Overview
Jeremy the co-founder and CEO of Biocanic joins us to share what the future of healthcare looks like including topics such as AI, Health Intelligence, Personalized Health, and how you can benefit from them.
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The Interview
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
technology, health, individual, practitioner, pathway, eat, hormone, recommendation, calories, supplements, test, diet, jeremy, data, driven, microbiome, testing, AI
SPEAKERS
Jeremy Malecha, Boris Berjan
Jeremy Malecha 00:00
Hey, I’m Jeremy, I’m the CEO and co founder of Biocanic. So we are a health intelligence system designed specifically for functional integrative or holistic practitioners to really help streamline and scale their practices, but really engage with their individual clients to help them achieve the health outcomes that they’re looking for on an individual basis. That’s why I had you do that, because you’re way better than me at introducing yourself. Thank you, Jeremy, for being on and doing this interview. Just for some context, I think Jeremy, I’ve worked with him personally now for a little while. And we’ve integrated with his company. And so he’s kind of like really on the ball all the time, go getter. And I was excited to have him on to kind of share the future of technology in healthcare and actually dive into his personal story a little bit to see how he kind of came about and is in this space. So Jeremy, if you if you would be so kind, you know, how did you kind of end up where you’re at now? And health and wellness? Did you have a personal journey? And talk a little bit about that, if you if you will? Yeah, for sure. So background in Biomedical Engineering, spent my whole career in the traditional health care space. So was originally signals and systems engineer for non invasive cardiology devices, brew into marketing, product management, LED connected devices, for ResNet, and built their software to service business. So we launched the largest telemonitoring medical device platform in the world today, through obstructive sleep apnea, which led us into the software as a service model, and got us into practice management. So really no acute care, EMRs, post acute care EMRs. And while we were acquiring, we ended up acquiring about $2 billion, and assets while I was there, you know, one of the things that I really learned was this, that the the technology systems have to be built for the care delivery model. And so during my time, as I was becoming in my late 30s, and 40s, I was seeing personal declining health. My wife is a functional practitioner, I was her first client went through that process. But really, you know, everything came to a head for me, I was doing all the right things, eating organic, gluten free, working out all the time, sober minds, you know, doing all the tricks of the trade. But every objective marker about my metabolic health was going in the wrong direction. And so working with my wife, we uncovered a number of different issues. But it wasn’t really till we got to the root of my issue, which was related to both my genetics, my hormonal status, and my dietary lifestyle. And so it wasn’t until a few years in where we kind of figured out that my issue was actually estrogen dominance, largely driven by what was a carb heavy diet. So even though I was doing the right things in terms of eating clean, you know, you know, grass fed all that good stuff, I was still overdoing it on the carbohydrate side. And so once we kind of understood that from one of the medical directors and one of the hormone test companies like, hey, why don’t you go keto, I did that. But I struggled. It actually didn’t work for me I couldn’t get into to ketosis for a long time. And the challenge was my individual kind of microbiome, my individual status was problematic, because I’m actually reactive to beef and cow’s milk. And so I was actually going down the pathway of a traditional keto diet, right, you know, revised heavy whipping cream and all that good stuff. But my history is that I was not breastfed as a kid, it was the, you know, late 70s, it was kind of the thing that that mothers did was to go to put you on breast milk, chronic ear infections, so I was on chronic antibiotics, my pediatrician literally said, just keep them on antibiotics. So my biome just flat out doesn’t support beef protein, for whatever reason, remains to be seen. And so once I was able to really uncover that, and identify, you know, where I had to kind of change the mix of my diet, but also controlling for glucose, then I was able to have that transformation, I ended up losing 40 pounds in about three months. It was a combination of inflammation, you know, just overdoing it getting down to be able to detox my estrogens, both on the filling of the bucket side and detoxing and on the other side. And that’s really what became transformative. And that’s really what led to what we built which is biochemic. And the idea behind the name is that your biology mechanic so if your car has a check engine light coming on, you go take it to the mechanic, they hook it up to a computer, and it tells him the error code, right. And so that’s the intention, which is, you know, building a platform which combines all of this rich information that helps practitioners enable their clients to understand what are the levers that are going to drive the right outcomes for that individual at that time. What works for me, which is a non beef based largely carnivore keto ish diet works for me. And it only works for me because of me, right? And so how do we actually take all this data, bring it together in a way that you can find out what works for you, your mom can find out what works for you, your sister can find out what works for them in a way that’s efficient. Right? So how do you actually get somebody on the pathway, so they’re seeing results instantaneously, you know, Vennela, you know, within reason. But seeing those results quickly, because when you start to see the pounds coming off, the brain fog going away the inflammation, the pain coming down. That’s what drives the motivation. And people are like, Wow, I feel like I finally have control. And, you know, maybe I choose not to adhere to my dietary program. But that’s my choice now, because I know what those levers are. And that is an empowering thing that we believe is what’s going to drive the future of health transformation, which is empowering individuals to have control of their own health.
