Today’s healthcare providers are inundated with data and information that they must sort through in order to manage their patient’s condition and choose the best care pathway. One company cutting through the data clutter and simplifying clinical decision support is Diasyst.
Diasyst builds solutions to simplify diabetes and other chronic disease management based on decades of clinical research and proven approaches at Emory University/Healthcare and the Atlanta VA Medical Center. The startup partners with healthcare teams to implement successful virtual care programs by aggregating their patients’ data, analyzing them against clinical guidelines, and helping them make quick, safe, and effective treatment decisions for their patients.
We spoke with Chun Yong to learn how his chronic management platform has grown since 2015 by leveraging evidence-based research and health system and industry partnerships.
About chun yong
Chun Yong, CEO & Co-founder
Chun Yong is the Chief Executive Officer and Cofounder of Diasyst, a company delivering solutions to simplify diabetes and other chronic disease management based on decades of clinical research and proven approaches at Emory University/Healthcare and the Atlanta VA Medical Center. Diasyst partners with healthcare teams to implement successful virtual care programs by aggregating their patients’ data, analyzing them against clinical guidelines, and helping them make quick, safe, and effective treatment decisions for their patients.
How did your company get started? What problem does your company solve?
I started this project over 10 years ago while working on my senior thesis at Georgia Tech. Because of my interests in computer science and computer engineering, I gravitated toward wanting to learn about healthcare IT. During this time, I began collaborating with an endocrinologist from Emory Healthcare and the Atlanta VA who specializes in diabetes research. Through him, I learned about the challenges of diabetes management and was inspired to make it better – and that’s how Diasyst, our digital chronic care management platform, was started. At Diasyst, we aim to 1) Make data collection easy for patients, 2) Enable patients to communicate with their providers better, and 3) Give providers the information needed to make quick, meaningful, and safe treatment decisions.
How do you differentiate yourself from competitors? What makes your company special?
This question would have been easier to answer 5-10 years ago when we were one of the very few working in this space! Today, there are many telehealth platforms that do remote patient monitoring and leverage devices to solve chronic disease-related problems. What makes us a little bit special is the “Diasyst Difference”, which is comprised of 3 things. 1) We actively work to enable patients to be connected into our program regardless of socioeconomic status, education level, or location. We employ a device-agnostic approach (i.e., we don’t require specific equipment that is only available to a subset of the population) to engage all types of patients, 2) Our analytics and clinical intelligence is ahead of the game – our platform incorporates all clinical guidelines for conditions like diabetes and hypertension, enabling us to leverage mountains of data to make real-time, patient-individualized recommendations, 3) We’re helping providers manage patients proactively rather than reactively by educating them on best practices in remote patient monitoring and virtual care, something many healthcare professionals did not necessarily get educated on how to do while they are in school or training.
How have you leveraged industry connections to help your company grow?
When we first started moving away from academia, we faced challenges in testing, piloting, and deploying our solution at the VA and Emory, where our connections existed, so we were forced to look elsewhere to help us accelerate our company. Networking with individuals from other clinics and health systems was crucial to getting a pilot and implementing our solution in real-world settings. After starting small, we were able to create some major partnerships, including our partnership with Sharecare; they help us by deploying our solution to their network. We’ve actually stopped selling to hospitals directly and now mostly rely on our industry connections to help us grow.
What types of partnerships are you looking to pursue to grow your impact?
While we are currently partnered with some big digital health and clinical services companies, we’ve seen several unicorns pop up in this space over the past few years that we’d love to partner with. In the future, I think it would be interesting to see where we could play a role in the pharmaceutical space – people have been talking about “digital pharma” over the past couple of years, we are interested in how that space could help us grow our product, especially since our Diasyst-enabled programs directly help improve patient medication adherence and assist providers with safely initiating and optimizing therapies.
What is the biggest change you envision in healthcare in the next 5 years?
People have been talking about at-home care and the digitization of healthcare for many years, and it’s actually happening now. I think this will only continue to grow over the next 5 years. We won’t have to go to the doctor’s office, hospital, or pharmacy to receive a lot of care that we used to receive, especially for certain chronic conditions, minor acute issues, and mental health. We’ll all be much more able to receive treatment wherever we want, whenever we want, from whomever we want.
To learn more about Diasyst, please visit diasyst.com
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