About the Episode
HealthTech Remedy interviews Othman Laraki, Co-founder & CEO of Color Health. Learn how Color Health is designing the "operating system for population health at scale," leveraging technology and AI to transform cancer care and preventive health for millions.
In this episode, join hosts Timothy Showalter, Trevor Royce, and Paul Gerrard as they delve into the story of Color Health. Starting in 2015 with a focus on genomics and cancer risk assessment, Color Health has evolved to address broader gaps in preventive care and population health. Discover their impactful role in providing large-scale COVID testing and their current focus on oncology, building a Virtual Cancer Clinic.
Othman Laraki shares his unique journey from Silicon Valley tech (Google, Twitter) to healthcare, motivated by his family's cancer history and personal experience with genetic testing. Hear his perspective on digitizing healthcare and providing accessible, high-quality care.
Explore how Color Health works with large employers (like Salesforce), unions (like the Teamsters), and public health departments, serving millions of patients with a full stack approach that includes logistics, care coordination, and navigation. Learn about their efforts to increase cancer screening adherence and compress the timeline from diagnosis to treatment.
The conversation also highlights Color Health's key partnerships with leading institutions like MSK and UCSF, and organizations like the American Cancer Society. Get insights into their collaboration with OpenAI on innovative AI applications in healthcare, such as their AI co-pilot demo designed to significantly reduce clinician burden and improve efficiency in cancer care.
Othman offers valuable advice for aspiring health technology founders, emphasizing the importance of humility, deep collaboration with clinicians, understanding healthcare economics, and being ready for iteration.
This episode is a great example of how cutting-edge technology meets a deep commitment to health care and population-level health.
Transcript
Timothy Showalter: [0:00] What's up, guys?
Trevor Royce: [0:00] Good to see you guys.
Timothy Showalter: [0:01] Yeah, good morning.
Paul Gerrard: [0:02] Yeah, good morning.
Trevor Royce: [0:03] You're back from your travels.
Timothy Showalter: [0:04] I actually have been traveling so much that I miss my college reunion.
Trevor Royce: [0:08] 50-year college reunion. Incredible.
Timothy Showalter: [0:10] No, it's like closer to five.
Paul Gerrard: [0:12] I have a feeling it's in between those two.
Timothy Showalter: [0:14] All right, let's get in. Let's do it, man.
Trevor Royce: [0:18] Welcome to Health Tech Remedy, the show where three physician leaders in health technology tell the stories of new and established companies and interview leaders from the industry. I'm Trevor Royce, radiation oncologist and researcher with experience in real-world evidence, informatics, and AI diagnostics.
Paul Gerrard: [0:32] And I'm Paul Gerrard. I started off as a physical medicine rehabilitation physician before focusing on reimbursement policy, diagnostics, and market access for AI products.
Timothy Showalter: [0:40] And I'm Tim Showalter, a radiation oncologist and prior med device entrepreneur who is now focused on bringing AI advances to cancer patients.
Trevor Royce: [0:48] We've got a great episode ahead of us this week. Super interesting company. We're going to be spotlighting Color Health, a company on a mission to make healthcare programs more accessible, equitable, and effective, particularly for large populations navigating preventative care, cancer risk, and complex disease management. Amazing company. Really look forward to chatting with you guys about it today.
Paul Gerrard: [1:06] Now, we'll be talking about Color's technology-first approach to scaling care delivery and how partnerships with leading health systems like MSK and UCSF are helping to bring the specialized care they offer to more people.
Timothy Showalter: [1:17] So, guys, I think this is a really interesting one. Their founding story goes back to 2015. But I think they keep getting a lot more interesting in the past couple of years in particular.
Timothy Showalter: [1:27] I've seen lots of flood of press releases from them. I think they really caught my eye. I was aware of them, but I think I really started to focus on them when I saw the press release for their partnership with American Cancer Society for the virtual care clinic. And then I think a lot of us saw the press release about using OpenAI to enable their cancer screening service. So I think they've got a really interesting model that sort of bridges, you know, technology enablement, but also supported by strong science and technology. So looking to their original founding, it was all the way back in 2015 by the CEO, Othman Laraki, who brings a actually a technology background. He had been at Google, Twitter, Mixer Labs, and I think he was a co-founder of Mixer Labs, which was an acquisition by Twitter, ultimately. And then, you know, he decided to get into the healthcare space. When we interview him later, I think we can hear a little bit of his motivation for doing that. And initially, they focused on genomic-based testing. So they wanted to look at tests that could inform an individual's cancer risk and to really envision doing that at a population scale. So they were working, thinking about unions and employers to improve cancer risk assessment.
