Rachel Schreiber: Hello and welcome to the Spark, a view of innovation in healthcare. I’m Rachel Schreiber, your co-host, and in this episode we’re speaking with Ryan Howells, principal at Leavitt Partners and Program Manager at CARIN Alliance. And also joining us is Jason Sherwin, Senior Director of Healthcare Business Development at CLEAR. I’m also joined by Joe Rostock, Chief Operating Officer at Avaneer Health.
Joe Rostock: Thanks Rachel, and welcome to Spark Ryan and Jason. We’re really excited to have you join our discussion today. We’re hearing a lot in the industry about innovation in healthcare, and we’re excited to get your perspective on how healthcare really needs to innovate and as we like to think about it, how healthcare can be reinvented. We’re also interested in your predictions for the future and best practices you can share with our listeners. So given all the complexities, costs, and challenges in delivering care, this is an area I’m really passionate about. And before we talk about these challenges, I’d like to hear about your source of personal passion for healthcare. What is your spark as we like to call it? Ryan, let’s start with you.
Ryan Howells: Sure. Thanks Joe. Excited to be on the program with you today. I’ve been doing this for 25 years. Joe, maybe it’s helpful to share kind of a personal experience that I just recently had. It really helps, I think people to relate. Maybe too personal for some, but hey, we’ll go with it. I just turned 50 and I think it’s either 45 or 50. You need to go get a colonoscopy. So for that to happen, I actually had to get a referral. Now, we just moved into our new home about a couple of years ago, and unfortunately I had not gotten a PCP yet, so I didn’t have anybody to make the referral. So the specialist would not see me unless I actually made a referral. So I was really busy. I didn’t have time to actually, I didn’t know, first of all, I didn’t get reminded that I needed one.
I had been 52 is I didn’t have a PCP, so I didn’t know where to go. Three is, it was too much of a hassle for me to try to download the health insurance app, figure out which one’s in my network. Then I go to the provider directory. I can’t figure out what in the world’s, how do I compare these physicians. I don’t even know who they are. Then I’m like, okay, well what’s an easier way to do that? So I’ll try telemedicine. So then again, I had to log into my health plan app. Then I had to log into another telehealth app. Then I had to actually meet a physician in Atlanta. I live in Georgia that I’d never met before. And I said, Hey, I want to go get a colonoscopy. I need a referral. He goes, great. Where do want to go?
I said, I want to go to this one down the street. That sounds good. Five minutes later, he wrote something, cost me $45 for that five minute visit with somebody I’d never met before. That supposedly got me through some kind of a gate, which allowed me to then go to the actual specialist who put me through a very significant, they were good, they were definitely good at what they did, but it was certainly a conveyor belt full of folks that just came in, got out, and they had multiple things happening. But hey, I got it. Things looked great. Everything went well. Why did I have to do that, Joe? Why am I going through this process and why have we not figured this out yet? So you asked what my personal passion is, it’s to eliminate garbage like that. That’s really my personal passion, don’t want, and I think somebody who is upper middle class, I’m thinking about all the people that just don’t want to do that and just have no desire to do that and believe that it’s too big of a hassle. And so that’s really my personal passion.
Joe Rostock: Thanks so much, Ryan. That’s a great example of the complexity and ultimately the cost of healthcare. All that complexity leads to a lot of different people being involved. That really shouldn’t have to be the process. So thanks for that. Jason, can you share your thoughts?
Jason Sherwin: Yeah, similar story to Ryan, I would say, but I think for me, being a patient’s hard and I’m really passionate about making it easier, and I’ll also share a personal story. So my wife and I recently moved from New York City to Boston about a year and a half ago. And I would say the problem that Ryan described, I experienced in an extrapolated format. I had to establish care with a whole new suite of doctors, primary care. I needed to establish care with a dermatologist. I have a genetic mutation, and I had to establish care with another provider as well. And unfortunately, none of those organizations were connected in any way, shape or form, despite the tremendous access to healthcare in the city of Boston. And so for me, having to fill out the same information over and over again on both digital and physical clipboards, having to have multiple conversations with call centers because my insurance changed and I booked an appointment on December 31st, and then on January 3rd they ran my insurance and it was no longer eligible, and I literally had to speak to three different provider groups with the same problem because my insurance was no longer accepted.
