Loren Brink and HealthPointe Solutions Revolutionizing the Healthcare Industry through Cognitive Artificial Intelligence

A Conversation with Loren Brink, CEO HealthPointe Solutions

Mission

To dramatically improve the delivery of personalized healthcare while reducing overall cost globally.

HealthPointe has shown the Company’s technology can interact with humans in unique ways to deliver better healthcare to everyone and, in the near future, to areas of the world where it does not exist today or is too costly to deliver.

What would you say are the top three skills needed to be a successful business leader?

For me, it’s the ability to discern and articulate the “real” problem your company aims to solve. Once the problem is identified, you need to have the ability to find and attract the right people to execute your vision using the strategies you have developed. When there is clarity of purpose and the right people are on the team, a successful business leader then must have the skills required to raise the necessary capital to achieve the goals of the company. No funding – no company.

Can you brief us about the history of your company and your background?

Early in my career, I worked as a cardiac rehabilitation specialist and saw patients go through months and months of hard, rehabilitative work after their illness only to have their insurance companies deny payment of their medical bills. I was very disillusioned with how the healthcare system failed its patients. After years of seeing the system failures, I decided it would be better to move to the business of wellness and prevent the catastrophic issues from beginning. I started Health Fitness Corporation, which became the largest preventive and corporate wellness business in the United States. After a number of years of very rapid growth and completing over 25 acquisitions, I took that company public on the NASDAQ.

After retiring from HFC five years later, I spent the next 10 years working with companies in China and Hong Kong assisting them with development of their Executive Management teams and investments – then joined an investment company in New York City as a Consultant. While there, I was approached by a company that was seeking to utilize Cognitive Artificial Intelligence (Cognitive AI) to achieve interoperability in healthcare. I was very intrigued and thought, “If this works, it changes everything.” I have partnered now with the CEO of that company and founded HealthPointe with the idea of bringing Cognitive AI to the healthcare industry.

Today, our healthcare delivery structure has limited interoperability between systems. Because of that, individuals are not getting the kind of complete care and ultimately the best outcomes. This incomplete care causes costs to continue to rise and outcomes to decline or become more complex. Cognitive AI will allow us to truly personalize medicine for the individual, enhance providers’ ability to function at their highest level, utilize their time in a way that benefits individuals under care and remarkably, at a lower cost.

What is cognitive artificial intelligence and what makes yours different?

There are different types of Artificial Intelligence. The form most commonly known is machine learning. It utilizes Machine Algorithms to detect patterns in large data sets; that’s what most artificial intelligence companies in the market use today. Think IBM Watson – it’s good and useful in many situations, but problematic in healthcare because there can be so many variables. The second major type of AI is Deep Neural Networks (DNN) – the kind that Google Deep Mind uses. Used by government agencies for facial recognition, it can look at patterns and images in order to recognize detectable patterns – like Breast Cancer. However, it is limited to the set of training it receives – it can’t automatically detect Brain Cancer without extensive retraining. Neither can function like the artificial intelligence technology that HealthPointe utilizes because, unlike machine learning and DNN, our AI has the unique ability to perceive and reason. It uses a system that already has a common sense understanding combined with higher-ordered health industry knowledge to determine best possible solutions. Most importantly though is its ability to provide the user with a complete trail of exactly how it got to that answer.

Can this be used in a variety of conditions and diseases?

It can be used across all disease and condition categories. It essentially gives a machine the ability to “think” in a way that mimics the way a human being processes information and builds a knowledge base that can be distributed in real time for all users.

Would you say this is the next big thing of the healthcare industry?

Of course, I would say yes, here’s why: We believe that our technology is the only AI available today in the medical industry that can demonstrate true interoperability among all systems within healthcare and enable human-like reasoning and decisioning across all of that combined knowledge at once.

What were the initial hurdles you had to face?

Naturally, developing a true disruptive AI platform took a lot of time, money and dedication. Our technology stack includes five or six different important AI components that together, make up the primary platform structure. Along with a series of inference engines in the platform, the system gives the technology the ability to reason across disparate data sources. The underlying Cognitive AI technology in our stack has been in development for over 30 years. It was initially funded by the U.S. government and then commercialized. However, one of the biggest hurdles was figuring out how to get investors to understand the true power of Cognitive AI before we had a finished product to show them. I think initially investors were trusting the experience and knowledge of our team and taking a leap of faith on the technology.

If you had one piece of advice to someone who’s starting out?

My advice would be to write a very specific plan and to raise at least two to three times as much money as you think is needed to get your company started. Most entrepreneurs underestimate the amount of capital that will be required. It’s often this lack of capital that causes a small company – that would otherwise have had a good chance of being successful – to fail.

How would this advance health system scale around the world?

It uses a knowledge cloud (not a database) that can be accessed in real time and come back with answers and suggestions in any one of 100+ languages. We can scale anywhere in the world where there is electricity and a phone connection.

Pioneering Executive – HealthPointe Solutions

For decades, Mr. Brink has forged his presence as a prominent figure in the health and wellness business ― from pioneering corporate wellness programs to the leading edge of the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence in healthcare.

“Our quest is to utilize cognitive artificial intelligence technology to help individuals stay healthy, improve patient outcomes and reduce costs in the healthcare industry.”