Empowering your health journey

Estelle Giraud is a PhD scientist in population genetics who has become a commercial operator, founder and leader in biotech and frontier medicine @Illumina. Estelle has had to navigate the change and challenges that come with this journey and is both excited and scared by the rise of big data in healthcare and wellness. She is also passionate about creating a better healthcare system from the ground up, especially for individuals. She believes people don’t neatly fit in single boxes and that some of the most interesting insights about people and the world come from the unplanned intersections and she brings her authenticity and openness to the tough conversations about the hard problems we face.

Estelle believes we have the fundamental right to have agency over own bodies and our own health and that this can’t be layered in political, religious or any other way of thinking – it’s your own body, your own health journey and, as humans, we have the right over that along with the privacy that goes with it.

Trellis Health has the belief that health is rapidly changing. What we think about health data is rapidly changing – genetics, wearable’s, where people live and what people eat all impact on our health. At the same time we don’t have a good infrastructure for health data particularly in the US as there is no national infrastructure and people have their health data in dozens of different systems. This means that from a patient perspective there is little value in that health information. It doesn't serve you and allow you to manage and own your health. There are a lot of things you can talk about - AI and data driven medicine for example - but at the end of the day we need good health data on people and that data needs to impact on, and serve them.

Estelle’s company has been creating a platform, a health data hub, which starts with pregnancy. There are a couple of very specific reasons for starting at this point. At a high level pregnancy is a really unique time point in a person’s life where a lot of deep and broad measurements happen. It is the first interaction with the healthcare system and there is a lot of space for improving that user experience as well as the health outcomes – how do we decrease maternal and infant mortality at this intense time in a really data driven way.

The idea is that you own your own health data, cleanse that data and show it to the people who need to know so they can provide the healthcare you need for yourself on a global scale. People are more mobile these days and there are different systems in different countries. You can’t just assume people are going to be born, live and die in one system if we are going to have a mobile lifestyle it makes sense for all of our health information to come with us as we move through life. For example when you are on holiday and something happens to you. You can’t speak and your wishes or allergies are missed.  The mission of Trellis is to empower people to see and connect with their health and those two things are difficult to do. Health is an abstract thing. We don't think about it until we are sick and that's when it will help to have that data at your fingertips. It allows people to connect with it so we can own our health journey.

Estelle comes at this from a patient and a data science perspective. Health is not just about going to the doctor, having some blood tests and going home.  Its about mental health, diet, stress, sleep and community. All of these things impact our health and we’ve gone through the period where people would have one doctor who had seen their family for generations and had information about the whole family in their head. Today’s medical systems have been fractured into specialties and fragmented out – an app for mental health, seeing a specialist for something else - all different people and systems. People are slowly starting to realise that health needs to bring that all together and that to talk about truly managing your health it needs to be holistic.

There are a lot of inaccuracies in health data generally and this is difficult to fix without a level of transparency. With transparency people can see the data and start to have the conversation that something isn’t right so lets try to correct it. To realise precision medicine, we need vast amounts of clean, accurate data – if its full of errors we can’t develop the algorithms to do that. This is of course some of the most powerful data you can have on a person and is even more valuable than financial data which is why the privacy and ethics of this space is so important.

Trellis work automatically though API’s. The US has massive problems with health data and has built exchange networks that operate within the hospitals. This means that when users sign up to the platform they don't need to call every single doctor they've had. They authorise Trellis and then they can collect and build a longitudinal health record for them automatically. The revenue model is that of a consumer paid subscription. They don't take money from insurance companies which simplifies and strips away lots of ulterior incentives. They work with a lot of younger Millennial and Gen Z women who have the idea that if it’s free you are the product. This comes from platforms such as Facebook that monetise people. Trellis makes it really clear that you pay a subscription fee and that's how they make money. It’s your data and they don’t sell it to anybody. They don't make money any other way - it’s all about you and the value you get from your health data.

Organisational resilience comes from this consumer model because it gives independence in the market place. It sounds simple but simple is always best, particularly in healthcare. If you get from where you start profitability, the more organisational resilience you’ll have.

Genetics is the use of simple rules that are written in how we inherit things from our parents and how we pass things down to our kids. When you look at population levels there are mathematical relationships between different people based on their genetics. Its also relevant for how we think about disease, and human health and predispositions. If you put the data across populations you can answer really interesting questions about human health. Things like longevity, bullying and mental health are the sort of things you see in a correlation between life chances and wealth, Some aspects of life are hard coded in a very specific way in our genetics but other things are far more complex and depend on environmental signals throughout our life – where you grow up, levels of pollution, how you eat. All of these things throughout your life will impact your genetics. You can derive algorithms for understanding all of that by looking at the data. Everything about us to some extent or another has a genetic component.

You can find out more about Estelle and Trellis Healthcare at LinkedIn or https://www.jointrellishealth.com/

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