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Welcome to the Healthy Brain Toolbox. I'm Dr. Ken Sharlin, neurologist, speaker, author, and host for this show. In each episode, I interview influential people whose work impacts how we live and how we think. My guests are leaders in the health and fitness industry, physicians, scientists. Authors and public servants. Here, you'll find conversations that break down barriers, expand your horizons, and give you the tools you need to protect your health and nourish your aging brain.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 0:33

Welcome to this week's episode of the Healthy Brain Toolbox. Today I have Dave Korsunsky. He's the founder and CEO of HeadsUp Health, a Scottsdale based digital health analytics company with over 15 years in tech leading strategic alliances at VMware and data analytics at cloud physics. He builds tools that empower individuals and practitioners through integrated health. Data, wearables and remote We call RPM Remote Therapeutic Monitoring to optimize Outcomes and Scale Care. Here at Sharlin Health and Neurology, we've started to use HeadsUp Health and I'm looking forward to our discussion today and really share with the listeners how they can integrate this type of technology into their practices and to their life. Really, this is really about getting high resolution data that is then actionable and can truly change your trajectory. So without further a do, Dave, thank you so much for joining us.

Dave Korsunsky: 1:37

It's an honor, Dr. Sharlin. Thank you.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 1:39

You spent seven years at VMware leading alliances with major global electronic health record systems, and I wonder how that experience perhaps shaped your vision for fundamentally improving health data access and control.

Dave Korsunsky: 1:55

Yeah, when I was at VMware, it was a cloud computing company, and if you go into a typical hospital. And you go down somewhere, 18 floors below ground. There's some guys with ponytails and they're managing a room the size of a football field full of computer data center servers. And those computer data center servers are running the electronic health record system. For example, let's say that health system was using Epic. As their electronic health record system, we might find 300 to 500 physical servers running that Epic implementation and that's just one application. Then you've got machines running the email systems, you've got machines running HR, payroll, finance. So it's not uncommon that these organizations would have. Thousands of physical servers running all of the operations of the business, and at any moment in time, each of those physical machines was using about five to 7% of their compute power. They all had their own individual job to do so they were all on separate physical machines. And what VMware figured out was, Hey, how can we take all these underutilized physical machines that are gobbling up tons of electricity and cost to support and maintain and upgrade, and can we take those physical machines and basically encapsulate them inside of a software container, and then take multiple of those software containers and run them on one physical machine? So we could take 10 machines at 5% utilization, wrap them in their own little software package and run them on one machine that was at 50% utilization. And that one machine still has tons of extra capacity to grow into. And we went and shut off nine machines. Okay? And when you extrapolate that out across a company, the annual savings quickly runs into the millions of dollars. Now in order to do that properly and make sure that you don't break anything when you do that, you have to go into these companies and you have to very carefully study the performance characteristics of these machines because if you pack too many. Containers onto a box, you're gonna run out of performance. And each machine has its own unique workload characteristics. Just like each person has their own little unique bioidentical profile. So my job was to go into these hospitals and collect millions and millions of data points from all of these machines. Think about a thousand machines. There's about a thousand performance characteristics we wanna study, and they're sampling these every five seconds and we run that for a month. And that's just one customer. So you run the math on that. At one point we were working with one of our partner companies to help us analyze the data, and there was over 80 billion data points per day being generated and ingested into a system. So it was a massive amount of data, but what I got really good at in that process, Dr. Sharlin, was understanding how to capture performance data from a machine, understand its unique performance characteristics, and then design a system to help run that workload in a more efficient way. And let's now extrapolate that to human health. Okay? We are now in an era where the biological system, me, you are not that much different than the server. We're generating all this data, okay? I have a continuous glucose monitor on my arm, sampling every five minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. I have an Apple watch or a Garmin or whatever you want on your wrist. That's measuring activity levels heart rate, resting heart rate, pulse oximetry, heart rate variability. The watch is sampling anywhere from 10 to a hundred metrics every single day. Then you've got all of your diagnostics, all your blood work, all your genetics, all your microbiome testing, okay? This is not unlike the physical machines. I got really good at figuring out how to understand. And so as I started getting deeper into trying to understand my own health, I started looking for tools that could help me understand my own data, and I didn't see anything on the market. I think everyone listening can agree that the patient portal in most of these systems is not designed for that type of task. It's designed to send messages and schedule appointments and look at PDFs and whatnot.

