--:-- **Raising Health Podcast Script**
--:-- **Host (Olivia):**
Hello and welcome. You know us as BioEats World, a podcast at the intersection of bio, healthcare, and tech. But today, we're evolving to bring you Raising Health. Raising Health is a show for and about the builders who are leading the companies behind the bio and health innovations. In each episode, we'll continue to engage with industry leaders such as Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, esteemed clinician Carl June, AI pioneer Daphne Kohler, and many more.
--:-- Today's episode is with Sean Duffy. I'm Olivia. And I'm Chris. Sean is the co-founder and CEO of Omada Health. He is joined by Vijay Pande, founding partner of A16Z Bio and Health. Sean and Vijay celebrated the milestone of Omada achieving 1 million members and looked back to how digital health has evolved since Sean first started raising capital for Omada more than 10 years ago.
--:-- **Vijay Pande:**
Welcome to Raising Health. The news for 2024 is that BioEats World is getting an upgrade. We're rebranding as Raising Health. And as our very first guest on Raising Health, it's my pleasure to welcome Sean Duffy, CEO and co-founder of Omada Health.
--:-- **Sean Duffy:**
Vijay, thank you. And thanks for allowing me to be the first. What an honor.
--:-- **Vijay Pande:**
This starts with actually that email that she sent me. I think it was actually maybe even a tweet that I saw that Omada hit a million patients. That's right. And so that was a huge deal. And I think that made us very sentimental about like all the whole path that you've been through and the path that we've been through together.
--:-- **Sean Duffy:**
Oh, for sure. No, I mean, a million, you know, we're really proud of it. I'm proud of it. I'm proud of the team. You know, I think it's a lot of people. It's a big impact. And I think if you pull up, I think it is a statement on where digital health has come from and that it's possible.
--:-- Admittedly, I feel two ways about it. I think the positives are, my gosh, it took, you know, so many years of toil to even get to the couple of thousand. But then if you compare the million to the task at hand of actually impacting epidemiology and really, you know, doing what we need to do for the business, we haven't really, really made a dent yet.
--:-- Kind of told our teams, "Let's celebrate for 30 seconds and let's go try to get it to 10, 20, 50 and beyond."
--:-- **Vijay Pande:**
Well, you make a great point because a million is hitting scale. But in principle, you could get to tens, hundreds of millions and even beyond. How do you view the next steps? How do you get to that type of scale?
--:-- **Sean Duffy:**
Well, I think you're at a million. You're on strong foundations. As long as you're serving your members well and you're serving your customers well, it does become slightly easier because we're in a new state in digital health where it's a little bit more accepted. There's a little bit more trust. We now have published trials, data, et cetera.
--:-- So we're staying as hungry as possible. And I think it just shows that the space, though, has progressed a lot. It's still relatively nascent relative to having the impact that it can and will.
--:-- **Vijay Pande:**
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, actually, I'd love to take us back to the beginning.
--:-- **Sean Duffy:**
Sure. So to set the stage, I guess, it's 2011, right? That's right, yep. And when you started Omada, obviously, there were zero patients then. What did that zero-to-one part of the startup look like? What was that like?
--:-- **Vijay Pande:**
Yeah, so first, just, I mean, I'm here in the, you know, in recent offices, speaking with someone who probably is in the same camp, but I've always been pulled between technology and science and healthcare. And originally, I thought I had to choose. I had to pick, okay, tech or healthcare.
--:-- So after undergrad, even though I did my pre-med recs, I worked at Google for a couple of years. I went off to medical school. I was enrolled in Harvard's MD, MBA. You know, through that, came up with the idea for Omada. And really the key reflection was, you know, a statement of where the market was at at the time.
--:-- I'd be with my tech friends from Google and, oh my gosh, these like Fitbits, they're going to change healthcare. My medical school classmates were like, well, where's the level one evidence? What disease areas are you targeting?
--:-- And so the idea for Omada was to build a convergence company. One that didn't sacrifice on technology and, you know, design, but tried to, you know, do so in such a way where it earned the trust of the existing, you know, healthcare market.
--:-- So that led to the business. And zero to one, it was a journey. I mean, we were a little ahead of our times. I think when we founded the company, the world kind of didn't know what to do with us.
--:-- Yeah, no, and I mean, in the early days of Omada, for instance, you'd say hi to a health plan and say, I want to contract as a provider. And like, okay, great. Well, where are your clinics? Like, we don't have any. Like, excuse me, where are your clinics? No, no, no. We're a provider. We don't have offices.
