Ep 51 – The Next Moneyball: AI in Value-Based Care, with Andrew Eye

What this episode covers

When Billy Beane decided to employ a recent Harvard graduate to use advanced statistical analysis to build a championship major league baseball team, he changed the game forever. While Beane’s famous early 2000s team never won a World Series, multiple 100-win seasons and a new record for the longest winning streak got the attention of teams across the MLB, all while on one of the league’s lowest payrolls. Most people know Beane’s story as it was popularized in the book—and later in the movie—Moneyball. In healthcare, we are overdue for a “Moneyball” revolution. The shift towards value-based payment has made it clear that our system needs to do a better job generating outcomes that matter to patients — a positive health-care experience, improved health, and good quality of life. The machine learning techniques that were used to algorithmically determine a player’s value were light-years ahead of the archaic methods that had been used in baseball up to that point. Similarly, many of our conventions in delivering care come from an era when healthcare was delivered primarily by doctors and nurses with elite training whose success depended mostly on content expertise. A key component to value-based transformation in healthcare will be artificial intelligence. Without AI, medicine will never advance to a state where the totality of a patient’s data can be used to find predictive signals that will lead to enhanced treatment and population health interventions that improve outcomes. Our guest this week is Andrew Eye, the founder and CEO of ClosedLoop.ai, the recently announced winner of the CMS Artificial Intelligence Health Outcomes Challenge. Listen and find out why Andrew and ClosedLoop are exemplars in the race to value!   Episide Bookmarks: 02:00 The Billy Beane story and how, in healthcare, we are overdue for a “Moneyball” revolution 03:00 A key component to value-based transformation in healthcare is artificial intelligence 04:00 Andrew Eye – a national leader in AI in Value-Based Care – and his company ClosedLoop.ai 06:45 Partnership with Dave DeCaprio following his work with the Human Genome Project 07:30 How Andrew’s daughter’s medical condition provided “WHY” inspiration to build a next-gen predictive analytics platform 09:20 How ClosedLoop.ai beat out the world’s leading technology and healthcare organizations to win the CMS AI Health Outcomes Challenge! 11:25 “Physician trust in AI is crucial.  Algorithms never saved anybody’s life. We predict the future so that you can change it.” 12:50 Creating an open source, AI-based predictive model for predicting COVID-19 Vulnerability 13:00 Andrew discusses what it was like to submit the winning submission for the CMS AI Challenge without electricity in the Texas Snowpocalypse! 14:00 CMS’ focus on AI Explainability and how ClosedLoop was “born to win” 17:00 “Explainable AI” (XAI) versus “Black Box” machine learning algorithms 19:00 Early AI firms were reluctant to share “secret sauce” of proprietary algorithms and the impact on physician trust and external validation of bias 20:00 “We’re not building models.  We are building a machine that builds models.” 20:20 “The idea that there is one algorithm that is best for every healthcare organization in the country is a total fallacy.” 21:00 “Explainability in AI is absolutely critical to helping care teams have more effective interventions in population health.” 22:30 Physician paranoia about “machines taking over” where there work will be eventually outsourced to algorithms and other artificial tools of clinical reasoning 23:45 The impact of AI on Radiology and how that scenario differs from other instances in medicine wher...