's they've seen a number of doctors and don't have a formal diagnosis, and so we see kind of the full spectrum of individuals who are symptomatic but but haven't been to a doctor in a couple years, all the way to people who have been diagnosed, have been taking a medication and working with a provider for years but are looking to optimize their care in between visits. And so that's important to us to be able to serve up a solution to everyone that ranges from their condition and from their symptoms. 

0:08:56 - David Williams
So I have this intuition, and maybe you can help me to validate it or not that gut health is a sort of thing that's particularly well suited for digital. I'm getting the sense, because there's sometimes vague symptoms over different time periods. It's hard to talk about. It's a variety of things. Is that the case? Is it a good one for digital, or is it just the average? I think? 

0:09:15 - Bill Snyder
it is one of the biggest opportunities in terms of digital, and it's for a couple of the reasons that you just mentioned. You know it is this massive population that range in terms of the impact that these conditions and or symptoms are having. And then the other piece is when you look at the patient journey, when you think about people who suffer from these conditions and I've talked about, sometimes there's access issues. Sometimes they don't really want to talk about what's going on in the bathroom, so they feel isolated, they feel alone. The other thing is that with a lot of these conditions, sometimes it's a diagnosis by elimination, so lots of doctor visits to figure out what's going on, and so that last piece is really a data problem in many cases, and so from a digital intervention, you can provide people immediate access, you can provide them the comfort and the confidentiality of having a remote care team that can be open and be there for them at any point in time, and then you can also aggregate data and look at patterns and start to understand and eventually predict the onset and progression of these conditions. 

And so I think that for us, we look at this as a huge opportunity in terms of a digital health intervention. And what I'll tell you is we're seeing that within the care ecosystem. We're seeing the providers, because what we say is we want to be additive to the care ecosystem. We want to work with brick and mortar providers because they do incredible work, and what we want to do is optimize that triage process, help give people immediate care, identify people that are at high risk and say, hey, you know, you really need to be going into the brick and mortar. You need some specific types of testing that can only be supplied within a brick and mortar setting. So we think that there's just this massive opportunity. So, in terms of when I think about conditions that can really benefit from a digital intervention, I think digestive health is one of the top, if not the top. 

0:11:13 - David Williams
Got it. So you partly started to answer my next question already. Clearly, with the venture-backed company, you're usually trying to scale technology pretty fast and, at the same time, I think what we've learned in digital health is that you can't completely do a technology. You need to bring in some coaches or care team or whatever you just mentioned. Maybe this is your key as you're working with physician practices, but since maybe you also have some care teams and I'm wondering how do you combine the care teams and technology and get the impact that you want but also have that scalability? 

0:11:48 - Bill Snyder
Yeah, 100% in terms of figuring out that balance of technology and then the people, the human-led approach. And so for us at Vivante, I think about scalable technology something that we've built that I think is a big differentiator for us is largely about the intake, and so it's a very simple intake process. We use the data that's provided by the member. We can also use third-party data as well, but it continues to create an evolving picture. 

For us, it's not a one-time thing. We're always learning about the member as we're working with them, and we talked about how there's all these different conditions within this kind of umbrella of digestive health. So imagine somebody coming into us saying, hey, I've been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, I'm taking a specific medication, I'm working with a GI doc, but I'm having these symptoms and so I'm looking for some support in between visits. That person, of course, needs something completely different than someone who comes in and says, hey, I haven't seen a doctor in 12 months and, by the way, I've been having abdominal pain and chronic gas and bloating and I'm not sure what's going on. And so, for that reason, what we've developed is a platform that's dynamic, based upon the needs of each member. 

So once we take that intake, we build an evidence-based clinical pathway based upon how they're presenting what condition, what symptom and what needs they have out of the solution. So that's really the technology aspect and where we can really scale in terms of optimizing the triage. But we're a human-led solution. We know that human contact and care needs to be delivered by people, and so, for us, we're leveraging our team of registered dieticians and health coaches and we have just announced that now we're offering full-stack virtual care, which means we've also got gastroenterologists and internal medicine specialists who are providing that care as well. And so, for us, it's leveraging the technology where we can for pattern recognition and for quick intakes, but our care is always gonna be delivered by a human team. 

0:13:48 - David Williams
Got it. So you mentioned a lot about data. We haven't spoken so far about artificial intelligence, and that's become a big topic in the last few years, and even particularly this year, and I'm wondering how you have incorporated AI so far and what is the potential of AI in your space. 