So I think for me personally, going through that experience and from getting digitally scheduled through the registration process and then finally physically presenting in front of the doctor is an incredibly friction filled process. And I’m really passionate about creating a better experience for myself. But frankly, as Ryan was also discussing, for me, it’s relatively easy. I’m a pretty sophisticated healthcare consumer. My wife is a physician, so there’s a lot that we have access to in terms of resources, but most folks don’t. And so I’m really passionate about trying to drive better consumer experiences for patients because healthcare is hard and we need to make it easier.
Joe Rostock: Thank you both. I think we could all acknowledge that we expect better. This is something that should be simpler and easy to engage. For our next topic, I’d like to get your views on what you believe needs to happen at scale in healthcare to really change the experience and not just for a certain segment of healthcare, but for all stakeholders. Jason, let me start with you. What are your thoughts on this?
Jason Sherwin: Yeah, so I would say the way that I look at it, particularly at the organization that employs me is identity is broken in healthcare. So when I’m describing my personal story or Ryan’s describing his personal story, there’s actually a trillion dollars of cost in this country that goes into administrative related tasks for your healthcare. So there’s a lot of duplicate work that’s happening as I go through that processes of the patient and then extrapolate that for tens of millions, hundreds of millions of Americans that are consuming care on an annual basis. And so when you zoom in and think about a healthcare system, just as one example, I am always the same me. However, I could be a patient, I could be a workforce member, or I could be a guest in different contexts as I’m entering hospital lobby as an example. So when you think about as a patient, if you’re creating a patient portal account through MyChart, for example, today, you may go through a series of knowledge-based questions such as your home address when you were 15 years old in order to get access to your account.
But then when you show up at the facility, you’re still being asked to present your driver’s license. I just went through this recently actually. I was asked to present my driver’s license, they verified my identity, and then I had to go onto a tablet and enter all the same information, including my name and date of birth. So the fact that those are disconnected, that ultimately drives cost to the system. Then as another example, I then present at the hospital lobby as a guest and I want to visit a family member or loved one. And I guess what I have to hand out my driver’s license. When you think about the duplication of identity throughout just the health system, let alone the broader ecosystem, right? I think at scale, the ability to prove who I am once, right? And I’m biased with CLEAR, you can do that very easily. Just take a simple selfie on your smartphone, verify you are you, and then be able to share your information and get access to, whether it’s scheduling an appointment, accessing the patient portal, checking into the doctor’s office that ultimately helps drive reduction in cost. And by the way, powers a better patient experience, all of which can help together in harmony reduce that trillion dollar cost of administrative burden in the industry.
Ryan Howells: Well, that would require another two hour podcast as well, but I would say that you could talk about misaligned payment incentives. You can talk about the waste, as Jason mentioned, there’s a whole bunch of things. I think our focus today is really just on the technology. What can technology do to really change things? There’s three things that are top of mind, and they all start with a APIs, ai, and apps. The three things really in order is that we’ve spent 40 billion to digitize the healthcare records in healthcare, which we have that now we’ve got to spend more money to actually implement these APIs, application programming interfaces to allow the data to actually get out of the legacy systems into apps, applications themselves so that we can run AI on those apps. That is the goal for the next decade.
And the reason that’s the goal isn’t necessarily a disparaging comment on the organizations that currently digitize our records today. It’s that we can’t trust that a single sector of the healthcare economy can solve every single problem we have in healthcare. There are too many problems, and we need a ton of innovators to actually build applications similar to our consumer life where we have consumer applications that do all kinds of things that we didn’t even know we needed. I didn’t know that I needed a car service at the touch of a button. I didn’t know I needed food delivered whenever I needed or someone’s house that I’m renting. All these things that have happened because of the implementation of APIs are significant. And as Jason mentioned, it all links together with digital identity, the rise of organizations like CLEAR and others that are in the space, the rise of mobile driver’s licenses, all these things start to say, wow, actually I can have my own identity and I can use that identity, digital identity to authenticate myself onto multiple systems, multiple apps in multiple different ways, which at the end of the day is what’s going to need to happen to actually transform healthcare.
And so we need folks to think about this in terms of what does the next decade look like? And it’s really creating the app economy in healthcare. That’s really the purpose of why we’re trying to get to the Send Space. We’re trying to find ways where we can cure cancer. Well, we want the best cancer docs on the planet to try to amalgamate their information into a third party application that allows for specific disease states to be able to come into that application and find opportunities where all of that logic that has been built up over time, including AI and other things that are out there, can really find opportunities to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives. And we see it being hyper specialized over time, similar again to what’s happening in our consumer life. So we’re excited to see what’s happening with the federal government in terms of ONC and CMS and the fact that they’re really pushing forward with these HL seven fire APIs. That’s going to happen even more going forward. And the opportunities here are incredible, and I think it really will start to ignite the digital health economy for individuals and for organizations.
