Expanding Mammography, Lung Screening Technologies to Improve Patient Care, Costs

As a result of staff shortages and facility closures brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of cancer screenings, especially mammograms, decreased drastically. Now that the pandemic is waning, the number of screenings is on the rise again.

Morris Panner, president of Intelerad, emphasizes how innovative mammography and lung analytics technologies are being expanded, and the impact this has on patient care.

How are the mammography and lung cancer diagnostics markets projected to change over the next several years?

We are seeing a revolution in screening procedures and associated growth. Mammography screening is pretty well established, but even that is expected to grow by more than 20% in the next several years. Lung cancer diagnostic screening is starting to be reimbursed for patients with certain types of medical histories and is expected to reach $3.4 billion by 2026.

How are mammography and lung analytics offerings being expanded, and how will the expansion impact patient care?

Analytics are going to drive all the progress we will see because analytics allow you to change the dynamic around population health.

PenRad has been a mainstay in the breast imaging market, as have PenLung for lung screening and PenTrac for patient tracking and reporting. You can do 2 things with these analytics. One, you can get a longitudinal picture of an individual patient as they go through life. Two, you can stratify that patient within a larger cohort of patients.

You have the longitudinal patient experience, but for the system as a whole, you need to understand where patients fit within your larger set of responsibilities, and there is a quality component to that. How do you address patients effectively? Sometimes you can do predictive analytics, given how a patient fits within a larger set of data. That is quality.

If you can intervene earlier, the patient is a lot happier because it will likely lead to a good outcome. From a cost point of view, intervening earlier will help the health system at large manage costs more effectively.

Analytics are the key, and you can only do this if you are aggregating sufficient amounts of data. We have gone from thinking of screening as a point in time for an individual, to a population, which is fundamental to that transformation.

How do you think innovative tools and technologies will affect the future of health care?

We are at an incredible point in digital health amid the impact of cloud technology. I think everybody who is in proximity to health care technology knows there is a delay between when other industries experience technological change and when the health care industry does, and there are good and bad reasons for that.

The Hippocratic oath is “first do no harm,” and the innovator's oath is “move fast and break things.” It is interesting when those 2 cultures come together. As a patient, I would not be excited if my physician said to me, "We have decided to move fast and break things because we think it will lead to more progress." I would be skeptical.

Nevertheless, we have learned how to manage that delicate balancing act, where we are moving fast, not breaking things, but improving things.

If you want to do analytics at scale, it must be in the cloud. We could all write down our results and mail them in like people used to do for large-scale studies, but the cloud revolutionizes that. Once you are in the cloud, you can manage different types of data.

One of the most exciting things about Intelerad's cloud offerings has been the marry imaging data with other types of data, which then leads to analytics. Intelerad has not tried to be the source of the algorithms but rather a platform on which algorithms can interact with data.

Analytics is driven by artificial intelligence (AI). AI is a cool buzzword, but it is really about cutting the processing time and making humans smarter. You are not going to replace a human, but rather, you are going to give them superpowers.

We just had our national sales conference, where a clinician said, "Radiologists will not be replaced by AI. Radiologists who don't use AI will be replaced by those who do.” That is how I think about the impact of technology—it is going to give physicians superpowers.

You touched upon this a bit, but how do these technology expansions affect the cost of care for patients? And what about payers?

Let me start with the payer side of the equation. At Intelerad, we are seeing a revolution in how payers are trying to understand what drives their commercial position.

I think payers, like everybody else in the health care system, are there because they would like to help people. Obviously, there are always commercial constraints, but what I think payers are trying to do right now is understand cost and quality in a way that is beneficial for patients. How do you intervene earlier with better care to avoid more expensive outcomes? Screening technologies are fundamental to how we will avoid this.

There was a fascinating company called Grail, which is now part of a larger company. But I was at the startup event where Grail pitched their idea. I remember the person who pitched it said, "I lost my wife to breast cancer." Those stories are why people are in health care. Because cells are changing all the time, if we could detect cancer in that screening early enough, we could probably stop just about everything.

That powerful vision is what animates our desire to improve that screening component, because imaging screening is one of the most powerful tools there is.

Is there anything else you would like to add to the conversation today?

One of the exciting things to keep an eye out for is Intelerad’s commitment to investing in this sector. We have put $1 billion to work so far. We just raised close to another $400 million from TA Associates. The combination of that commitment and vision will enable us to have a big impact on global human health. Certainly, population-based care approach is going to be front and center to that vision.

About Mr Panner

Morris Panner, JD, is the president of Intelerad and helps deliver better care through improved technology as an active voice in the cloud and enterprise software arena, with a strong focus on services and health care verticals. 

Mr Panner served as CEO of Ambra Health for over a decade until it was acquired by Intelerad in 2021. Previously, he built and sold an industry-leading business process software company, OpenAir, to NetSuite (NYSE:N). He once served as the US Embassy Resident Legal Advisor in Bogota, Colombia. His first job was as a janitor at his old high school while on summer break from college.

Morris is a frequent contributor to business, health care, and technology publications. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a JD from Harvard University.