In answering an email question, Brad Bostic, CEO and founder of hc1, talked about how his company is dealing with some challenges in the field of precision medicine.
Why did you start this company?
I founded hc1 based on my own frustration with one-size-fits-all, trial-and-error patient care. After witnessing the challenges of data fragmentation during the family’s illness, I will promote precision medicine as my personal mission because it has the ability to save lives and eliminate wasteful practices. The focus of many high-value nursing campaigns is to cut unsustainable health care costs through effective processes. This is necessary, but not enough. Hc1 was founded on the belief that by providing precise health for everyone to improve patient outcomes, the greatest success will be achieved. This is why we chose to use the rich patient data in the laboratory database and system to advance personalized medicine, thus becoming the world’s best company that provides laboratory insights. It is great to see that our strategy and the hard work of our dedicated team fulfilled the promise we envisioned. Fast-forwarding our 10-year history to 2021, the hc1 platform has generated actionable healthcare insights to improve care for more than 160 million patients.
Brad Bostic
What needs/problems are you seeking to solve in the healthcare sector?
The basis of hc1 Precision Health Cloud is the recognition that every patient is unique and should be treated this way. On this basis, hc1 took the lead in bringing a new type of solution to the market-Precision Health Insight Networks (PHIN). This clinical tool is ushering in a new era of scalable precision medicine.
PHIN achieves large-scale personalization by aggregating previously isolated health data and turning it into insights and signals that guide doctors to make care decisions that meet the unique needs of each patient. For example, precise testing and prescription combine required patient information and clinical guidelines to ensure that the safest, most appropriate and most cost-effective drugs are prescribed for patients based on their own personal genetics, lifestyle, and other factors . By presenting these insights directly to the healthcare provider as part of their regular workflow, this eliminates the guesswork of trying one or the other drug to obtain the desired clinical impact (e.g. effective in lowering cholesterol) or to help avoid the use of drugs May cause severe bleeding or other pathological side effects.
A person’s unique genetic characteristics affect their ability to metabolize many common prescription drugs. The personalized genetic code determines how each patient uniquely metabolizes the drug into the “active” form in the body. In some cases, a person’s unique genetic code may even transform normally safe drugs into a form that can cause serious, life-threatening side effects. Precise prescription can ensure that patients get the right prescription at the right time and at the right dose based on these specific genetic characteristics.
Given that 82% of the U.S. population uses at least one prescription drug, advancing these models is critical, and the FDA states that half of these prescriptions are ineffective or harmful. hc1 has launched a guided prescription solution to the market in the form of hc1 PrecisionRx Advisor to advance the promise of precise prescription, replacing the traditional trial-and-error prescription model by personalizing patients’ medicines to their unique genetic mutations.
It is the only unified platform that combines patient-specific data from traditional drug treatment management, pharmacogenomics, and laboratory testing with integrated participation and monitoring workflows to provide recommendations that can improve patient prescription plans and overall care. Uniquely, hc1 can combine the details of precise prescriptions with subsequent laboratory data tracking. The data tracked and measured and demonstrated the enhanced clinical results achieved with changes in medications (for example, cholesterol levels dropped rapidly after switching to better genetically matched cholesterol-lowering drugs).
What does your product do? How does it work?
At the beginning of the high-value nursing movement, healthcare organizations only focused on adding value by cutting costs, and in many cases by terminating caregivers, but we know that sustainable value enhancement can only come from reducing costs by improving outcomes. This is why we created the hc1 Precision Health Cloud-to provide patients with high-value care by ensuring that healthcare professionals have immediate access to complete data, patient information, and specific patient insights.
Hc1’s solution——hc1 Operation Management, hc1 analysis, hc1 PrecisionDx Advisor, and hc1 PrecisionRx consultant-Helped to establish a wide range of laboratory and health system partnerships.
- hc1 Operation Management Aims to automatically organize the large amount of data generated by the laboratory into a rich archive of providers and patients. Equipped with this data, hc1 generates insights, analysis and alerts to provide providers with better services and improve patient diagnosis.
- hc1 analysis Automate reporting and enable real-time key performance indicator (KPI) tracking to equip laboratories with indicators and proactive services required by service providers and patients.
- hc1 PrecisionDx Advisor Utilizing the unparalleled scale of hc1, more than 25 billion laboratory results, expertise, and advanced machine learning have been processed to date to ensure that each patient receives precise tests to support the most accurate diagnosis, leading to the correct treatment and Better results.
- hc1 PrecisionRx Advisor It is very valuable in advancing precision prescriptions. Using this tool set will greatly reduce the percentage of prescription drugs that are ineffective or potentially harmful. On the contrary, accurate drug formulations can be prescribed based on the patient’s personal genetic code, and the correct prescription can be provided at the correct time and in the correct dosage. Pharmacogenomics (PGx) tests determine how the body processes and responds to prescription drugs. With the help of PGx and a complete patient diagnosis history, clinicians can personalize the treatment they recommend. Patients’ medications are personalized according to their personalized genetic code—until their unique genetic mutations—to improve outcomes and reduce costs.
Hc1 has always focused on the company’s mission, which is to ensure that patients get the right tests and the right prescriptions at the right time.In response to Covid-19, hc1 uses data collected and ingested through the hc1 platform to create CV19 Laboratory Test Dashboard Powered by hc1. The company is committed to improving patient care, so it decided to provide this dashboard as a free resource to decision makers in public health, public policy, healthcare, and laboratories who need to check the Covid-19 detection rate, positive rate, and increase virus activity risks of.
Based on the success of the dashboard, hc1 identified an opportunity to measure and report the risk of Covid-19 infection in the workplace by introducing a return-to-work solution, thereby helping to reduce the spread of the virus in micro-communities such as workplaces or universities and The local community where the employee lives.
Who are your customers?
Hc1’s customers include medical laboratories, health plans, and health systems. In today’s changing environment, all of these customers are under tremendous pressure to provide the highest quality patient care at the lowest cost. Customers including Quest Diagnostics, Sonora Quest Laboratories, and DrugScan are using the insights provided by hc1 to inform growth-oriented decision-making, thereby further improving their return on investment.
With the impact of Covid-19, diagnostic laboratories initially became the focus of attention and became the main bottleneck for our country to detect and slow down the further spread of the virus. This is mainly due to the need to configure and purchase new equipment and the subsequent shortage of test supplies available in the supply chain. As these supply chain, equipment, staffing, and funding issues are resolved, our biggest challenge has shifted to the providers who tirelessly serve patients in need.
For providers, isolated clinical data is one of the biggest challenges. Patients with chronic diseases often see multiple doctors, take many different drugs, and obtain diagnostic test results from various laboratories and other diagnostic centers. Doctors are forced to make quick decisions based on incomplete information and try to piece together a clinical problem, which inevitably misses key components and creates a greater risk of error.
Although the current situation may seem terrible, emerging solutions spanning multiple data sets promise to provide a unified view of patient stories.
Laboratory data drives 70% of diagnosis and treatment decisions made by doctors and other healthcare professionals, and is a very powerful source of patient “clinical stories”. The insights provided by laboratory data can identify hidden risks that doctors may not be immediately aware of at the point of care. Through advanced diagnosis, automated cloud computing and machine learning, these test results can build specific patient insights for doctors. This enhances a more comprehensive understanding of the patient’s clinical condition, and doctors either do not have the time or a complete database to determine independently. It raises important issues that require clinical interventions that can save lives while also reducing health care costs.
Photo: Susanna, Getty Images