Boris Berjan 05:59
Amazing, and, and very, very cool story on exploration. Yeah, diving deep into what’s going on with you. I didn’t want to unpack a few things that you mentioned that I thought were interesting, that probably other people think but never really ask or say. Where did you think the why was it healthy for you to eat non gluten, for example, like all these so called guidelines or pathways that we choose as people? Where did that come from? For you? Why didn’t it serve you? And what’s your opinion on why it didn’t? Yeah, I mean, look, you know, you if you read a lot of the literature, I think,
Jeremy Malecha 06:40
you know, I think it comes out of Harvard, which is, look, if you’re human, you’re reactive to gluten. The question is not whether you’re gluten intolerant, it’s how your what is your intolerance, right? And many people can deal with whatever the reaction is, right? So A, it’s not a celiac response, it’s actually an inflammatory response. So if I literally went out, and I said, look, it’s gonna be one of those days, I want to eat the bread, because it looks great. I know, I’m gonna get zits and back pain the next two days, in the same spot, every single time, that not a lot of people are attuned to that. I mean, it’s, you know, that’s the business that we’re in is, you know, so I’m really attuned to those types of things. So getting the understanding and be able to separate what is what’s useful from the noise. And oftentimes, you know, people walk into can, hey, I’m going to finally do my health transformation, and pull a bunch of levers, and then they don’t really know what was actually working and what wasn’t, right. And so that’s really where the inside of the technology and the enablement of both this the sensors, the lab data, and be able to track on the self reported side is what’s going to really derive the insight to actually helping somebody understand why those things are working, or they aren’t working. Right. That’s really where this this I think becomes super powerful is giving people the ability to do that on their own.
Boris Berjan 08:05
And would you say we have now enough technology to make those because your journey? You know, you summarized it, but obviously, I think I’m not going to speak for you. But that was it took some time and testing and back and forth. And then probably some art to it to oh, I noticed these it’s like, after like years of testing on yourself, do you feel like we have technology now that gets us there? Much faster? Or do you think luck, we still have a while to go? What’s your what’s your take on it? And that lens? The the the challenge, I think is it’s not so much the lack of technology, I think the technology exists. The question is, what technology? Do you need to be able to answer the question that you’re looking for? Right? And so for example, I always I always tell the story. When I started my health journey, we went down a gut health pathway, right? So I’ve mentioned my historic background. So I just have a poor microbiome I make for good host, I had CDiff recibo resistant h pylori, we went down that pathway, and we effectively resolve those issues yet I saw no net benefit. And in my health improvements. Imagine running multiple microbiome tests as SIBO breath test. It worked, but I was still gaining weight ca still having back pain, still, you know, seeing my blood pressure increase. The question was where was that? What was the actual root cause of that? And that was actually because of the carbohydrate, the estrogen dominance, the inability to effectively detox that. And the way that I like to put it is look, the information was there. We were just looking at the wrong information. We should have started with this with this, you know, the dietary approach related to my genetics and my hormones, rather than focusing on the gut. And that can be a challenge today, right? So when
Jeremy Malecha 10:00
We think about technology availability, you can go buy a direct to consumer, I’m gonna go, you know, do an at home stool sample, I’m gonna send it in this consumer company is going to recommend some supplements. Okay, that’s great. But is that really the root cause of my issue? Sometimes it’s, sometimes it isn’t. And that’s really what one of the, one of my mentors in the space read says it’s a cycle of trial and error. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don’t. And that’s great. You found the issue. But oftentimes, most people are then caught, and they become demotivated and fall out of the cycle. So I think where the technology needs to come in, which is what is the piece of information that you need, what is the tool that you need now? Right? So this idea, you know, if I’m always using a gut microbiome test as a hammer, I can’t really drill in a screw. Right? All that I need is a screwdriver that the how do you know what tool you need, based upon what the challenge is? And that’s really where the technology has to come together? You know, we can go down, you know, we can do whole genome sequencing, we can do broad based information. But again, that’s like kind of a test of a population level, not an individual level. So the question is, what is the next set of information that’s going to inform me on making the right next step tomorrow?
Boris Berjan 11:17
Understood? And if somebody came to you right now and said, How do I do that? What would you advise them to do? With all these options?
