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Agentic Healthcare and Building AI Advocates to Navigate Healthcare with Eric Marton · Becker’s Healthcare Digital Health + Health IT

• 0:00
  This is Scott Becker
• 0:02
  with the Beckers Healthcare Podcast.
• 0:04
  I'm thrilled today to be joined by a
• 0:06
  brilliant healthcare founder.
• 0:08
  We're joined today by Eric Martin, and Eric's
• 0:12
  the founder and the CEO of AgenTic Healthcare.
• 0:15
  He's gonna talk to say about what they're
• 0:16
  doing, what they're trying to solve,
• 0:18
  the trends he's watching, and a lot more.
• 0:21
  Eric, I know you've had a a a
• 0:22
  spectacular
• 0:23
  career. Can you tell us a little bit
• 0:25
  about yourself, your background,
• 0:27
  as well as AgenTic Healthcare?
• 0:30
  Yeah. Thank you so much, Scott. Really appreciate
• 0:32
  you having me on,
• 0:34
  and I appreciate all of the, folks that
• 0:36
  are, are tuning in. So,
• 0:39
  I am a lifetime,
• 0:41
  health care guy spanning large academic health systems,
• 0:45
  large physician organization,
• 0:48
  private equity backed health care companies,
• 0:50
  and I've been a part of two different,
• 0:52
  health tech venture capital funds.
• 0:55
  I will tell you that I was a
• 0:58
  very happy, health tech venture capitalist, and I
• 1:01
  thought I would be doing that for the
• 1:02
  rest of my professional life. But this opportunity
• 1:06
  emerged,
• 1:07
  and I think, you know, there are these
• 1:08
  moments in time where
• 1:10
  we kind of get the chills professionally.
• 1:12
  And this was one of those times, and
• 1:14
  I couldn't not
• 1:16
  step in and,
• 1:18
  and take advantage of the, of the opportunity.
• 1:21
  So,
• 1:22
  I'll give you a little bit of that
• 1:24
  background. But first, I will say that during
• 1:26
  the course of my professional career,
• 1:28
  I would say the most important work that
• 1:30
  I've done
• 1:31
  is being kind of the unofficial
• 1:34
  health care navigator
• 1:35
  concierge
• 1:36
  for thousands and thousands of patients
• 1:39
  and families.
• 1:40
  Whether I was doing that on behalf of
• 1:43
  some provider organization
• 1:45
  or simply as a private resource for people
• 1:47
  that have had access to me,
• 1:50
  yeah, I really came to appreciate
• 1:52
  the unbelievable
• 1:54
  complexity and
• 1:55
  fragmentation and and often frustration of dealing with
• 1:58
  The US health care system.
• 2:00
  And that's very much kind of the backdrop
• 2:02
  for what we are doing at, AgenTic Health
• 2:05
  Care. So
• 2:07
  a little bit about us. Let's just say
• 2:09
  we're a very unusual
• 2:10
  start up company.
• 2:12
  We have been
• 2:14
  quietly
• 2:15
  building
• 2:16
  some pretty serious deep tech,
• 2:19
  and acquiring
• 2:21
  the assets of other companies over the course
• 2:23
  of the last eighteen months.
• 2:25
  It all started,
• 2:27
  back, with a meeting
• 2:29
  I was having up at NVIDIA
• 2:31
  headquarters,
• 2:32
  and I had the pleasure,
• 2:34
  and I will tell you this is close
• 2:35
  to eighteen months ago.
• 2:37
  I hardly knew what the word agentic
• 2:39
  meant at that time.
• 2:42
  NVIDIA
• 2:43
  gave me a little bit of a behind
• 2:45
  the scenes of what they were investing in
• 2:48
  and what was possible
• 2:50
  in the realm of building
• 2:52
  AI agents
• 2:53
  that would support
• 2:54
  enterprise players in health care, health systems,
• 2:58
  physician organizations,
• 3:00
  health insurance companies, and the like, driving efficiency,
• 3:03
  dealing with labor gaps,
• 3:05
  and I do believe truly hoping to improve
• 3:08
  the patient experience.
• 3:10
  And in that session we had together,
• 3:13
  we asked a question, what would it take
• 3:16
  to bring that same level of AI
• 3:18
  power
• 3:20
  and put that into the hands of patients
• 3:22
  and families.