Timothy Showalter: [2:48] And then over time, they evolved to take on broader gaps in preventive care and population health. They approach it with technology infrastructure and clinical services for large-scale health programs. They've got a great story for how they stepped up during the pandemic and offered testing for COVID. And my recollection is that they actually helped run the state-level programs for the majority of states in the United States, which is quite impressive. They're really working closely with a variety of stakeholders. And I think you'll see that more in their models than a lot of others. They're really intersectional and they employ leaders in a variety of disciplines to make sure that there's a strong continuity of care. In terms of key leadership members, I've had a chance to meet a lot of these folks, and I think uniformly they've been quite impressive. I think the main three I'd wanted to highlight, despite the rest of their bench being very strong, is Othman Laraki, who's co-founder and CEO. We'll speak with him later, which will be really interesting to hear his story, transitioning from technology into healthcare. Caroline Civello, who's their president, and Rebecca Miksad, who's a recent addition. She's the chief medical officer. And I actually worked with her at Flatiron Health as my manager when I was there. I was working the academic side with her. And I think, Trevor, you've got a little bit of a backstory as well.
Trevor Royce: [4:15] Yeah, super cool to see Rebecca take that role over there. And I think she'll do fantastic. It was a lot of fun working with her at Flatiron. So it's good to see the Flatiron Alumni Network just continues to sort of rise.
Timothy Showalter: [4:26] That's right. And I think for her, like she does, you know, she has that population health focus. You know, I think a lot of her research was focused in that direction as well. And so, you know, it's going to be pretty exciting to see how she leverages that. Absolutely.
Trevor Royce: [4:41] You know, one cool thing about Color is, you know, obviously they have very talented people there, but they've demonstrated how they can address market needs in any given era. So, you know, starting out in the genomic space in 2015, when personalized genomic testing was kind of entering mainstream. And then, as you mentioned, in the COVID era, like providing lab tests and COVID tests to a great majority of Californians and even the U.S. And now, and we'll talk a little bit more about like where they are now in the AI world and so forth. But, you know, fundamentally, I think they have quite a few products and solutions that they list at their website. A big piece of what they do is this preventative care helping employers and health plans address very complicated health spaces like cancer or oncology. So like preventative care could mean screening in that space. And I think they have like personalized screening kits that they can send to those plans employees.
Trevor Royce: [5:34] Preventative care is a tough one because you need to go where the puck is heading, meaning like you need to get that screening test and as opposed to waiting for that diagnosis when you develop symptoms. And so elevating that upstream and providing screening tests hopefully can save costs for those plans and obviously help outcomes if you detect the cancer earlier. So they help with a lot of that scheduling, transportation, knowing the costs involved and bringing that directly to the patients or in this case, employees or participants in a health plan. So they're, you know, that very much aligns with their mission of basically simplifying and democratizing access to health care, complicated health care situations like a cancer diagnosis.
Timothy Showalter: [6:13] You know, the other thing, Trevor, that I have been really impressed by is like even even the virtual care clinic with their partnership with ACS is I think my understanding is that a fair amount of that also involves survivorship. And they had this recent report about helping working-age cancer survivors. And, you know, it's not trivial. Like, you know, you go through the treatment, all the stress of a cancer diagnosis, the time required to receive the care. And then how terrible is it when you're back to work trying to focus on normal life to have to take a whole day off of work to go get your routine testing? And so, you know, we'll hear more from Othman, but my, you know, I imagine that solution has really focused on like more time efficiency and just making it more seamless for people to get care. So definitely can relate to that as trying to juggle a lot of things and having kids at home. I think that's a pretty valuable contribution.
Trevor Royce: [7:05] Oncology is so complicated with the different tests involved that, you know, every cancer diagnosis is different. Prognosis, like all these really complicated issues when it comes to cancer care. And we often hear about this term of like navigators, you know, a cancer navigator helping navigate that system, find the right services, talk to the right people? But what they're doing seems to be sort of one level up from that. There certainly is navigation that they're offering here, but they're taking it all the way even to genetic testing and specific screening tests, plugging you in with consultants or oncologists and actually facilitating those conversations through their employer health and health plans.
Paul Gerrard: [7:37] Navigation on steroids.
Timothy Showalter: [7:39] That's right.
Paul Gerrard: [7:39] Yeah, I thought it was kind of interesting. It sounds like they really started as focused on the genetic testing side of things and really started as a lab and then over time branched out into some of the other things they do with broader cancer care navigation. But it sounds like that is some of what really, really makes them special and different. They have, you know, digital patient engagement tools, embedded logistics, EHR integration, all things that can be very important in managing a lab efficiently. And they've taken that and brought it to patient care beyond the lab.