0:14:07 - Bill Snyder
Yeah, I think there's great potential for AI in digital health, and we're utilizing it today, and we are very specific in how we're utilizing it because I think that's really important For us. 

When we think about AI, we're thinking about pattern recognition, we're thinking about diagnostic labeling, we're thinking about how do we get information into the hands of our care team so that they can make informed clinical decisions, and so it's almost think of it as like the back office work where we're able to lighten the load process that information more quickly and group it in a way that shows up and is easy for our care team members to see, recognize and then evaluate. 

But it's our care team who are ultimately making those clinical decisions and who are designing the care model. And I think that's really important because I think there's great opportunity here, but it needs to be done in a very responsible way that keeps patient safety and data security at the forefront, and that's something that we talk about every day as, first and foremost, we focus on the care of our members. So it's optimizing care, it's improving symptoms, it's making sure that they have the absolute best clinical care and then, second, it's keeping a very high level of focus on data security and so for us, we're high trust certified, we're SOP2 certified, which is pretty rare for a company at our stage, but we take that data security very seriously. So I think, huge opportunity with the use of AI. I think for us what we think about it is more kind of that back office work that we can help automate and that provides us the opportunity to give our care team members all the information they need to make clinical decisions. 

0:15:50 - David Williams
Great. Well, you know that high trust certification in particular is challenging to attain and to maintain, but also a real stamp of approval for when you're working with different partners and should make the patients comfortable as well. I know that it's difficult actually for patients to assess who's secure and who isn't, but it's becoming increasingly. To the extent that they can, it will be a deciding factor of whether they want to engage with you. So congratulations on that, thank you. 

0:16:21 - Bill Snyder
Yeah, thank you very much. I appreciate it. 

0:16:23 - David Williams
Now I mentioned upfront about how you must be doing something right because you just raised a sizable series B. Now, you know, $31 million isn't what it used to be with inflation and nonetheless that is a sizable amount and right now is a difficult time. In general, you know, there's not that many series Bs being announced in of that size. So what is it? You know, how did you get yourself into that spot and kind of, what are you doing with this next tranche of funds? 

0:16:52 - Bill Snyder
Yeah, yeah, we are really excited. You know we have incredible partners. You know our round was led by Mercado partners and also new capital from help, countless capital with a lot of our existing Investors who also participated, who have been phenomenal partners to us along the way, and so For us, we were really fortunate. We were oversubscribed from the round. We had a competitive bid process and I think For us, that was driven by the recognition that this is a massive market. We've got incredible market product market fit Because we are working well within the ecosystem. 

So the providers are supportive, the health plans are supportive and our members absolutely love the solution that we're bringing to them. We have proven outcomes at scale. So we're showing those reductions and symptoms. We're showing hard-cost savings. We're showing reduction, emergency room visits, reduction and duplicative doctor visits, improvement in things like medication adherence. So it's all. It's a combination of all those things coming together. And then I think you know the last two things that have really set us apart is the focus on innovation in terms of how we're using our technology as a scalable solution, and then our partnerships on the distribution channel we have. We're working with a number of health plans, some that have been yet to be announced that have, that we're entering into national partnerships with where they really evaluated the solution, evaluated our outcomes. Instead, boy, we really want to bring this national to our members, which is really exciting and, I think, a really strong vote of confidence in terms of what we're doing and so you kind of preempted me here. 

0:18:30 - David Williams
But you know, are the customers, are your customers, health plans, self-insured employers, who's the? Who pays the bills? 

0:18:37 - Bill Snyder
Yeah, yeah. So for us it's. It is a business-to-business-to-consumer model, so we're selling to large self-funded employers and to health plans, and so we've got great partners from Self-insured employers standpoint. You know, we've got great benefit leaders who have seen the need and implemented us across their employee populations, which is really exciting. And then for the health plan work, as I mentioned, that's a big, great partnership and distribution opportunity for us and again, just another kind of vote of confidence of them saying, hey, we're gonna take a deep look at this from a clinical standpoint, from an analytic standpoint, from the data security standpoint, and and we're really seeing a lot of success there. It's exciting. 