--:-- They're like, well, you can't contract with our network team. It's like a hotel chain without hotels. Yeah, exactly. And so to be honest, I mean, the last 10 years has been, you know, that scene from Apollo 13 with like the square CO2 cartridge in round hole. We just try to like somehow pull it off with the parts on the ship before your oxygen emplates, which is your bank account, you know, in startup language.
--:-- Yeah, well, and I made that analogy to the hotel company without hotels. Yes. Airbnb and then there's, you know, fleets without cars and so on. So it makes sense in that zero to one time, there was probably some surprises. I don't know if there's any no surprises. It makes sense to recount.
--:-- I quickly realized how hard it was to sell into enterprise healthcare. It was a surprise to me. Now it's not a surprise at all. And I'll kind of relay that to any tech founder. It's like the key thing was that it was not sexy to be a startup. This was kind of a moment in time where, you know, it's like, oh my gosh, Zeitgeist was that 20-something founder that goes off and builds like a $10 billion company.
--:-- And you'd be with these health plans. I'm like, I'm never calling ourselves a startup. We were three people and Omada was a digital health company. But you had to quickly try to, you know, frame yourself as a, you know, a measured, thoughtful business in order to have, you know, success.
--:-- When you were raising, you were raising probably from tech VCs primarily. And now there are examples of tech bio VCs or health tech VCs that are sort of doing both. And actually, you know it worth noting that actually A16Z investment in Omada predates the bio fund itself. How has the sort of investor landscape changed for you?
--:-- **Vijay Pande:**
I mean, it's not, it's not a different. Yeah, we were, we were the first major healthcare investment from Andreessen, but there were very few conversions funds and you'd be on the, you know, in the healthcare kind of fun track and they're like, well, excuse me, like where specifically is your monopolistic IP?
--:-- And, and it's going to be just so easy for any health plan to build software. Right. It's software. You just. That's what they're known for, right? And then on, you know, you go to the tech side and they're like, how about that budget item for that, you know, million dollar peer reviewed study and the RCT you're thinking about running? I don't think we need that.
--:-- Right. And so, you know, and, and, um, you'd work to kind of, you know, explain and. And I think that was very much sort of in our mind for launching the bio fund, you know, which came after the investment in Omada, that realizing that you were a tech company and there are other tech companies that happen to be in life sciences or in health care that were being built like tech companies.
--:-- And that was the opportunity. Yeah, 100 percent. Yeah. Yeah. So any other changes that you've seen to the space? I mean, digital health, I mean, you're very much a pioneer of digital health. That's probably changed over this decade as well.
--:-- **Sean Duffy:**
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, as we talked about the investment landscape, I think, you know, equally, you've seen drastic differences in both the go-to-market, you know, landscape and the talent, the talent landscape.
--:-- Yeah, we shouldn't take each in turn. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, the go-to-market, it's very different. I think there are, like, more plays. There's still kind of things to be learned. I think if you use Omada as an example, we started targeting self-insured employers that can turn into business with plans.
--:-- And there's a little bit of emotion now that is slightly more codified. Now, albeit it's still very difficult, very capital intensive, but it's more of a known thing. And there's been examples. Well, so what makes it difficult? I mean, there's a lot of stakeholders. The buying cycles are really long.
--:-- You're dealing with not just HR leaders, but consultants and their plans and their channels. And it's a very multi-stake horrible service process and still a risk-inverse environment. But there's a little bit of like a known way to do it. And when Omada founded, that was far less so.
--:-- I mean, you'd seen Castlight work towards selling into employers, but a little bit not the way that Omada was doing it. We figured out a way to bill through claims. We took our trials to the American Medical Association, got them to issue the first ever digital-specific CPT code just literally for billing infrastructure.
--:-- Now there's many startups that have figured out on the back of that how to bill through claims and contract as a provider like we talked about before. So the world has evolved. If I could make one statement that I think is the most beneficial relative to the go-to market is buyers better know how to buy.
--:-- So how do you make that happen? Well, I mean, it's kind of like a moda that you're like, well, and I remember in the early days, you know, you'd be talking to the network teams and you're like, you know, I'm imagining a world where there's actually specific individuals on the network team focused on your digital provider network.
--:-- Wow. And you just kind of paint this future that could be, but that's not there yet. And then you just kind of work your way to it. And a bit of his learning together with your partners, like how do you implement, you know, what are the claim systems?