Timothy Showalter: [8:14] They excel at using partnerships quite well, too. I mean, like, if you look at their list of folks they're working with, I think their MSK partnership and UCSF and ACS and OpenAI is... I mean, it's hard to think of a company in the cancer space that's doing more than that.
Trevor Royce: [8:32] You know, they started out in this genomic space, and obviously they had this great story during COVID, but now a core part of their identity is oncology and cancer care. So they're sort of at this intersection between preventative health for oncology specifically, you know, the genomics underlying those cancer diagnoses or your risks for cancer, and then really a digital care infrastructure to facilitate all this. And so when they think about their customers, you know, we've heard a little bit about employers, you know, helping those employees navigate the cancer world, but also unions similarly. And I think they work with like consultants and oncologists and then health plans to try to keep the cost of care down while still delivering effective care. So those are kind of the main players I think that they're helping. You mentioned as well, public health departments. And with this platform, they basically are now facilitating care for millions of patients. And, you know, we haven't even mentioned this, but I think their valuation is on the order of billions, just showing the great impact that they're having in health care.
Timothy Showalter: [9:35] Yeah. And I saw a statistic on their website that I think they've like served something like 7 million patients and which which is an impressive number. And I do know that, you know, there's a couple other companies in the space that we've heard about. Time Care, which, of course, has notable Flatiron alums. Transparent, I think, has some similar services. And then, you know, when we interviewed Andrew Norton from OncoHealth, I think he indicated that some of their sort of structure, I think, I think touches on this. But my guess, without looking at comparison numbers, is that the reach of Color Health, you know, fueled by some of these partnerships, their scale and in terms of their COVID testing and their genetic screening and their cancer screening test is they're probably the largest scale one. Maybe we can we can ask Othman if that's if that if that checks out in terms of the math, but definitely a pretty impressive overall reach.
Paul Gerrard: [10:29] It sounds like they have heavily focused on employers and presumably employers who have employer-sponsored health plans and bear some of the financial risk of their employees' health care. They indicate they've also have some arrangements with government health departments as well as payers and maybe even health systems. It looks like that's the primary sources of their revenue. The way that they differentiate themselves and come in is by offering this full stack approach where they don't just have technology and genetic testing, but they handle, you know, logistics, care coordination, kind of this navigation on steroids that we talked about previously.
Trevor Royce: [11:10] And I think I saw that their work was in pretty large employers like Salesforce and Levi Strauss and Hasbro. And I mean, these guys are really, these are massive employers. They're really flipping care for, you know, many, many, many patients.
Timothy Showalter: [11:22] Since they have technology and humans involved and they actually have a team of clinicians, I do think they're providing a substitute for many services compared to receiving them in the clinic. And so their cost structure is clearly much lower. Or I think that health systems and, you know, employers can be can be certain that their covered lives or their employees are actually getting the care that they should. And so they're going to have, you know, better outcomes overall, including more time at work. They're certainly going to be missing fewer days of work for for health care appointments. So it seems like a pretty compelling offering to them.
Paul Gerrard: [11:58] Hopefully not, you know, wasting time and money on ineffective care as well.
Timothy Showalter: [12:02] Why don't we just stop and take a pulse check real quick and highlight what our top takeaways or even questions that we'll have for Othman are?
Trevor Royce: [12:10] I'm going to go on a bit of a tangent just because I was playing around with their website and I hadn't appreciated this. But I saw their AI co-pilot demo online and it is like super impressive. I was talking about this with a colleague the other day where a lot of the potential from the ontologist perspective on these large language models in the clinic is not necessarily, you know, using a scribe, which we hear a lot about in the sort of note generation. But actually the pre-charting where it can come to medical record, pull all those procedures, pathology reports, colonoscopy reports, radiology reports, PET scan results, and put it in a document, you know, because that takes a lot of time and you're accessing a lot of different systems to compile all that information as you get ready to see the patient. And as best I can tell, that's kind of a really cool feature that they have. And I assume that this is part of their collaboration with OpenAI. But then it takes it to the next level where it identifies gaps within that report that they've compiled. So if you have a breast cancer diagnosis and they don't see an Oncotype DX report, then it highlights that. That was the example that they used where a patient might benefit from that. So I thought that was pretty cool as a way to like a very clinically actionable use of AI for the oncologists that these guys are clearly working on. It'd be fun to hear a little bit more about that.
Paul Gerrard: [13:18] There's some interesting partnerships they have, MSK and UCSF, that show real-world impact. And it's going to be interesting to hear them talk about how they maintain quality and consistency as they've scaled?
