Podcast | Healthcare (HC)

Unlocking Better Health Outcomes with Data-Driven Insights

March 13, 2025

[00:00:02] Ivana Naeymi-Rad There’s actually been a report out of the CDC about the fact that IMO is able to more rapidly predict outbreaks than the CDC is. And so we see there being opportunity around clinical surveillance with various public health organizations to leverage that data.

[00:00:22] Josh Nelson That’s Ivana Naeymi-Rad, COO of IMO Health, and I’m Josh Nelson, Head of Healthcare at THL. And this is Healthcare in Action, a podcast that explores the latest developments and innovations transforming the U .S. healthcare sector, from cutting-edge technology to thoughtful approaches to patient care. I’m joined today by my colleague, Jon Lange, who is going to lead us in a conversation about IMO Health, a clinical terminology software company and how it is using the latest technology and AI to unlock the power of data in clinical records. And in the process, improving efficiency, cost and outcomes across the US healthcare system. Jon, take it away.

[00:01:03] Jon Lange Thanks, Josh. Having accurate healthcare data is essential to the U .S. healthcare system. Diagnosis and procedure data is needed to provide high-quality care to patients. Claims data is needed to allow for reimbursement. And providers, payers, and patients are increasingly leveraging data to drive lower costs, better experience, and better outcomes. I recently had the chance to speak with Ivana Naeymi-Rad, the Chief Operating Officer of IMO Health, an HCIT company that plays a crucial role the healthcare data ecosystem and has been at the forefront of improving data quality for health systems across the US. IMO Health was founded in 1994 when the founders saw the need for a common language to enable providers and payers to communicate with each other more efficiently. IMO’s core offering includes a dictionary of clinical terminology which is the standard used by most providers and EMRs in the US. It allows providers to document diagnoses and procedures using colloquial medical language without worrying about reimbursement codes and it frees up providers to do what they do best so that they can focus less on administrative tasks and more on patient care. Recently, the company has been making a big push into data intelligence and analytics. Years of data from their terminology product has given them a unique glimpse into what providers are reporting and where. That data is in turn being interpreted via AI to provide better insights to clinicians. As the COO of IMO Health, Ivana has been at the forefront of leveraging data and AI to drive the healthcare system forward. Ivana has also been a thought leader in healthcare IT and a champion for building culture and driving diversity in tech. I spoke with Ivana about IMO Health, its mission to improve patient care, and the company’s more recent focus on leveraging AI to drive greater efficiency and better outcomes. So let’s get into it. Ivana, thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:02:53] Ivana Naeymi-Rad Of course. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:55] Jon Lange First, for those who aren’t familiar with IMO Health, would you mind just telling us a bit about the company?

[00:02:59] Ivana Naeymi-Rad Sure. So IMO Health has been around now for three decades. So this is actually our 30th year of being in business. And our mission started with really empowering providers at the point of care to navigate the transition from paper medical record to digital medical record. And for those of you in the healthcare industry, you’ll know that the original electronic health records were really developed to help facilitate billings and less about empowering the provider or helping facilitate documentation for the provider. So we’ll say you come in for chest pain. The pull down may or may not have an appropriate representation of that term, but you’re forced to select what’s there. And those selections largely come from these billing code sets, which is really meant to be the language that helps insurance companies reimburse for that particular diagnosis. So it’s not clinically friendly, let’s put it that way. And so IMO really set out to ensure that when a doctor is sitting with a patient, that they’re able to capture exactly what they want as it relates to that visit, as they did in the paper medical record. And so our key kind of foundational solution is a medical dictionary. So think of it just like you would any dictionary, which is a set of terms and those terms have definitions. In our world, those definitions are mappings to different administrative and reporting code sets, and those are important in healthcare for a wide variety of reasons, to the most important being billing and reporting for their downstream. But really, that solution integrated into the core provider workflow allowed them to document without having to worry about all the downstream administrative process. And one of the things that we learned pretty quickly after implementing that solution was that there are still a wide plethora of data issues further downstream. And we are now starting to solve with our insights products, some major data quality challenges in healthcare, leveraging the power of that medical dictionary that we’ve developed over the last 30 years.

[00:05:26] Jon Lange So maybe in other words, IMO health allows doctors to speak doctor. And for those like me who aren’t doctors, it’s something I wouldn’t have thought about before getting to know IMO health, that there is a language associated with medicine and there are real benefits to having everyone speak the same language. And you and your team over 30 years have really written the dictionary for that language. Is that fair to say?