• 3:23
  Let them optimize the system
• 3:25
  to their benefit, kind of put a wrapper
• 3:28
  around all the component parts that make up
• 3:30
  The US health care system
• 3:33
  and create an army of agents
• 3:35
  that could represent those patients,
• 3:37
  get work done on their behalf, not just
• 3:40
  provide recommendations, but actually do the work,
• 3:43
  wait on hold for that representative at the
• 3:45
  health plan, help navigate to the appropriate specialist
• 3:49
  and the like.
• 3:51
  And let's just say that the group was
• 3:53
  excited about that vision,
• 3:55
  understood the complexity, the challenges, and the like,
• 3:59
  over the course of time.
• 4:01
  The group of people and organizations,
• 4:04
  that we were engaging in this conversation grew
• 4:07
  to include people from government,
• 4:09
  people from deep tech, and, of course, across
• 4:11
  the health care ecosystem.
• 4:13
  And,
• 4:14
  last year, we decided to incorporate Adjentic health
• 4:17
  care. We brought a very large engineering team
• 4:20
  together.
• 4:21
  And, again, we made, we made some some
• 4:23
  acquisitions that,
• 4:25
  make us
• 4:26
  quickly a vertically integrated
• 4:28
  organization.
• 4:30
  So that's amazing. And and just so the
• 4:32
  audience understands,
• 4:33
  yes, you've been a health care investor,
• 4:36
  but more than that, you've also worked at
• 4:38
  UCLA
• 4:39
  and several other health care institutions
• 4:42
  in direct
• 4:43
  in in in surgery
• 4:45
  partners as well. Talk a bit about your
• 4:47
  health care background too that weaves into what
• 4:49
  you're doing too.
• 4:51
  Absolutely. Happy to do that. So it goes
• 4:53
  back, quite a long way. I cut my
• 4:55
  teeth up at UC San Francisco, actually, in
• 4:58
  the managed care department
• 5:00
  and, really came to appreciate
• 5:02
  the good and the bad of, managed care
• 5:04
  and value based care initiatives, here in California
• 5:07
  where I'm based.
• 5:09
  Learned an incredible amount
• 5:11
  and, then spent a lot of time on
• 5:12
  the UCLA health campus.
• 5:15
  Again, more work in managed care, international
• 5:18
  medicine,
• 5:19
  and the like, and then eventually moved over
• 5:21
  to the cardiovascular
• 5:22
  program
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  and had the great pleasure of working with
• 5:26
  what we referred to as the advanced heart
• 5:28
  team. So we ran the heart transplant, heart
• 5:30
  failure, mechanical circulatory support program, and we had
• 5:34
  a vision
• 5:36
  for building what would be the greatest heart
• 5:39
  institute in the Western United States. Not to
• 5:41
  offend any of my friends at at UCLA,
• 5:44
  and I still have many friends there.
• 5:47
  For whatever reason, that that vision was not
• 5:49
  able to be realized on that campus,
• 5:53
  but I was able to
• 5:55
  partner with my friends at Cedars Sinai
• 5:57
  and build the Heart Institute there. I was
• 6:00
  the inaugural
• 6:01
  executive director of the Heart Institute at Cedars
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  Sinai,
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  and they are now among the top two
• 6:06
  or three,
• 6:07
  in the nation and and very proud of
• 6:09
  the work that's done there clinically,
• 6:12
  in the research realm and and, of course,
• 6:14
  the teaching
• 6:15
  mission being supported as well and really jumped
• 6:18
  from there,
• 6:19
  into the private equity world to help turn
• 6:22
  around other health care systems, including the daughters
• 6:24
  of charity,
• 6:25
  and others and saw kind of the other
• 6:28
  side of medicine. I had been in the
• 6:29
  ivory tower academic institution,
• 6:32
  and now I was seeing what it was
• 6:33
  like out in community hospitals,
• 6:35
  safety net hospitals,
• 6:37
  FQHCs,
• 6:39
  you know, a very different type of of,
• 6:41
  care delivery,
• 6:43
  incredibly important work.
• 6:45
  But I think it gave me a really
• 6:47
  deep appreciation
• 6:48
  for the very different journeys
• 6:51
  that our patients and their families
• 6:54
  go on across
• 6:56
  systems, across geographies, across the socioeconomic
• 7:00
  spectrum.
