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Today we have another interview in action from the conferences that just happened down here in Miami and Orlando. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week health, a set of channels dedicated to keeping health it staff current and engaged. We want to thank our show sponsors who are investing in developing the next generation of health leaders, Gordian dynamics, Quill health tau site nuance, Canaan, medical, and current health.

Check them out at this week. health.com/today. Here we go. We are from 5 20 22, and we're here with Terry Myerson with Truveta. nice meeting you. Nice to meet you as well. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Truvada is, is really fascinating to me. It's it represents an awful lot of, potential I think is what I want to say.

I mean, the number of health systems you have in, I wish I could rattle them all off, but it's, it's like all the players. I mean, it's, it's a advocate, Aurora it's Providence. It's one of the St. Luke's. I mean, there's St Luke's everywhere. I don't know which one it is. Maybe Idaho or Missouri or St. Louis, Missouri. , Bon Secours, mercy, and so forth. It reps with how many health systems at this point, we've announced 20 health systems and together they provide about 16% of the clinical care every day in the United States. All right. So Truvada is, , bringing that dataset together. What does this look like?

Where are you going with it and what are you showing off here?

Well, today at Vive, we showed is our first public demonstration of the platform and what you can do with it. And, , what we did on stage as we showed, , how a clinical study that was looking at. Effectiveness of COVID vaccine boosters that was originally done in November.

, the CDC took a couple months later and produced the same study with the same statistical results a couple of months later, but we demand it into that burden, but we basically reproduce the study with updated data through the Omicron wave and showed how the effectiveness of boop boosters varied with different co-morbidities.

And we publishing that and making it showing how it's reproducible and transparent on the platform. So, I mean, the whole thing was just to. This is a lie. This is a, this is now a, a data platform, which you can use to study, ask and answer questions about America health every day. How many

patient Rutgers does that represent at

this point, Vive on the platform today, 50 million, it gets updated every day is new patients visits our health systems and new health systems grow.

But for research on. Every disease. Any disease, any device, any G 50 million patients lack today? I mean,

I think that one of the things that's powerful, if she has these health systems are going to be feeding this information. I don't know if it's real time, but it's going to be feeding every day, every day.

So there are real-time connectors connected up to this again, you're you're, de-identifying the data it's primarily for research, right?

That's where it fits to be used for, we say for ethical purposes. So it's no sales and marketing. It's all about improving patient care.

Yeah, that's I mean, it's art. So the data is going to, you're going to be able to do these kinds of studies before the CDC does, because when we think about that, the data chain of getting the data into the, to the CDC,

I don't know how the CDC does their studies.

You know, , one of the things we're really motivated by is providing, you know, a platform that only not only has representation. Diversity of the country, but also a lot of studies to be fully transparent and reproducible because we think that will build trust and clinical studies that will help, you know, by, you know, when the CDC publishes a finding, we don't know how they did it.

We can't reproduce it. We don't. And then so, yeah, but when studies get done and Truvada. Yeah, we want to empower researchers to build trust in their findings by being transparent.

So are you looking for, are, do you have partnerships with academic medical centers? Those are the people doing the research is pharma doing research is who who's all doing research on.

So researchers on the platform today are the health systems that are members of Truvada. They have academic affiliations, right. , you know, whether it be Washington, state and Providence or Michigan state and, you know, Henry Ford. You know, there's sort of, there are academic affiliations with the health systems are members of Truvada.

And then there are a few pharmaceutical companies right now doing research in the platform. Also, we just haven't announced that yet.

I haven't announced it yet. And so this is not a pre-announcement of any kind. We're just so that that's a direction you guys are heading. What's the, what's the. Five years from now, what are we looking at here?

Are we looking at more health systems, more research, being done more

partners? I think so. Yeah. And I know we were welcoming the pharmaceutical industry to do research on the platform. I think, you know, one of my learnings and they got me involved in the Truvada from the beginning of the pandemic is that these life science partners, they have a real need to, to understand, you know, how their product.

Are safe, effective, , to make better products every day. And this is the data they need to do that. And that is, those are the cures that we depend on in health care to treat patients. And so we think it's very exciting to be partnering with life science companies, to go improve their products and making the data available to them.

So talk to me about talking about governance, because this is one we're going to be talking to healthcare providers, primary listeners of this, and they're going to say. This looks interesting. I'm interested in this. , you know, w th does each health, some participate in the governance model and look at the architecture that the security model, the privacy model, obviously all these things are important to, to these health systems that are partners.

