The people behind healthcare innovation: Interview with Connor Landgraf, CEO and Co-founder of Eko Health

As part of my work, I have the privilege to speak with many inspiring innovators. Although the business community usually focuses on companies, pitches, and valuations — and less on the innovator — I thought it would be interesting to learn a bit more about the people behind healthcare innovation. In this series, I’m sharing some of my conversations with innovators in a condensed format to gain insights into their experience, their opinions, and their learnings.

This latest conversation is with Connor Landgraf, CEO and Co-founder of Eko Health, an AI-powered healthcare pioneer known for its advanced digital tools and disease detection platform.

Tobias: What’s your story? How did you become an innovator in healthcare?

Connor: My journey as an entrepreneur actually starts with my dad. He was an engineer and an innovator who gave me a passion for building and creating. I brought that mindset to school, where I found the intersection of technology and medicine to be incredibly fascinating. Specifically I became fascinated by the way that we use sound as a diagnostic tool: listening to patient heart and lung sounds to identify early signs of disease.

What started as a class project laid the foundation for Eko Health. At Eko, we specialize in developing advanced digital sensors and machine-learning algorithms aimed at assisting clinicians in detecting cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases with greater accuracy. Our mission is to use AI to make specialist-level healthcare available to hundreds of millions of patients around the world.

Tobias: Where do you see AI-enabled diagnostics moving to over the next ten years in healthcare?

Connor: Healthcare has some big challenges ahead: staffing is going to be a persistent issue with a population that is continuing to age and demand for medical care that continues to rise. We’re simply not going to be able to train enough specialists to keep up with this demand—especially in high-demand fields such as cardiology. Better diagnostics that integrate AI and are focused on primary care and front-line care providers will be essential to help keep up with demand without sacrificing quality or access. In the coming decade, these digital-empowered diagnostics will become easier to use and require shorter training, become even more rapid and accurate, and will help reduce disparities and bias through rigorous validation and training of the algorithms.

Tobias: If you could design a digital-first health system from scratch, what would it look like?

Connor: Most healthcare globally still revolves around treatment as opposed to prevention. This is partly because most prevention is expensive and resource-intensive to do well. If we’re really flipping the model on its head, we would be looking for a prevention-focused, digital-first health system that would educate, motivate, and empower people to be more involved in their own health. This would proactively guide people to the right test early to help them understand their risk for disease, and it wouldn’t end after a 15-minute office visit. It would be a healthcare model that wouldn’t leave patients on their own between episodes of care and wouldn’t require faxing your medical records around. Dream big!

Tobias: In your opinion, what would be meaningful near-term steps towards a digital-first health system?

Connor: The key steps would require breaking current health system incentives and building new ones. A large number of steps are necessary, but some of the immediate ones would be:

- Rapidly embracing digital tools and working to remediate and improve vulnerable legacy technologies

-?Building better incentives for preventive care, early detection, and cost avoidance

-?Enhancing digital literacy as part of medical education

-?Updating legacy regulatory frameworks which were not designed for a digital era.

Tobias: What do you know now that you wish you had known when you were starting out as an innovator?

Connor: Healthcare has an incredibly complex set of stakeholders and health system incentive structures that almost no one fully understands—including many healthcare providers! In other industries, consumers usually have at least a basic understanding of incentive structures. If you’re buying a car, or eating at a restaurant, or looking to buy a house, you have a basic understanding of what everyone’s incentives are— usually, this is not the case in healthcare. When you start as an innovator, most people bring a set of assumptions that are often quickly disproven, and this often makes people discouraged. I think the best way to approach healthcare innovation is with a bold north star for how to improve patient care while also recognizing that you have to solve for complex health system incentive structures. Maintain the patient-focused idealism but recognize the pragmatism necessary to work in healthcare systems.

Connor Landgraf is the Co-founder and CEO of Eko Health, a pioneer in AI-powered healthcare technology known for its digital tools and disease detection platform, SENSORA?. Eko’s products are used by hundreds of thousands of providers, serving tens of millions of patients around the world. Eko has achieved significant milestones, including creating the world’s largest database of heart sounds and receiving numerous FDA clearances and a breakthrough device designation.

For more information, see Connor Landgraf and Eko Health.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and his guest contributor and do not reflect the views of McKinsey & Company.