Joe Rostock: Fascinating.
Jason Sherwin: To build on what Ryan was saying, the way I think about it is Healthcare 1.0 is paper, and there are still providers today that have mounds of it in their back offices, but Healthcare 2.0 was the electronization of healthcare and meaningful use and effectively digitizing all that information that was previously on Paper Healthcare 3.0 is breaking down those data silos that have been built up over the past 10 to 15 years, and really empowering consumers, whether they be a patient or whether they be a provider, to be able to access control and share that information to ultimately streamline the experience for all.
Joe Rostock: Fantastic, yeah, true digital economy that we all expect. Again, it’s something we as consumers expect based on how we experience other industries. And that’s a great segue to our next topic. What are other industries doing that healthcare can learn from? So Jason, let me start with you on that one.
Jason Sherwin: Yeah. Well, the obvious answer for CLEAR is airports, so I’ll talk about that a bit. So CLEAR right was born out of nine 11 when fundamentally airport screening changed forever. And at that time, identity became foundational to ultimately providing a safe experience for you and everybody around you to get through that airport lane and onto your plane. And so CLEAR was really born out of a zero fail environment. You cannot get identity wrong at the airport. And so we are applying that same principle to healthcare, right? You cannot get identity wrong when a patient’s checking in for a visit because you need to make sure their insurance is verified so that you can properly bill on the backend. B, you need to understand, for example, their allergies and their medications to make sure that treating them effectively. And so that’s just one principle that I think we brought from the airport to healthcare.
The other is the need to partner both with the private and public sector. So the analogy in the airport would be we partner closely with the Department of Homeland Security and TSA as well as local airport city ordinances, et cetera, because it truly takes a public-private partnership to do what we do. Healthcare is obviously very similar. We have government payers, we have private payers, we have different types of healthcare organizations that feed the ecosystem. And so being able to apply that same principle of public private partnership and healthcare is something else that we believe we can help bring to the industry. And so I would say in summary, it’s really about establishing those public private partnerships, taking what we’ve learned out of a regulated industry in the airport and ultimately applying it to healthcare and frankly, other regulated industries as well.
Joe Rostock: Thanks, Jason. Ryan, what do you think healthcare can learn from other industries?
Ryan Howells: Well, a few things. One is again, just under the umbrella of technology. One is using open standards. That’s really key. Non-proprietary ways to actually send the data back and forth. We have used proprietary ways in the past and it hasn’t worked out really well, but if we can have more open standards, HL seven fires an example of that Open Id connect OAuth two. These are all open standards that are actually on the internet, so we need to start getting into other standards that are internet based too, like ISO and W three C and other ones that are out there. Those are important open standards for how we think about things. Secondly is, as we talked about just moving the technology, moving the data, allowing for us to move the data similar to how we move the data today in our consumer life, the app economy wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t certainly for the app stores.
And also if it wasn’t for these modern technologies like application programming interfaces and we’re whatever it is, 30 plus years behind the rest of the industry in terms of implementing those. And so for us, we will see, and some of the digital health companies are actually suffering right now as a result of the fact we don’t have an API economy in healthcare yet now. And so a lot of ’em are early and they’ve been trying for a decade and it still hasn’t worked the way that it needs to. So we’re trying to find ways where now we can actually move to an app-based economy, and that will help us to be able to then engage again, as Jason mentioned, both to the provider and to the patient level. So that’s going to be the future is personalized experiences like micro experiences based on individual needs of the patient or the provider. Those micro experiences using APIs, apps and ai, those three things are going to really help make that happen. I agree with Jason completely. Digital identity is a core to making that happen, but it requires that ability to bring all of those three things together and say, I’m going to intervene with this specific disease state, with this specific technology that can actually provide this specific result for this specific patient. That’s when we know we’re really moving healthcare forward and we’re finding ways to be as efficient and as effective as possible. Thank you.
Rachel Schreiber: So I typically ask about barriers to achieving those big ideas of what’s going to take to transform healthcare, but I think I’d like to focus more on the fact that there’s a reluctance in healthcare to make these bold changes. The things that you’re talking about. A lot of it is industry inertia or reluctance, but to make those huge changes. But what do you think it’s going to take to really reinvent healthcare? And Ryan, you can go first.