[00:05:54] Ivana Naeymi-Rad That is fair to say. And the original version of the dictionary was legitimately our team of clinicians, informaticists, administrative coders. They developed their own slice of that clinical dictionary. And from there, as we implemented at every customer site, we would get their local dictionaries. And this is a part of how we modeled our data. So we call our dictionary the terminology behind it. We call it interface terminology, largely because there is a concept that means one thing and there’s a bunch of different ways of saying that concept.

[00:06:35] Jon Lange What are the biggest problems you see in healthcare right now across the whole system for each of the key stakeholders, patients, providers, payers, et cetera?

[00:06:45] Ivana Naeymi-Rad So starting with patients, I would say, and I mean, speaking from my own experience, it is a lot of work managing the connectivity between your various chain of doctors that you’re interfacing with. It’s the scheduling, it’s the connecting dots for them, it’s ensuring that they have the right data so that they can have an appropriate conversation with you. and it’s the follow-up with the physician. So it becomes almost a part-time job managing your health, especially if you have major health issues. As a provider, I would say burnout is the number one issue that they’re dealing with today, making sure that they’re seeing as many patients as they possibly can because revenue is a factor, but also needing to input data so that they can get appropriately reimbursed. So really, the amount of time they’re spending doing what they went to school to do, which is taking care of you as a patient, is maybe 10 percent of the time that they would like to be spending with you as a patient. And so they end up spending a lot of it doing things they don’t wanna do. Third, as a hospital or a health system, I mean, of course, since COVID, there’s been so many demands around how do you pick back up elective surgeries? How do you take advantage of some of the regulatory incentives? How are you interfacing with your payers that you’re contracted with? Depending on what your hospital is configured for, it’s a lot of and we deal with so many different types of hospitals and health systems in this country, and there are all these small rural institutions where their executive teams have two people in them. I mean, they’re so understaffed that it’s nearly impossible to run their business on top of the fact that there’s major provider shortages, both clinicians, but also nurses and other kind of administrative roles so they’re really dealing with a lot at that level. And I would argue maybe on the payer side too, I would say you’re seeing a lot of operational inefficiency around getting access to the right data to do what you need to do, whether it’s on the life sciences side, drug discovery, clinical trial eligibility. We’ve heard stats like for a rare disease, it’s taken them five years to find five patients for a clinical trial. So it’s trying to find the right data. And on the payer side, it’s how can they get quicker, closer access to their hospitals to help optimize revenue and to optimize care for their at-risk populations.

[00:09:42] Jon Lange You spend so much time thinking about how to make providers’ lives better and how to impact outcomes and experience for patients. Of course, we are all patients and consumers of the U.S. healthcare system ourselves, and so do you have any personal stories, friends or family, where you personally impacted by IMO Health?

[00:10:01] Ivana Naeymi-Rad Yeah, I mean, I have so many, but the one that always comes to mind for me was my sister-in -law, and this was four years ago, so she was pregnant with my nephew, and she was, unfortunately, diagnosed with stage one breast cancer. When they tested the tumor, they found that it was estrogen receptor-positive, which is very important to understand because the treatment for that is different than it would be otherwise. And of course, just like all of us, but especially in that situation, she had a massive care team. Obviously, her oncologist, her obstetrician because she was pregnant, her family medicine doctor, she had a dermatologist, ophthalmologist, and she went to her dermatologist for a skin issue. And the great news was all of the data that was happening for her was being transferred to all of these different doctors, so it was up to date, but for this particular dermatologist, it was a different affiliated hospital than where the oncologist was from. And when the data was transferred over, the estrogen receptor-positive part of that Diagnosis was cut off because that EHR that it was sent to didn’t have the ability to capture that level of specificity. So what ended up happening was the dermatologist prescribed her some medication that was estrogen impacting, which could have been extremely damaging to her treatment plan. And so the good news was we have some family members that are in medicine and were able to catch that quickly, but what it caused was of course chaos across her care team because they had to all talk to each other and figure out what went wrong, how did you not see this data point, talking to the folks that had to manually input the data to understand why they didn’t include that part of it, oh the EHR doesn’t support it, and on top of it of course stress for her, just given such a sensitive time and potentially impacting her long term if she didn’t have the right plan. It just highlights, you know, we were lucky that we had medical professionals in our family, but how often things like this are happening across our country and the importance of having the right data accessible to providers as quickly and as efficiently as possible to make the best decisions for their patients.