• 7:01
  And when we started building agentic health care,
• 7:05
  a guiding principle for the team has been
• 7:08
  that this
• 7:09
  must work just as well for the rich
• 7:12
  folks that have access to enormous resources
• 7:15
  as much as it does for that single
• 7:17
  mom living in a poor neighborhood
• 7:20
  facing
• 7:21
  more complexity and more challenge
• 7:24
  than than, you know, most of us having
• 7:26
  this conversation have ever had to tackle.
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  And,
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  we're incredibly
• 7:33
  proud of the work we've done so far,
• 7:35
  and I will say
• 7:36
  publicly,
• 7:38
  long term, we are committed to making sure
• 7:40
  this is available to every
• 7:42
  single American, and it's something that we're working
• 7:45
  on with our our friends connected to government,
• 7:48
  as well.
• 7:50
  Thank you. Take a moment, Eric. What are
• 7:53
  you most focused on and excited about this
• 7:55
  year?
• 7:56
  A year or so or eighteen months after
• 7:58
  launch, were you most focused and excited this
• 8:00
  year?
• 8:02
  Yeah. You know,
• 8:04
  I will tell you that,
• 8:06
  you were just so proud of the team
• 8:08
  of of people and organizations that have come
• 8:11
  together
• 8:12
  around
• 8:13
  this, our ability to accelerate the development of
• 8:17
  this platform. We've been
• 8:19
  we were in this kind of euphoric bubble
• 8:21
  of stealth mode where most people didn't know
• 8:24
  what was going on. And and, Scott, I
• 8:26
  will tell you, this is the first time
• 8:28
  we're really speaking to a broad public audience
• 8:31
  about what we're doing. And the timing is
• 8:33
  perfect
• 8:34
  because we are, in fact, about to kick
• 8:37
  off
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  with a large publicly traded
• 8:41
  company who will be giving this platform
• 8:44
  to their employees
• 8:46
  as a benefit.
• 8:48
  And not only is it a benefit to
• 8:50
  those individuals and their families,
• 8:52
  but you can imagine the, and I will
• 8:55
  say,
• 8:56
  appropriate insights that we can provide back to
• 8:59
  the organization
• 9:00
  to help them with plan design, benefit design,
• 9:03
  really drive efficiency,
• 9:06
  and
• 9:08
  create a workforce that's more engaged, healthier,
• 9:13
  and, and I think cared for in a
• 9:16
  way that they haven't been,
• 9:18
  before. So incredibly
• 9:20
  excited about that. I think we're very fortunate
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  that the stars are aligning
• 9:24
  from a policy standpoint, from what we're seeing
• 9:27
  from other kind of big tech companies
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  in putting a spotlight on consumer
• 9:33
  driven health care.
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  We've talked about it for many, many, many,
• 9:37
  many years. I think there have been small
• 9:40
  examples
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  of success here and there,
• 9:43
  but it's never come together. We've never had
• 9:45
  the technology
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  at our disposal
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  to really do this at scale, and I
• 9:50
  think we're finally there.
• 9:52
  Thank you. Take a second, Eric. You've been
• 9:55
  both an investor, but you've also been an
• 9:57
  operator in health care and a leader in
• 9:58
  health care.
• 10:00
  What what advice would you give to emerging
• 10:02
  leaders in health care as to how to
• 10:03
  deal with artificial intelligence
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  and how to embrace it?
• 10:08
  Fantastic question and,
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  something I've been spending my time speaking about
• 10:14
  really across the country with health system leaders,
• 10:17
  health plan leaders,
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  and the like.
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  First and foremost,
• 10:22
  you gotta keep the patient experience at the
• 10:25
  center of strategic decision.
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  I think some of us, me included, have
• 10:30
  the luxury
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  of
• 10:33
  having that be somewhat secondary as we tried
• 10:35
  to make sure that we, you know, improved
• 10:38
  margin and kept the doors open and made
• 10:41
  sure that our programs could continue to build
• 10:43
  and whatnot. And we counted on the frontline
• 10:46
  teams, the physicians, the nurses, the administrative folks
• 10:50
  to really deliver great
• 10:52
  patient care down at the front lines. I
• 10:54
  think now we really have to think about,
• 10:56
  from an infrastructure standpoint,
• 10:58
  how we change what we do. And a
• 11:00
  part of that requires
• 11:03
  leaders,
• 11:03
  again, provider and payer,
• 11:06
  to challenge some legacy assumptions
• 11:09
  that were developed during this pre AI era.