Timothy Showalter: [13:32] I'm going to go a little leader-focused here. We hear a lot of stories that we've certainly seen tech people come in and not understand healthcare and just not be able to make that transition. And I'm really impressed by the story of Color and the story of Othman as a founder CEO.
Timothy Showalter: [13:50] You know, he came from a very high-performing technology, consumer tech-type background, had had product management roles, He's someone who clearly came into healthcare, which doesn't make sense from an engineer's perspective, let's be honest, and learned along the way. If you look at their timeline for how they started off with being one of the risk assessment genetic test companies, they clearly learned over time that you needed to have a connection to the actual healthcare system or support consumers and patients with access to the right information to transition those insights into clinical action. And then you see that every step of the way, how they are able to spin up their testing for COVID and really work with the established health systems and then take those learnings into their virtual cancer clinic. And so I just think it's really admirable that they've clearly, as a company and Othman as a leader, has evolved over time. And I think that's really the model of what we'd like to see more from technology leaders rather than coming in with huge egos and trying to move quickly and break things. I think, you know, taking more of that product management perspective is really admirable. So I think they're a perfect company for us to cover.
Timothy Showalter: [15:03] I'm really excited to learn more about Color Health from Othman as a really great example for our listeners about when cutting edge technology meets a deep commitment to health care and population level health.
Trevor Royce: [15:17] All right. Well, stay tuned for our conversation with Othman Laraki, co-founder of Color. And we'll hear about how Color is designing the operating system for population health at scale.
Timothy Showalter: [15:29] Othman, welcome to Health Tech Remedy.
Othman Laraki: [15:31] Thanks for having me, Tim.
Timothy Showalter: [15:32] Well, along with my co-host, Trevor Royce, I'm excited to learn more about Color Health and your personal journey from Silicon Valley technology and leader to healthcare transformation.
Trevor Royce: [15:42] Othman, it's a pleasure to have you. Thanks for taking the time to chat with us today. I guess before we get into the details about Color Health and what you guys are up to, we'd love to hear a little bit about your personal story. You know, behind every founder is a story. and your career, as I understand it, didn't necessarily start in oncology or on the healthcare side of things. So we'd love to hear a little bit about how you got to where you are today.
Othman Laraki: [16:03] So I grew up in Morocco, in Casablanca. Initial early interest was very much in physics and computer science. Came to Stanford for undergrad. Happened to be very lucky to be here right during the dot-com bubble when the internet was really kind of exploding for the first time. And so that kind of really just gave me the bug for both, I mean, continuing to love software and technology, but also the startup world, actually, like literally in the first couple of months when I was at Stanford, you know, got to meet like, you know, Jerry Yang, who founded, you know, Yahoo and Masa, who, you know, was SoftBank. But it just kind of really made this entire kind of like opportunity of building interesting companies through technology, something that felt very appealing. Over time, I mean, I've started four different companies, three of them in technology. I also spent part of my career in some of the larger tech companies, was one of the early product managers at Google. Got to work on a lot of really neat products there, including, I don't know if you still remember, I guess this will age me, but the Google toolbar, which was, you know, before browsers used to have a search box in them. There was this toolbar that was one of the products I worked on. And I also got to do a lot of work in the early days of what became Google Chrome. And then later started a company that Twitter acquired where I was VP of product.
Othman Laraki: [17:31] And so my career is mostly in technology, but the thread that connected me to healthcare was that I have a fair amount of cancer history in my family. My mother is a two-time breast cancer survivor. And actually it was while I was at Google, I, both she and I found out that we have a mutation in a gene called BRCA2 or BRCA2 that increases people's risk of a variety of cancers. And so that really just gave me a lot of interest in that link between cancer and genetics and initially it was more of just a personal curiosity and in around 2012 it was right when the cost of sequencing was dropping very rapidly got really interested in genetics and cancer genetics in particular and that's what really led to the founding of Color and Color started off initially as a cancer genetics company really focused on how do you make testing for genes that predispose people to a variety of cancers like BRCA1 and 2 or Lynch syndrome genes. And so we started there and we can talk more about the evolution of Color, but it was a 12-year evolution to a very different company than where we started off, but still in the cancer space, but with a much broader aperture than purely around testing. But That was kind of like the path in some ways that led me into healthcare.
Timothy Showalter: [18:54] Back in like 2012 and 2015, in that time period, was there something about like access to BRCA testing that particularly inspired you? Because, you know, as I see it now, like years later, you see how Color is really making access to testing so much easier and providing support direct to people who are at risk. Was, you know, what was the motivating sort of consideration for you?