0:19:20 - David Williams
So gut health is certainly a big issue For for employers, as we talked about up front, but it's not the only one. You know here about I did a Podcast the other day was that, you know, oncology is the number one concern. And then there's, you know, opioids, and there's Orthopedics, or, you know, musculoskeletal are all are all big and not to say that they, they aren't there's, you know there's. I Lose track. I used to think there were two trillion and spending and three trillion, maybe four, maybe five if I didn't look. But you know there's trillions of dollars, so there's plenty of room for hundred, you know, multi hundred billion dollar markets in there. But From an employer standpoint, do they want to have things that are multiple solutions, just to even take obviously very different by oncology, musculoskeletal, gut health or do you ultimately need a vision where you're going beyond one and being sort of like the overall approach? 

0:20:10 - Bill Snyder
Yeah, I think so for us. When we think about digestive health, I think what's interesting is like you look at a lot of the solutions and I always talk about the hub and spoke model and you see a lot of organizations that are focusing on a specific area and then they're thinking about how do I get into another aspect of health care? I think what's unique about digestive health is that it is at the center of everything that we do. It's highly correlated with a whole host of other conditions, including things like type 2 diabetes, things like mental health, things like cancer even MSK claims inflammation of the joints. So when you think about digestive health, it's so highly correlated and at the center of everything we do. 

So I think we are having positive impact in other areas as well. That always provides us the opportunity to move into those areas, but it's not part of our plan today. Today, we are extremely focused on helping people with their digestive symptoms and conditions, and then we're also working with third parties and aggregators, like accolade and virgin pulse, to make sure that we're fitting into that existing ecosystem. And then the same with our health plan relationships. You know, that is, we're looking to integrate into their offerings so that we can really be part of the solution and not just an add-on for a specific set of conditions. 

0:21:25 - David Williams
Got it Now we talked a lot about. You know how you're bolstering your infrastructure, your partnerships, product and so on. When you're growing the company at this rate, you're also going to be building your leadership team as well, and what has that experience been like and what have you brought from you know your prior experience, in particularly at Humana, in terms of scaling up and having a larger leadership group. 

0:21:47 - Bill Snyder
Yeah. So I'm really fortunate We've got an incredible leadership team and that's just across the board, from our C-suite and across the organization. I think at Vivante one of the things that we've done really, really well is a focus on hiring and a focus on development coaching for our team members, and so, again, I'm just really fortunate that the team that we have absolutely incredible. They're innovative, they're also highly structured and they're always putting their members first, so they're always thinking about how can we improve the experience for the member that we're serving. 

I would say, you know, from a scaling perspective, I learned a lot at Humana in terms of how to build and maintain large organizations, and so that training early on has really helped me to think about personnel development and to put in process that I think a lot of early-stage companies maybe don't think as much about, and so when you implement a process early on, you build that muscle, and so I think for us, what's great is a lot of times when people come into the organization. We've heard a lot of our employees and team members say, wow, you guys, you guys feel like a much larger organization just in terms of the educational content and how you bring somebody into the organization. So that's really important to us and I think that you know we've got a lot of growing to do, but the growth has been really effective and it's all about the people that we bring on Great. 

0:23:15 - David Williams
So the last question is about any books that you might have been reading lately, anything that you recommend, or always say. Anything you recommend to avoid. 

0:23:26 - Bill Snyder
That's a good question. So I have an eight-year-old and a five-year-old, so a lot of my books these days are reading books at night, and so that's the gamut. The fun fact that I'll share is what I've been. You asked about AI. I've been utilizing chat GPT to create bedtime stories for my kids, so that's something I highly recommend for any parents is to leverage the chat GPT to build the story for your kids, because it's pretty incredible. And then, in terms of the last book I read, I tend to switch between business-focused books and pleasure books. So the last one was a pleasure book and it was the book Band of Brothers, which they also made an HBO series about, but it follows an incredible group of young men during World War II. So I highly recommend that and none that I can think of to avoid. 

0:24:19 - David Williams
Yeah, that's okay too. 

I don't want to piss off any authors, you know it's rarely do people take me up on that one, although from time to time they'll say I started this one, that was a stinker, so those are good. Well, bill Snyder, ceo of Vivante Health. Thank you so much for joining me today on the Health Biz podcast. Thank you so much for having me, david. It was a pleasure You've been listening to the Health Biz podcast with me, david Williams, president of Health Business Group. I conduct in-depth interviews with leaders in healthcare, business and policy. If you like what you hear, go ahead and subscribe on your favorite service. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe on your second and third favorite services as well. There's more good stuff to come and you won't want to miss an episode. If your organization is seeking strategy consulting services in healthcare, check out our website, healthbusinessgroupcom.