Revolutionizing Healthcare with Reusable Networked Identities

Demi Radeva: We're on HIT Like a Girl, and I'm Demi Radova. And Shreya Palekar. Let's start with a quick intro. Can you share a bit about your background and your role in healthcare? Yeah, absolutely. So 

Shriya Palekar: I have been my whole career, a healthcare consultant and operator, very focused on using cross cutting change to enhance the patient experience, and I think technology is a huge opportunity to do that.

I develop healthcare partnerships. A lot of people know us from our work at the airport where we've been powering safer, faster experiences in a highly regulated, zero fail counter terrorism environment. But our vision has always been to be bigger than that. Our vision has always been actually to offer consumers a single, reusable, networked identity that they can use to actually unlock experiences that require identity just the way that you unlock experiences that require payment with apple pay or mastercard or visa And health care is a big opportunity for that because obviously there's a lot of opportunity to drive interoperability To drive seamlessness in terms of the patient experience and the provider experience.

And so we're doubling down in that space. 

Demi Radeva: We're here at VIVE discussing what's coming with the new administration from your perspective. What are the biggest policy shifts or industry changes on the horizon? 

Shriya Palekar: I think a few big themes come to mind. One is around, I'd call it deregulation. So moving the decision making centers of gravity more to the states, more to employers, more to individuals, more privately held, and another is just around efficiency at all costs.

If you've heard, heard some of the headlines already, I think both of those actually present big opportunities for technology to play a role. So there's, possibly some big tailwinds from that. And then I think also on the public health front, we should be looking at that and just the way that, new administration will change everything from what goes into our food and how those regulations play out to how we prepare for the next pandemic or how we vaccinate our children. 

Demi Radeva: I am a user of Clear and I love it. And you mentioned efficiency. And so I'm curious from a healthcare perspective, how would you see that play out? 

Shriya Palekar: First off, thank you for being a member. Efficiency as it relates to Clear. Let me take a step back and actually explain what a reusable networked identity is.

So the idea there is that you create an identity that's tied to who you are. And you're able to use that across a range of experiences. So if you think about a health care, a typical health care journey today, right over the course of a few years, you go to different providers. You often are seeking care that is completely interrelated because you are more a longitudinal story than a one time experience at a specific provider's office.

But in each of those providers today, there's often its own identity. You go in, fill out paperwork on a clipboard, and then you get a digital, usually an EMR record out of it. And these providers may be in the same health system, but they may be separate. And that's been my personal experience.

My PCP is in one place and, a lot of my specialists are in another place and there's really no way to connect those dots. And so what we're doing in terms of efficiency is actually making that identity a single identity so that. From an integration perspective of the actual medical records, you can actually know that two records belong to the same person, and then you can give that power to the consumer to actually decide where they want to share it to validate who they are and then securely bring those data points together and share it as they need to.

Demi Radeva: This sounds incredible from a patient experience perspective. I'm curious, have you had any feedback from providers and who are the key users of? 

Shriya Palekar:  This platform, the platforms used both on the patient and the provider side. So from a provider perspective, so I've described that patient experience from a provider perspective, if we are able to drive greater interoperability and bring data together, they get a more clear picture of the patient they're treating, right?

They'll know more about what other providers have. They'll get more of the specialist perspective across all different aspects of the patient's care longitudinally as well, which is something that, I think today is somewhat blocked in the US healthcare system. So there's that aspect of it. And then there's also the security aspect of it.

Or they can feel confident that, that patient's data is going to feel, is going to be protected. And they're able to then go and, treat with that confidence. 

Demi Radeva: How can identity verification and consent management streamline access? While maintaining privacy and security? 

Shriya Palekar: Clear, first and foremost is always an opt-in platform. So any user that is, creating an identity, you're verifying their identity with clear is doing so opting into that process and then opting in to share that. information on to whoever might be the end user at the provider or health system. So that's, piece one. I think the other thing to note is we have 14 years of experience in the airport, and we've brought that best in class tech stack over to healthcare.

So we're operating from a place of, having a very strong kind of technology, as far as validating the user's identity. 

Demi Radeva: The 21st Century Cures Act has driven progress in data sharing regulations. Are we seeing real improvements or are healthcare organizations still finding ways to delay full compliance?

Shriya Palekar: I think, yes, the Cures Act has actually created frameworks for what needs to happen to get to a place of interoperability. The legislation around preventing information blocking or, creating better standards in terms of how data is coded and shared has given, I think, the industry a framework.

I do think some of the pieces of the puzzle that, still need to bear out are like, what will enforcement look like? So for example, today, what happens if you don't comply with the CARES Act, will there be fines? So I think those are some of the kind of areas of opportunity, but we have seen a great willingness to think about investing into the space and think about, what are the remaining keys to unlock interoperability and identity is certainly one of them.

Demi Radeva: For you as a female in the space, if there's Thoughts or takeaways? How should we as women? Should we be careful? Should we actually really embrace these type of innovations? Any advice? 

Shriya Palekar: Yeah, I think everyone should sign up. I think the more that there's power in the hands of consumers to take control of their health care experiences, the better.

I also think the more you're able to provide consumers easier access to care, whether that's You know, making that patient experience of, creating an account and checking in to their appointment easier. Or whether it's some of the many, virtual care and digital health solutions that are enabling access from home and from alternative care locations.

It drives towards people being more likely to get care more likely to get it earlier in their disease progression. And from a, women's specific perspective, we're often the ultimate caregivers. So, the earlier we're able to get there, the more it takes that burden of caregiving and hopefully gets to healthcare issues before they get exacerbated.

Demi Radeva: With that in mind, if you could send one message to policy makers about the future of healthcare, what would it be? 

Shriya Palekar: I recently read about some of the new appointees to HHS. Some of the new leaders are actually women. They're women who come from healthcare and from a public private partnership perspective.

And I think continuing to have that type of deep expertise in leadership is critical. Healthcare is a really nuanced space. There's a lot of transferable lessons from industry, from other industries, but certainly the best thing we can do is have people who are used to navigating the waters of health care and the patient sort of needs be the ones that are able to then problem solve at the highest levels.

Demi Radeva: I've seen innovations from, all types of spaces get translated into healthcare, but never aviation. So that's a new one. Awesome. Where can our audience find and follow your work? 

Shriya Palekar: Yeah, so you could go to verifywithclear.com to learn more about what we're doing. across industries and especially in healthcare.

Thank you so much. 

Joy Rios: Thanks for listening. You can learn more about us or this guest by going to our website or visiting us on any of the socials with the handle hit like a girl pod. Thanks again. See you soon. Again. Thank you so much for listening to the hit like a girl podcast. I am truly grateful for you.

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