Interview: Jack Challis, CEO & Co-Founder of CliniCast

With all these new health monitoring devices and apps appearing in the past five years, it is becoming easier to track your own health with increased awareness of your daily activity levels and eating history. But behind the scenes, there are companies that are trying to predict your future health needs and help providers identify patients that could benefit from early interventions to prevent future hospitalizations.As Jack Challis, CEO & Co-Founder of CliniCast, describes his company’s vision, “It is about how to find patients that are going to get sick before they get sick so providers can intervene and get them better preventative care, which lowers their future health costs and costs to the healthcare system.”Jack was always very interested in cost management, “I wanted to know why healthcare was so expensive – why we get such low outcomes for such a tremendous expenditure of resources. I wanted to attack and mitigate overutilization, inadequate care delivered in inappropriate settings and patients being managed poorly.”CliniCast sells its ARTO analytical system to at-risk providers. The online platform uses demographics, claims data, lab results, pharmacy usage and text notes to find patterns that might lead to high risk patients. These patients can then be matched to available preventative care (i.e. educational programs, peer mentoring and medication management).So why healthcare and why now? Jack explains, “Traditionally one of the least utilized resources in patient management has been data, and we see an opportunity to use that data to make people healthier.” The most important thing for him and CliniCast is to prove that the model can allocate resources more efficiently.As a patient, you can also help the system by keeping a detailed record of your health data on one electronic medical record and staying educated and informed on which interventions really matter to your health (i.e. changing your lifestyle if you are a diabetic to better manage your condition). We can all work to improve the healthcare system and as you are doing your part, know that there are companies like CliniCast in the background also helping.