I recently got a chance to catch up with Chris Hall, formerly of Humana’s Innovation team and now at HealthCentral. Chris and I got to know each other after I began covering the Humana health games initiatives last year. I wanted to find out what his new plans were all about.
P/S: Tell us a little bit about your background and what you did before joining HealthCentral.
You bet, Andre. So I grew up in Southern California, attended the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and served as an Acquisition Officer in the Air Force in exotic locations such as Germany, Alabama, Iraq, and Texas before I resigned my commission and joined Humana, America’s fourth largest health insurer. After a year managing internal projects, I found my way into Humana’s Innovation Center where I was able to convince the right people that we needed to create a small web development team focused on gleaning and visualizing health related data from the open Twitter, Google and Amazon Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Once we had the team built, I co-created three tools: myTPSreport, Diabatron and Shopensteinr…
P/S: What attracted you to HealthCentral and what exactly do you do there now?
The company, the job and the people attracted me to HealthCentral.
Information helps people understand their conditions, but it’s the people living with the conditions that help other people understand how to live with those same conditions. That is the premise of HealthCentral in a nutshell, so I was attracted to the company because I believe they have it right.
I also was attracted to the job, because out the gate I’m leading the development of an SMS/Web based mood visualization platform called Mood 24/7. And Mental Health is an issue that affects nearly 60 million American adults, according to the NIMH. We want to see how big of a dent we can put in that number with something as simple as a text message per day.
So that’s the company and the job, but then there are these extremely passionate people inside of HealthCentral that totally sealed the deal for me. My leadership, for example, is voluntarily helping the Government solve some of the nation’s toughest current health problems, on top of their daily duties within the company. My boss, Ted Smith, is auditing HHS data transparency plans and our CEO, Chris Schroeder, is doing everything he can to get Mood 24/7 in the hands of service members suffering from traumatic brain injuries and PTSD for free. On top of that, I get to work with one of the country’s top physicians, Dr. Adam Kaplin, who is the Principal Psychiatric Consultant to the Johns Hopkins Multiple Sclerosis and Transverse Myelitis Centers of Excellence.
It is an awesome opportunity.
P/S: Talk more about this product (Mood 24/7) that you are working on and how do you see it making an impact for our society’s health?
We believe that better treatment decisions can be made when more data is available. Mood 24/7 provides the data, while letting doctors and patients visualize the effects of mental health treatment in an easy way.
There are two parts to the system, an SMS text per day of a person’s mood rating, on a scale of one to ten. And the web based mood chart that allows doctors and patients to visualize mood changes as a result of treatment.
Anyone can sign up, pick a time of day to receive a Mood 24/7 text, and start tracking their mood. The real value occurs when doctors and patients review the mood charts together at their next appointment. They can actually see how effective a treatment has been on mood over time, via the Internet.
I see Mood 24/7 making an impact on our society’s health at scale. We have to be successful in getting it in front of and used by 100,000s of people, if not millions, and that’s what I’m working on at the moment. If everything goes according to plan, we should have some initial results by the time South By Southwest (SXSW) rolls around, next March. You’ll be able to hear about them if you vote for our presentation called, Suicide Mission: How Text Messages Can Save Lives before this Friday, August 27th.
P/S: What are your thoughts on mHealth and the potential to dramatically impact the health world?
I’m a fan of technology in general and think that mHealth is important because it gives people a real option to engage in their health through their mobile devices. It would be easy for me to speculate on different uses that could have an impact, but I’m most excited to learn from and build on what ends up working the best.
We do know that 91% of Americans use cell-phones, and at least one study has shown that text-message-based symptom monitoring during routine follow-up may be a reliable alternative to in-person interviews.
That’s why I’m bullish on mHealth in general and Mood 24/7 in particular.
P/S: You’ve really entrenched yourself in the health innovation world – what sort of things do you see on the horizon to make a lasting impact?
I think that the Air Force unlocked this weird passion of mine for figuring out ways to connect data together to make things easier. That also seems to be the big push in health at the moment, so we’ve sort of found each other at the right place and time. When it comes to medical records, the move from a doctor centric, paper based model to a patient centric digital model will be where the difference is made. It’s the most important problem in healthcare that we’re taking on, in my opinion, because so much is possible once we connect the data.
A world where ALL of my health information can be accessed by me or any doctor I allow at any time is the world I want to live in… and that’s a big reason why I’ve chosen to be a part of it.
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Chris Hall is the Director, Clinical Platforms at HealthCentral and, when he’s not busy eating carne asada burritos, he believes in connecting data to help people. Chris leads the development of Mood 24/7, an SMS based mood visualization platform, in partnership with Dr. Adam Kaplin and Johns Hopkins Medicine.
