Measuring Employee Wellbeing with Dr. Don Brown, LifeOmic

Welcome to another episode of the HRchat show. In this episode, we consider tech to monitor and assess employee wellbeing.

Bill's guest this time is Dr. Don Brown, Founder, and CEO of LifeOmic, a software company that leverages the cloud, machine learning, and mobile devices to offer disruptive solutions to healthcare providers, researchers, employers, health coaches, health IT companies and individuals.

His first company was acquired by EDS in 1986. He founded Software Artistry in 1988 which became the first software company in Indiana ever to go public and was later acquired by IBM for $200 million. Don then founded and served as CEO of Interactive Intelligence which went public in 1999 and was acquired by Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories in 2016 for $1.4 billion.

Don received a bachelor’s in physics from Indiana University in 1978, a master’s in computer science from IU in 1982, an MD from the Indiana University School of Medicine in 1985, and a master’s in biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University in 2017.

Questions Include: 

• LifeOmic had its start in the oncology space around healthcare data aggregation and visualization. How has this background informed your approach to corporate wellness?
• What value does a medical-grade approach to wellness have for both the employees and the employers?
• The core of the LifeOmic Precision Wellness solution is the five pillars of health – plant-based nutrition, activity, mindfulness, sleep, and intermittent fasting. Based on hundreds of scientific studies, these pillars will, your team claims, improve your employees' health. Can you tell us more about the five pillars of health and ways HR can be more mindful of each to encourage better habits in the workplace? 
• Using your tools, employees can do self mini-checkups using fitness wearables, connected scales, blood pressure cuffs, spirometers and more to monitor their improvements. You support seamless connection to Fitbit, Oura and all Healthkit devices. Can you tell me more about how the tech can monitor employee health in real-time? 
• Using advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence, LifeOmic Precision Wellness aims to create and deliver tailored recommendations to improve health as well as identify areas employees should proactively discuss with their doctor. Many HR pros remain skeptical about the pervasiveness of AI and machine learning as presc

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to the HR chat podcast, bringing the best of the HR and talent communities to you.

Speaker 2: 0:21

Welcome to another episode of the HR chat show. I'm your host today, bill Banham. And in this episode, we're gonna consider tech to monitor and assess employee wellbeing. My illustrious famous awesome guest. This time is Dr. Don brown founder, N CEO over at life on a software company, the cloud machine learning and mobile devices to offer disruptive solutions to healthcare providers, researchers, employers, health, coaches, health, it companies, and individuals. Don. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the show today.

Speaker 3: 0:56

Hey bill. Nice to be with you.

Speaker 2: 0:58

So beyond my reintroduction there, Don, why didn't you start by introducing yourself and maybe providing a we overview of life OIC? Yeah,

Speaker 3: 1:07

Well, um, I'm a, uh, 65 year old, uh, serial entrepreneur. Uh, I started off, uh, my academic career in an MD PhD program, uh, in, uh, biochemistry and figured that I would be working as a researcher in a basement lab someplace, but, uh, uh, so often happens in life. Uh, you go off in unexpected directions. Uh, I ended up switching the, uh, non-medical part of my studies over to computer science, got a graduate degree in, in, uh, that field. And, uh, I started a little software, a company while I was finishing up medical school and, uh, took an unexpected detour for the next, uh, three decades, uh, started, uh, two companies that eventually went public and, uh, I had a, had a great, uh, uh, career, so that's kind of the capsule summary.

Speaker 2: 2:02

Wow. Listeners check this guy out. So he just, he had started a little software company while he was finishing off his, uh, his medical degree. And then he started a couple more. We get some amazing achievers on this show. Geez. Um, okay, so let's, let's, let's talk a bit more about, uh, life. I believe that it, it had its start in the oncology space around healthcare data aggregation and visualization Dom had, how has this background informed your approach to this?

Speaker 3: 2:30

Well, um, you know, well, one interesting thing that I found, uh, was that even though, uh, after leaving, uh, medical school and, you know, going into the software industry, I, I really didn't do anything in the healthcare field yet. Uh, when I came home at night, I was always grabbing a biochemistry book or molecular biology book instead of some sort of, uh, business, uh, magazine. And, uh, that led me to go back to graduate school a few years ago. And I got a, a master's degree in biotechnology from, uh, Johns Hopkins. And, uh, so when my most, uh, recent company, uh, was called, uh, interactive intelligence, it was a publicly traded company of about, uh, or over 2000 people, uh, when it was sold in, uh, 26 team to a big, uh, California company. I really saw it as an opportunity to kind of, uh, close the circle of my life and, uh, get back into, uh, uh, the life sciences. And so that's what led me to form, uh, life. I started it, it was announced the day after, uh, the closing of the sale of, uh, my last company. And I had, uh, oh, roughly a dozen or so senior developers who were foolish enough to wanna join me in, uh, a new venture, even though I really wasn't sure what we were gonna do. And so, um, I started lymphic with, uh, those developers and, uh, a handful of, uh, uh, scientists, uh, geneticist. And our initial thought was that we would do whole genome sequencing. Uh, we bought a couple of Illumina, uh, sequencers, and we're going down the path of, uh, um, uh, starting Alia certified lab and, uh, really, uh, changed, uh, our minds and decided to focus entirely on soft where, and, uh, so that's kind of the Genesis of lipic.

