Mitch Heroman:
My name is Mitch Heroman and I'm the chief medical officer for OptumServe. I've been doing this a long time, over 40 years. I was a clinician in military medicine, Navy Marine Corps to be exact, and I started doing executive medicine toward the end of my career. So a clinician in the newborn intensive care unit and then managing hospitals. I was a commander of a hospital and deputy commander of a large medical center. In my current job, and actually most of my career, I have what I think is the most important mission on earth, and that's the privilege to take care of the military and the veterans who have served in the military.
Mitch Heroman:
Data and analytics and the speed with which we can do it with artificial intelligence and machine learning, is bringing in... I think this is something that is totally changing medicine as we know it, and that is bringing in the social determinants of health. Whether someone lives in a certain zip code, has a certain education, whether they're employed or not employed, whether they live near a supermarket that has fresh vegetables, all of these things make a huge difference in the outcome of a patient's condition.
Mitch Heroman:
the work that's being done on that already, and we're just starting, but the work that's been done on that already shows how very important something as simple as a ride to an appointment makes in someone that doesn't have the means to do those things. And so I think social determinants of health, taking that into account along with the disease, along with all the high tech medicine that we do, is going to be just as important as that MRI or that CAT scan or that genomic test that we're going to be doing. I think that's going to make a huge difference for the patient and for the cost and the quality of healthcare. Veterans now have a suicide rate that's 73% higher in the 18 to 34-year-old than a non-veteran. The ability to take all of the information, clinical information as well as social determinants of health, and be able to do predictive analysis on who is at risk for suicide is going to be a very huge breakthrough.
Data-driven insights with social determinants of health can enhance Veteran health
Listen to Mitch Heroman, M.D., chief medical officer at OptumServe, explain his perspectives on how data analytics can help transform health care for those who serve the nation.
