Glen Tullman Discusses Tech Adoption Amidst Millions Losing Healthcare Coverage

SAN FRANCISCO – Outside the JPM Healthcare Conference here, Glen Tullman, CEO of Transcarent, sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss the state of digital health as employers and providers face mounting costs amid reduced government support, and how the company is using technology to improve access to care. MobiHealthNews: During COVID, digital health was widely adopted and companies garnered massive investments in 2020 and 2021. Since the pandemic has waned, fewer companies are garnering large funding, and more mergers and acquisitions have occurred over the last couple of years. What is the current state of digital health? Glen Tullman: Well, it's a very interesting question. We have a few things that are all colliding at the same time, so let's talk a little bit about the trends. One, there's that old saying that says we always underestimate a major change in that we always overestimate the impact in the beginning and underestimate the long term. So, computers come out and we say they're going to change everything, and paper use goes through the roof because we didn't know how to use them, so we would print out files from the computer and then file them because we didn't understand. And then longer term, today, we can't imagine not using them, and they've now moved to our phones, and this is how we run our lives on our phones. So, the pandemic comes along, and digital health gets this incredible boom because we couldn't do it the old way. So we had to move 100% to digital at one point, and then we backed off a little bit. And so digital health got this amazing infusion. And then the pandemic is over, but life has also changed, and so we kind of went back halfway. We didn't have the right payment systems in place and the like, and so we saw kind of a little bit of a dip, but what we really understood was how powerful the technology was, so now we start to see it come back. Now two other trends have happened, and this is why it's a complex question. One is, what's happening is the government is pulling back from care, so that's going to accelerate both people without care, and the challenge is that health systems and businesses, which are the only two remaining parties to pay for care, it's going to put increased pressure on them. And what do we do when we have to improve quality and take costs out? We use automation. That's what we've always done in this country. We've done it in every other industry. We've used automation to take the middle out. We don't have travel agents anymore, except in very specialized cases where they really earn their value. We don't have tellers of banks because we do it ourselves, and travel and transportation, and on and on. In healthcare, the middle has gotten bigger, and we have more friction. So, this is an opportunity to say we have to look everywhere. And what we see in our business at Transcarent is more and more employers saying, "OK, we told you no. We told you slower. Now we've got to do it faster because we see what's coming." So, here at JP Morgan, last night, I was meeting with people who are saying, "Can we use your technologies to help accelerate because we know what's coming?" And we know what's coming is more pressure on business, more pressure on providers and they're not seeing that from any other place. So, it's more and more important. Now, on top of that, there's one other little thing you might not have heard about called AI. AI is largely today, there's a lot of talk, but we see very little ability for you or I to use AI to change our healthcare experience. So, Wayfinding was the first to venture into that. MHN: Transcarent recently updated Wayfinding. Can you tell our readers about that? Tullman: So step one was, could we actually provide a platform that was built on generative AI that didn't exclude people because at any point you could talk to a person, but they actually made it easier for people to get access 24/7 to high-quality, affordable healthcare, and that's our vision. And could we do that? So, we did step one, but when you give a mouse a cookie, people started to say, well, we can do this, but could it also actually schedule the appointment? You told me where I should go, but my other hassle is scheduling that appointment. Could it do advanced symptom analysis? So, could it say, "Here's what's going on. Can you tell me what you think it is, and then can you tell me what I might do about it?" MHN: What's the difference between searching for your symptoms on ChatGPT? Tullman: It's a great question, because we've gone from search, which was step one, we could Google something, to ChatGPT, where we could have a conversation about it. And now what we've introduced, Wayfinding 2.0, is actually agentive. We'll actually do it for you. So, you ask the question, you say, "Here's what's going on," and we say, "Here's what it seems like. Here's the best place to go for it. Would you like us to schedule an appointment?" And it does. One of the quotes I love is, "Technology perfectly applied is indistinguishable from magic."