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Dr. Ken Sharlin: 8:43

Even like we order labs on patients from a variety of companies, Quest, LabCorp, other companies, and I say, look, you get this, let's say you order 20 different lab variables, but Quest will provide me with those results. It'll give me what they have decided somehow as a reference range. But the labs don't really tell a story. They're not in any particular order. They don't really have meaning outside of that lab, a B12 level, for example. But why worry? B12 deficiency, for example, is a very serious, has very potentially serious neurological complications from dementia to spinal cord disease to peripheral neuropathy. It does, that's not even talking about what it does at the cellular level and things like that. And folks don't really see that, and they just, here's your B12 level. And in fact, the levels according to Quest or a LabCorp can go down into the 200 range and still be considered quote normal. But we know that it can lead to some very serious neurological consequences, even at that level, what's not even flagged as abnormal. I like this idea that. We are data overloaded, whether it's billions of data points or even sometimes 50 data points, and we to do with it.

Dave Korsunsky: 10:02

A hundred percent. So how do we then create an intelligent system, Dr. Sharlin, that can, first of all. Take the PDF files from Quest and LabCorp and all these other systems and at least get the data into one system and structure it properly. At least show me a longitudinal trend line. Let's just get the basics in place first. Even that is hard for a lot of clinics and not just to look back at the most recent value. Let's take B12, but can I look back at all of the B12 tests that person's ever had over the last 20 years? And can I then start to see perhaps when a certain value started trending out of range? Maybe it started trending down 10 years ago, but you can't really see that because there's no longitudinal trend line in any of this data. So even just basic things like normalizing these values and putting them together on a trend line gives you insights. You may see that this person started seeing suppressed levels of something when they were living in another city and in a moldy home, for example. And so even just the longitudinal trend lines is important. Putting all that data back together and now we can really start to measure. Health between the doctor visits, the lab tests. So if you run the labs every six months, great, but what can we start to measure between those tests and can we get clues from that data And can we start to capture data from individuals in their natural habitat that are gonna give us clues into what's going on? That's the promise of sensor and wearable. Technology. So you have this clinical data. Sometimes it's in a PDF file. Sometimes it's in an EHR, sometimes it's, folder on somebody's computer. You have all this sensor and wearable data. You have the genetic data. So it's a mess. And our mission has been to solve, said, miss. And make the data intelligent, usable, and actionable for the individual and for the practitioner they're working with.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 12:10

Just curious, in your own personal journey, you mentioned mentioned wearing a CGM and all your own moment where you shifted from a data guy, supporting hospitals, servers in their EHRs into saying, Hey, I need to do something from my own health, or human health in general.

Dave Korsunsky: 12:29

Yeah, I got bit by the biohacking bug pretty early, and when I was at VMware, yes, I was doing all of this computer analysis work, but I also started reading a lot about health optimization. Back then, and there were really only a few people in the game putting out information on advanced health optimization. There was some early books by Tim Ferris and Four Hour Body and Robb Wolf Paleo Solution. Dave Asprey was putting a lot of really good content out there. So I went down that rabbit hole very early as far back as 2011, 2012, and that's when I started tinkering. With my own health and I started doing different experiments on myself. The first thing I did was move off of a standard American diet and move on to a diet that was based on a paleo template. That was the big buzzword at the time, but it got me off of processed foods and got me off of, just stuff that wasn't generally healthy for me and on to much more of a clean natural food diet. And I did my DEXA scans and my blood work before and after I made the change after eight weeks on the diet, and I saw some very interesting changes. The DEXA scan showed the visceral adipose tissue and the the abdominal fat starting to dissipate and the blood work started to show improvements in my blood sugar levels and my inflammation levels. And then I went and did the next experiment. So this was all before CGMs, Dr. Sharlin, where we had to use this prehistoric tool called the glucometer, which I still use by the way, because there's limitations with CGM. But setting that aside, then I started investigating the ketogenic diet and that kind of took paleo one step further where you were intentionally. Restricting carbohydrate levels to a point where you got into ketosis, nutritional ketosis, that's a whole other skill on its own. So I was tinkering with carbs and protein and fat and glucose levels. And then the CGMs came on the market. For the longest time they were prescription only, which was a barrier. Now they're over the counter. From Dexcom and Libre, i've been wearing a CGM for, I dunno, two or three years, and I still learn from it. I still I've mostly got it mastered at this point, so there's not a lot of things that surprise me on the CGM anymore, but I still wear it. I still find it helpful as a compliance tool. And I think learning to self calibrate your blood sugar levels. Is probably one of the highest leverage things anyone could really invest in understanding. There's lots of things you can do to improve your health, but getting your metabolic mastery under control was just something I learned in my own self experimentation.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 15:21

