CLEVELAND Monday featured a big announcement during the 2019 Medical Innovation Summit, with the Cleveland Clinic and American Well revealing that they are partnering to create a joint venture (JV) focused on telehealth.
The venture, dubbed The Clinic for now, was conceived "in order to achieve our joint vision and our ambitions in how to revise the delivery of care and to be at the forefront of it," said Semih Sen, chief business development officer, Cleveland Clinic, as part of a keynote delivered by Roy Schoenberg, president and CEO of Boston-based American Well.
"This has been a marriage of two leading, visionary, forward-thinking institutions" that have come together in a time when the system for consuming and delivering care is broken, Will Morris, executive medical director, Cleveland Clinic Innovations, told BioWorld. "We've been using telehealth as a means to transform [the system], and we see the promise; we see the unbelievable satisfaction of patients, the unbelievable satisfaction of, actually, providers, and we see the time to value." He added that he wanted to see all of that coming to scale.
"I think these two organizations coming together creates a new capacity to discover things that we don't even know we don't know," he added related to the question of where he saw the joint venture in one year.
For his part, Schoenberg said he sees the potential for much more clarity, especially in terms of improving the health care experience for patients. "There's really so many places you could go there are different patient populations; there are different geographies; there are different care settings. There are different points along the line of a patient interaction with the health care system that we can make an impact," he told BioWorld. He views that as a challenge, but he anticipates that in a year, the pair will have a clear picture on the area where it can deliver value "in the most sustainable way, in the most consistent way and in the most impactful way." Along those lines, he is hopeful that some of the products associated with such delivery are in an advanced state of being consumed by both patients and providers.
Ongoing relationship
The two organizations are no strangers, as they have worked together for about five years to deliver nonemergency and specialty care via telehealth through Cleveland Clinic Express Care Online. That service is available 24 hours a day for U.S. patients, allowing them to receive a quick diagnosis for a variety of minor injuries or illnesses through a virtual visit. Patients can make on-demand appointments or schedule them through the Express Care Online app.
The two seem to be a natural fit, as Schoenberg noted during his presentation. "We've been doing this since 2014, which in the world of telehealth, I can tell you, is the Dark Ages." People were skeptical of telehealth for a while, and it was difficult to pitch at least initially.
While some had doubts, Cleveland Clinic was different. "Cleveland Clinic became immediately, almost overnight, the most diverse partner that we've ever had in deploying types of telehealth." Indeed, Schoenberg estimated that there are more than 30 different programs that it conducts with the clinic today.
Morris noted that Peter Rasmussen, a neurosurgeon and medical director of digital health at Cleveland Clinic, was really the father of his organization's telehealth initiatives. "I remember when he brought American Well to the clinic. Right off the bat, it wasn't a vendor-client relationship, it wasn't a piece a software that we implemented. There was such a deep philosophical and cultural alignment, [and] I would like to say that he knew that there was something special." So, roughly a year ago, the idea came about of establishing a vehicle to nurture this JV idea and its work something that would be separate from the day-to-day operations of these organizations.
"One of the great things about working together over the last five years ... is that we got comfortable. Both sides are secure enough to say if there is something that we really want to do and there is an element that's missing that relies on technology that could come from the outside, nobody here is threatened," Schoenberg noted when asked about bringing others into the relationship. However, doing so must serve a purpose for example, overcoming a challenge or speeding up innovation.
Seeing your role
During the keynote, Sen asked Schoenberg about American Well's success and what others can learn. Schoenberg emphasized being humble and seeing your role in the giant machine that is health care. "It's very easy, especially with technology, to come forward and say, 'I can do it all; I can just add another capability; I can connect to everything, and so on.' And that is usually where things go wrong." He went on to emphasize the importance of having a clear picture about what they can bring to the table, which is the "brokering of live health care encounters," in the case of American Well. In other words, pitch what you're good at when linking with potential partners or investors.
"We have the capability to use technology to redistribute health care, not unlike what Amazon has done for goods and inventories," Schoenberg replied when Sen asked how the JV could be more successful than their organizations. Schoenberg pointed to the great disparities in terms of health care across the country, so, "bringing together the insights, the technologically infused insights that the Cleveland Clinic has developed starting from its leadership all the way to the grassroots providers with the ability of technology today to take live services and make them available wherever they can deliver value ... that opportunity is knocking at the door." And all stakeholders are going to be pulled in faster in that direction than they can imagine.
When asked to expand on that in terms of where he saw telehealth going in the next five to 10 years, Schoenberg told BioWorld that it will become part of the relationship between clinicians and their patients. "And that's a very, very big departure from most of what telehealth does today, which is a quick, accessible and convenient alternative for very transactional types of things," he said. "The opportunity [for] telehealth to become a new distribution infrastructure for health care is mind-boggling," changing areas such as affordability, access, convenience, expectations, experience, as well as how we age.