Video: Iora Health's Rushika Fernandopulle on Building a New Operating System for Healthcare

Founder and CEO Dr. Rushika Fernandopulle discusses Iora Health's history and vision and the road ahead for primary care with Tom Main, the managing director of the  Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Center. Read the full interview here. An excerpt:

The mission of Iora is simply to rebuild healthcare starting with primary care. A lot of what others are doing in healthcare is trying to rebuild the system top down, waiting for people in Washington to create new rules, waiting for the big health systems to somehow change things.

Our first proposition is that we’re going to rebuild healthcare bottom up or from the consumer in. Our second is that we’re going to start over with a clean sheet of paper. We’re not going to take existing practices and make them better. We’re going to build from scratch.

A third part of the fundamental change is addressing the situation where healthcare in this country and probably elsewhere has turned into a series of transactions: billing, coding, everything feels like widgets off a line. And then we try to fix healthcare by adding more transactions and more boxes to check. So our proposition is that maybe that stuff doesn’t work, and the thing that causes healing is relationships; so we need to center primary care around healthy, continuous relationships.

The way I frame it is building a new operating system for primary care.