--:-- And then the next one that comes in the door, they're like, oh, we've kind of done this before. And, you know, I remember one experience. It was a health plan, related to health plans. So I get a call from a CEO of another digital health company.
--:-- He's like, hey, I just want to take five minutes to thank you. I'm like, well, why? And he's like, we just did this deal with a health plan, kind of named it. And they sent over the papers, the contract. And they just forgot to take a modest name out of it all.
--:-- And I was like, how long did that take you to close? He was like, you know, three months. I was like, well, that took us a year and a half. And what that means is, all right, there are plenty of ambitious, digitally forward people in enterprise healthcare.
--:-- But, like, there's also, like, laid down processes and infrastructure and ways of buying that are pretty solidified. So it takes a little bit of time to, like, chip it, morph it, you know, heat it up, make it a little bit malleable and then kind of lay new foundations on how to just ingest things like Omada.
--:-- Yeah, once you've re-tempered that steel for your analogy, then it's ready to go. And then you mentioned something on the talent side too. This changes from everything to current state to kind of the feeder world.
--:-- And I remember in medical school, it was kind of like me and like two other people in my med school class who had an entrepreneurial bent. You know, there was – Out of what? Out of like hundreds? Yeah, 250. And I restarted the Harvard Medical School like entrepreneurship society.
--:-- It died. It had died. It existed. There was only a society of three and then withered on a vine and like, you know, had to give it CPR and get that thing back going. And now I think that's different.
--:-- It's like, you know, today's cursive is JavaScript. There's just more tech fluidity coming out of the, you know, I think the life sciences, which speaks to more talent that can appreciate both worlds, which speaks to cultures that can pull the best of both worlds together, which speaks to it just being easier to build a convergence business.
--:-- Yeah. I'd love to see this. I don't know if a graph of time and the fraction of med school students who have taken a CS course. Yeah. No, probably just like growing dramatically. It's growing dramatically.
--:-- Well, it's key because like if you really weren't sort of sophisticated on the tech side, you wouldn't be able to handle that side of it. It seems like at least a part of the problem early on was there were just so few people that were conversing in both.
--:-- And it's, and it's funny, it's both like a vision issue that's super important, but it's also like a hiring issue. Because you need, you know, at the end of the day, like you need to be able to pull in incredible skill sets in your organization.
--:-- And if the language you're using, like doesn't communicate that you understand the skills that that person is bringing to bear, and you can't just like over a beer, like riff on a specific thing in their world, they're not going to join.
--:-- So, I mean, that's one of the reasons why the legacy health services companies have had trouble, you know, hiring talent. They'll put out a role for like, you know, IT engineer. And you know and it's you're in the language and just the appreciation of the skill sets like matter and it's hard to get that if you don't if you're if you're not fluent and the top talent are not going to want to they're not going to do it yeah they're not going to do that yeah and the same you know the same is on the health care side like if you're i mean if you're just an amazing tech company but you're trying to hire a great health care talent they're like they don't know they don't know what they're doing well how's it gone now like how's it hiring uh sort of the latest crop like on the mlai side um well you know so much easier because it's specific to that what's need is we have just an awesome data corpus.
--:-- At the end of the day, these models are more or less commodities. It's what feeds them, so that's important. And then, Omada has operated against our users' preferences, which is asynchronous messaging, large part. So we've got 25 million messages that have flown back and forth between our care teams and our members.
--:-- Maybe the richest asynchronous text data corpus in metabolic care. And LLMs are kind of nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They came in a nice time for us. A candy store for any kid would love. That's right.
--:-- So that talent side is fine. But the neat thing relative to the last kind of couple minutes of conversation is now there's a crop of folks that have worked in tech and healthcare. Maybe they're at a startup that tried to do both but didn't work out. Or maybe they're a company that has scaled and they want to do something different.
--:-- So there's just actually a richer crop of talent to pull from. It's no longer everyone trying to steal from Omada for people that are experienced with both. That's kind of a broader set, which is great.
--:-- I think it's an amazing thing. Oh, it's a real ecosystem.
--:-- **Vijay Pande:**
Well, so 10 years changes all of us. How have you changed?
--:-- **Sean Duffy:**
I mean, yeah. I mean, I was extremely green when I founded Omada. I was in an MD, MBA program, but hadn't done any of the business side. I had never hired anybody. I didn't have any managerial experience. I didn't know what a venture capitalist was.
