LifeOmic is a company that works with healthcare providers, researchers, and health-focused enterprises to aggregate and utilize health data to improve patient outcomes and provide valuable, actionable insights. To learn more about LifeOmic, Pulse 2.0 interviewed the company’s chief medical officer, Dr. Shelagh Fraser.
Shelagh Fraser’s Background
Dr. Fraser has over 25 years of experience as an internal medicine physician and has practiced with Priority Physicians, PC, in Indiana since 2006. Dr. Fraser received a Bachelor of Arts and a Doctorate of Medicine from Yale University. Plus, Dr. Fraser has a Master’s Degree in Clinical Research and completed a National Research Service Award Fellowship in 2003.
“I have a comprehensive understanding of healthcare delivery, having worked in various environments, including academic, inpatient, traditional outpatient, and direct primary care,” said Dr. Fraser. “Throughout my career, I have always been passionate about understanding my patients’ lives, making prevention an underpinning of daily practice, and working closely with them to overcome their health challenges. I have been focused not only on providing optimal treatment for illness but on preventing and predicting disease before it exists. This passion has led me to become deeply invested in precision medicine and genomic analysis. I believe that by using data in a meaningful way, we can provide better care to patients and help them live longer healthier lives.”
Responsibilities At LifeOmic
As the chief medical officer for LifeOmic, Dr. Fraser continues to explore the potential of precision medicine and technology to revolutionize healthcare. By continuing to innovate and collaborate, Dr. Fraser believes the company can help more people lead healthier lives. “Within my role, I lead a team of geneticists and scientists, working with them to provide better care and helping them understand the vast and complicated ever-growing data set,” Dr. Fraser added. “This includes genomic data, which, when combined with other biometric data, grows algorithmically in scope and depth. My goal is to help clinicians use this data in a meaningful way and also help patients understand diagnoses, treatments, clinician communication, and more.”
On a day-to-day basis, Dr. Fraser communicates with customers and helps her team ideate tools and resources that can be used throughout the business. Overall, Dr. Fraser is deeply invested in genomic analysis and believes it is the key to personalized medicine. Integrating genomic data with other clinical data in a practical way to a clinician’s workflow is a solution to many of the pain points that exist within the healthcare system. Dr. Fraser’s main goal is to provide clinically-actionable data in a way that can be easily digested by both patients and clinicians. Dr. Fraser is also focused on digitizing medical care, giving patients a sense of control to help manage their diagnoses and medications.
Challenges Faced Building The Company
What are some of the challenges that the executives faced in building LifeOmic? Dr. Fraser pointed out that the challenge is helping healthcare systems recognize the inherent and immediate benefit to their clinicians and patients, as well as the return on investment (ROI) for their institutions.
“We understand that clinicians sometimes feel overwhelmed by new technology and that adding more technology isn’t necessarily better. Throughout development, we have strived to create tools that make clinical workflows simple, not more complex,” Dr. Fraser explained. “Our platform improves clinician efficiency, optimizes patient outcomes, and facilitates health literacy. Freeing up clinician time for higher-level activities and increasing patient throughput translates directly into ROI.”
Core Products
These are three of the products that LifeOmic offers:
– LifeOmic Platform – The LifeOmic Platform is known as a secure and scalable cloud-based software solution that supports health systems’ precision medicine programs by prioritizing efficiency to help cut unnecessary costs. The platform simplifies complex and often unusable data from genomic, clinical, imaging, population, and patient data into actionable insights, saving providers time in analyzing data to inform patient care. Additionally, the platform is HITRUST CSF Certified, ensuring it meets industry standards for managing sensitive healthcare information.
– LifeOmic Oncology – LifeOmic Oncology enables clinicians to create individualized patient treatment plans by exploring data from EHRs, genetic tests, clinical trial matching databases, wearable devices, patient-reported outcomes, etc. Plus, LifeOmic Oncology enables clinicians to expand the practice of precision health with automated patient engagement programs delivered in a mobile app to improve health outcomes.
– LifeOmic Patient Mobile App – LifeOmic’s Patient Mobile App was designed as a hub for all connection points. The app can be configured for different audiences and use cases, so whether it is being used for remote patient monitoring, patient adherence, patient education, or research, the app is flexibly designed to offer two-way communication. This makes it possible for LifeOmic to empower health systems and providers to improve patient outcomes through patient monitoring and reduce readmissions and visits to the emergency department via valuable insights gained by utilizing patient-reported data.