Ryan Howells: Well, I wouldn’t say anyone anywhere is ever going to quote reinvent healthcare. I know why you’re saying that word, but how do we make incremental progress and incremental changes to be able to help more people access more ability to get care and for lower costs and higher quality? That’s really what it is going to be. It’s going to take a public-private partnership. So nothing happens in healthcare without the private sector getting behind it. And also the public sector being able to say, look, everyone really needs to do this, the right thing to do. So it does take a public-private partnership without question. I think the other thing that needs to happen is we need more folks to say this isn’t working. I think there’s too much inertia on the status quo that allows for folks to then be able to still be in the same position that they’re in five years from now.
There’s not enough reinvention happening in healthcare. What’s happening is the money is actually starting to really get squeezed. You’re seeing hospital systems, health systems across the country really get squeezed this year. Others are as well digital health companies. There isn’t much VC money coming into those organizations, which is understandable and warranted to some degree. But now the question is how are you going to reinvent yourself? What does that actually look like? So that crazy experience I mentioned at the beginning, why should you fix that first so that I will come back and visit your facility? That could be a really good opportunity, but there isn’t enough folks to say, look, this is broken. It’s not working. It’s too expensive, and the physicians are burned out and the patients are tired of it. So I think it’s going to take bold leadership too inside of healthcare to make these changes. It’s going to be painful for a while, and it should be painful, by the way. There are things that need to change structurally that we need to feel that pain in order to get to the other side to say it’s going to be better.
Rachel Schreiber: So you’re saying not the change itself is painful, or are you saying we have to make these painful? What side do you see as painful?
Ryan Howells: We have to make very difficult and often painful decisions, and they will be painful to the industry. So I’ll give you one example, and this is probably a controversial topic, but we have too many hospitals in this country. We just do. We don’t need that many hospitals. We do need access to care at individual points. We need to solve the rural healthcare crisis that we have, but we don’t need hospitals to do that. We are doing it in outpatient facilities. We’re doing it in the home now. We’re doing it right on our person. All of these technologies can help us to do that and to do it in a more equitable and accessible way. Walmart Dollar General, all of these folks are starting to come up and say, look, it’ll just be right on the corner of your street. So why do we have so many hospitals?
How do we figure out a way where we can say, no, I actually don’t need that. I can actually move those same healthcare workers into an outpatient setting for half the price or a hundred percent less, 75% less of the price. Those are kind of the decisions we need to make. But those are hard policy decisions to make because two of the largest employers in the country is healthcare and educational institutions. So it’s really hard to get that through the House of Representatives when they’re saying, we’re going to shut down the local hospital, which is one of the biggest employers in our area, but we have to make those hard decisions. But we have to do that in a way that still keeps folks employed, but keeps folks employed at a less costlier location to provide better outcomes. Certainly don’t want someone who has only done five open heart surgeries in an entire year to do that on me. If I’ve got a heart problem, I want somebody that has done it 500 times last year so that they’ll know actually, and that’s, like I said, going to take some inconvenience. I’m going to have to drive or do other things to make that happen, but it’s going to be worth it in the end because there’s going to be better outcomes as a result.
Rachel Schreiber: Centers of excellence, right? Yeah. It’s changing the paradigm on access, right? Instead, it’s more of the same. It’s different. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you. And Jason, what’s your perspective on what it’s going to take to really reinvent healthcare or change how it works?
Jason Sherwin:
Yeah, I’ll take, I think about it from a different lens, right? And I’m thinking about it from the lens of a consumer experience, which ultimately B drives reduced to the system. So I think we need to stop leading a horse to water in healthcare. What I mean by that is when you think about the patient experience today, you are being asked to share different drips of information to ultimately get into a physical or digital exam room. So when I schedule my appointment, I have to key in my name and date of birth, and ultimately the care system wants to minimize the amount of friction I go through just to get that appointment booked so that once I book, now I can start to enter my health insurance information and I enter my member ID during my registration process. I may give them my allergies and my medications, for example, to start building that initial health record, if you will.