Othman Laraki: [19:23] Yeah, you know, in part actually it came out of my personal experience. You know, I got my tests done at Stanford. At the time, right, it was still very early. Tests were very expensive. I think it cost like $5,000. It was also a very cumbersome process where I had to get my PCP to refer me to a genetic counselor who then had to check with my insurance. It was basically like five different appointments just to get a test done. When we kind of started unpacking really what does it mean to run these tests we had a few realizations, or hypotheses early on which was one was that we felt that there was no reason that things should cost five thousand dollars we like when we did a bottom-up edition of what it what it took to actually get these tests done you know we felt like we could get it done in 150 dollars 200 that's number one and the second part is that we also had the hypothesis that you really do not need to have such a cumbersome process. When you think about it, like a genetic test is like.
Othman Laraki: [20:24] Eminently distributable right like the sample can be collected using saliva from someone's home the it's all information so really like there's nothing that really requires you to be there in person requires you to have multiple appointments and then that to be expensive and so it was almost more of a bottoms-up view on it. It was actually right when SpaceX was kind of had its first kind of like big successful launches. And I remember like reading the book or like a story about it. And we just sat there with a spreadsheet and did a bottom up like, you know, build of what we what it would cost to run one of these tests. And when these tests used to cost $5,000, we came out with a, you know, a $250 version that was like, you know, a 20th a cost and way more convenient. I think that was kind of almost like the beginning of this arc that really has continued to through Color's history, which is realizing that so much of our healthcare experience today and the cost structure that is around it is built around a...
Othman Laraki: [21:33] Health infrastructure that that kind of got created out of physical health infrastructure right like the way so socially we organize health care in the critical old days was you know we choose a small part of our population that we invest a huge amount of money to educate them get a lot of information to their heads we buy these expensive buildings and a lot of expensive equipments in those buildings and we put those people there and the way you get health care is It's a pilgrimage to this place where, you know, you can get this high cost, you know, scarce resource. But when you zoom out, right, like you start realizing that so much of what we do in health care is actually not bound by that physical location, that kind of in that physical cost and, you know, the cost structure that's associated with that. But I think like over time, it feels to me it's very similar to the journey we've been on societally in a bunch of other aspects of our lives, whether it's like shopping or education or transportation, where, you know, we came from a world where that was, you know, bottom up built around a non-digital framework. But when you actually think about what does it take to rebuild or evolve in a digital native existence.
Othman Laraki: [22:53] You know, a huge amount of these service areas can be put on a digital kind of plane, if you will.
Othman Laraki: [23:03] I mean, I remember, for example, with retail, the early Amazon days being like, okay, I can buy a book online, but I'll never buy something expensive like a camera or clothes. That seemed unthinkable.
Timothy Showalter: [23:18] And then the next year, it's everything. Exactly.
Othman Laraki: [23:21] And it's very similar here. In many ways, I think actually now, it's especially topical on the AI side, explosion that we're living through now because so much of healthcare is a cognitive task of expertise.
Othman Laraki: [23:40] And now we have technology to be able to serve people on a completely different scale and with a very different level of service because one of the things that I think is happening or is likely to happen is not that we for example won't need doctors, it's more that, we will all come to expect that we will have a level of medical or clinical support at a much higher quality of service or level of service than any of us assume. Maybe in five or ten years, every one of us will expect that there is world-class expertise in every different healthcare dimension that's looking over you 24-7, right? Like you know the best nutritionist in the world is analyzing everything you eat and the best cardiologist is like you know seeing every beat coming through your whoop or your apple watch and so I think like our capacity to consume expertise is probably like a million times higher, than it is than we think it is because we all came from a world of scarcity around that so.
Othman Laraki: [24:54] To me, that's really exciting, right? Like it's kind of, and, you know, we can talk more about what, you know, where Colors evolved to, but like, it's very much that same spirit where, you know, what does it look like to, not try to take what we have today purely and say, how do we just, the incrementalism, but rather start off from the other end and try to meet the current standards and current expectations, but really starting off in as unburdened of a starting point as possible.
Timothy Showalter: [25:27] That's really interesting. I mean, I love how you've got sort of a broad lens on the history of healthcare and the sort of future looking trends and how to maybe build a better version. A lot of these tools are where the trends are heading. It's very healthcare and technology connected in terms of a viewpoint. I think the world needs great stories about technologists who really learn to understand healthcare and appreciate it from a big picture and then reinvent it in a sense as you're doing. And I'm curious from the founder and from the leadership level, when you approach the transition from technology into healthcare, I can imagine there are some things from a product development standpoint and a technology standpoint that were hugely helpful for building a company. And then there were probably some things that were, it felt like you're learning a new language or it felt really inefficient. I'm wondering if you could just sort of take us through like, what has, what has been, what have been the technology superpowers and what have been the maybe initial blind spots that you've had to learn?
