Q&A with Michela, a proven healthcare leader, on the healthcare startup’s opportunity ahead
Today, Curve Health announced the appointment of Matthew Michela, a longtime leader in the healthcare industry, as CEO.
Curve Health allows patients and providers to connect beyond the four walls of a facility. The Curve solution includes telemedicine, health information exchange, data, predictive analytics, and billing integrations that reduce or eliminate unnecessary trips to the hospital. Curve enables providers to have a one-of-a-kind user experience and helps skilled nursing facilities, healthcare systems, and provider groups to improve on both the cost and quality of their services.
I joined the board of Curve Health in August 2022, following Lightspeed’s participation in the February 2022 Series A and October 2020 seed round.
Matthew and I sat down on the occasion of his appointment to talk about why he joined Curve, the problems with the healthcare industry and senior care today, and how Curve improves care and reduces costs.
Ling: You’ve been working in healthcare for nearly four decades. What makes your experience unique, and a good fit to lead Curve?
Matthew: My career represents several decades in a broad range of healthcare sectors and domains that provide a solid base of experience for understanding the end-to-end process of healthcare innovation, delivery, financing, and patient care that Curve Health operates in today and will operate in the future.
I have worked in large public companies and understand the influence of public markets on the behavior of Curve customers and partners. I have worked in the non-for-profit sector, which gave me an understanding of regulators and the wide variety of State and Federal influences on companies like Curve.
Having developed several of my own start-ups, I have working experience in establishing and financing new companies, as well as providing capital and investor liquidity that are required to keep companies operating. I have experience in healthcare technology businesses including forward focuses on interoperability and real world data, both of which will be essential components of future Curve services.
I have experience with technology-enabled healthcare service companies which should help Curve correctly partner with other organizations, whether customers or partners to drive additional value. I have experience in creating new clinical interventions and services at scale, providing insight into what actually affects patient outcomes.
And I have been in both high-growth and high-turnaround situations, so I am familiar with the barriers and problems that arise when growth is done incorrectly, and I know how to make the hard choices to get companies on a better path when challenged.
So in short, I have experience with the majority of things we can anticipate Curve will need to do or will face in the market over the next several years, which has prepared me to lead the organization with intention toward a future where Curve makes a measurable impact to the care millions of seniors experience daily.
Curve aims to improve senior care with an interconnected platform. What are some of the healthcare problems facing seniors today and what makes them so difficult to solve?
Seniors face a significant number of health-related issues today that unfortunately do not receive the attention and resources they deserve. On the clinical side, seniors are seeing an increase in problems related to aging, including cognitive decline, frailty, falls, depression, hearing and vision loss, as well as cardiac, vascular, and cancer conditions associated with a more intensive decline. Additionally, there are a wide variety of medical issues related to the basic maintenance of balanced health in seniors.
On the care delivery side, seniors struggle with receiving preventative care, accessing medicines, transporting themselves to medical facilities, and generally accessing medical professionals early enough — when health issues initially present — to avoid unnecessary progression.
These issues are difficult to solve for a variety of reasons, including the lack of resources and attention spent on our senior population and the disproportionate stresses placed upon senior care facilities. These stresses include significant nursing shortages acerbated by the pandemic, high staff turnover as many skilled nurses and managers leave the profession altogether, financial pressures on senior care facilities, and an inability for facilities to carve out time for training, retraining, and process improvement in their facilities.
Overall, this is a very challenging time for this very vulnerable population. We are experiencing a time of increased clinical need when the system has the least capacity in my lifetime to manage it.
Let’s get a little personal. How do you connect to Curve’s story? What made you want to lead the company?
Millions of Americans have personal experience with loved ones who have received care in skilled nursing facilities (SNFs), nursing homes, or other post-acute healthcare facilities, as do I. Everyone with that experience knows how poorly the delivery system operates, how underfunded it is, how staffing shortages and inferior training negatively affect patient care. It’s tragic to see our seniors receiving poor care or having to endure substandard care coordination.
“Our society does a poor job in taking care of [seniors]. Curve has the opportunity to make a real difference.”
Our society does a poor job in taking care of this population. Curve has the opportunity to make a real difference by connecting seniors to the care they need when they need it, so that they can avoid hospitalizations and have the best care experience possible.
If you could snap your fingers and change one thing about the healthcare industry, what would that be?
I would argue that the most impactful thing we could do to sustainably improve the balance of cost and quality in our healthcare system would be to encourage more commercial competition at all levels of the system.