Jeremy Malecha 11:26
Yeah, so So today, there’s basically four foundational tests that people run. So one obvious, obviously, is blood chemistry, that’s kind of standard, we know what to do with that information. The second is microbiome, just to really understand kind of where your gut health is that it is important we know it’s, you know, tightly integrated to mental health, digestive health hormone health, then an advanced hormone test. The challenge with blood testing on hormones is just one snapshot. One day, the advanced hormone test is going to tell you a little bit more about your adrenals, how you’re actually processing the various hormone metabolites to give you a view more about how your hormonal system works. And then that the controversial one is food sensitivity testing. I like food sensitivity testing, it’s been super impactful for me, because when you run a foods, a high quality and not an at home bloodspot, a high quality food sensitivity, which means a blood draw, you can take advantage of that tomorrow, even though the you know, there’s an argument, well, you know, your food sensitivities are a reflection of your gut health. So if you fix your gut, your food sensitivities, not really meaningful, but your gut is going to take a long time to recover, to repair, you know, to rebuild the microbiome or your gut barrier. food sensitivity is something that you can do tomorrow and say, Look, I’m reactive to beef and cow’s milk, if I just take that out on my diet, I’m going to see an instant benefit. And that’s a motivating factor, which is why we recommend that. So that’s kind of like the four foundational tests. The next steps are kind of filling in the gaps. You know, things like organic acids, give you a little bit more insight, toxin testing mold, toxin testing molds, a huge problem of you know, in any developed country today, people underestimate that line testing EBV, those kinds of latent more, I would say kind of filling in the gaps, right? So we’re seeing something on those four foundational tests that aren’t quite clear, or they may be discordant. And what we’re thinking then we need to say I’m suspecting is something else. And that’s the additional kind of layer.
Boris Berjan 13:28
Gotcha, gotcha. And, again, a lot to unpack there. I did want to dig in a little bit into the points that you’ve made, because I know this comes up a lot, which is, you know, you just mentioned I lost 30 pounds, and I think it was three months. Yeah, correct me if I’m wrong. Yeah. So as you know, because I know you’re well versed in this area, there’s always those two schools of thought one is, calories don’t matter whatsoever, just intuitively eat and or eat until you’re not hungry and or only eat whole foods, then you have carnivore keto, vegan keto, etc, etc, etc. Then you have the other side of the camp, which is the only thing that matters is calories. And let’s take out of context things like, you know, eating 1000 calories a day, let’s say you could actually do it for a long time, which is almost we know that that’s almost impossible, because he gets so hungry at some point you binge. But let’s say you could do it for three years, right? And let’s say there was no impact on your organs or hormones and basically starving yourself. And you know, you could lose weight. So what’s kind of what have you seen, because you’ve worked with a lot of providers, you’ve probably seen these arguments 10 times over on any given Sunday. How do you perceive that and what would you say to those people who are looking at both sides of that argument, to kind of make sense of it and or is the path like, figure out all your markers as you were seeing like the four core ones? And then the secondary ones? See how you feel then? And then maybe combine it with calorie counting? If that’s easier for you to mentally visualize, like, what’s what’s your take on this exact topic? Because it’s always talked about and never, never resolved, it feels like,
Jeremy Malecha 15:20
Yeah, I mean, look on the calorie side, if you do have to have a calorie deficit in order to lose weight, right. And if you’re continuously eating calorie dense foods at you know, a high level, you’re going to put on weight. It’s just a matter of physics. From that perspective. The real question is, what’s the goal here? Right, so if you are a hyperthyroid female, you are actively burning, you’re have a higher energy metabolism, which causes you to increase that but increase your caloric content, right. But even with that hyper thyroid activity, you need to understand why is the thyroid hyperactive, right? It’s a combination of genetics, lifestyle, and external factors. And that’s really where this objective testing comes in. Because what we wanted to do is we want to match the ability for that, that underweight female to basically add weight to get to their ideal weight. Similarly, somebody who is overweight or maybe above their ideal weight, you do need to be at a caloric deficit, but just calories alone isn’t necessarily going to help you along the way. Because your body is going to your metabolism is going to readjust if that’s the only lever you’re pulling. So you have to think about what does it look like from a sleep perspective, Am I under sleeping, and then I’m in a chronic adrenal stress, which is causing me an inability to effectively manage my calories in calories out from a burn perspective, am I working out in a way that matches my genetics and my output to really get that fat, fat oxidation going, so I can start you leveraging my fat oxidation to ensuring that I’m not just burning the calories that consuming, I’m actually actively liberating fats into my bloodstream as a means to losing weight. That’s really where this combination of things comes in. And so you know, so again, going back to this idea is that the cycle of trial and error, some people have great results on V diet, some people have great results on a carnivore diet, that doesn’t mean anything for