[00:12:39] Jon Lange Yeah, and it’s such a powerful story, you know, we spend our time thinking about healthcare IT and data, it’s easy to get lost in the nuances of it and the technicalities of it. And it’s so easy to forget that this is impacting patients and having the wrong data or having systems that don’t talk to each other that aren’t interoperable, can really be dangerous can lead to terrible outcomes. So it’s it’s a great example of how important the work you and your team are doing. One of the things I find so fascinating and powerful about your solutions is that not only are you addressing physician burnout and other things like cost across the U.S. health system, but also quality and outcomes. How do IMO solutions impact patient experience, quality outcomes for patients?

[00:13:26] Ivana Naeymi-Rad So one of the key values, other than of course the provider efficiency that I mentioned, is the fact that when you capture data that is specific and granular and in the terms that the clinician wants to capture that data in, it facilitates a more accurate clinical representation of that patient. Everyone has more than one provider that they’re working with. And so when you’re sharing data across your care team, you want to ensure that they’re all speaking the same language and that they’re able to see that this patient has this particular complication on top of this chronic disease versus just knowing that they have this chronic disease without that extra layer of identification or specification. So the outcomes are that much better because the appropriate diagnosis, the appropriate representation of that patient is captured at the point of care. So that’s at the provider care team level. When you think about broader population health and how you want to look across very specific cohorts of patients to understand how they’re responding to a medication or how a particular disease evolves given certain protocols, you wanna ensure that you’re appropriately representing that cohort and the best way to do that is leveraging the language that the doctor actually intended so that you know that that patient is exactly the type of patient that you’re looking for. Of course, there’s financial outcomes that are improved through IMO as well because the more specific and granular a diagnoses or a procedure is leveraged, the better the reimbursement will be as well. But of course, patient health and safety outcomes are much more important to us as an organization.

[00:15:31] Jon Lange With so many customers using IMO solutions, are there any insights you can draw from all of their behavior, the data, the diagnoses, procedures coming through the system?

[00:15:43] Ivana Naeymi-Rad Yes, actually. And this is one of the things that drew me to the company initially, because we’re able in real time to see what providers are searching for at the point of care. So really, if you think about COVID, you think about the Zika virus, you think about these kind of rare infectious diseases that are popping up, IMO can predict when there are breaks around the country in real time. And there’s actually been a report out of the CDC about the fact that IMO is able to more rapidly predict outbreaks than the CDC is. And so we see there being opportunity around clinical surveillance with various public health organizations to leverage that data. The other use case is in life sciences. You know, when they’re looking for clinical trial eligibility and that example of we were only able to find five patients with this rare disease in five years, looking at our data for that use case, we were able to find a few hundred in minutes. And so it’s really interesting to see how we can leverage that data, one, to make our products better, which we do all the time but to think about new use cases that really help enable the broader healthcare ecosystem.

[00:17:15] Jon Lange Such an interesting point that because of IMO Health’s breadth and how much coverage it has across patients all over the U.S., but also because of the specificity, you’re able to find out these interesting insights about whether it’s public health and outbreak or very specifically, you know, patients who are suitable for a certain medicine.

[00:17:37] Ivana Naeymi-Rad Yeah, and we’re still learning, honestly, through our partnerships, the power of that data, and we want to respect the customer relationships that we have today and around data rights and all that. So we’re slowly getting into, where is there potentially secondary use of that data? But you hit on a really important point, which is the specificity of our data is so unique that, especially in the life sciences world finding that very narrow cohort of patients that meet a certain set of eligibility criteria is so hard. And yet we have the ability to do that because our terminology gets that specific. And because we know a provider looked for that very specific term, there’s a higher degree of likelihood that that patient actually has that rare disease.

[00:18:31] Jon Lange Maybe from a layman’s perspective, you’re able, because of your specificity, to find the needle in the haystack and you have the perspective on the entire haystack across the US. Is that fair?

[00:18:43] Ivana Naeymi-Rad You got it. Yes. It’s a very cool position to be in.

[00:18:46] Jon Lange And another thing you said that I find so interesting is that I suspect most people, at least outside of software engineering, when they think about software engineering, don’t think of team building as a really core function. And it makes sense that it is, but you have been so thoughtful about building your own team, about building a strong culture, about driving diversity, all of which is not necessarily stereotypical, the first thing you think of in the world of tech. Can you talk a bit about that? Why is it important to you? How have you done it? What has the impact been?