We need more payors in each state to provide consumers more choice, to allow providers more opportunity to market to patients, and to facilitate quicker innovation. We need more nurses, doctors, pharmacists and mental health professionals to treat patients by allowing delivery of care across state lines, by decreasing institutional barriers in licensing medical professionals by medical societies, governments, and medical schools, and by speeding the approval of new drugs, technologies, and therapies by the FDA.
We need more benefit flexibility at both the state and federal level so payors can provide consumers and employers a greater ability to choose the price/benefit match that meets their individual needs. We need greater enforcement of the interoperability standards promoted by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and more aggressive penalties for providers and healthcare technology companies that are blocking access to data to patients.
Overall, the consolidation of the healthcare industry across payors, providers, pharma companies and more that began in the second Bush administration has continued to accelerate, and has not resulted in either lower cost, better quality, or more efficiency in our healthcare system. It’s time for a different approach.
On a more tactical level, we need a single healthcare identifier for each patient (like a social security number for taxpayers). The current system of provider-specific patient identifiers geometrically increases cost at every step of the patient journey and prevents providers from having access to essential data to treat patients.
Secondly, we should alter the ownership of patient data as earlier defined by HIPAA to establish that patients are the only owners of their healthcare data and that providers may have access to it for treatment purposes, and require consent from patients for any further uses. The current system of granting ownership to providers while allowing patients only limited access to their own data creates friction in the delivery of care and increases the cost and time for innovation due to provider resistance to make data widely available.
Finally, we need greater enforcement of the interoperability standards promoted by the ONC, more aggressive penalties for providers and healthcare technology companies that block access to data to patients, and a timely mandate to eliminate old interoperability and technology standards such as the reliance on fax machines and CDs for medical imaging.
What do you think has been the most important innovation in healthcare in the past decade?
The development of the commercial cloud for healthcare is the most significant development in healthcare in the past decade, perhaps even greater than the mapping of the genome (yes, now more than 20 years ago) due to the cloud’s ability to positively impact every healthcare sector. Cloud availability accelerates innovation, commercial development, treatment deployment, care planning quality, analytics, new discoveries and treatment protocols, drug and device development and more.
Resistance for healthcare organizations to move to the cloud more quickly lie in cultural resistance to change by delivery systems, lack of delivery system expertise in cloud technology, lack of interest in existing healthcare technology vendors to disrupt their existing revenue streams, and the availability of resources to invest in the transition to the cloud.
Movement to the cloud is accelerating, however, as services become more diverse and specific to healthcare applications, innovators recognize the benefits of development speed, new technologies are brought to market that require processing speeds only available in the cloud, the Federal government continue its efforts to deploy its DoD and VA infrastructure in the cloud, and consumerism in healthcare increases demand for applications and services that are not location specific.
What do you think the human impact of Curve will be? How will this change seniors’ lives?
Curve has the opportunity to address the significant staffing shortages affecting the entire senior care community by using both insightful analytics and remote clinical staff to complement local staffing. Curve can provide seniors the care they need, at the time they need it, in the most cost effective manner possible.
“What we all should want is our senior community to be as healthy as possible and to live their best.”
By increasing access to the right types of medical care in the senior community at the time of need, Curve can decrease unnecessary hospitalizations, address medical conditions before they become severe, and allow treatment in place thereby reducing the stress seniors experience with unneeded trips to the hospital while decrease the strain on our already overburdened hospital emergency rooms and urgent care facilities.
What we all should want is our senior community to be as healthy as possible and to live their best during this last phase of their lives. By providing the healthcare services seniors need, when they need it, Curve can help make that happen.
What’s your vision for Curve? Where do you see the company this time next year? In five years?
Curve has developed a leading telehealth and analytics platform that economically facilitates the identification of at-risk patients and access to medical professionals when local clinicians are not available or might not have the specialty training to address a specific patient’s need.
Over the next year, Curve will complete the operational work to allow expansion of its customer base to hundreds of skilled nursing and post-acute care facilities across the country.
Over the next several years, Curve will continue to expand its footprint and become the largest remote complimentary provider network in the US supporting the senior care post-acute care community through the following initiatives:
- expansion of its platform into all 50 states;
- connection of its platform to a wide variety of diagnostic devices used locally in these facilities, improving provider access to essential patient data in medical records;
- extension of its platform to additional medical specialties that would otherwise require patients to transfer to other places of care;
- extension of the platform’s use to other places of care, such as home health, hospice, and like delivery sites and;
- extension of its care model to other healthcare segments such as Medicare Advantage and other retiree populations.
I am excited and humbled to lead Curve Health on this exciting journey.