any any individual, right. And the way you the way I like to describe it is I have 13 reactivities, to vegetables, and I have six proteins that I’m reactive to. So if I chose either one of those binary approaches, I would be in metabolic, no man’s land. So I would be restricted, I’d be overly restrictive on both sides, feeling awful, and getting no benefit. Right. And that’s how I would end up now, you know, maybe you may have a better benefit of somewhere else. You know, a lot of people have great results on pure keto, because they don’t have the same type of issues as me. So that’s where this kind of overly reductionist approach becomes problematic, because so many people do see great results. But that’s just coincidence, right? It happened to fall across a fall into the right approach, depending on who they are. And, you know, you’re talking about kind of, you know, the ability to stay compliant or to given protocol. Well, the compliance is not necessary is not a level of effort if you’re highly motivated, right. And so once you find what works for you, the motivate the compliance as a function of you wanting to stay on the path that you’re on, stay at the weight that you’re at, no, continue, because you feel great, you don’t have brain fog, you can go play with the kids, you know, you can go you know, play in your adult softball league without any pain or risk of injury. Those are the motivations that are going to keep people on an individual program. And then when you are able to see, right, so if you’re just pure keto, and then you’re just like, just so tired of, you know, heavy whipping cream in my coffee and eating rib eyes every night, and sour cream on my salads, right, then that becomes tiring, because you’re just like, I’m just doing a diet because I’m doing a diet, not that, hey, I know that when I do this, in equates to feeling more, you know, feeling more aware, more present in my relationships, better sleep, lower weight, my clothes feel better, and I’m more motivated. And I think that’s where the challenge is. People want to become overly reductionist, that it’s a binary thing, this or that. But, you know, I always like to say around health care, there’s only one rule of your health. And that rule is it depends. And it depends on you depends on your genetics depends on your lifestyle depends on your sleep, it all depends, right? And you can’t be reductionist about it. It’s our natural pension to kind of simplify it to a binary for speed of thinking, but we have to kind of reject that for our own personal self accept the fact that it’s complex and really work to become our own detective from that respect.
Boris Berjan 19:46
Yeah, makes sense. Another thing that you brought up that gets this discussed a lot is you mentioned you know, are you are you accessing your fat burning pathways essentially, right is Are you setting your life up to do so? And the counter argument to that always is, or at least, I think this is a good one. You know, bodybuilders don’t do any of that stuff. They count calories religiously. And then they do either a ridiculous amount of cardio to lose even more weight and or keep maintain that muscle with obviously high protein diets. We can even if they’re on steroids or not, you know, they still kind of shape their body. They’ve been doing that for 50 years not following any of this new newer diets, ancestral living, go back to how we were. What’s your take on? Are we getting better with technology? Understanding that there’s more efficient ways to do it? And those guys have been doing it for decades? Is it does does your research and what you guys work on with technology support, that it is more efficient, maybe or a better way to get rid of that fat if you’re in fat burning versus just reducing calories through exercise and or restricting calories? By restricting food? What’s your take on it? Because it is, again, it goes a little bit back to what we were talking about calories, and this is not, but you know, they are a good example those bodybuilders have they don’t really follow those rules they eat from every food group. Lots of variety usually is especially like an offseason. So I’d love your take on how you see that viewpoint. And, and what you what you guys are looking at in terms of studies.
Jeremy Malecha 21:34
Yeah, it it’s funny, because in that you’re kind of doing the same thing that everybody else does, which is bodybuilders, right? There’s a bodybuilder, right? Well, for every successful bodybuilder that you can find out, I can show you nine that are failed, right? And there are people that are in the gym that are thinking they’re doing it, right, they’re doing the quote unquote, bodybuilding approach, but they’re unsuccessful because it’s not actually working for them. Right? You can you can profile them right away, right? So you’re looking at somebody who’s got, you know, putting on a ton of mass except they are now having a distended abdomen. They’ve got hair loss, they’ve got acne, there have skin issues that are showing up, probably sleep issues. And so yes, the body building approach has worked, those that approach worked for and then they are ultimately successful. Right? Yeah. And that’s this idea. I think that the dietary approach as well, which is how do you how do you actually tease that out? And yes, you have super successful people where the particular Hey, this is the bulking phase, this is my cut phase, this is what I do. I need lean chicken and rice. And then I do cardio. Oh, it you know, it is to cardio five days a week and only lift heavy, right? There’s there’s any litany of kind of menus of options. But again, it’s really trial and error and not objectively driven. That’s where I think the challenge and the complexity is right, because we put a bodybuilder on a pedestal that does this, therefore, I’m going to do this because I want to be there without any objective data behind whether that’s actually going to work for me to get to that goal. Yeah.