I’ll get a phone call two days before my visit where they asked me to verify my insurance a second time, which is a point of friction for me as the consumer, but also there’s a cost associated with that process on the care system side. And then I show up at the facility and I effectively have to share all that same information. I have to hand over my driver’s license. I have to hand over my insurance card, which guess what? I don’t carry my insurance card. I have a photo of it on my phone, and I end up insecurely emailing it to a front desk person and then have to fill out a clinical questionnaire with 50 to a hundred questions, some of which are relevant for that visit, but some of which I already had answered during the registration process. So when I think about all those different touch points just to get into the exam room, why can’t we flip that entire model on its head?
Why can’t you put me as the consumer in control of my information? And part of the challenge today is that information is disparate. I have to log into 10, 15, 20 different patient portals to access that information. In my personal case, I actually keep a lot of my health records in spreadsheets because I have a complicated family history that I need to be able to share with my provider. Why can’t we flip that concept on its head? And when I’m creating my account or booking that initial appointment, give me the ability to verify my identity securely with the platform like CLEAR. I upload my driver’s license and take a simple selfie on my smartphone, which verifies my identity, allows me to access my healthcare information through various channels and then put me in control of that information and ultimately give me the ability to then consent to share all that data that I just described earlier, right when I booked that appointment, you’ve now completely eliminated that point of friction for me. You put me in control and ultimately you’re reducing the cost to get me into that exam room. So it’s a win-win for everybody. It’s going to take a lot of work to Ryan’s point to get there, but that’s how I like to think about ultimately where the industry is going and how we can improve the care continuum.
Ryan Howells: Well, and Rachel, just to build on what Jason said, I know there’s a lot of people that are going to be in healthcare technology that are listening to this. There are five things that I think I call ’em the big five that we need for sure in order to scale this ecosystem. One is we need an address directory, a digital electronic address directory. We call that a fire, API endpoint directory. I need to know how to link up to your system. That’s basically what that is. We need that openly available free, so I know how to connect to you. Second thing we need is that what’s called the Qualified Health Information Network, this QN technical framework, because I need to find where your records are located across the country to Jason and my point, I need to go out and get it somewhere and I need to pull it back, and I need a way to make that happen.
And then I also need a common agreement because we just have this thing called hipaa. We need one agreement essentially for how that actually operates. So that’ll pull all that information back. The third thing is we need an app economy. So we need individual providers and payers and patients having their own app so they can connect to this new healthcare internet. Fourth thing we need is, as Jason mentioned, digital identity framework. How do I know that I am who I say I am, not just for the patient, but for the provider too, by the way. And the provider has this, it’s called EPCS, electronic prescribing controlled substances. They identity proof themselves already, at least prescribers do on the network. So providers have one of these digital identity credentials. Patients now can have these digital identity credentials, and then we can use these apps to go get our data from the address book that’s out there.
And the final thing that we need to make this easier and scalable and less costly is we need a real time nationwide, what I would call testing gateway. And the good news is ONC has actually created that. It’s called Inferno, and it’s an ability for these APIs to get up to make sure that they’re essentially consistent and compliant with the latest nationwide policies. There’s value to doing that. So as each incremental API version is out there, they’ll get tested against this national gateway, which allows all of these third party apps then to be able to connect in a standardized way across multiple different systems so that two people in a garage scenario is creating an app that’s really beneficial to cancer patients. They can do that in 90 days. I can stand up the app, be able to make that happen. Innovation can occur. We can actually make this really beneficial to individual patients and to providers. I think if we can do those things and we can focus on those five priorities, I think we go a long way into actually solving a number of different healthcare problems that we have today.
Rachel Schreiber: That’s creating the experience that patients are expecting. I was speaking with a family member recently and he said, well, I don’t know why they can’t just share my records. They have them. And I was like, I know, right? We’re trying to even worse solving that.
Ryan Howells: Even worse, I’ve got family friends of mine, they’re like, I logged into this MyChart account and then I gave ’em all my information. I got to log into another MyChart account. I got to give ’em all my information. Again, they don’t understand that there’s two different instances of what’s going. So I’m like, I understood that from a technology perspective, but our poor folks, I’m thinking about this 7-year-old grandma who’s like, why am I entering this stuff? Again, to Jason’s point, it doesn’t make any sense,
Jason Sherwin: But I think the world that Ryan’s describing, it’s all predicated on trust. The only way, those five pillar. Because if these organizations come together and often into these frameworks, but also there has to be identity and trust is foundational in that experience. When you think about cybersecurity is a massive issue in healthcare today, both in terms of individuals trying to access patient data on behalf of the patient, or resetting a provider’s password, for example, and getting access to the EMR when they shouldn’t have access to it. And so where we think we fit in at CLEAR is we built an incredible brand that stands for safety and trust and privacy and protection of your data. And so CLEAR, effectively helping serve as one of hopefully multiple platforms that effectively become a credit card acceptance network for your identity. Just like you have the option of using Visa or MasterCard or Amex to make a payment, why can’t you have the option of using CLEAR to verify that you are you at a very high bar, right? Whether you’re a patient looking to access your records, whether you’re a provider looking to prescribe a controlled substance to Ryan’s point and being able to safely and securely verify who I am and then ultimately enable me to consume whatever transaction it’s that I need to.