Speaker 2: 4:27

Wow. You either pay extremely well or you're a very, very good leader then. Uh, what was it, you said there about a dozen of your folk wanting to come with you, even though you didn't really know what the next company would be. That that's, that's pretty cool, Don. I like that. Um, so what, what value does a medical grade approach to wellness have for both the employees and the employers then?

Speaker 3: 4:50

Well, I, you know, I, I think it, uh, gives the, the whole approach to wellness a much more scientific, uh, foundation than it's had in the past. You know, it, it, uh, uh, li initially, uh, what we did was work with my mater, the Indiana university school of medicine, and we built a cloud platform that, uh, they use today to aggregate, uh, all the information, all the data they have around their, uh, cancer patients. So everything from electronic medical records to, uh, whole genome is, uh, the what's called the germline sequence that patients were born with, and then, uh, the somatic sequence of the cancer. So, and then our software, uh, helps those oncologists, uh, analyze, uh, those differences and try to, uh, decide which mutations are driving the CA cancer. And increasingly today, uh, we can find drugs, uh, that can, uh, be used in a very personalized way, uh, based on that information cancer. And so that's what underlies our whole wellness program, this medical grade platform that's being used to, uh, treat cancer patients today. Um, and so it, it just gives us a, a much stronger foundation than any sort of corporate wellness, uh, product has ever had in the past.

Speaker 2: 6:18

Okay. Wow. Thank you very much. Um, and I understand at the core of the, the lymphomic precision wellness solution is, is the, uh, five pillars of health, uh, which are plant-based nutrition activity, mindfulness sleep, and intermittent fasting based on hundreds of scientific studies, Don, these pillars will, uh, your team claims improve your employees. Health makes sense to me. Uh, can you, can you maybe tell us more about the five pillars of health and ways that HR can be more mindful of each to encourage better habits with, within their workplace, within their employees?

Speaker 3: 6:54

Yeah, you know, it's, it's something that I became fascinated by the whole process of, uh, aging. Um, you know, aging really hasn't been effectively studied until the last 20 years or so. And, um, so now there are a number of famous papers that lay out the, the underlying molecular mechanisms, uh, what, what are called the hallmarks of, uh, aging. And I think one of the fascinating ones that, uh, I, I tripped over during my studies at John's Hopkins was this notion of, uh, intermittent fasting, or it's also called, uh, time restricted eating it. Uh, really the whole idea is to kind of flip a metabolic switch, uh, between the normal sugar per her mode that, uh, most of us are in our entire lives, uh, over to a fat burning mode that has been proven to have a number of, uh, beneficial health, uh, effects. Um, so that, that was one that's, that's kind of, uh, where it started. Uh, we actually built a little mobile app, uh, for, uh, intermittent fasting, just kind of to indulge, uh, my, my passion, we expected we would have five or 10,000 people, uh, use it. And, uh, in the process we would get some free, low testing because that mobile app used our cloud platform, uh, on the back end. And, uh, we got some low testing, uh, that, uh, now have been downloaded 4 million times by people around the, the globe. And so it led us to, uh, focus our science team on, uh, really a year's worth of research to distill out, you know, what would be the, the sort of foundational behavioral, uh, dimensions that, uh, a, a person could use to improve their health and, uh, ultimately, uh, maximize their, uh, longevity. And so, uh, in doing a lot of research, in addition to intermittent fasting, we've, uh, uh, settled on the other four, uh, that, uh, you listed, and they're really not surprising perhaps, but, uh, what we eat, how much and how we exercise, uh, to what extent we try to relax and do some mindfulness and then, uh, how well we sleep all have a tremendous, uh, impact on our health. Okay,

Speaker 2: 9:17

Thank you very much. Let's, uh, let's talk a little bit about, uh, monitoring employees and, and, and tech that can help with that Don, um, using your tools and employees can do self mini checkups using fitness, wearables, connected scales, blood pressure, cuffs, spiral meters, and, and more to monitor their improvements. And, uh, you support seamless connection to Fitbit, to aura and to all health kit devices. Can you maybe tell me more about how the tech can monitor employee health in, in real time?

