Building the Digital Healthcare Superhighway | Michael Levy at DHIT

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Michael Levy 0:00
Every purveyor of goods should tap into this infrastructure. And there will be a community driven a sessioning, if you will of control, what level of of data, how much data, what kind of data that’s not for me to decide. That’s for you to decide, and the community in which you live inside.

Alexander Ferguson 0:29
The healthcare industry in America can often seem a chaotic tangle of archaic systems. But according to Michael Levy, the founder of blue door, healthcare growth agency, the problem isn’t merely a matter of technology, its culture, talent and opportunity. That’s why Michael started the Digital Health Institute for transformation, a nonprofit education and research institute where he’s helping develop a universal digital health care infrastructure. In part one of our conversation, Michael tells us about his efforts to build a public health utility grid, and why he believes the healthcare industry approaches their mission the wrong way. Well, thanks, Michael, for joining us. I’m excited to learn more about this decade of transformation, as you see coming up the started off for you right back in 1999. With technology you got started in it with 2003 really getting into the medical field, you see the opportunity of a lot of transformation that can happen that in the medical field 2016, you started your consulting group, and 2017 DHIT we’re going to really dig into right now of, of digital health transformation. Now you’ve been able to go full time on this new vision, a nonprofit organization, and hug which is this health utility grid. This is an exciting vision that I see. Tell me more about where you are with the hit and the purpose of it and also this health utility grid. Sure.

Michael Levy 1:55
Thanks, Alex. You know, the hit was founded under a guiding vision of a world without health inequity. Our purpose is to ensure that global advancements in care are readily accessible to every one of our citizens of the world, starting with North Carolina, D hits main premise and posit is that the current system that services care services to what not the WHO that means their service against disease and condition, not against the behavioral, social, environmental and genetic data streams that define who we are as people. Where do you hit is right now is a place of extreme excitement, where we believe that we can deliver on the promise of new infrastructure to service those data streams to the ecosystem to build against to serve against and to care against. And the only way we can do that is by treating our healthcare data as a public utility. So we believe that the health utility grid represents the interstate that wasn’t there. Prior to 1964 the car, this is the interstate for our healthcare data, to align the global advancements of care to and to bring those global advancements of care to the individuals of the community. So the

Alexander Ferguson 3:28
concept you saw is that healthcare overall is is walled off community that the individual consumer can’t get access to. So you’re trying to create a new utility grid that democratize democratize, democratize this, yeah? This the ability and access to the infrastructure. So tell me more about then you call it hug. So the health utility grid, how does it work? What’s the blockchain is one of the technologies but let’s dig into it a bit more.

Michael Levy 3:57
I think that the core principle is that there’s four Ness standard cloud infrastructures, three of which we hear a lot about public clouds, private clouds, a public private cloud, which is a hybrid cloud. But the fourth is one that that’s not spoken about. It’s called a Community Cloud. And the Community Cloud is a is an idea or a standard that supports community data sets and community infrastructure and opening up those data streams to the community and the ecosystem to power the community. And so we look at that core premise as the database infrastructure or the environment call it a data lake that sits within a human intermediary, a non biased, non judgmental, public place of service. And that public place of service for D head is the public library. They have historically been data custodians information, custodians serving knowledge and insight to communities from here and beyond. So let’s power the future through the Community Public Library, as we’ve done many, many, many centuries before. Now it’s our time to bring new infrastructure to that public library is called the Community Cloud.

Alexander Ferguson 5:23
So I see this vision, I see your your, this big shift opportunity in the medical space, but it’s a long road potentially to get there. There’s a lot of pieces that need to come together. So tell me what we’ve got a lot of partnerships that coming together and a kind of test case in North Carolina. Tell me more about that.

Michael Levy 5:44
Yeah, sure. We’ve got a tremendous group of operating partners that are supporting us in this initiative from academic institutions like UNC Pembroke, like Alamance Community College, and research centers, like the Center for Applied to know MCS and precision health at Duke University. We’ve got the Area Health Education Centers, namely Charlotte, Charlotte AHEC. Technologies like tanjo, Dinah AI that is a cognitive brain, we’ve got globe net, which is the cloud provider that will we’ll be laying the core back end, we’ve got digital therapy, which is a company that focuses on computers, computer assisted therapy, to democratize talk therapy and bring it to the masses. All of this is being deployed layer by layer, out of our most impoverished and disenfranchised, if you will, communities across North Carolina, and we’ve got 100 counties in North Carolina, where 90% of them are technically rule. We’re only 10% of them, where I live, have and get to exist and and achieve and access the advancements that that we find very normal and very routine. So it’s about partnering with these local communities from Robeson County and Pembroke to Ashe County and Alamance County and, and New Hanover. And it’s to understand that we are not a top down narrative, we are a bottom up opportunity.

Alexander Ferguson 7:36
But where do you see it five years from now. So that kind of the first couple steps is then probably some test cases. And then what’s what’s beyond that

Michael Levy 7:43
five years from now, my expectation is that the health utility grid is a brand new public utility that is rolled out throughout the state of North Carolina end to end and has made its way through the entire southeast, if not through the country, as a brand new 21st century infrastructure to power our healthcare system and our life. Fundamentally, every purveyor of goods should tap into this infrastructure. And there will be a community driven a sessioning, if you will of control, what level of of data, how much data, what kind of data that’s not for me to decide. That’s for you to decide, and the community in which you live inside.

Alexander Ferguson 8:32
Be sure to check out part two of our conversation with Michael in which he goes into more detail about the underutilized data we all possess that could forever change the way health care is administered.