Boris Berjan 23:08
And you bring up a good point, which is, you’re brought up the same argument that I bring up, which is, yeah, they might have muscle, but that that’s basically where the buck stops, right? Because like you said, they might have a lot of them die early, you know, because of a overdose of performance enhancing drugs, or B, you know, those the way they’re eating and working out is not actually conducive to longevity, for example. Right. So it is a it is always going back to what you said, it does depend on it and people hate that answer.
Jeremy Malecha 23:46
Yeah, I mean, look, one of the perfect examples is I have a friend and colleague who is on testosterone replacement therapy, so it results and then all of a sudden started putting on weight and wasn’t seeing it. So staying on there increasing his testosterone dose, because it’s not getting the outcomes that he’s looking for based upon what whatever his goal was originally, an advanced hormone test on him. And testosterone is actually at the high end for his individual age range, yet all of his estrogen markers are off the chart. And so what’s happening is the it’s this reductionist idea that hey, the more the better. Well, this person is actually from their practitioner prescriber who’s getting overdosed on testosterone. What’s happened is he’s driven up his testosterone so high that his body can no longer process it and now it’s dumping it and it’s aromatizing it into estrogen pathways and it’s actually pushing hard. So my issue I family history of estrogen German cancer, I was it what’s like a 1.1 1.0 is considered high 1.25. So not only was he not seeing the results that he was going for, by doing kind of Is this, you know, testosterone supplementation, it was actually pushing him in the wrong direction thinking he was healthy with. And without that objective insight, we wouldn’t have known to actually back and back down from the dosage that the prescriber recommended. And that’s one of the challenges that you see with a lot of kind of the online approaches. They tell Ed, you know, hey, you know, I have Ed headaches, weight gain, and everything else. Sure. Here’s some, here’s some, here’s some testosterone therapy. And oftentimes, and we hear this from doctors who don’t use the objective testing, they’re like, yeah, why are my clients complaining of sore nipples? breast growth, you know, smaller, you know, smaller testicles, it’s like, you’re not testing, you’re pushing them too hard. And the body’s responding in the wrong way. And so without that objective information, you’re actually doing more harm than good.
Boris Berjan 25:50
Yeah, no, it’s a great point. Why do you think that men medical system hasn’t undertaken? Let’s say, all are some of the things that we’ve talked about so far in this interview? Where do you see roadblocks to getting that information and making the right assessment for yourself?
Jeremy Malecha 26:11
Yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s a couple of huge roadblocks one, a physician doesn’t have the time to get in at the individual level under the current reimbursement system. So that’s just a challenge. They have to do their volume based clinic for episodic care, they have to get in and get out, they have to prescribe refer and chart and Bill for an e&m or whatever procedural code that they’re doing, that’s just not going to change with the amount of increasing volume of people with chronic disease, and, and pathways. The other side of this is we’ve become in the traditional healthcare system is so dependent upon the double blind, placebo controlled trial, that it’s problematic, okay. So if I have a novel pharmaceutical, I’ve got a biologic injectable that doesn’t exist in nature. And I go, you know, and I put it in 100 people, and I don’t put it in 100. That’s easy. You can power the study to show a significant difference. What we’re talking about in the functional integrative holistic world is diet, lifestyle, sleep, exercise, stress management, core content, okay, those are five completely heterogeneous variables. You cannot power a study to have a double blind, placebo controlled outcome at all, it’s just impossible to run. And so what’s happened is to say that, hey, look, a given intervention is going to drive the desired outcome in a placebo controlled way is impossible. So we have an impossible acceptance standard in the traditional health care model. So that’s not going to change, right? It works for pharmaceuticals, we’re relying on pharmaceuticals does not work for holistic or functional, or, you know, whole person interventions. And so that’s really what the prevention is. So an insurer is not going to pay for anything unless there’s that placebo controlled outcome data. I get it, their businesses, their for profit businesses, if you have an s&p 500 Index Fund, you want them to make more profit. So not disparaging great people there, but they’re a coin operated business. So the only way that really changes is for people to take ownership of their own health. Because it’s not going to happen from the system itself, because it’s just not set up that way. The unit economics are completely off for what we want as individuals. Yeah. And
Boris Berjan 28:29
how do you see that actually unfolding because we could say, You got to have self personal ownership, which I personally believe in 100%, have my whole life, battled through numerous things health wise to to get through the other side, I wouldn’t have done otherwise. You know, what about people who are indoctrinated with all these foods that are now very addictive, right. That’s how they were made. They’re getting marketed to all the time. It’s cheaper. Usually, I know this, someone’s gonna argue this in the comments for sure. But you can eat healthy on a budget all this? I know, I understand that. It’s just not what they were taught. It’s not how what their habits were built around. They’re not as satiating. Well, they are but they don’t think so in the beginning, and then, you know, it’s not as addictive and it’s not a dopamine rush, like the other ones have been made. How, what’s How do you propose maybe using is like technology part of that answer, where it’s like, if you can see something right away how it’s happening, or here’s like your weekly review of your data, and you can actually see your health how it’s performing objectively not. How do you feel after taking the supplement because you might have just had a flight or you know, got a raise, right? So it’s like, those things are always out of context. And to put them in contact is very difficult because you don’t really, you’re not tracking that right. So how would you how would you in a perfect world or how are you guys helping Fergus forward are this way to be self accountable and making it so that it’s appealing to people who are getting bombarded with billion dollar companies whose sole purpose was to invent something that’s more addictive? So you’d buy more of it?
