Ideagen Radio
Ideagen Radio
Catalyze Impact Ep. 5:Transforming Healthcare: Terry Myerson on Truveta's Genome Project and Data Innovation
Discover the gripping journey of Terry Myerson, co-founder and CEO of Truveta, as he transitions from a successful career at Microsoft to tackling the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic by founding Truveta. For those eager to understand the future of healthcare, this episode promises a deep dive into how Truveta is revolutionizing the field by partnering with 30 American health systems to harness de-identified data, driving groundbreaking research and enhancing patient care. We unveil the ambitious Truveta Genome Project, a pioneering initiative aiming to merge genetic data with medical records to unlock the mysteries of diseases and forge innovative treatments. At the heart of this endeavor is a commitment to inclusivity, ensuring diverse American communities are well-represented and poised to benefit from these advancements.
Delve into the vital importance of trust and innovation in the handling of healthcare data, as Terry shares his insights on securing data for regulatory-grade decisions. Highlighting AI’s transformative capabilities, we discuss how Truveta processes vast datasets to reshape medical research and patient care. Terry also sheds light on the stringent measures Truveta employs to protect data privacy, including prestigious certifications like ISO 27001, HITRUST and SOC 2, along with adhering to HIPAA standards. Reflecting on his Microsoft experience, Terry emphasizes the power of collaboration within the healthcare ecosystem.
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Learn more about Truveta here: https://www.truveta.com/
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Welcome to IdeaGen TV. Today. I am honored to have with us Terry Myerson, founder and CEO of Truveta. Terry, welcome Thanks for having me. Veda, terry, welcome Thanks for having me. It's great to have you here, terry, on IdeaGen TV, especially with everything that you're doing to change the world. As we launch into this interview for our global audience, would you kindly introduce yourself, and I'd love to hear if you could include your career journey and how it brought you to what you're doing today at Truveta.
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, career journey. Well, I'm co-founder and CEO of Truveta today. My career journey probably the cut to the chase. I spent 21 and a half years at Microsoft. The last decade of that was leading Windows and Surface and xbox, and so I left microsoft in 2018 without really any experience in healthcare or really deep understanding of life sciences and biology. But, you know, I became a real passion and interest of mine and the the pandemic then occurred in 2020. And with the pandemic it became, you know, through collaboration with colleagues that were then at Providence Healthcare.
Speaker 2:It became clear that within healthcare, we don't have the ability to ask or answer basic questions about how to treat a specific patient, do not have a great digital feedback loop on how their medical products, drugs and devices are performing. And from that inspiration and from that defining moment in all of our lives, you know, trivetta was born. You know, a group of health systems you know came together to you know, to found a company where put together a clinical data asset of a scale and clarity that never existed before. You know, since that founding in 2020, we now have 30 American health systems. You know, the de-identified data from all of their care comes to Truvette on a daily basis. It enables the work of the CDC. It enables the work of researchers at Stanford and Duke and many other academic institutions. It's enabling research within the healthcare systems how to best take care of their patients. It's enabling, you know, work within the life sciences. Its fifth year and we're just incredibly excited, you know, to be able to contribute to the world with this incredible data.
Speaker 1:Well, Terry, it is exciting and I recall you and I had a conversation a bit earlier in your journey at Truveta, your journey at Truveta and it's exciting to hear that you recently announced your launch of what holds so much promise that I'd love for you to sort of articulate to our global audience, which is what you refer to as the Truveta Genome Project. Terry, what inspired you to launch this initiative and how do you envision it transforming literally transforming the future of health care and medicine?
Speaker 2:Well. So what Shred has been working on for the last five years is creating this clinical data asset so we understand the safety and efficacy of medical products being used throughout the American healthcare system and we can compare the effectiveness. We can understand if there's any adverse events of the medical products in their use. But there's been something missing that we don't have any core biological data to understand the root causes of these various diseases. And that biological data, that core data, is known as genetic data. It's understanding the genetic sequences that are at the core of our humanity. And we don't have that data because it doesn't exist at any scale associated with our medical outcomes.