How

does

that model work? Well, we have, we take the governance very seriously. God, it's actually one of the, , Funnier things at the beginning of Truvada, when it was founded, was rod Hochman, the CEO of Providence joked that one of the hardest things about my job was going to be having 12 health system CEOs as bosses.

But, , you know, I think it's the right thing because you have to do this right. Patients trust their doctors. We can't make any compromises, you know, under the integrity of that patient, even though the data's all de-identified, we have to do this, right. So we have, we have a board of directors, which is all health systems, and we have a board of governors that provide strategic guidance across the board on security, privacy, ethics, health equity, , that health systems have.

Opted into participation in the areas where they are most passionate about the spading and there's some areas where they go, all right, I'll trust my colleagues, other health systems, the governance shred in that area. But you know, I'm going to invest the time that sort of, it's all documented on our website.

We're trying to be very transparent about how the governance works.

Yeah. That would make sense. How, , you know, when I, I think about this, is it, is it just EHR data or are we looking at other datasets as well?

Today it's primarily

EHR data. Okay. And the, the connectors we're, we're utilizing it are those, , I mean, HL seven fire, that kind of stuff.

Or are we looking at, , direct connectors into these platforms is what we're looking at?

You know,

we'll take the data, I'm trying to get the order of magnitude. So when my CEO comes to me, Hey, we signed a deal where we're going to be a part of this as a, as a it organization. I'm sitting there going all right.

What, what, what did we just sign up for? What do I have to, well, I think what I would encourage

folks to do is talk to other members and ask them how they're doing it. But our general approach is we'll take the data. However, you know, the actual structure of the file. That's the least of our challenges. I mean, once we, you know, we, we normalize the data, you know,

just ship it over the

shipping, a parquet file, putting it on a secure FTP site that works for us.

Fantastic. , raw data. Are you normalizing the data at all? I mean, research is tough. Well, what

we do that. We take the raw data from the health system, whether it comes from Meditech, Allscripts, Cerner, epic, whatever it may be. And then, you know, we're, then not only syntactically normalizing it to a common structure, but we're also working through all the semantic normalization of right now.

However, however, a clinician would have captured information about a medication or diagnosis or a lab test, , or have captured the symptoms or the treatment plan in the clinical note. We're, we're, we're doing all that. The work. Turn that into structured, useful information for

research. All right. So you came from Microsoft.

I did came from Microsoft now working in the healthcare industry. What's what, as you came in what's, what's the thing you notice or that you see? I came in from outside of healthcare. Has you have that different lens for a little while? Then you become an insider as well. So what, what's your lens? You know,

I

feel like I joined, you know, you know, what brought, what brought your better together and what brought me to Truvada was the pandemic.

I mean, so I feel like I am a very fortunate place where, , Truvada has the, it's a coalition of the willing it's, it's, , it's a group of health systems that share this vision of saving lives with data, knowing they can make a difference in the world, but bringing their data together, they can treat patients better and find new insights of.

With that sort of moral imperative and coalition with system. I just feel this momentum and interest in, in making things happen. And so some of the things I hear about health systems about healthcare being slow, and I haven't experienced

that you came in during the middle of. So, yeah, and healthcare has a mood faster than it has over the last year.

And

it was born out of this pandemic, my involvement, Mr. Better, you know, it was inspired by this pandemic. And so I feel this incredibly fortunate that, , the health systems that are involved in Truvada wants to be instrumental and , we're not. And we, we welcome more for sure, because with more data we can.

Treat more precise conditions. We can find those needles in the haystack that will really help improve patient care. But when you have a coalition of the willing, the people want to be there and you can really make things happen. And so that's pretty exciting.

That's fantastic. , if people want more information website, does that primarily where they

following us on LinkedIn is that.

What I would say is the best way to do it, but our website is absolutely a great way to contact us and it

has all the health systems listed has the governance model are completely

transparent about it's a principle for ours that transparency creates trust every health system. That's number of Truvada, you know, is there on the website?

Our governance model is documented on our website and we'd love to hear from any healthcare leader that would like to join us.

Fantastic. Terry, thank you for your time. Thank you. Appreciate it. Another great interview. I want to thank everybody who spent time with us at the conferences. It is phenomenal that you shared your wisdom and your experience with the community, and it is greatly appreciated.

We also want to thank our channel sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders, Gordian dynamics, Quill health tau site nuance, Canon medical, and current health. Check them out at this week. health.com/today. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.