Evolution Of LifeOmic’s Technology
How has LifeOmic’s technology evolved since launching?
“With a wonderful team of physicians and cancer researchers at the Indiana School of Medicine, we built a cloud platform capable of ingesting these huge omics datasets along with the relatively sparse information from electronic medical records in a way that made them usable,” Dr. Fraser explained. “The project proved so successful that it was quickly moved from clinical research into the day-to-day care of complex cancer cases at Indiana University Health, the largest healthcare provider in the state of Indiana. Oncologists have used our technology to identify actionable mutations and corresponding therapies for cases previously considered hopeless. Those are the stories that drive our team of software engineers, data scientists, geneticists, and physicians.”
This eventually gave LifeOmic the idea to build a mobile app that acts as a liaison between physicians and patients, encouraging ongoing communication and streamlining data gathering from wearables and devices. The cloud platform and the patient engagement tools that LifeOmic has could be considered one of the most complete end-to-end healthcare data management solutions in the world.
Notable Milestones
What have been some of LifeOmic’s most significant milestones?
Dr. Fraser cited a few major milestones, which include:
– The development of the LifeOmic Platform that achieved and maintains HITRUST CSF certification, HIPAA & GDPR compliance
– Achievement of EMR integration with Epic, Cerner, and Cerbo with the capability to integrate with others using our open APIs
– Partnership with Indiana University Health for day-to-day clinical use with complex cancer cases. The platform has served 8,500 patients comprising a massive database of known gene variants with scientific annotations now numbering over fifty billion entries covering millions of unique variants
– Development and launch of patient mobile app technology that has been downloaded by 4M people and has active users of over 300,000
– Integrations with several wearable devices and medical devices and the development of health and wellness content exceeding 500 educational modules
Customer Success Stories
When I asked Dr. Fraser whether she could share a customer success story, she cited the following points:
– LifeOmic accelerated speed to market for EyeCheq, an early screening device to prevent blindness.
– LifeOmic enabled a clinical research study with 7,500 patients for a large Health System. The LifeOmic Platform enabled clinical and genetic data aggregation as well as eConsent and survey collection.
– The LifeOmic Platform (formerly Precision Health Cloud) is the solution used by TriAxia to overlay patient-level clinical and molecular data to enable the discovery of new treatments for rare diseases.
Funding
Dr. Fraser pointed out that LifeOmic – which was founded in 2016 – is largely a bootstrapped organization funded by the founder and CEO Dr. Don Brown. Dr. Brown is a serial entrepreneur who has created a string of successful companies. He sold his first startup to GM, second to IBM, and sold the third for $1.4 billion. Along with being CEO and founder of LifeOmic, Dr. Brown is an active technology and business advisor, investor, and philanthropist.
The organization has been focused over the last few years on completing the technology in partnership with our existing customers. The revenue with these customers is over $5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
“With a tech stack that is built and tested with customers, we are actively working to expand our customer base,” emphasized Dr. Fraser.
Total Addressable Market
LifeOmic is specifically focused on addressing opportunities within the Global Precision Medicine Market – which is estimated to be valued at over $65 billion.
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates LifeOmic from its competition? LifeOmic Platform offers the following:
– Secure Cloud Data Storage
– User Management & Access Controls
– Mobile Application Framework
– Built-in HITRUST CSF Certification and HIPAA Compliance and GDPR Compliance
– Genomics Storage & Analytics
– Patient Data Visualization
– EMR & Wearable Integration
– Science-Backed Educational Content
– Health Surveys & Risk Assessments
The Patient Data Visualization, EMR & Wearable Integration, Science-Backed Educational Content, and Health Surveys and Risk Assessments features are not offered by LifeOmic’s competitors and those within the space.
“Since LifeOmic offers these features, it gives us a leg up within the industry and provides additional assets customers wouldn’t get all in one place elsewhere,” Dr. Fraser pointed out.
Future Company Goals
“The goal at LifeOmic is to expand the use of our technology to help healthcare professionals of all types tailor their recommendations and therapies to the unique needs of individual patients. If we view the needs of the field as a pyramid, the cloud platform is the very base,” Dr. Fraser concluded. “Mobile-based patient engagement is the following layer. Next up the stack is the graphical visualizations and analytic tools we’ve added for researchers, but the biggest challenge is to make this technology available to non-experts – primary care physicians, dieticians, physical therapists, and patients themselves. We intend to address this challenge with decision-support tools that leverage AI to make specific recommendations. It’s up to the entire field to achieve broad adoption and realize the enormous potential.”
