David McCallen, Director & Chief of Marketing and Strategy, Star Health Network shares his vision of high quality precision medicine that is personalised through DNA Sequencing and delivered across the globe. He shares the revolutionary module with Shahid Akhter, ENN

Star Health Network (SHN) seems to be a unique health company. Can you please outline the basic features, services and the modus operandi?
Star is a unique global health network that connects the centres of excellence in the United States to centres of need around the world. Stars integrated healthcare network, wherein more than 50 American, European and Indian Hospitals work together in science, technology and patient treatment methodologies, is revolutionizing the delivery of healthcare globally. Stars Connected Health Programs promote advanced care around the world.
Connected Health Program Services include: World-Renowned Experts Come Together: Stars network enables physicians and their patients to participate in two-way second opinion consultations with specialists at network hospitals, facilitating a global collaboration in patient care.
Personalized Medicine For Every Patient: From genetics to stem cells, from cancer to neuroscience, Star network partner doctors are in the vanguard of their fields. These doctors work as a team to provide personalized treatment for every patient.
Discoveries Move Quickly To The Bedside: Generations of researchers at U.S. University hospitals have worked tirelessly to unravel the mysteries of disease, push the boundaries of medicine and develop break through treatments that change lives. Today, Stars network hospitals are actively working to bring advanced care and technologies to their patients.
Global Collaboration In Treatments Of The Future: Stars interinstitutional clinical and basic science research programs foster collaborations in new treatments and new drug development.
Creating A True Global Medical Fraternity: Physicians, nurses, and medical technologists are benefiting Sick patients dont have the stress of having to travel, while saving time and money, and there is a much larger pool of expertise that can be accessed on a virtual basis David McCallen, Director, Marketing Chief, Star Health Network by visiting Stars US partner hospitals to gain advanced training and nurture exchange of ideas, knowledge and expertise.
Clinical Program Development: Stars U.S. partner hospitals, with their large reservoir of medical intelligence, assist in upgrading or establishing advanced care capabilities at partner hospitals outside the United States.
Is it akin to consultancy via telemedicine?
Star has put together all the pieces “ medical expertise, technology and patients – so that our US institutional partners and their top-notch physicians are capable, for example, of providing a second opinion to a cancer patient in India with a particularly difficult case. So it is a telemedicine consult, a way that the patient and their physician can get another opinion about their case from an expert, remotely. This is a normal, typical process for any primary care doctor, to refer his patient to an expert; we are providing that expert remotely, through technology, so that the patient doesnt have to go to the expert, which is significant.
We are getting the primary physician, who has the relationship and trust of the patient, to tap into Stars global medical intelligence pool. This is quite the opposite of most telemedicine projects that we look at, which are attempting to provide a patient with access to basic medical services, information, and a remote doctor, as the case may be. All are needed, but it is a different segment of the telemedicine market.

What is your bandwidth? The spread of doctors and hospitals associated with you?
Before we can talk about the bandwidth of the system, lets take a step back and figure out what a system that works may look like. This is the process we went through. First, we needed to determine the specific areas in healthcare where the disparity in expertise created an opportunity. Then we had to identify the right partners in those areas and establish those relationships, and figure out how to provide their expertise in services that would meet the needs we saw in the marketplace. Next was creating the structure, financial model and process to create the agreements with all the participants, so that this made sense to them. Once that was done, we figured out the tools required to provide the service so that the business will scale. None of these are trivial matters, so it has taken some time. Today, our US hospital partners include and Thomas Jefferson University- Kimmel Cancer Center, Yale University Genomics and Pathology through Precipio Diagnostics, Fox Chase Cancer Center at Temple University, DuPont Childrens Hospital, Willis Eye Centre, and Magee Rehabilitation Hospital; our most notable Indian hospital partner is Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute and Research Centre – one of the top cancer treatment and research centres in India; we also have established relationships with Healthcare Global group, a commercial cancer treatment group with 28 hospitals, and RG Stone, a Nephrology/Urology institution with 16 hospitals; we are beginning to integrate them into the global community.