• 11:13
  I have been,
• 11:14
  I guess, not surprised,
• 11:16
  but I'm a little fearful
• 11:18
  of what I'm seeing around the country, folks
• 11:21
  not fully appreciating
• 11:24
  what's coming.
• 11:26
  The power of these AI technologies,
• 11:30
  is so transformational.
• 11:31
  I I just don't think that many organizations
• 11:35
  are fully prepared.
• 11:37
  And I, you know, I I beg these
• 11:40
  these folks to make the investment, bring the
• 11:42
  right people and organizations
• 11:45
  together as partners, embrace those partnerships. And some
• 11:48
  of those partners are gonna seem maybe a
• 11:50
  little bit out of the box based on
• 11:51
  what we used to do historically
• 11:54
  operating these health systems.
• 11:57
  But you you gotta become educated, and you
• 12:00
  have to bring people and organizations
• 12:02
  in who are focused
• 12:04
  on delivering the kinds of outcomes
• 12:06
  that are going to set up your health
• 12:08
  system or your health plan for long term
• 12:11
  success. I think those that don't,
• 12:13
  are gonna be in some trouble.
• 12:16
  Thank you. And and and what does that
• 12:19
  look like? Would where do you see the
• 12:21
  cascading use cases in AI?
• 12:24
  Like, obviously, we're seeing it on the ambient
• 12:26
  listening side. We're seeing it on particular analytics.
• 12:29
  We're seeing it in revenue cycle.
• 12:31
  We're seeing it in a lot of places.
• 12:33
  Are there places where you see it transforming
• 12:37
  clinical
• 12:38
  care, and and where might be some of
• 12:39
  those use cases that you expect to see?
• 12:43
  Absolutely. And and you've highlighted, you know, the
• 12:46
  the first
• 12:48
  and
• 12:48
  maybe most obvious use cases that have been
• 12:51
  embraced.
• 12:53
  We already have some good feedback from the
• 12:55
  industry on ambient listening and what that means.
• 12:57
  Certainly, RCM
• 12:59
  always the first department
• 13:01
  to take advantage of of new tech because
• 13:03
  it's the lifeblood of these organizations.
• 13:07
  There is going to be a a growing,
• 13:10
  I think, recognition
• 13:12
  of what happens
• 13:14
  kind of in between the enterprise
• 13:17
  representing AI
• 13:18
  and the consumer
• 13:19
  representing AI.
• 13:21
  And there is a certain amount of magic
• 13:24
  that can happen when those two
• 13:27
  platforms
• 13:29
  interact with each other in a coordinated,
• 13:32
  in a fine tuned fashion.
• 13:35
  I'll give you an example. I I can't
• 13:36
  provide too many details, but we were speaking
• 13:38
  with a particular,
• 13:40
  you know, government
• 13:43
  health program,
• 13:45
  and we talked about what it meant
• 13:48
  for a patient representing
• 13:50
  AI agent
• 13:51
  to reach out with a request, whether that
• 13:54
  was to schedule an appointment, a question about
• 13:56
  benefits,
• 13:57
  to find out how they can get their
• 13:59
  prescribed medication approved or whatnot.
• 14:02
  And if the enterprise, that program had
• 14:06
  appropriate kind of AI on the other side,
• 14:09
  not only can the task
• 14:11
  get taken care of
• 14:13
  very, very quickly, I think there's a lot
• 14:15
  of talk about in the tech world what
• 14:17
  we refer to as AI agent to AI
• 14:20
  agent protocol.
• 14:22
  That when these AI agents meet in the
• 14:24
  cloud,
• 14:25
  they will understand each other and and be
• 14:27
  very, very efficient.
• 14:29
  In health care, we're taking it a step
• 14:31
  further, and this is a part of what
• 14:33
  we're building our platform around. And that is
• 14:36
  when, let's say, miss Jones reaches out
• 14:39
  to her health system,
• 14:41
  And the health system says, oh, we understand
• 14:43
  in the moment that miss Jones needs to
• 14:45
  have something taken care of.
• 14:47
  But that's the same miss Jones who we've
• 14:49
  been reaching out to
• 14:51
  to talk about her medication adherence, the fact
• 14:53
  that she's got an overdue colonoscopy,
• 14:56
  the fact that maybe she's got an outstanding
• 14:58
  claim.
• 14:59
  And there is an opportunity in this moment
• 15:02
  when you have these AI representatives, what we
• 15:04
  refer to, by the way, as AI advocates,
• 15:08
  representing that patient.
