Dan Baker has had a front-row seat to digital health’s evolution over the last 20 years – and its “incredible, world-changing benefits,” he said. Looking back 20 years ago to a world where most clinical documentation was done on paper and stored in manilla folders, it’s incredible to reflect on the progress that’s been made,” said Baker, who recently joined Cardinal Health WaveMark™ Supply Management and Workflow Solutions as vice president of Global Commercialization and Sales.
Dan spent the past 20 years on the front lines of the largest industry transformation in history – the digitization of healthcare. Dan joins Cardinal Health from Phase2 Health, a leading healthcare growth services firm. As its founder and chief revenue officer, in just three years, Dan led Phase2 to achieve seven-figure revenue growth in services year-over-year. Prior to this, Dan served as senior vice president of sales for Syapse, a venture-backed, precision medicine platform and network based out of Palo Alto, California, where he grew the commercial organization to deliver 40-times bookings growth and helped secure enterprise-wide contracts with some of the world’s leading community and academic health systems. Dan has served as a mentor, advisor, investor and board member to dozens of digital health companies and is passionate about applying technology to improve lives and eliminate waste in healthcare.
In an interview with Repertoire, he described the evolution that has taken place over the last two decades:
“The aughts were still the early days of electronic health records, bookended by rapid adoption through “meaningful use” stimulus credits afforded by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act. Widespread electronic health record (EHR) adoption really laid the groundwork for the digital health ecosystem we know today.”
“As core clinical data began to be captured at scale, population health and data analytics became the next best opportunity to impact care, allowing provider groups to practice more proactive and preventative versus pure traditional diagnostic care. I was driving adoption on the front lines, realizing the power of these growing data sets. Like any meaningful change, it was hard work, but we saw tangible clinical and operational improvements.”
“The opportunity to unlock additional value for health systems from their EHRs, as well as from other clinical and ancillary systems, remains massive. As a personal example: I led a team that helped scale a precision medicine software company called Syapse. We did some pioneering things with structuring and normalizing genomic and clinical data to help health systems make better treatment decisions for their cancer patients. We signed partnerships with many of the largest health systems in the world and we eventually evolved to become the first-of-its-kind network connecting pharma and health systems to identify clinical trial sites, pre-screen trial cohorts and understand the clinical efficacy of targeted oncology drugs using real-world data and evidence.”
“I believe that technology that can enable greater trust, transparency, and collaboration between healthcare’s largest stakeholders presents the biggest opportunity in digital health today.”
Look for the complete interview with Baker in the October 2021 issue of Repertoire.