Mark Cuban & Top Pulmonary Doctors Discuss Healthcare Technology Opportunity at the American Thoracic Society’s Annual Conference

Eon co-CEO’s, Dr. Aki Alzubaidi and Christine Spraker, sat down with Mark Cuban, Dr. Gerard Silvestri, Dr. Peter Mazzone, and Dr. George A. Eapen for a live webinar hosted May 20, 2019, at the American Thoracic Society conference in Dallas, TX. The panel met to discuss healthcare technology issues that have led to patients, health care providers and hospitals facing an ever-widening gap between what technology can do and what is currently implemented.

Eon, a complex patient management technology company out of Denver, Colorado, is dedicated to creating sea-change in the healthcare industry and is determined to use advanced technology to improve complex patient management of every kind. Technology has improved processes and is now less expensive in every other industry – why not healthcare?

The webinar addressed issues in healthcare technology, such as the cost, the failures of EMRs, the siloing of data and misaligned incentives, as well as solutions to mitigate these issues. Eon launched the discussion with a question on how providers, as well as hospitals, can educate themselves on what technology should cost and why it has been okay for the industry to overcharge for technology that is now fractional to develop.

While some healthcare technology companies repackage and repurpose technology from the 1990s and sell it to hospitals for hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s not surprising technology now contributes 40-50% of the annual cost increase in healthcare. As Dr. Eapen points out, it’s not necessarily the cost of the software that is the issue, but what the value is. He says, “It’s really not about driving down health care costs. Something costs what it costs, but if it provides value, it is either worth it, or it’s not.”

The physicians on the panel encountering these challenges were able to pose questions about patient data and the utility of EMRs from a user standpoint. Cuban, as an entrepreneur, Eon investor, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) aficionado, brought a unique perspective to the conversation and allowed it to naturally move in the direction of siloed data by both hospitals and insurance companies.

“Stop siloing data,” said Cuban. “My perception of it [referring to doctors using electronic medical records] is that you try to fit whatever you can into the square and round holes that are already there, and that’s not necessarily optimized for process.”