• 15:10
  That information can be passed from the enterprise
• 15:14
  to the patient
• 15:15
  in a way that can be translated,
• 15:17
  organized, presented at the right time at a
• 15:20
  time when we know that patient is engaged,
• 15:23
  and the value that can be driven through
• 15:26
  that kind of interaction
• 15:28
  is incredibly powerful. We've been testing this, again,
• 15:31
  somewhat quietly behind the scenes
• 15:33
  with small cohorts,
• 15:35
  and the
• 15:37
  feedback has just been remarkable on both sides
• 15:40
  of the house.
• 15:41
  So to answer your question more directly,
• 15:44
  these institutions
• 15:45
  need to move beyond
• 15:47
  kind of the individual
• 15:49
  functions of ambient listening and some RCM solutions
• 15:53
  and really start looking about being a participant
• 15:56
  in this, what I refer to as this
• 15:58
  action layer
• 16:00
  that is now going to kind of wrap
• 16:02
  the legacy systems that we've historically been interacting
• 16:05
  with as health system leaders, as health plan
• 16:08
  leaders, as employers,
• 16:10
  and the like.
• 16:12
  Fantastic.
• 16:13
  Eric, again, AgenTic Healthcare.
• 16:16
  Tell me the exact name of the company.
• 16:17
  Do I have that right, AgenTic Healthcare?
• 16:19
  You have said it, perfectly. And, again, we're
• 16:22
  a little bit of an unusual
• 16:24
  young company. AgenTic Healthcare
• 16:26
  is the parent organization we created.
• 16:30
  The patient representing
• 16:32
  AI agent platform is actually called Teleport Health,
• 16:36
  and that is what we are initially launching
• 16:38
  with a series of large employers.
• 16:42
  And, ultimately, we'll get this out to all
• 16:44
  consumers.
• 16:45
  And then we've made acquisitions
• 16:47
  of two other companies,
• 16:49
  one called Cellfy,
• 16:51
  one called TripleBlind.
• 16:53
  Cellfy
• 16:54
  actually has technology
• 16:56
  that lives behind the firewalls of many of
• 16:58
  the health information exchanges
• 17:00
  in The United States and is the creator
• 17:03
  of the Cures Gateway,
• 17:05
  named after the twenty first century Cures Act,
• 17:08
  giving patients the right to claim
• 17:11
  their longitudinal health record. And you can imagine
• 17:14
  if we have the ability to bring in
• 17:16
  the longitudinal health record for every one of
• 17:19
  our members, for every one of our patients,
• 17:22
  the ability for the AI
• 17:25
  advocate
• 17:26
  to be proactive to optimize things on behalf
• 17:29
  of the patient,
• 17:30
  is supercharged.
• 17:32
  So we were really excited to be able
• 17:34
  to make that acquisition.
• 17:35
  And then triple blind, I won't spend too
• 17:38
  much time on. It's a deep tech encryption
• 17:40
  technology that provides privacy
• 17:43
  beyond HIPAA. We it allows for multiparty compute
• 17:47
  without the need for traditional de identification
• 17:50
  with greater privacy, greater security,
• 17:54
  than seen before. And some very large institutions
• 17:57
  and the US government had been involved in,
• 17:59
  in its development. So, again, we were just
• 18:01
  incredibly fortunate to be in a position to
• 18:04
  bring
• 18:05
  those assets into Agenstic Healthcare, creating this vertical
• 18:08
  integration
• 18:09
  and getting us ready to do what we
• 18:11
  do at scale and do it in a
• 18:13
  safe fashion.
• 18:15
  Yeah. Absolutely fascinating. Eric, I wanna thank you
• 18:18
  for joining us today in the Becker's Healthcare
• 18:20
  podcast.
• 18:21
  Congratulations
• 18:22
  on what you're doing and continue good luck,
• 18:24
  and we're all sort of watching
• 18:26
  the cascading transformation of health care through AI,
• 18:30
  so it'll be fascinating to watch and keep
• 18:31
  an eye on. Thank you so much for
• 18:33
  joining us.
• 18:34
  Thank you so much, Scott, and really looking
• 18:37
  forward to interacting more with you and all
• 18:39
  of the folks that I know listen to
• 18:41
  your podcast. Those are the partners that are
• 18:43
  gonna make this happen.
• 18:45
  Thank you so much.