Jeremy Malecha 30:14
Yeah, I mean, first, I mean, the biggest, the biggest way that this changes is it changes from healthcare from health care insurance driven to consumer driven. And that’s how that’s already happening today. The reason why the shift to Consumer Driven Health Care is happening is we’ve seen the insurance plans go from, you know, everything’s covered to high deductible, with a high out of pocket expense and a high pocket maximum, right, so people are already accustomed well on, I need to pay because I have a 9010 $1,000 deductible. So that’s I’m already now getting accustomed to paying for medical services, that’s the biggest hurdle to get past. The second side of this is the awareness of the bullshit that people are spending their money on. Right. So I have a peloton a gym membership, I have a cupboard full of supplements, I have a whole bunch of stuff that I’m using, I did a juice cleanse, I’ve got you know, my buddy’s supplement that he recommended I the gym and I got the KNOX drink with, you know, you know, pea protein pretty out post workout, by the time you actually add up all of that consumer spend, you’re actually more than doubled the actual healthcare spend there is today even with all the pharmaceutical hospital costs that you imagine it’s the $7 trillion industry. And it’s the same outcome people are looking for, you’re investing in that supplement that juice, the wellness clinic, you know, hyperbaric oxygen, whatever you’re spending your money on to be healthier and feel better, you’re just not spending it in the right way. So when you take this kind of shift of the consumer mindset of I’m paying, I need to pay out of pocket to get the health care that I want. I’m paying it already. So I’m spending, you know, $10,000, on average a year, I just don’t feel it, because it’s a $60 here, or $100 There $20 or $8. There, once I think about it, I’m like, Look, if I told you that if you gave me $10,000, I could give you the health outcome and the tools to be healthy in the next three months. People will do it, right, they have to recognize that look, I’m spending it now rather than just being bled dry on wasted consumer spend. That’s the next phase of this. And it’s already happening, where we’re seeing it with our practitioners. Now the challenge is you as a consumer, finding the right practitioner who can see you in a timely manner, because this is not easy, right up to the practitioner is going to spend eight hours going through all of your data, who you are your family, your sleep, your stress to get you on the what is the step today, the step tomorrow, the step three weeks from now, the step after that, to get you on that pathway and enable you to actually control your health in the future. That’s kind of the third phase of this, which is how does this actually mainstream.
Boris Berjan 33:00
Amazing. And we have a little bit of time left. So I wanted to shift a little bit of this focus thing. We’ve done a lot of digging into the system, different testing, how to personalize health, how to motivate people what it’s going to take systematically. And you talk a little bit about how you’ve biomechanic that is been empowering these providers that you just mentioned, that was a good segue. How is biocanic helping these providers, let’s say you get a good one, you you resonate with them, they understand you you can tell that they’re actually wanting to understand where you’re coming from what’s going on in your life. How does biocanic play a role in bridging that relationship closer and or giving insight to those parties involved?
Jeremy Malecha 33:50
Yeah, great question. So the the the biggest problem that we saw when we started in 2018 is practitioners, well known practitioners. We work with a very large clinic in Northern California, you know, best selling author, everything else they were losing 75% of their of their clients or patients. After the results review in the issue was the individual would get a eight to a 20 page Word document of everything they needed to do. Supplements, recommendations, here’s how to sleep here’s what you need to do both are Lago meditate acupuncture. Okay, you get when you get 21 things to do. Tomorrow, you do zero, because the cliff is too hard to climb. You also understand the context and I always jokingly tell the story. When I first started down this pathway, I would ask my wife Hey, why am I buying the $70 bottle of thorn digestive enzymes? She goes, Don’t you remember on page three of the test that you have Baba blah, blah. And I was like, No. I have five PDF documents. I have a Word document with supplements. I’m trying to track my health and I don’t remember why. Yeah, is how do you actually bring all this rich information together in a way that both the practitioner can see the information quickly. But then the patient or the client can actually connect the dots, right? So when you go through, and you have five or four different lab tests, and you have your different information, and you see you’re lit up on gut, dysbiosis, and somebody and they make a recommendation that you need a probiotic digestive enzyme, bio dx and gut restore with a glutamine or something like that. Now, it’s like, okay, that’s right. I’m working on this. That’s why I’m taking this, that’s why I’m adding fermented foods are on changing my diet in a certain way. Then when I come back on a retest, when I see those markers of change, that becomes the reinforcement mechanism. And you can’t do that without technology, because otherwise you just have disconnected data points. And that’s what really brings the connection between the practitioner and the client together that drives the outcomes everybody’s looking for. Very cool.