Othman Laraki: [26:36] You know, I think actually, I think one of the most important superpowers we've had as a team, and I think actually tends to be one of the biggest challenges. I think people come purely from a tech starting point. And I think it's actually a common thing across different fields where from afar, everything looks easy in a way. And the problems can when plays where you can see a problem or a challenge there's always a temptation to be like oh you know these people you know on the other side like they're missing all these opportunities and doesn't make sense right like and it's kind of like use and i think like you know especially people from tech like are notorious for you know showing up and thinking you know oh everyone who's been in health care is not very smart and like we're going to show show up and like you know solve all the problems because they look easy but in reality it's like when you at low resolution things look simple but then when you zoom in you realize oh wow like no actually it is it is very hard and it's very complicated and there's a huge amount of depth and i think one of the things that for us has been enabled us i think to be very effective over time is that we've always had a very healthy amount i think of humility in that respect you know whether it was in genetics like you know literally our first scientific partner was Dr. Mary Claire King, who, you know, was very core to the association of, you know, the BRCA, one gene with cancer, or, you know, our work right now, like, you know.
Othman Laraki: [28:04] With, you know, people like Rebecca Miksad, who you both know from Flatiron Health, working very closely with great clinicians and oncologists or people who are deep in the field to have a tight feedback that loop to work closely together to try to understand what are the actual kind of deep problems or challenges in every domain. I mean, even for example, like, you know, Color's Virtual Cancer Clinic, which is our, you know, core product and what we do today as, you know, as a company. The genesis of that actually came from discussions with Karen Knudsen, who used to be the CEO of the American Cancer Society.
Othman Laraki: [28:47] So I used to be on the board of the ACS And, you know, we spent a lot of time together and I was kind of like the entrepreneur technologist on the board. I think I was the only non MD or PhD on the ACS board. But a lot of what we do came out of a lot of time together, thinking through like, what does it look like to build a virtual cancer clinic? That is holistic, that thinks about the problem in a holistic way using technology but goes very deep into the specifics, right? Like at the end of the day for every single cancer patient, every person going through it, there are no general solutions, right? Like for each person you have to be able to do the best possible job and so, I think that has ended up being I think one of the key dimensions of all these collaborations I think.
Trevor Royce: [29:42] That resonates with me a lot. I mean, I was looking at your website today, and it's a fantastic website. One of my favorite parts of it is the timeline. And it really shows a very kind of just how thoughtful and intentional I think you guys have been with applying technology and healthcare and your timing has been impeccable. I don't think that's like a mistake. I think that shows, you know, a very intentional reflection on the direction that you guys have taken. To be specific, you know, obviously starting in the genomics and then your success story with COVID, I think, is pretty well known now. And now as we enter this sort of new era of AI applications in health care, I was playing around with some of the demos on your website. And we can talk a little bit more about that. But the co-pilot feature was pretty cool. I'd love to hear you kind of reflect on, you know, we talked a little bit about where you guys started and how your journey to date. And so, like, where are you now and what's on the horizon for you?
Othman Laraki: [30:31] Close of all this so in part actually through our COVID work you know we we dramatically scaled our both our diagnostics infrastructure but also we built a 50-state medical group so we can actually one of the biggest frustrations or challenges for us when we were purely a testing company initially was that we generate all this great information but then we relied on you know the world to do a good job with it, right? Like, how do you manage someone with a high risk of colon cancer, et cetera? And it's like, and it was always a challenge to ensure that, you know, people actually were able to benefit from the information we were providing them. And so through COVID, we built a whole medical group that enables us to actually, you know, also work directly with clinicians who, you know, whether it's on supporting people through screening or treatment and so on.
Othman Laraki: [31:23] And so today, what our core work is around this virtual cancer clinic that is designed around working with large populations, like especially with like big employers. So some of the like, you know, a lot of Fortune 100 companies.
Othman Laraki: [31:39] A lot of pensions or unions. So like, for example, the Teamsters union, which is a lot of truck drivers. We work directly with these populations to manage cancer for them holistically from screening and prevention through treatment all the way to survivorship and what's interesting there is like each one of those phases there is a it's less about reinventing the wheel or creating new medicine or new science but rather taking this what's already been established and there's consensus for, and applying it in a way that is with a lot of immediacy. So for example, on the screening side, you know, we will get like 50 to 70% increase in screening adherence rates just by getting people a much more convenient way to get their screenings done. So literally, people just show up, they answer a few questions, things that can be done at home, they receive kits either at home or they can pick them up at the workplace. For example, we were working with one of the major airlines. We were at their major hubs where, you know, you had people who they call them working under the wing who people were like, all the people would do the, you know, you see tossing, you know, doing your luggage under the plane, etc.
