David Korsunsky, founder and CEO of Heads Up Health, delivers an important overview of the current state of health information and steps we can all take to organize our health data.
For more than 15 years Korsunsky has been a business leader, leading technology firms and forming strategic alliances. Recently, Korsunsky served as Director of Technical Alliances at VMware, Inc. where he led partnerships with global EHR companies such as GE, EPIC, Cerner, McKesson, Allscripts, and others. Korsunsky is active and believes in a healthy lifestyle, and it was his passion for good health that inspired him to find a new way to innovate in the healthcare space. Korsunsky sought to create a means for everyone to take charge of their health, by accessing important markers that elucidate where they are on the path to optimum health.
Korsunsky talks about his sources of inspiration, from nutritionists to select nonconventional health advocates, who introduced him to a trove of information that was not always the go-to for traditional medicine practitioners. Realizing how his own personal medical information was literally scattered all over the place from healthcare office to office and patient portal to portal, Korsunsky knew there had to be a better way. He had a tremendous desire to find a way to connect his lifestyle choices with the blood work that would bear out his theories on diet and exercise, etc. Korsunsky founded Heads Up Health, a company that seeks to empower people, helping them to transform their health through the use of state of the art tracking tools. His team of experienced and knowledgeable health-conscious technology experts wanted to clean up the current system fraught with confusing medical records, underutilized health-tracking technologies, and poorly managed health data. Korsunsky saw a way to implement a software solution to clean up the mess and get to the heart of the matter—improving health for everyone by connecting them to their own data.
The healthcare tech expert discusses how important trend lines can be totally missed by physicians when health records are scattered and unorganized. And when physicians cannot see the full picture over a long period of time, they are unfortunately less aptly equipped to make the best decisions on long-term care plans for treatment or general health advice. Korsunsky states that the onus is upon the patient, in most systems, for them to be their own advocate and investigate deeply into their own personal medical issues. He details how these markers of our health, the look into our blood work and body chemistry, are essentially our longevity numbers and it is important for individuals to know where they stand, to understand what needs work or improvement.
Korsunsky outlines how their platform works and how users can enter their medical data and get active right away at tracking their health and making improvements. He discusses some of the important aspects of their system, such as tracking HOMA-IR (Homeostatic Model Assessment of Insulin Resistance) scores, which as he states is significantly better than simply looking at blood sugar. He explains how their platform actually collects data while we sleep, from heart rate to core temperature and beyond, to calculate a score and overall assessment of our recovery during sleep. Additionally, he elaborates on public data sets and useful information that he wants their users to have access to through the platform, to allow them to be notified about pharmaceutical news and more that could affect them.
Korsunsky discusses their growth as a small company on the rise. He details how it is important to build out their system slowly and organically. Currently, they have tens of thousands of users and are growing via word of mouth. As their product is an intricate product its pace of growth is carefully controlled by Korsunsky and his team of developers.
Korsunsky enthusiastically discusses the personal fulfillment he experiences when he hears stories of users who have learned to successfully manage or reduce certain chronic health problems by getting a handle on their data and working toward solutions to improve health. Based on his team’s core belief that superbly organized data is a critical key to improving and optimizing health, Heads Up Health has created a central space where anyone can manage and explore the important information that is crucial to maintaining great health or improving their health issues
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