Speaker 3: 9:50

Yeah. You know, we're, we're moving into an age, uh, it's often qu called a quantified self movement where people really wanna understand what's going on in their bodies at a more, uh, granular level. And so we really try to embrace that as you mentioned, we, uh, uh, provide, uh, uh, access to these, uh, kind of home physiology devices that people can, uh, use an HR department can put around the office so that, uh, employees can monitor their blood pressure and other, uh, biomarkers, uh, we've negotiated a deal with quest so that, uh, employees, uh, for a hundred bucks can get a, a blood test that would ordinarily be almost 10 times, uh, that, that cost, uh, to measure seven me two different, uh, biomarkers, uh, to assess, uh, oh, things like, uh, cardiovascular risk, uh, degree of, uh, inflammation, uh, lipid levels and, and many, many other, uh, important biomarkers. And then we, uh, even, uh, provide, uh, optional genetic testing so that, uh, employees can, uh, uh, uh, upload that information. And then we can use it to provide very, uh, uh, personalized information, uh, that, uh, you know, leverages all of this data, including what's coming in from these real time devices that many of us are, are wearing. I use an aura ring for example. And so, um, uh, our system has access to, uh, that information and knows my resting heart rate, you know, other parameters of, of my health. And so it just allows us to, uh, give much more personalized, much more medically rigorous, uh, advice and recommendations to employees. Okay, so

Speaker 2: 11:38

You using advanced medicine, learning and artificial intelligence, life omic, precision wellness, aims to create and deliver tailored recommendations to improve health, as well as identify areas employees should proactively discuss with their doctor. Many HR pros remain perhaps a little skeptical about the pervasiveness storm of AI and machine learning as, as prescriptive technology. How does your AI work and, and what would you say to any doubters out there?

Speaker 3: 12:04

Well, I've, I mean, we, we use the, the sort of, uh, machine learning techniques that have, uh, become so popular are, and proven so effective in, uh, many different fields. And so, you know, what, what we are careful not to do is to try to play doctor, uh, in our software. So we don't give people a definitive diagnosis. We don't say, you know, you've, you've got, uh, Alzheimer's, but what we do try to do is assess risk and more than anything, we're, we're just trying to guide employees toward the behaviors that are well proven, uh, to, uh, reduce their risk for, um, cancer and diabetes and heart disease and all of these other, uh, nasty infirmities. Um, so, um, you, you know, I, I would just say that, uh, this sort of a approach, uh, it's not, it's not voodoo it's, uh, well established and, uh, uh, we actually are about to publish a paper, showing our results, uh, from, uh, uh, a year's worth of use by hundreds of thousands of people. And it's a pretty incredible, the, uh, the results in terms of sustained weight loss, uh, reduction in, um, um, insulin resistance, things like that, uh, exceed those of any other, uh, published statistics by anyone in, in the industry.

Speaker 2: 13:30

I'd say that's a pretty good defense there. We've got this paper bill, which covers to hundreds of thousands that goes over the course of a year. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. This guy, this guy knows his stuff. Um, so you, you, you recently launched life ascent, which is a 52 week guided program that empowers individuals to start building sustainable healthy habits. Uh, this content is something that employers can include in their precision wellness. What kind of impact can a program like this have on employees?

Speaker 3: 14:00

Oh, well, I, I can't tell you how, how excited I am about, uh, that, that program pill. Uh, we've put a lot of work into it. Uh, and yeah, basically what we did was, uh, lay out a, a 12 month health improvement program, uh, in the first month, uh, the participant, uh, uh, really, uh, submits a number of measurements. Um, uh, we do the, uh, the blood tests, the, uh, other sorts of, uh, physiological, uh, measurements, um, and, and really just try to prepare the person for, for change, uh, for, uh, introduce, seeing sustained changes gradually that can improve their health. And then we kind of take them through a, a, uh, anatomical Odyssey. So, uh, the first, uh, month after the initial assessment is devoted to metabolic health, uh, we, uh, and each month is curated by a leading clinician, uh, uh, from around the country. So the, uh, metabolic month is curated by a Harbor trained, uh, endocrinologist, uh, practicing up in the Northeast. Uh, then that's followed by a cardiovascular month, uh, led by a, uh, uh, a cardiologist, a leading cardiologist in Indianapolis. And so we go through the pulmonary system, the brain and, uh, Cerebra, uh, vascular system, uh, uh, the, uh, we have a section on cancer immunology. So it's, it's really been fun to put this together. And then what we try to do is first educate the participants about that particular system, the basic anatomy and physiology, uh, the common disorders, but more than anything, helping them understand their personal, uh, risk and the things that they can do to improve their health and the, uh, kind of overall human, uh, effect is, uh, people lead to a, uh, a healthy weight. Uh, if, if they, uh, if they have excess weight, they, we help them lose it. Uh, we can often reverse type two, uh, diabetes, um, and, uh, otherwise just minimize risk for all these chronic diseases that start to, uh, appear once we get into our forties and beyond.

