CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Sept. 28, 2015 – GNS Healthcare (GNS), a leading provider of analytics solutions for driving personalized interventions that improve population health, today announced the expansion of its Strategic Advisory Board (SAB). Joining the SAB are Susan Weaver, MD, former Chief Medical Officer of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina; Robert J. Perez, the former Chief Executive Officer of Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Inc., acquired by Merck (NASDAQ: MRK) for $9.5 Billion in January 2015; Steve Eisenberg, MD, former Vice President, Healthcare Informatics for UnitedHealth Group (NYSE:UNH) subsidiary OptumHealth; and Timothy Thompson, Chairman and CEO of Intervention Insights.
“These proven leaders will advance the GNS mission – to leverage big data machine learning on behalf of health plans, providers, and pharmaceutical companies, helping them match interventions to individuals,” says Colin Hill, CEO and co-founder of GNS. “In a world where traditional market boundaries are yielding to new partnerships focused on delivering high-value health interventions, we can no longer ignore the hundreds of billions of dollars that are wasted each year when individuals are not matched with their most effective treatment or when treatments prove ineffective.”
Dr. Weaver will assume a special role on the SAB, leading a Medical Care Management Task Force composed of clinical experts, including Dr. Eisenberg and Dr. Jan Berger, Vice Chair of the GNS Board of Directors and former Senior Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer for CVS Caremark. The group will accelerate the adoption of precision population health by payers and providers. In addition, the Task Force will shape real-world analytic solutions to advance the GNS vision for a collaborative workflow between clinical and analytics teams.
“Susan Weaver will lead what I consider to be a clinical dream team. Its work will bring precision population health to life, accelerating the application of technology and solutions to eliminate Knowledge Blindspots™ related to pre-term birth, new member population risk, palliative care, and many others. These solutions inform decisions about a range of health interventions – how they are reimbursed by payers, implemented by care managers, applied by physicians, and ultimately purchased by consumers,” says Hill.
“Health care leaders have been working in the dark too long, applying interventions on the basis of population-level averages,” says Dr. Weaver. “Data streams are no longer the bottleneck. It’s being able to look at trillions of data points to come up with an individualized strategy to positively impact a person’s health outcomes. The GNS REFS™ (Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation) technology is the key to transforming that data into solutions.”
In her former role as Chief Medical Officer of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBSNC), Dr. Weaver earned national regard as the architect of innovative collaborations with physicians and hospitals. She joined BCBSNC as Vice President, Health Delivery Redesign in 2012, after serving WakeMed Health & Hospitals for three years as Executive Vice President, Medical Affairs and Physician Practices. Before that, Dr. Weaver was Executive Director of Alliance Medical Ministry, an organization that she helped create to provide primary medical care for the working uninsured in Wake County, North Carolina.
Perez was a senior executive with Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Inc. for 11 years before taking the helm as Chief Executive Officer. He was elevated from the position of President and Chief Operating Officer. Perez joined Cubist as Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing in 2003, the same year in which the company’s flagship drug, Cubicin® (daptomycin for injection), earned FDA approval. He is widely credited with the successful launch of Cubicin®, which was the first drug in a new class of bactericidal antibiotics. Prior to Cubist, Perez led the Biogen, Inc. U.S. neurology franchise as Vice President of the company’s CNS Business Unit. He also held sales and marketing roles with Zeneca Pharmaceuticals.
Dr. Eisenberg has held executive positions with a number of healthcare organizations, most recently serving the UnitedHealth Group subsidiary OptumHealth as Vice President, Healthcare Informatics. He maintains a consultancy focused on healthcare informatics, predictive analytics, business intelligence, performance benchmarking, and case and disease management. Prior to his role at OptumHealth, he was Senior Vice President and Chief Science Officer for the disease management company LifeMasters Supported SelfCare, where his role included oversight of all analytics, methodologies and reporting with a focus on value demonstration. He was also Chief Science Officer for United Healthcare and medical director at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota and Blue Cross Blue Shield of ND.
Timothy Thompson, a 20-year veteran of the healthcare technology industry, has built and led high-performance growth-stage and Fortune 100 companies. Thompson is Chairman and CEO of Intervention Insights, a technology company focused on decision support for molecular oncology. Thompson was previously President and CEO of Proventys, a healthcare technology company that, as an early innovator in precision medicine, developed web-based decision support solutions in oncology. Before Proventys, Thompson was Managing Director of Mergers and Acquisitions and the Head of Strategic Business Development for the health informatics business unit of Aetna, Inc. (NYSE: AET).
About GNS Healthcare
GNS Healthcare applies machine learning technology to predict the value of individual interventions, improving population health and reducing costs. Based on the MAX™ (Meaningful Actions Accelerator) architecture and patented REFS™ (Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation) inference engine, GNS helps health plans, providers, and pharmaceutical companies plan, implement, and measure interventions that benefit individuals and drive value across a population. These cloud-based solutions are being deployed to address pre-term birth, palliative care, comparative effectiveness, medication non-adherence, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, specialty care medications, and more. GNS solutions focus on reducing adverse events, slowing disease progression, and improving therapeutic effectiveness through precision selection that reduces wasteful spending and maximizes impact.
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