Othman Laraki: [32:59] You know, those people like hourly workers many times, oftentimes rarely will be taking all the time to go and have a PCP, go get their screenings done, et cetera. And they're just able to like show up there, take the kits, submit samples, sometimes literally on site, sign up their dependents. If they need to go get a colonoscopy or a lung CT, we kind of get them scheduled right there. Then next, like one thing we start realizing is when people have a finding in a screening, huge amount of those just the ball gets dropped on. So about 40% of people have a positive fit tests, so for colorectal cancer screening, about 40% of them never get a clinical follow-up.
Othman Laraki: [33:44] So, you know, these are people who have like 5-10% chance of actually being diagnosed with colon cancer, but nothing happens for them until they show up a year or two years later with, symptoms and a much more advanced cancer, right? And so what we do is we take a very hands-on model to just kind of like immediately do the follow-ups put a lot of effort to compressing the time from positive screen to initiating treatment so that's you know very impactful window of time and you know your example of the thing you mentioned around the cancer co-pilot is that oftentimes.
Othman Laraki: [34:21] You know, part of where the ball gets dropped is that you have a diagnosis, you just get referred to a specialist, right? And then it can take weeks or months to see them. And in that time, nothing is done to prepare you for treatment. And so what we do is we get all the balls rolling immediately so that by the time you actually see your oncologist, you're much more likely to be able to initiate treatment immediately. And so we do a lot of work to kind of compress all of that timeline and give people a much more, you know, rapid and hands-on follow-up. And so we do the same thing during treatment and then also for survivors. In a lot of these cases, once someone sees a doctor, the doctor knows exactly what to do. The problem is getting to the doctor as rapidly as possible and for the doctor to have as little of a documentation burden as possible. So it's really about kind of like tying all those pieces together in a coherent way. And that's where technology ethic is amazing. It's not about.
Othman Laraki: [35:20] You know, interestingly, like, you know, for example, with the cancer co-pilot, this is where they kind of like, it's good as a technology person to be very close to either the practitioners. Initially, all of us were like, oh, it's gonna be really exciting to get the AI to help doctors make decisions because decisions look complicated, etc. And as we started iterating with doctors, we realized, you know, like, actually when they have the information in front of them the decision part is oftentimes the easiest part for them to do they don't need AI to make decisions for them what they do need AI for is like you get a hundred pages of PDFs with stuff like sprinkled all over completely unstructured and you just need that to be kind of like synthesized and put in front of you around the specific task you're trying to achieve in a way that you can actually do your job more efficiently as opposed to spending a lot of time, you know, pouring through these, you know, these poorly structured documents, and then doing the same thing on the back end, like writing up all these letters to try to get someone to be able to get their treatment approved by their insurance. It's really that stuff that is, you know, real pain for doctors, and we can start, you know, reducing that burden.
Trevor Royce: [36:35] You know, I'd even throw a hypothesis out there that you might reduce some of this burnout that we hear a lot in the oncology world on the provider side with tools like this. I mean, it is a major burden.
Timothy Showalter: [36:45] I agree. You've clearly listened. Those really are the pain points. And I think you're absolutely right. Those are the things that slow patients down.
Othman Laraki: [36:53] And we were completely wrong in our initial hypothesis, right? And so that's where we're very glad to be very close to a lot of folks who could give us great rapid feedback. Because, you know we were very naive in our initial assumption right it's like because to us those decisions look complicated but you know at the end of the day when someone spent 10,000 hours in training, It's really, that decision part, like, is, like, hardwired. They can do that. It's really the, you know, the world is messy around all of us, right? Like, and that's the part where I think, you know, these tools can, you know, can have an amazing contribution.
Timothy Showalter: [37:30] You know, it sounds like we spend a lot of time talking to healthcare providers and health systems and making sure that Color Health really connects with those. There were two high-profile collaborative programs sort of highlighted in the press this year, both UCSF and Memorial Sloan Kettering. I wonder if you could just comment on how you see those fitting into Color's continued impact.