Speaker 2: 16:16

I'm not too long away from, uh, from that journey from that road coaster, I've got about a year and a half before I hit the big four row on,

Speaker 3: 16:25

Well, it's, it's a good

Speaker 2: 16:26

Time to, I've got the gray hair of a 50 year old.<laugh>,

Speaker 3: 16:30

It's, it's a great time to kind of, of assess what you're doing and, uh, you know, start to make some improvements. Many of us, uh, you know, kind of at that, uh, stage in our lives, we're building our, our businesses, our careers, you know, we can let ourselves go a little bit. And so it's, it really is a good time to, you know, kind of, uh, get your, your mindset for, uh, the, the changes you wanna make to, uh, make sure that you age gracefully and well

Speaker 2: 16:59

Gracefully. Okay. I'll give it a go. I'll give it a go<laugh>. So, so you say that your weld solutions can scale to any size organizational team. Sounds great. Uh, can, can you share how a company can introduce a wellness solution that's able to scale at speed, um, and maybe what are, what are the checks that one can put in place in the, in the initial testing phase, and then throughout the rolled out to, in to ensure that each and every employee has the, the, at least the education to access the solution?

Speaker 3: 17:33

Yeah, well, I, uh, my team and I had, uh, at my previous company, we led the, uh, transition of a very large company, a very, uh, complex application to the cloud. And that ultimately, uh, became, uh, one of the most heavily used, uh, enterprise cloud applications in, in the world. There are half million people on that, uh, platform today. And so we, uh, leveraged that experience at ophthalmic. Uh, so we built a very scalable, uh, cloud platform. Um, I think the success of that is demonstrated by our ability to handle those 4 million P people who have, uh, downloaded our apps, uh, around the world. And so, uh, it gives us, uh, great confidence that we've got an application that can scale. We're talking with some very large application, very large companies with, uh, tens of thousands of employees. And so it's, it's critical to have that scalability. Uh, but so, uh, you know, in, in designing a, a cloud based application, a cloud mobile, uh, application, we really wanted to make it as, uh, easy to deploy as possible. Uh, this is only a slight, uh, over simplification, but the idea is that the, uh, HR, uh, leader, uh, uh, get a, a, a little spreadsheet of employee information, uh, uploaded into our system, uh, choose a few configuration parameters like, uh, uh, financial subsidies. They wanna provide to employees or financial incentives, and then press go. And the, it handles, uh, the invitations to employees kind of, uh, nagging them, nudging them, uh, along and, uh, downloading the app, creating a, a profile, uh, going through a consenting process, all, all of that sort of stuff, and all the way through to getting their blood tests, their, uh, biomarkers and, uh, uh, uh, starting to en engage in, in the program and make the appropriate, uh, changes. Uh, so we've, we've really tried to, we put a lot of work into building something that, uh, is very, very easy for HR. Uh, we have standard email S that, uh, the HR professional can I just edit with, uh, the company logo and, and colors and those sorts of things. Uh, but after that, as I say, they just press go and the program runs by itself.

Speaker 2: 20:06

I am sad to say that we are almost out of time for today. Um, I've enjoyed this, and by the way, you have a wonderful voice, you could be a podcast host. I rather<laugh>. I, listen, I, I listen out to this sort of thing, you know,<laugh> um, so, you know, let's talk about this, maybe some sort of offshoot, HR chat, medical focused episodes or something. Um, but before we do wrap up for today, how can our listeners connect with you? Uh, so, you know, maybe that's through LinkedIn, that's how you and I, uh, connected. Um, maybe, maybe you wanna share your email address. Maybe you are on TikTok, who knows, and how can I learn more about, um, all the cool stuff happening over at live? Yeah,

Speaker 3: 20:45

Well, the, uh, the, for, for me personally, uh, you can just look for me, uh, Donald Brown, uh, life on, uh, LinkedIn and, uh, the, uh, the precision wellness, uh, product, uh, the corporate wellness product that we discussed is it precision wellness.io, uh, while they, uh, uh, the personal wellness product, uh, that can be used by anybody, they don't, it doesn't have to be, uh, within the context of corporate wellness, uh, is at, uh, life ascent dot, uh, IO.

Speaker 2: 21:17

Wonderful. Well, uh, sometimes I have episodes where I just sit and I learn, and this was definitely one of them today. Um, Don been an absolute pleasure. Uh, you, you, I can tell that you are passionate about what you do and, and how you help people. And I, and I love that. Um, and I'd love to chat to you again on the show, but for now, Don, that just leads me to say thank you very much for being a guest on this episode of the HR chat show.

Speaker 3: 21:43

Well, my pleasure bill, I enjoyed it.

Speaker 2: 21:46

And listeners as all until next time, happy and healthy working.

Speaker 1: 21:54

Thank you for listening to the HR chat podcast brought to you by the HR Gazette.