Rachel Schreiber: Well, that is an exciting view of the future. Joe, did you have anything?
Jason Sherwin: It’s here now
Rachel Schreiber: And it is happening.
Jason Sherwin: There are real use cases that Ryan was talking about, proof of concepts. I mean, this stuff is out there, so we’re happy to talk more about that.
Joe Rostock: Yeah. That’s the point I wanted to make that I think for our listeners, the most important takeaway from this is so many companies are committed to transformation, which is really important. And you heard great examples of it here. It’s not really a technology problem, it’s a commitment to change problem. And so companies that are rethinking how healthcare is transacted, that’s something we’re really proud of at Avenue. It’s how our company was founded by innovators in healthcare that wanted a better way. So more of that drives the change, and I think that leads to the innovation we’ve talked about leads to the commitment we talked about, and it’s all really exciting. So
Rachel Schreiber: As a wrap up, what key phrase describes the vision of what you’re creating when this comes true? And maybe a short key phrase. I think you’ve described it in this discussion. So Jason, you want to go first?
Jason Sherwin: Yeah. I would say a single reusable health identity unlocks a better experience for patients and providers. Ultimately, together we can replace the clipboard.
Rachel Schreiber: What about you, Ryan?
Ryan Howells: Providers and patients need better data and to make more informed decisions and better decisions than they do today. So they need to find, they just need to make better, more informed, more personalized decisions than they’re doing today. And it’s an opportunity for us to really reinvent that as we move into the API economy.
Rachel Schreiber: Great. Thank you. Well, thank you for joining us today and sharing your perspective on healthcare innovation. And if our guests want to follow you on social media, how can they find you and where can they find you?
Ryan Howells: I’m at our Ryan Howells on X or Twitter or whatever it’s called now. And we also doing some work in the CARIN Alliance @CARINAlliance as well. And then obviously LinkedIn and other things.
Jason Sherwin: You can find me on LinkedIn. Just make sure that you verify your identity with CLEAR to make sure you get your trusted badge on LinkedIn. I’m much more likely to accept your connection request, and then you can also find us more generally at CLEARme.com/healthcare. It’d be great to connect.
Rachel Schreiber: Great. Thank you. We’ll make sure to share that information in the show notes. So again, thank you for joining us and hope to talk to you soon.
Healthcare 1.0 was paper (which is still too prevalent), healthcare 2.0 was digitizing information, and healthcare 3.0 is about breaking down data silos and empowering consumers to control their own information. In this insightful podcast, Ryan Howells, principal at Leavitt Partners and Program Manager at CARIN Alliance, and Jason Sherwin, senior director of Healthcare Business Development at CLEAR, discuss the five pillars of healthcare innovation and how they drive better experiences for patients and providers.
Ryan Howells is a Principal at Leavitt Partners based out of the Washington, D.C. office. Ryan works with the White House, Congress, HHS, and VHA on health care policy and interoperability issues. He currently leads the CARIN Alliance, a multi-sector, public-private alliance focused on giving consumers digital access to their health information. Ryan is a board member for multiple healthcare companies. He also is on the CMS MITA Governance Board, Carequality Steering Committee, ONC’s FAST Identity Tiger Team, and the VCI.org SMART Health Cards Steering Committee. Ryan has an MHA from USC and a BA from BYU.
Jason Sherwin currently leads healthcare business development at CLEAR, where he focuses on how CLEAR’s single, interoperable identity platform can deliver value to health systems, payers, digital health, and more. Prior to CLEAR, Jason spent 10+ years at NYU Langone Health, where he built their Virtual Health program, including during the organization’s response to the COVID-19 surge. He also led product management for NYU Langone’s Department of Radiology and deployed Epic across the enterprise. Jason earned his MBA at NYU Stern School of Business and his undergraduate degree from Skidmore College.