[00:19:22] Ivana Naeymi-Rad My understanding of what it takes to build a strong team has absolutely evolved over time. I mean, I think you learn as you go and some of it is trial and error. You think it will work and it won’t work. But to me, the best teams are those where each member brings something different to the table. It’s of course about diversity. on so many different levels, but especially diversity of thought and diversity of experience. And when you’re in healthcare, and you’re building solutions for providers, you need to have people who represent all different types of patient populations. And you need to have medical expertise, you need to have technical expertise, you need to have commercial expertise. There are so many different dimensions to what it’s like to build a team. Even personalities make such a huge impact on how the team functions. And so this is very much a part of my passion too, is how can you kind of build the most effective optimized team.

[00:20:38] Jon Lange Maybe switching gears a little bit, we are seeing lots of investments in automation, in AI. Can you talk about some of the investments you’re making, some of the trends you’re seeing, and then maybe that’s a good segue to talk about some of your insights products.

[00:20:55] Ivana Naeymi-Rad So I think AI is kind of the key word that so many people are talking about right now. And what’s important to note is that we’ve been leveraging AI now for over two decades. Not generative AI, but we’re using machine learning, we’re using deep learning. There are a number of natural language processing solutions that we’ve developed over the years and what’s really exciting about where AI is going is the compute power that enables us to build some of these GPTs, these large language models, and really process our understanding of language in ways that we just weren’t able to before. In healthcare and probably like some of the other kind of high-risk industries, you can’t return a response that isn’t nearly 100 percent accurate. The quality is first and foremost the most important thing that’s needed with any of our products. And we promise that to our customers. So we’ve created an AI layer that helps do things around our portfolio that helps us get to the answer more quickly, but still leverages the knowledge and the team to ensure that it’s the right answer.

[00:22:20] Jon Lange And, you know, one thing you mentioned, again, it may seem like sort of a nuance or a footnote to some people who aren’t in this every day, but AI is not 100 percent accurate. How do you manage that in healthcare when accuracy, when specificity is so important? How do you think about incorporating AI into all the various use cases?

[00:22:43] Ivana Naeymi-Rad So the way that we started, especially with the generative AI solutions that we’ve been developing, is first by understanding the foundation models, and there are a lot of them. So think ChatGPT, you know, Google has their own AWS, Anthropic, Claude, there’s a number of these foundational models out there and understanding which one provided the best results just out of the box for some of our use cases, then we leverage our knowledge and prompt it accordingly. So when I think about large language models, one is the foundation model is trained off of a data set. So it’s important to understand that data set that that foundation model is trained off of. The second is prompting and prompting itself is a whole classification set of frameworks on its own. And then third is knowledge. So the rules behind what is the expected output based on a set of kind of taxonomies or data sets. We play in that knowledge space very well, as well as in the prompting space. And so we are looking at all these different combinations of how do we integrate both into a wide variety of foundational models to get the best, most trustworthy responses. And it’s just important to ensure that you’re constantly looking at how things are evolving and how your data and your prompting plays into the way that these large language models are evolving.

[00:24:27] Jon Lange Got it, and there’s so many key pieces of what you just said. One of them, maybe for a Layman, is the importance of training a model, that generative AI models are so powerful. At the same time, they’re only as correct, only as helpful as the data they’re trained on. And IMO health, of course, is a major player in the foundational data that the healthcare system needs. Is that a fair way to summarize it?

[00:24:56] Ivana Naeymi-Rad That’s right. You have to rely on some set of knowledge to help understand, to some degree, the art of medicine. There is a science, of course, but there is an art to it that helps you really get into the mind of how a clinician thinks, how they document, how they look at a set of data inputs and decide on an output. And that’s that knowledge that I’m talking about that you just you can’t get without kind of amassing the asset that we’ve built over the last three decades.

[00:25:34] Jon Lange IMO Health has recently launched a new discovery product focused on bringing AI to the healthcare system in a different way. Can you talk a bit about that?

[00:25:45] Ivana Naeymi-Rad Yeah. So similar to what I had talked about earlier, one of the approaches that was suggested to us actually through our provider community was you do a great job of organizing the data for us and showing us where there may be relevant information for this particular visit. But is there anything missing from this documentation? that you can infer from maybe the meds and labs that this patient has either taken or gotten done or from the notes. And so discovery, IMO discovery is a solution that really helps providers by prompting them with alerts or notes that may help them see where there are potential gaps in documentation.

[00:26:34] Jon Lange And that goes back to the example you gave with your sister-in -law. It may seem like a small thing, but having the right information in the clinical record can be so impactful for the patient and I imagine also for reimbursement for the provider.