Speaker 2:In cancer today we do do some very focused genetic sequencing of tumors so we can understand the right therapies to treat tumors with. But for every other, for every other disease, whether it's obesity, lupus, sickle cell, various rare diseases, you know, any other medical outcome it just would be so insightful to have this biologic data that could help us understand the root causes of these various medical outcomes. And so we had to. What the Trivena Genome Project is doing is working with patients across the US to obtain their consent for their anonymized genetic data to be associated with their medical records for anonymous medical research and we are just so excited about the potential that the insights we're going to find in this to really discover new therapies to be able to prevent the onsets of diseases. We take Alzheimer's and dementia. We really don't know the root cause of why some people have these ailments and other people don't, but with this data we're going to be able to figure it out and that's incredibly exciting.
Speaker 1:You know trivetta genome project that we announced last week that is just incredibly exciting, and so a key focus of the project is actually capturing data that represents the full diversity of the US population. So how does Trivetta ensure that underrepresented communities are included and that their unique health challenges are also addressed here, terry, Well, Trivetta has 30 health care members today.
Speaker 2:You can go to our website at Trivettacom and see the members. They provide care all across the United States and including into, you know, incredibly diverse communities from Alaska to Hawaii to South Central LA, to the Bronx and New York, and in these communities we have incredible diverse populations. And from the care in these incredibly diverse populations we get this incredibly diverse, de-identified or anonymized data which can then be used for this research into how to better take care of those communities or develop new therapies for those communities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so looking ahead, terry, what breakthroughs do you anticipate emerging from this massive initiative, and how will all of these advancements influence global health, in addition to personalizing, in the next decade?
Speaker 2:I mean, there's one story that I find incredible, inspiring.
Speaker 2:There's a very specific, rare form of pediatric deafness and we now have a cure. Regeneron now is a cure for this pediatric deafness where, if you search the Internet, you can find stories of this little girl who received a medicine shortly, you know, as a young child, and she went from being completely deaf to hearing, being able to hear really well within you know, immediately after this therapy. It's an incredible story, and you know that development of that therapy predates today's AI, and what I think is so incredible to think about is now, with today's AI and now we have this data at an scale like never before. We have the tool set, the process, this data like never before, I think we're going to have insights on how to improve the quality of care, improve the cost of care, which will improve the access to care. I just think that this is going to have a profound impact on how we treat the diseases that all of our families and communities face every day. We're going to delay the onset of these diseases and then we're going to cure these diseases.
Speaker 1:You know that's, you know, a bold challenge, and one that's so necessary, obviously with all of the technology and leadership that you're exhibiting. And so what challenges have you faced in scaling Trivetta and gaining those critical industry partnerships, and how have you addressed these challenges, Terry and?
Speaker 2:how have you addressed these challenges, Terry oh gosh? I think the biggest challenge with all of these endeavors is earning trust. Earning the trust of the patient that their data is going to be de-identified. Earning the trust of the healthcare systems that who are stewards of this data for the patient, the data will be kept secure, all the privacy will be there. The trust of regulators the data is can be trusted and you can make regulatory grade decisions with it.
Speaker 2:The trust of the life science community that they can invest in the ai and invest in the data science and make decisions that are the core of their r? D or safety and efficacy for their medical products decisions from this. And so you're really moving at the speed of trust. And it's this incredibly fragile, critical asset that we're building behind this data. We're building and we invest so much in the data quality. We invest in maintaining the provenance of the data and documenting any transformation of this data and third-party audits into the security and privacy and de-identification of this data. And all those investments are there to build trust in trivetta data and as trust gets built into the quality of that trivetta data, we can then make these safety and efficacy decisions. We can invest in the R&D behind this data.