--:-- You know, my goal has always been each year I want to look back at last year's Sean and just feel a little bit embarrassed. Wow. Oh, that's a really unique way to frame it. But embarrassed, is that being hard on yourself?
--:-- I think it's purposely hard because it's like, it's the truth. So I think I have been just a little bit embarrassed about every preceding Sean. So the Sean now is very, very different than the vintage 2011 Sean.
--:-- And I mean, you've been on the board a number of years. I'm sure you've seen it too.
--:-- **Vijay Pande:**
Yeah, actually, now I think about it after you said that. The thing that most people get embarrassed about is like when you watch yourself on video or you listen to yourself. It's actually the fact, getting embarrassed is not unusual. It's the fact that you're willing to look at that and look at it in its face.
--:-- I think that really takes bravery and most people don't do that. I think a way to think through it, a way that I think through it is to think through decisions or mistakes. Would that have happened with today Sean that misstep that we made?
--:-- Would today Sean have fallen into that trap? I think it a good mindset I think similarly I always encourage entrepreneurs to especially founders try to purposely decouple yourself from the founder mind and the CEO mind How would you differentiate those two?
--:-- In fact, sometimes I purposely ask, let's just pretend I was a hired gun CEO brought in today. What would I be doing differently? Day one, great. Just joined Omada. I'm the CEO. Like what, what would be the next play?
--:-- And then, and then you can similarly ask, what do you think the, the organization needs from its CEO like next year and beyond? And then that, that like becomes your L and D plan.
--:-- Also organizations need sometimes things from their founders too, which are unique from what they need from their CEOs, presumably.
--:-- That's yeah, that's right. You could reverse it too. You could reverse it too. And there have, there have been things, I mean, you know, as the org grows, you have to, even as a founder, especially learn how to like work with your organization because your teams, you know, you have so many bright people and they need to like find the energy around a direction and you have to set the strategy.
--:-- But, you know, there are, there are certain things that, you know, I think is very helpful with kind of founder orientation. Like you, you almost, um, that optimism doesn't always tend to like carry forward with scale.
--:-- And if there's like new things in the market, like for us, this whole GLP one landscape, or even that, you know, the generative AI landscape, those new things, like I view it as my job to like just press the organization into, into seizing those.
--:-- Yeah, to really sort of almost keep that spirit that you had when you were like 10 people or 30 people. But now you do that at scale.
--:-- **Vijay Pande:**
Any advice you'd give to Sean?
--:-- **Sean Duffy:**
That's a good question. I mean, all sorts of tactical stuff. Yeah, yeah. My number one advice to not just healthcare entrepreneurs, but on the enterprise side, is put a ton of thought in how you price and package kind of what you're buying.
--:-- That has just so much path dependency. Yeah, and that sounds like a detail, but that's like the core future of your business in a sense. Yeah, no, it's funny. It's never the strategic stuff that tends to matter as much as the tactical things.
--:-- Yeah, and some of them you can read about and others like it is a little on-the-job training.
--:-- **Vijay Pande:**
Well, okay, so let's take us to today. And actually, you brought up two great topics. I want to hit AI and GLPs. Yep. Let's start with the AI side.
--:-- **Sean Duffy:**
Yeah, I mean, the whole team and the engineering team is just giddy with it. And there's yesterday's AI, which we've been doing, build models and ML models and recommend resources. Almost like small ML, small AI versus a large foundation model.
--:-- Yeah, exactly. Versus kind of the generative side. I mean, there's hundreds of ideas on how to best leverage our data. So we're still learning and growing. But to give you just some specific examples right now, one thing we launched is the ability for our care teams to just see instantly summarized views of eating history of their members.
--:-- So what we found is like if they wanted to talk about food, we had a very beautifully structured like view where they could scroll through the meal patterns, looking at the eating patterns. But they were spending about six minutes getting the context to be able to craft a message.
--:-- And so one quick hit was have the model do that. And then they can take that and craft it and craft a note to the member that allows them to just feel more insightful, more precise, and likely more impactful and more efficient.
--:-- It's like everybody wins in that world. And maybe even more empathetic sometimes. Yeah, absolutely. More empathetic.
--:-- There's like step one for a model, which is, all right, of these 100 ideas, what are the ones where you have high impact, low regulatory risk? Because there are considerations that you need to think through here.
--:-- We're trying to strike that balance of ensuring that, you know, at the end of the day, like we, people feel the compassion of the Omadas, you know, services as well as the intelligence where, you know, you've got to have a humanness shine through.