Othman Laraki: [37:54] So with UCSF, actually, we published a paper about two months ago on this AI architecture that we built, and we worked with UCSF to validate it with retrospective cases. So the challenge that happens, and again, this is a great example of engineers not talking to doctors. I feel like most of the people doing healthcare AI look at it as like, oh, we want to create this healthcare super intelligence that's going to understand all of healthcare and kind of can answer all these questions, etc. The reality is like every single clinic operates differently. And the decision framework, there's a common base like, you know, in cancer, for example, a lot of people follow NCCN, but then, you know, MSK versus, UCSF versus a community clinic will have their own internal SOPs and, you know, layer of.
Othman Laraki: [38:52] Decision models that is very specific to their community, to the type of payers they work with, et cetera, et cetera. And so the world doesn't converge to a single logic. I think like all the machine learning people think that, okay, if you feed all of the world's EMR data, the model is going to have the best decisions possible and we'll all converse to the same outcomes. But in practice, actually, you know, we realized that the world doesn't converge. It actually, there is a diversity and that is likely to be, to remain the case. And so we build this architecture that's all about that, that's around, how do you make it possible for us to operate on a logical, common ground in a way that removes hallucinations, but also enables every setting to have specificity with the decisions that they're operating with.
Othman Laraki: [39:47] And so we built this architecture, it was working really well for us internally. And so with UCSF, we did a study, we put 100 cases of both breast and colon cancer cases that we fed into the system, and to see how accurate it was, and how much time it saved for a clinician. And the results were amazing. Like it was over 98% accuracy in terms of understanding the clinical decision factors that both guidelines and UCSF SOPs and took these tasks that normally would take about an hour of this specialist time down to about 10 minutes. So huge time-saving and super high accuracy and also the ability to see the logic, not treat it as like this black box and we don't know if it's made a mistake or hallucinated something.
Othman Laraki: [40:44] So that was a very exciting publication and then we're now starting to work with different folks to implement it in different settings, including in community clinics. So that's kind of the work with UCSF. And then with MSK, you know, MSK has huge influence and impact, like in the tri-state area and, you know, in the Northeast. They already do a lot of great work with some of the big employers through a program called MSK Direct. Employers can have more direct access into the MSK system for referral, second opinions, etc. We have a lot of common customers. And so we build this partnership to be able to integrate Color's virtual cancer clinic with MSK and MSK Direct to better serve all of our joint customers.
Othman Laraki: [41:38] And so, you know, that's a very exciting collaboration for us. You know, and it's, I think there's just like a lot of opportunity to just have a much more expansive way to serve a broader population. I think that's one of the MSK's orientation is how can you, you know, more broadly almost syndicate out the clinical reasoning and the, you know, quality of care that they can provide to a much broader population and make it as accessible as possible. So I think that alignment, you know, really connected our, both of our missions. And so, yeah, we're really excited about that partnership. And, you know, I think there's just like a lot of opportunity to, you know, serve more people and, you know, keep keep improving the quality of care.
Timothy Showalter: [42:29] In my mind, you're now going to be the archetype for a great technologist, founder, and healthcare, just to be honest. So I'm curious, we have a lot of young listeners and folks who are interested in founding companies or early in their careers. And I think it'd be interesting to hear your advice on someone whose early career or is contemplating founding a health technology company. What advice do you have to give based on your experiences?
Othman Laraki: [42:57] Thank you for saying that. I hope time will tell. I do think a very important part is, especially if you're coming from a technology background, realizing that technology is not the hardest part of healthcare. It really is, I think, both the clinical sites are really investing in technology. Working with top people from the field as much as possible. That's number one. I think number two, that's, you know, an unfortunate reality, I think, of healthcare, especially in the U.S., is that harder than technology and harder than medicine is the economics of healthcare, and dealing with the kind of the business model of healthcare. You know, I think it is an extremely difficult industry to build sound business models. And so it's not like I know a perfect formula for that. It's more that I think if you're going in, you need to be ready for a lot of iteration. And if it looks easy, you're probably wrong. So I think it is just very, very difficult to figure out how to make, you know, the goals of impacting people in a positive way.
Othman Laraki: [44:27] Building a sound economic model and making it scale. I think those are very, very difficult. And so, you know, and so being ready for a lot of iteration, I think, and embracing that iterative process, like, you know, like not being at all attached to a single strategy and approach, like you should just assume you're going to be wrong. Like statistically, that's almost a certainty. And so being ready to iterate, I think that's like, I think one of the key things.
Trevor Royce: [44:59] That's great. I think we're probably at time here. So we really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today. Othman Laraki of Color Health has been an honor speaking with you.
Othman Laraki: [45:08] Thank you for having me.
Trevor Royce: [45:09] That wraps up this episode of Health Tech Remedy. Be sure to like and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and share the show with friends or colleagues. You can find us on LinkedIn or reach out with ideas, questions, and feel free to say hello.