Speaker 1:Well, that trust is critical, especially with what you're dealing with on a daily basis and just the profound impact that you're looking to achieve. And so AI, ai has become ubiquitous within the lexicon in society, and so it's incumbent upon me to ask you, terry, what role is AI playing in Truveta's solutions?
Speaker 2:Well, it's really played two roles, I think one is the AI Truveta is building, and that is we take this incredibly heterogeneous, incredibly complex, incredibly diverse data, which is an incredibly diverse set of heterogeneous formats, and we're building this complete, timely, clean data so you can study yesterday's care data, you study yesterday's care today, build the dashboards of trends going on across American health care, ask precise, scientifically rigorous questions about what's going on in American health care. We use AI to prepare all of that data in a way where everything is documented in a regulatory grade way as to the transformations that were done to create this clean data set, documented in a regulatory grade way as to the transformations that were done to create this clean data set. Now our customers then receive this incredibly rich, de-identified data, and it's a massive amount of data and it requires AI to really process it and find the insights, to find those needles in the haystacks that will change patient care or discover new therapies.
Speaker 1:And that's incredibly inspiring to hear. And then you've talked a little bit about this, but I'd like to go maybe a little bit deeper on how Truveta is ensuring that patient data privacy piece and the security while utilizing this data for healthcare innovation to save lives.
Speaker 2:Sure. So security and privacy, they work very much together. I mean, if you can't keep the data secure, obviously you know. Then that's at the core. So security I mean we invest tremendously in the security infrastructure and then we have third parties come and audit. So we have ISO 27001 certifications, we have the SOC 2 certification, we have the HITRUST R2 certification. This is where third parties have established the highest standards of security and they're coming and inspecting and hold us accountable to be meeting or exceeding all of the bars they have defined.
Speaker 2:And so that's the core of security. Privacy the baseline is defined by HIPAA here in the US. And again you have standards for de-identification, for making sure that there is an incredibly rigorous statistics being done on that data. To say, let's take any given patient record, any given patient encounter, and say, how do we ensure that we have removed all the identifiers made it statistically very, very hard to find the patterns across encounters and find patients? And again, if third parties come in and look at the work we do to ensure we have exceeded the identification standards set by HIPAA, and that's the key piece, right?
Speaker 1:And so you mentioned early on your experience at Microsoft, terry. How did this experience at Microsoft actually prepare you for not only founding but leading Trivetta?
Speaker 2:But I think we're all a product of our experiences. I mean, microsoft is a company that has bold ambitions and it works in an ecosystem of partners and I think, when I think about Trivetta, we have a very bold ambition, a very hard technical challenge, like Microsoft takes on, ambition, a very hard technical challenge like Microsoft takes on. And we live in an ecosystem of Incredibly innovative health care systems, the government, the US government, the CDC, the FDA you know our life science partners and the same thing, living in an ecosystem and collaborating well, earning their trust and driving innovation forward, investing in innovation, building teams that love innovation and love pursuing a meaningful mission. I mean all that you know I had absolutely am shaped by the over 20 years of microsoft incredible, incredible.
Speaker 1:You're truly changing the world, ter, terry, and so hard to believe, but we're at the end of this incredible, insightful interview. How would you say you would inspire the world? What iscom see? The members which are, you know, making Trivetta possible, the healthcare members.
Speaker 2:Please go to those, visit those members for your care and please consider participation in the Trivetta Genome Project. Please consider in consenting that your leftover biospecimens from your care can be used for this anonymous genetic research. Biospecimens from your care can be used for this anonymous genetic research. I mean, that's the how I think collectively, together, we can discover the science of humanity and take better care of our families and the communities we live in.
Speaker 1:Terry Myerson, co-founder and CEO of Trigetta. Thank you so very much for your inspiration, thank you for all you're doing and wishing you, for humanity's sake, tremendous success.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. It's very meaningful.
Speaker 1:Likewise Thank you, Terry.