--:-- And so for us right now, we built our care team platform homegrown by scratch. So it's about helping to enable our care teams to be authentic humans, to come across that way, do it more efficiently and per your point.
--:-- And, you know, many instances with a little tee up, perhaps more empathetically.
--:-- **Vijay Pande:**
Well, it's really interesting because you sort of alluded to the history of virtual-based care, where not having brick and mortar was like kind of crazy, right? And now that's actually, especially post-COVID, it's actually been quite routine.
--:-- Actually, many of us prefer it to some degree. It has its own conveniences and so on. Now you're almost like a different type of virtual, because now you're even like the caregivers themselves.
--:-- **Sean Duffy:**
Yeah, that's totally true. Yeah, it's funny. How far does that go? Are you always going to have caregivers and you're just massively scaling them? Take us five years into the future, like maybe even 10 years in the future. Like how far does this go?
--:-- I mean, it's going to be balanced. I think the, you know, you remember in peak COVID, it was like virtual care will do everything. And I literally, I felt like the crazy one being like, guys, like biopsies still need to be done. Surgeries. Moles need to be removed.
--:-- So it's, and it'll be the same, the same truth here. I do, there's a reason that artificial intelligence is a buzzword and artificial empathy is not. Yeah.
--:-- And I don't think there is any substitute for just the human accountability. And in fact, I actually think that maybe in this era of AI, it may actually become more valuable. Like human time, you know, handcrafted goods, like, you know, proper human caregivers, that may feel more valuable.
--:-- So in the same vein, you can leverage not just them, but tee up an augmented support through these models in a way that I think just will transform outcomes and, you know, impact the world.
--:-- Yeah. And, you know, we talked about scaling and we talked about the million members. Maybe this is how you get there.
--:-- **Vijay Pande:**
Yeah, it helps yet, no question. So it's such a crazy time because we've got AI doing this insane thing. And then generally unrelated to AI, but very related to Omada is GLP-1s. How does that play into what you're doing in Omada?
--:-- **Sean Duffy:**
Yeah, I just feel giddy with what's happening here because you've got these two parallel tracks. Just extraordinary technology innovation, extraordinary life sciences innovation, two different silos. And I mean, similar to like the fact that you're a convergence investor, Omada's a convergence company, they just hit each other.
--:-- Like right now, you know, right at the moment. And I think they're both, you know, really have knocked on the doors, you know, of Omada as a skilled provider that, you know, has not only the data for the generative AI side, but also just enough scale and enough clinical credibility to capture the opportunity in GLP-1s.
--:-- And, you know, the way I look at them is incredible. I mean, incredible breakthrough. Like, you know, humanity, we should pat ourselves on the back that these exist.
--:-- Yes. you know, in large part, especially since the data has borne out in type 2 diabetes, I think they'll, you know, generally considered a very safe medicine. And hopefully that continues to be the viewpoint.
--:-- The challenge is GLPs are great at quantity. What do you mean quantity? Quantity of food. So you can and will lose weight on a GLP without changing anything about the quality of your calories because it will reduce the quantity. You just will lose appetite.
--:-- That's right. You'll lose appetite. So you're dropping your caloric intake, but eating exactly the same foods. The challenge with that is most patients tend to not want to be on these medicines for life, even though, I mean, you will find the KOLs that argue that that's the right clinical point of view.
--:-- Right now that's counter to the patient preference. And then the cost profile is making that, for the employers that are covering GLPs for obesity, you know, a challenge as well.
--:-- There are very few that are thinking, well, shoot, I'll cover this for life. So you have this issue where, okay, you've got quantity. Well, what does the quality? And that's where Omada thinks we can really differentiate.
--:-- If GLPs are quantity, Omada's quality, because you can use these as almost a behavioral catalyst, help reframe someone's psychology around, hey, I can lose weight. This is amazing.
--:-- And then on that, you're like, well, what are your goals relative to the medicines? Let's do it in a healthy way. Exactly. Well, let's take advantage of this therapeutic window.
--:-- Like let's figure out some new meals that you could do now, you know, that you couldn't do otherwise. And then Omada can address some of the clinical, you know, complexities here.
--:-- I mean, I think that the next issue that is already starting to bubble up is sarcopenia. I mean, you're, you know, because what's happening with these meds, you'll lose fat and muscle mass. If you do regain, you're going to regain only fat.
--:-- So there's all these complex body comp questions that are going to require new, like, physical activity protocols on top and recommendations and diet and intake to make sure that you addressing this kind of truth about weight loss generally not specific to the GLP.