Boris Berjan 35:57
And where do you see that going? That connection? That’s where it is now. What do you think, Where do you think it’s going to be? Or where are you guys building for it to be in three 510 years down the road?
Jeremy Malecha 36:13
Yeah, I mean, look, the biggest challenge is getting we believe fully in the practitioner market. We don’t believe that these kind of direct to consumer artificial intelligence systems are built on anything other than just they just, you know, scraped a bunch of clinical data that is not individualized recommendations. The practitioners challenge is making sense all of the, of all the data quickly. And effectively. We believe that there’s kind of a next layer of technology, which we, which is called clinical decision support, which is starting to serve as insights to the practitioner saying, hey, look, did you know 70% of people, like Jeremy have benefited from a low FODMAP diet that restricts beef and cow’s milk? That that interpretation without having to go to PubMed without having to go to my community without having to go to the interpretation guide, saves time and effort? And then the practitioner has the ability to look at you and say, Okay, are you willing to make the change? Can you make the change? Can you afford the change? If not, how do we actually tailor this to you as an individual? Maybe you’re, you know, I can’t afford all these supplements, okay, well, then let’s focus on this, or, Hey, you know, you’re a shift worker. Okay. So how do we reprioritize and get you on a path, because just data and a recommendation doesn’t make sense, we still need the human to kind of humanize it for the individual. And that’s why we’re so focused. And so really bringing the data and the correlations across these different systems to help speed that is where we see this going in the future.
Boris Berjan 37:42
Very cool. Couple more questions, and then we’ll wrap it up. We’re getting close, close here. And so from everything that you said, what’s interesting to me to maybe dive into a little bit more is, does that does that recommendation when it pops up? Is it still too general? Like, how much data points? Do you feel like you guys will need to actually get to a point where that recommendation has, let’s say, like, 80 to 90%? Efficiency rates, right? Like how many Jeremy’s that our X amount of age that live in Miami that have grown up a certain way? You know, because there’s gonna be so many variables on, as we just talked about, for every individual. How do you see kind of navigating that and what’s your take on? Like, building that in the future?
Jeremy Malecha 38:37
Yeah, I mean, look, it’s getting improve over time, right. And we, we tend to forget how things have evolved. Right. And so I’ll use kind of this idea around spellcheck. Right. So originally, when we first started Microsoft Word, we’d have to go hit f7 to do a spellcheck. The next evolution was, hey, I’m identifying words, and I’m underlining them that appear to be misspelled, right, and then now and then the original iPhones, hey, I’m suggesting replacements and then I’m going to suggest word replacements based upon your misspelling. Now in the context of the words around it, I’m now suggesting words without you having to type it because of the probability that that next word is connected to the word before it. Right? Now you have predictive text within Gmail. And now of course, everything is chat. GPT. Right. And so the same thing is going to happen, it’s going to be an evolution over time. So the initial recommendations based upon multimodal data will kind of, you know, be very rudimentary and basic, but those will become more specific as the datasets get more powered. The challenge today is outside of us. There’s very few systems that have any centralized data of any magnitude at all. We continue to grow, but we’re orders of magnitudes away right. So if you think about all of the data that you’re able to tune from chat GDP Ta cross I think they use Reddit and all the public sites and Wikipedia and everything else. We’re talking trillions of data points, right? The centralization of that data just doesn’t exist today. But we’re starting on that pathway. And as those datasets get larger, the acceleration of the recommendations will continue to increase over time. I mean, interestingly, I did put in to chat GPT. I said, Hey, what is the interpretation of somebody with gut dysbiosis? And adrenal stress? And what will be the recommendation? And it wasn’t that far off? Yeah, if that everything that you asked, it always has the caveat of talk to your doctor first. hilarious how they’ve trained it to always put that in there, or I don’t know if it’s always just associated with it. But it wasn’t actually that far off. And that was, you know, 30 seconds of taking two different data sets and putting it in. So I think I think you know, that those types of technologies will enable that faster, because you’re not building it from scratch, you’re just leveraging it for the application.