[00:26:47] Ivana Naeymi-Rad Exactly, exactly. Absolutely.

[00:26:50] Jon Lange And maybe finally, I am a real optimist about the impact IMO Health can have on the whole US healthcare system. As you think about what you and your team are working on now, what are you most excited about that IMO Health can bring to the industry in the next, call it five, 10, 20 years?

[00:27:10] Ivana Naeymi-Rad I see us playing a major role in the understanding of data throughout the entire healthcare ecosystem. We’re already starting down that path and I see that expanding and the interest in us playing a big role in that expanding. And through doing that, I see us helping enable the ability to apply some of these advanced, powerful technologies. So this is an opportunity to accelerate those insights and really to kind of make possible that vision of every patient is unique. Every one of us has a unique fingerprint. How can we ensure that all of us get the best care possible to live the most healthy lives we can? And I see IMO playing a huge role in enabling that.

[00:28:09] Jon Lange It’s great to hear. Ivana, thank you so much for taking the time with us today. It’s always a pleasure. Really appreciate it.

[00:28:17] Ivana Naeymi-Rad Ofcourse . Thank you.

[00:28:18] Jon Lange As we wrap this episode, I’m joined by my colleague, Shahab Vagefi, Head of Healthcare IT at THL. Shahab, from your vantage point, looking across healthcare IT, how do you think about where IMO health fits into the landscape?

[00:28:31] Shahab Vagefi One of the things that’s so exciting about the opportunity you had for IMO is that its solutions are so foundational and mission critical to provider organizations and individual provider workflows. The vast majority of providers in the US use IMO solutions all the time to accurately document diagnoses and clinical records. That means that IMO sits at a critical point in the value chain and has the opportunity to add even more value to providers and other stakeholders not only by making sure that data is as accurate and specific as possible, but also by using analytics and AI to make sure that physicians and other providers are armed with the best data when they need to make critical decisions. Within the landscape of healthcare IT, this is a really interesting setup where IMO is positioned directly in the workflow at the point of care, and that creates a ton of opportunity for innovation and improving the experience and outcomes for both patients and providers. On that point,

[00:29:27] Jon Lange On that point, it seems like everyone is talking about the importance of data quality and interoperability in healthcare. Where do you see that being most impactful across the healthcare IT ecosystem?

[00:29:37] Shahab Vagefi One of the really exciting things about the current moment in the evolution of healthcare IT is that we’re really at an inflection point where technology and in particular AI is likely to have an outsized impact on both administrative tasks and clinical decision making. One straightforward set of use cases is that if data in the clinical record is more accurate and providers and systems can share that data in a seamless way, patients are more likely to receive better care. Ivana gave a great personal example of this, but of course, you can imagine cases like this are happening every day. In addition to that, the administrative burden on providers is staggering, and we all know that provider burnout is the enormous problem. I’m also very excited that advances in healthcare data and interoperability are going to be able to streamline an enormous range of administrative tasks, allowing providers to focus on delivering great care to patients.

[00:30:26] Jon Lange particularly in the context of IMO and the conversation with Ivana, what are your reflections on which sub-sectors within HCIT are most compelling from an investment perspective?

[00:30:37] Shahab Vagefi First of all, I should mention that healthcare IT continues to be a major focus for us at THL. IMO is a great example of a company we identified from the outset as having great fundamentals, clear market leadership in an area that’s mission critical for providers, and an opportunity for THL to partner with the company and take it to the next level. We continue to see a ton of opportunity for HCIT companies to make a significant impact not only in the provider end market, but also for payers, employers, biotech, and pharma companies. IMO is a great example of how much opportunity there is for technology to make provider workflows more efficient and effective. There are a lot of really exciting companies focused on improving the way providers run the business of being a provider, whether that’s optimizing utilization or more effectively engaging with patients or improving the provider revenue cycle. We continue to believe all of these opportunities are very compelling. We’re very fortunate that we’ve had a chance to partner with pioneers like IMO, and look forward to partnering with many more management teams, founders and entrepreneurs, as they continue to drive the healthcare technology landscape forward in the coming years.

[00:31:45] Jon Lange Shahab, thanks so much for joining me. Healthcare IT is such a dynamic area, and I look forward to continuing the conversation with you and with Ivana soon.

[00:31:54] Josh Nelson Thank you for listening to Healthcare in Action, brought to you by THL. To help Healthcare in Action reach more listeners like you, either share this episode with a colleague, subscribe to the show, or rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more information on THL’s healthcare franchise, visit thl.com/verticals/healthcare.