For folks listening, it's diet of course is a big part of it, but it's not the only thing. I recently started using a Stelo, CGM and I'm not diabetic. I have very low fasting insulin, a game changer. I was actually almost taken back by how much it influenced my thinking and my behavior. I think you've alluded to it, even if know you're not diabetic and all that, it's kinda like wearing a little genie on my arm or whatever, and not only is it insightful when I'm experiencing an increased level of emotional stress or whatever, it was very interesting to see, I am, I don't refrain from alcohol. I'm not a heavy drinker by any means, but it's very interesting to see if I have a social drink or whatever, how that influences. The blood glucose overnight in particular, it's almost shocking. But it, it is incredible accountability tool that I'd never thought when I put that on my arm that it was going to, influence me in that way. I can't say enough about how incredible it is personally.

Dave Korsunsky: 16:31

that's some of the things I first noticed back in 2011, 12 was just getting some simple data. I actually changed my behavior and I didn't have to be a medical person. I didn't have to understand a lot of complex medical terminology. In my case, it was the first time I started really measuring my sleep with a sensor. It was a bit of a rude awakening, and the numbers actually were a lot worse than I thought they were. They would be, as I started looking into it, I realized actually the data was right. I was getting six or less hours of sleep. Per night. But it had just become so normal for me. I didn't think about it and I didn't have any actual quantified data for me to speak to intelligently. Like you said, as soon as I started seeing the numbers in front of my eyes, it changed my behavior. And I said, wow if just getting some simple biofeedback can change my behavior, maybe if I made biofeedback available to other people, it could help them make healthier. Behavior choices and I realized it didn't have to be super complicated actually. It needed to be simple. So similar experience to you. It's just some of these numbers just they give you some accountability and they help you make some adjustments.

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Dr. Ken Sharlin: 19:45

Now this is a slightly different paradigm of course, because there have been the Apple watches and the Oura Rings and the Garmins and so on and so forth, and I have my phone right here. He's probably very close by. We can all look at our data with HeadsUp health. We're bringing it into a different arena where. The patients themselves and the provider can share that data and can look at it very globally. Meaning not just one parameter, but multiple parameters all at the same time. I tell my patients, and this doesn't occur in my office so much, but the very typical doctor visit is five minutes. Here's your prescription. I'll see you in six months. Doctor walks out, patients are left with questions that they never got answered, didn't, don't even know how to take their medicine properly, which happens all too much. And then six months later, we have to solve a problem, but we have to solve a problem six months later, meaning not day to day or even minute to minute, or hour to hour. And the beauty of this is this shared platform. That's what I want folks to understand, that your doctor, your providers, are looking at the same data that you can look at and if it's structured properly, meaning there's a system in place on how we're gonna look at it, how we're gonna analyze it, and what action steps can come from it. that six months is not wasted. It's huge opportunities so that when you come back and visit with the doctor, it's, what has been accomplished in six months as a result of all of this data coming in.

