The people behind healthcare innovation: Interview with Elliott Green, co-founder and CEO of Dandelion 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 Elliott Green, co-founder and CEO of Dandelion Health, a real-world data and clinical AI platform powering next-generation precision medicine and personalized care.

What’s your story, how did you become an innovator in healthcare?

The interesting thing about becoming an innovator is how many different paths there are to get there. I didn’t have entrepreneurial role models growing up, so I started on a more traditional path through finance. I then left finance to quench my desire for more impact, which led me to healthcare.

Healthcare is so complex that it takes not just time, but also multiple different perspectives before you begin to feel like you have a basic handle on the incentive structures and associated outcomes. One such new perspective for me was how impactful AI could be in healthcare. This was back in early 2020, long before it was common to hear people talking about AI regularly. At that time, I was fortunate enough to meet my co-founders — Ziad Obermeyer , Niyum Gandhi , and Sendhil Mullainathan — who all had different skill sets and held a common desire to explore how we could use data to drive the next series of evolutions in healthcare AI. Ultimately, Dandelion Health was born from the bold idea of convincing several large health systems to securely share their de-identified data with us so that we, in turn, could share it with the world and help improve outcomes in healthcare using AI to bring precision and personalization to patient care.

Where do you see real-world data moving to in the next ten years in healthcare?

Many unstructured data assets (e.g., images and waveforms) were never stored to be investigated as data for learning at scale. Instead, they were collated to be accessible to physicians looking to understand individual patient histories. Therefore, they are not easy to access or extract from their current “home” (often on-premise servers in hospital systems). The amazing thing about this data is actually how high-quality it is. Unlike other information that is captured by human observation, this unstructured data represents raw biological information that can provide incredible layers of understanding. Our challenge is not to merely transform this data into insights, but simply to access these new, unique forms of unstructured data. This is what Dandelion is focused on — accessing high-value, unstructured data that was previously locked away in places beyond the electronic health record - and then applying validated AI solutions to these new data sets to derive high-value insights that will power a new era of precision medicine and personalized care.

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

Ultimately, a digital-first health system has to focus on and cater to the patient. With that in mind, a digital-first health system built from scratch would prioritize:

?●??????? Ease of access — Patients would never have to wait months for an appointment. If they need real-time access to a clinician, they could easily tap into asynchronous tools to engage an in-network clinician via text;

●??????? Simplified experience — Patient portals were meant as a starting point for simplifying the patient experience, but they have not panned out as such. A digital-first, patient-centric healthcare system would offer a single app that combines provider information, makes appointments, accesses personal medical record data (in layperson terminology), provides a cost estimate before an appointment, and personalizes payment options post-appointment

●??????? AI-supported clinician care teams — A digital-first healthcare system would also ensure that all care teams have access to validated AI tools that empower them — as a collective whole — to provide the highest-quality, preventive care possible.

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

At Oscar Health, I fell in love with the concept that what we were really saying to people was: Come to the same digital front door every time you need to interact with the healthcare system, and we will guide you to the correct next step. To me, that’s incredibly powerful as the starting point for any future digital-first healthcare experience, but the reality is that “digital” can only flourish with some adjustment to current legacy issues. To address legacy health system issues that are holding back a true digital-first healthcare system, I believe we would need to remove healthcare control from employers; provide people with subsidies to pay for their insurance, rather than using government or employers as payors; and ensure that every provider is required to accept every insurance, while also legally requiring care teams to share the cost of a service before providing it (aside from emergency procedures).

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

Three main things come top of mind when I think about what I wish I had known when starting out as an innovator: 1) Fundraising isn’t something you do now and again, it’s an always-on function for most businesses (and CEOs); 2) If you get the wrong people on the “bus,” you’ll pay for it, so invest the right resources in a thorough, values-driven hiring process; and 3) Pause and appreciate the occasional moments of downtime — while few and far between, that is where you’ll gather the energy and insight to push forward in business and in life.

Elliott Green is the co-founder and CEO of Dandelion Health — a real-world data and clinical AI platform powering next-generation precision medicine and personalized care. His career has spanned finance and healthcare technology, culminating in executive roles within health-tech startups that are focused on payers, providers, life sciences, and healthcare data.

Elliott brings an in-depth understanding of the operational components of the U.S. payer, provider, and life sciences ecosystems, as well as an ability to establish and manage complex institutional partnerships. He has taken this experience into his latest AI-focused venture, Dandelion, where he drives impact in the transition to precision medicine and personalized care.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in the interview responses are solely those of the guest contributor.