Soon-Shiong has now turned his focus to something as complex and elusive as a cancer cure: The U.S. health care system. His highly ambitious plan calls for establishing a national health information network that connects scientists around the country working on breakthrough medical research with doctors and their patients, and pushing for rewarding doctors based on a patient’s outcome, instead of the number of procedures they perform.
So far, he has invested a total $400 million on projects and companies through his non-profit Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Advanced Health, and his newly-formed holding company NantWorks. He has also partnered with the University of Arizona, and Arizona State University to establish the Healthcare Transformation Institute. Soon-Shiong and his wife Michele Chan have already pledged $1 billion for health IT projects.
Other deep-pocketed entrepreneurs before him with grand scale visions of fixing a disparate health care system have thrown money at the problem and failed. Netscape co-founder Jim Clark was as passionate about it, forming Healtheon, which set out to connect doctors, insurance companies, and patients over the internet. Healtheon was eventually folded into WebMd, a company that is now seemingly in need of rescue. AOL founder Steve Case had the same disruptive vision when he formed Revolution Health in 2005. The company is now more modestly part of online consumer health site Everyday Health, a competitor to WebMd.
Timing could work in Soon-Shiong’s favor. There’s a government-mandated push to implement electronic health records, and to encourage the establishment of accountable care organizations—hospitals, doctors, and payers the government rewards not on a fee-for-service basis, but on how well they manage the wellness of a Medicare patient by reducing readmission rates, for instance. There’s also the creation of so-called health information exchanges, health care providers that have the ability to exchange patient information. None of those initiatives existed when Healtheon and Revolution Health were formed.
One of Soon-Shiong’s first moves was to take over the National Lambda Rail, the high speed link which connects academic centers throughout the country, but is also used by NASA and institutions working with the Large Hadron Collider. NLR was running out of money, and Soon-Shiong offered to write a $100 million check in July to upgrade the entire network. He is talking to genome sequencing centers about linking up, and has picked cancer as his institute’s first focus. The Institute for Advanced Health is based in Arizona, where patient sequencing data is stored in two data centers in Phoenix and Scottsdale, and crunched on a supercomputer in Phoenix that was launched last month.
It sounds futuristic, but Soon-Shiong wants to make the genomic information available in real time to doctors so they can tailor treatment, circumventing the twelve or more years it takes a drug to reach the market. One example he gives, is newly-emerging information that not all women with breast cancer who have cancerous lymph nodes in the armpit need to have them surgically removed. Scientists can look for telltale DNA markers in tumors to see which women can escape surgery. A doctor can then administer a blood test that helps him make that decision.
Soon-Shiong is still putting the pieces of the puzzle in place to implement his slew of ideas. He has invested in a dozen companies. Here are some of his partnerships, and companies:
--Vitality: Maker of GlowCaps. Reminds patients to take their meds by lighting up the bottle cap which also plays music or rings a phone.
--Dossia: Maker of personal health records.
--Ziosoft: Visualization technology that enables clinicians to build multi-dimensional images of internal organs and tumors.
--Toumaz: Remote monitoring of patients.
--Vodafone: Partnership to develop mobile health services. Identifies and invests in health IT start-ups.