How do you decide upon a particular doctor or a hospital from a massive pool of 4000 doctors?
There are areas of specialization that exists within each of these institutions; depending on the patient, their condition is matched to the appropriate specialist by a coordinator; we are now developing tools to electronically match the expertise to the patients condition, which will become part of the system and allow us to scale up as volume grows.

Is Star confined to oncology and tumor profiling (Cancer DNA sequencing) or does it incorporate other faculties as well?
All our Institutional partners in the United States are centres of excellence in all areas of medicine. We are not confined to any area; our original concept was to bridge the gaps in expertise, and provide access to the super- specialty areas of medicine. Cancer happened to be the best example of a huge disparity, so we chose to deploy our business model in oncology first, which is where we are today. While we have other opportunities today to expand into other areas, we remain focused on building out our oncology footprint while exploring the next best super-specialty area to branch out into, which we will do in time.

To participate in a Star consult, is it important to have a standby, local, treating physician?
Having a local, treating physician is a requirement. We see this relationship between the physician and the patient to be a fundamental part of how medical care is dispensed; we are looking for participation from the physician, as opposed to trying to replace him.

Sick patients dont have the stress of having to travel, while saving time and money, and there is a much larger pool of expertise that can be accessed on a virtual basis.

Can any physician function as an intermediary support or has it to be in alignment with a hospital?
Yes, it is no different than how any physician operates now, which is vital; they can seek a referral through the network. Today, we are doing these consults between the US and India; soon, the consults will be done within India, between any physician and an expert, for example, at RGCI&RC; if their expert cant handle the case, it will be referred to an expert in the US. As the consults occur, each physician benefits “ they learn from the interaction, and collaboratively make decisions about the nature of the care that needs to be provided; most importantly, patient care is improved.

Is Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Centre the first hospital to avail your services?
Yes, RGCI&RC is the first hospital to offer these services. RGCI&RC is a cancer- specific hospital with high volumes of patients and many difficult cases. RGCI&RC understood both the practical nature of our services for their patients, as well as the value of a relationship with leading academic institutions that Star has in the US. So RGCI&RC understood the importance in providing their patients access to genetic testing today, making them among the first to do so and a true leader in the field, and they also understood that to eventually provide such a service in India, it made sense to learn about it, to become familiar with genomics and understand it more deeply so that they would be able to establish their own genomics capabilities along with partners with the expertise to do so.

Please give some idea about the fee that you charge for connecting patients to worldclass experts who are leaders in their area of medicine?
There is no charge to the institutions joining the network; each service has a fee, which is shared among all participants. This is an important element of our model; it ensures that each participant has the appropriate economic, as well as medical, incentives to provide their expertise. Stars goal is to advance the delivery of healthcare and improve the lives of as many patients as possible; to do so, we created an economic business model where everyone wins.

The world of genomics and personalized medicine has evolved and advanced to the point that cancer experts understand it is the future of oncology

Your future plans and potentials that you envision for your global network?
The last 50 years have witnessed tremendous growth in medical infrastructure and the incorporation of new technologies to detect and monitor disease; however, the medical expertise to serve humanity has lagged behind. Medical intelligence, as we all know, has taken centuries to develop; now we have the tools to deploy this knowledge and expertise.
The disparity in the availability and access to medical intelligence can, however, be overcome by employing information technology that fosters a global collaboration between hospitals and physicians. This in my mind is the way to leapfrog the current situation to one where advanced medical expertise is made available to anyone with an Internet connection; an inflection point that changes medicine fundamentally and is a tremendous win for all participants, including the patient.
The potential of Stars model is enormous – its a game changer: medical expertise will be shared anywhere, anytime. It is now possible for physicians and hospitals within Stars network to tap into a collective medical intelligence pool which facilitates collaboration in science, technology and patient care. There are approximately 5000 hospitals in India; Star intends to invite them all to join the global community of hospitals.

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