Breaking Through the Paper Wall with Mike McSherry

In this latest executive interview, Mike McSherry speaks with Chilmark VP John Moore III about how his past successes in consumer tech and an entrepreneur-in-residence opportunity at Providence prepared him for tackling patient engagement in the healthcare industry.

During our conversation, Mike recounts how he and his team explored 70+ startup ideas with Providence stakeholders – patients, nurses, physicians, executives – before settling on the Xealth concept. As veterans of the industry are aware, the idea of a centralized, vetted app marketplace for providers to activate patients has been attempted a few times since the mass adoption of smartphones.

We have followed this area closely for years, but to date, no startups have actually found a successful business model. The reasons for these failures (for lack of a better word) are many-fold, and each attempt needs to be examined in its own context to truly understand what arrested progress. That said, one consistent fact emerges: this is a complex model that requires buy-in from multiple healthcare stakeholders and adoption from two notoriously difficult to engage populations (patients and physicians). And as the concept of digital therapeutics continues to gain traction, the need for a viable "digital formulary" becomes that much more critical to the industry.

So why do Mike and his team think they'll be successful where others have failed? You'll have to listen to the podcast to hear their rationale for what makes Xealth different from previous solutions – we make sure to press him a bit on the topic, since it's our view here at Chilmark that this type of offering is critically important to integrating these new digital tools into care provision workflows in an effective way. Patients / consumers of health care are increasingly accustomed to the self-service, mobile-enabled options offered in other critical aspects of their lives, and a truly modern digital health ecosystem is incomplete without providing an option to utilize that for positive behavior change.

We'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback on this interview in the comments!