Boris Berjan 40:58
That makes sense. Awesome. We’ll do one more question here. And then we’ll let you go. How do we get insurance to cover this?
Jeremy Malecha 41:07
You don’t? What people don’t understand about the insurance industry, and I alluded to this, insurance is a for profit business. Okay. They in the US market, they have a thing for their commercial covered lives called the medical loss ratio, that means they cannot make profit more than 10 or 15%, depending on the number of covered lives. If you are a for profit business, and you need to increase your profit and your and that needs to grow over time, the only way to increase your profit is to increase your revenue, which is increasing claims. So the ability of getting somebody into the system and then reducing claims is counter to the business model of the traditional commercial insurance model. So the money does not make sense for commercial insurance to cover it. That being said, there are two health systems where there there is opportunity. Medicaid is on a what’s called a capitated model, which is they get paid on a per life basis. And so any ability to cut cost makes sense for them because Medicaid is not a for profit system. The other side is the Military Health System. Military Health System. If you’re, you know, if let’s say you’re in Iraq, you’ve got TBI from a roadside bomb, they own you for life. So it’s in their best interest. They’re not in the Military Health System, again, not trying to make a profit, like you know, a Cigna or an EPA. So there is a need to be able to get that in and be able to drive cost out of the system. They’ve issued a number of memos over the last 20 years around things like how do we get people off of opioids? How do we increase mindfulness, meditation, holistic approaches to help improve patient our soldiers lives along with their loved ones. So there is some opportunity, but I think when people try to focus on the commercial, $3 trillion animal we just full stop, it’s not going to work unless the whole economics change, which is like government subsidized health care, which is just not going to happen in the US market.
Boris Berjan 43:06
And Gotcha. So to nitpick a little bit there.
43:10
There is an argument to be made, if you go to insurance. Let’s just hypothetically, say you do this, it costs insurance about 14,000 and a half dollars a year if you’re a diabetic. So if you’re not a diabetic, you’re averaging, let’s say, like four to 6000. So wouldn’t it be useful for them to cover something that maybe cost them one or two grand a year to save 10? Like, can’t you make that argument? Or are you saying the the system does not work that way at all,
Jeremy Malecha 43:44
they they you in order to make more money, you have to issue more claims. The other thing is I as a commercial insurer, I’m kicking the can down the road. So investing in your health today doesn’t save me money tomorrow, because you’re going to switch plans along the way. You may be Cigna, one week at another next week, you may go into Blue Cross Blue Shield, though, the week after that week, the year after that, because you’re moving jobs, maybe you’re maybe you’re in the marketplaces or not So investing in the long term health, the the only thing that I would potentially be worried about is just managing, how am I managing that medical loss ratio? Right. And so if that is not a cost center for me, and I’m not worried if it’s I always say insurers have the JC conundrum, they have 99 problems. And this is not one of them. Right? And so the idea is, you know, is it a high ticket cost? Can it move my bottom line? I don’t care about you as an individual. The question is, does this policy change, coverage change, reimbursement change, affect my ability to increase my bottom line than I care otherwise? I don’t. And that’s where I think people you know, people are, you know, who are altruistic. You may have highly empathetic people working at Cigna that care about health and care We’re about all that stuff. But at the end of the day, this is a corporate for profit entity, and it’s their job to maximize profits and people lose sight. They conflate what is well intentioned individuals for and a for profit, multibillion dollar business.
Boris Berjan 45:13
Yeah, makes sense. Very cool insights. And thank you, Jeremy, that was amazing. Anything you want to add? either personally or for biomechanic? Before we wrap this up?
45:25
No, I mean, look, we’re biochemic, bicanic.com. practitioners that are looking for technology to streamline their approaches and this functional holistic space, definitely come check out our website. We also have a free community site that we provide to anybody. It’s called the Health intelligence exchange. It’s Hix.biochemic.com. We do live events every single week, we highlight people we had the Theia team on, we’re just really trying to elevate the collective knowledge about personalized health opportunities, technologies, industry movement. So it’s a really great way to bring everybody better together and have a conversation about it.
Boris Berjan 46:02
Amazing. And for anybody watching, we’ve linked everything Jeremy just mentioned down below. So please go follow biomechanic please go follow Jeremy join the community. It’s amazing. Been there personally, so I can I can vote for it. And as you can see, Jeremy has a wealth of knowledge and so are his team. And obviously, they have a huge provider network that are working together to solve these problems. So click down below go do it right now. You will, you will regret it. And thank you again, Jeremy. We had a we had a great time, and I’m sure we’ll have you on again.
Jeremy Malecha 46:35
Yeah, awesome. Thanks. Appreciate it. See everybody