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HLTH 2022: Komodo Health Says “Big Pharma Needs to Kick Its Consulting Addiction”

By JESSICA DAMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Komodo Health’s co-founder & President, Web Sun, has a big challenge for Big Pharma: Kick your “addiction” to the laborious, time-consuming, consultant-led process it takes to get the answers you need to your big data questions.

Komodo itself works with a lot of Big Pharma clients to use its full-stack approach to deliver insights on patient costs and outcomes at-scale – so, what’s up with the tough love??

The answer may have more to do with the news Web shares about how Komodo is starting to evolve its business model from working with Pharma on “applications” that leverage its platform to a model that lets third-party developers access that platform and its capabilities DIRECTLY. Web unpacks what this shift means, and how his team hopes it helps Pharma more cost-effectively invest in research for everything from clinical development and real-world evidence projects to health economics studies and patient outcomes research.

Still not sure how Komodo does its data magic? Web talks us through a great example — a synthetic control arm project (!!!) — Komodo is doing with AppliedVR, and, OF COURSE, what WTF Health interview would be complete without a follow-up on IPO gossip.

Komodo Health: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Partnership, Rare Disease Patients, and… IPO Rumors?

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Komodo Health has been catching lots of buzz lately thanks to a recently announced partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Rare as One Network AND some chatter about a possible upcoming IPO that seems to have come from its own CEO Arif Nathoo. To check what’s true and what’s false, we sat down with Komodo’s President, Web Sun.

What did we learn? Well… a lot. The core of both the CZI partnership and the future of Komodo’s business is their Healthcare Map, which Web says draws together the data of more patients (300M+), across a longer period of time (as long as 6-years for some cohorts) than anyone else in the industry. But, this comprehensive, longitudinal view of the patient journey is only part of Komodo’s usefulness – the other part is how they use that dataset to surface insights.

As Web talks about how all this will manifest itself in the context of rare diseases to benefit the patients who belong to the 60 different advocacy organizations that will now have access to Komodo thanks to the CZI partnership, it’s not only easy to understand how comprehensive data can help rare disease patients, but how this is a metaphor for helping all patients across all manner of healthcare. Shortening the diagnostic journey, better understanding symptom patterns and comorbidities, matching patients to specialists highly experienced and adept at managing their conditions, quickly bridging connections to novel therapies and clinical trial opportunities… how beautiful that this will be offered to patients who need it most. The market potential, however, lies in how it will be scaled-up-and-out to the rest of us – which brings us back to those exit rumors! Tune in to hear what Web has to say about his co-founder’s comments, and how he believes Komodo is differentiated from other big data businesses in the analytics space.