--:-- Yeah especially if your body muscle mass goes down then your basal metabolic rate goes down It makes it more likely you a vegan you feel hungry Exactly exactly.
--:-- And if you're only eating, I don't know, what is it, 1,500 calories, 1,000 calories with these things? Whatever small number it is, then every calorie counts, right?
--:-- Exactly. You know, I mean, Omada's made some decisions that we're happy about. You know, the first is to launch this like GLP-1 care track. You know, we've chosen to not initiate people on the medicines, but just, you know, support them regardless of where the script came from.
--:-- So when we work with our partners who are covering GLPs for obesity, it can create kind of a little bit of an all roads lead to Omada strategy. Like look for these to be covered. We want to make sure that you have the lifestyle support alongside.
--:-- **Vijay Pande:**
Given all this that's going on, where do you think this gets us to? Like what does digital health look like, you know, five, ten years from now?
--:-- **Sean Duffy:**
Yeah, I mean for Omada, I hope these innovations help us do, you know, what always has kind of been the most important, which is to have tomorrow's epidemiologists notice bend and disease curve and have us be a part in that.
--:-- It's been this weird kind of thing where I feel like every couple of years you see this report on diabetes measures, et cetera, and you're like, wow, the nation's gone nowhere. Was that really true? Have we really gone nowhere or have we gone worse than nowhere?
--:-- In fact, if anything, it's gone in a worse direction. We're on a poor trajectory as a country, to say the least. I think these innovations help us hit a level of scale that matters.
--:-- And this is the most acute labor crisis we ever had in the U.S. On the provider side. On the provider side. You talk to the average provider in the C-suite, you're like, well, what are your challenges? They list, you know, 10, 1 through 8 are labor.
--:-- You know, we don't have enough practitioners. Right. So not enough doctors and not enough nurses. Yeah. And, I mean, we're not going to have 200,000, you know, primary care clinicians, like, show up on a tanker.
--:-- So what does that mean? A, like even outside of what we do, you have to find technologies that give more leverage to every credential, like inter-LLMs. You know, B, what you need is to provide care differently.
--:-- Like there is no way that a decade from now the primary care clinician is going to be point on something like longitudinal diabetes care. So Omada can come in as a between-visit care provider, as an adjunct to primary care and a partner, and make it such that really what you need to do is route the person to us, And we'll handle that between visit care and take that off your plate, which I think is going to be required.
--:-- Yeah. I mean, it's amazing that scaling goes from an aspiration almost to an obligation. There is a silver lining. I mean, this is just an extraordinary crisis of labor.
--:-- What is happening is the everyday provider recognizes that there's not a solvent. And I mean, you've had providers that like literally they're like, well, shoot, we've tried almost everything. They bought nursing schools. Right. Right. Gobbled up nursing schools to try to build.
--:-- But there's nothing that's going to be enough. So it's like we have to deliver care differently. What does that look like? Who do we work with to do it?
--:-- So the shortage is one thing. Then the other sort of crisis that we all know about is cost. Yeah. Presumably this plays into that as well.
--:-- Oh, yeah, precisely. And oh, my gosh, if we just kept the percent of our GDP spent on health care constant, but just used the dollars better, like we've got an embarrassment of riches to put forward to the country here.
--:-- It's not like, oh, could it be done more effectively or efficiently? Like, look anywhere besides, you know, the U.S. and you find ways that one could.
--:-- But you kind of need a rock thrown into the lake. Yeah. And there are enough, like, pressure points there that I do think that the silver lining will be. It's kind of hit the fulcrum or it's reinventing the system.
--:-- Let's paint the picture. So, like, you're dealing with something which is one of the biggest crises for America. Like, pre-diabetes, type 2 diabetes, weight, and it's comorbidities. Hypertension and musculoskeletal, all the comorbidities.
--:-- So the problem is very clear. And then on top of that, you have the provider problem and the cost problem. You put in AI and GLPs, it's almost like this wonderful, almost deus ex machina, like to the rescue.
--:-- And no technology to the rescue. Literally, I'm like, in absence of that, plus the model layers to tie the room together, what happens? You know what I mean?
--:-- Well, what do you think about regulations in this space? I mean, that's one of the reasons why it takes a little bit longer. Especially, let's say, additional regulations for AI. Do you see a role for that?
--:-- **Sean Duffy:**
Oh, yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think right now, the