Dave Korsunsky: 21:25

Yeah, precisely. And there's signals in the data, Dr. Sharlin, and that can tell you if a person's responding favorably or unfavorably, even to a new medication, for example. And so we might get some clues in the heart rate variability data that someone's not responding well to a medication or treatment, or we might get some clues in the body temperature or the resting heart rate that could indicate the response is not as good as we thought it would be. And then conversely, we may get some signals in the body that indicate the program is working extremely well. So there's a lot of valuable clues we can get just from capturing more of this, what I call like real time data. What I wanted to do with HeadsUp was give people away and practitioners, first of all, to say, okay, if I can self calibrate every day instead of every six months.'cause in your example, you're waiting every six months to calibrate. You come back in, you get the blood work, maybe you tweak the medication dosage. But what I wanted to do is, okay, if I can make some smarter choices on my blood sugar every day, and I can get that instant biofeedback to see that it's working. And I can make some smarter choices on my sleep and my training. Then when I go rerun the blood work there, I'm gonna expect to see certain other markers improve. So let's just take someone who puts on A CGM for eight weeks. And works on finding the foods and activities in stressful situations that cause their blood sugar to elevate. And they start making corrections. And over the course of eight weeks or 12 weeks, they're able to start minimizing a lot of those unnecessary glucose spikes, for example. And then we run the hemoglobin A1C and the fasting insulin again, and we are able to show someone how their lifestyle changes. Lowered those two values by a meaningful number. That's the feedback loop and that's something that helps people make a connection back to the choices they make and how this actually plays out and in a clinical setting. And once you see it and you see it working, it becomes. Even more motivating. And then you wanna see, okay how much more can I improve the numbers? And then you want to ask, okay, what can I optimize next? So I think there's a feedback loop between the day-to-day real-time data, and then this periodic clinical data that we get as well. It's all a story that we can weave together.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 23:50

That is absolutely powerful and true, and it's the thing that shapes us the most we can. Going back to that B12 level, we can tell a personal whole story about their health versus this abstract concept of it's just a vitamin. You know how important is one single vitamin? it. Is much more resonant and ultimately gets to people in a way that leads to changes in behavior, which is really what we're aiming for choices and behaviors that optimize health. It's a HeadsUp, right? HeadsUp Health pay attention. I like that, you probably listened to how I built this, and I was just wondering just briefly, you had this brilliant idea and you got together and, I'm sure with other people and did the whole pitch deck approach eventually. But How did that sort of unfold? It must have been other people that you were surrounding yourself with that saw the value in what you were proposing and ultimately helped you form this company.

Dave Korsunsky: 24:47

Yeah, it was. It actually took me a couple years to figure out how to even start. You have an idea, but you've never started a software company before. You're just a guy with an idea like, Hey, there's a better way to do this. And so like a lot of, like a lot of companies I just started solving my own problem. And used a little bit of my own money to build version one of the software that, that got it to a point that was usable for me. Yeah, and then I went and found some other people that had the same problem I had. It was going out there and figuring out at that time it was early, Dr. Sharlin, we're talking like 2015, 2016. None of these sensors had been invented. There was no such thing as an Oura ring or a CGM or a wireless scale, or none of this stuff had even been invented yet. So I needed to find some other crazy people out there. Who needed what? I had, your early adopters, if you will, and I found some communities of early adopters. These were mainly people who did have a medical reason and a need to very carefully self monitor people who were dealing with type two diabetes or autoimmune or really trying to work on weight loss. And so I found these communities of people that needed what I had. And started building this initial cohort of users. It was free at the time, and I started seeing people start to use the system more. And then I started learning how to raise money that's a whole other world in and of itself, and started to raise investment capital to, to build the software faster and bring on more software developers. And then continuing down that process. Ultimately it's been a, I dunno, I've been full time on it now for seven or eight years and a lot of those first four or five years were just being too early in the industry and just honestly needing to stay alive. Like healthcare as we understand it today was not where it was 10 years ago. There was not this mindset of individual agency. Over health and there was not as much of an emphasis on integrative and proactive and health optimization. And so the first few years we're just hanging in there and waiting for the market to mature. And fast forward to today and we're in a very exciting space in digital health and some of the conversations you and I had just before we came on the air were now how artificial intelligence is even coming into the conversation, which. Didn't even exist back in the day. So then you just go on this long insane founder journey, Dr. Sharlin, that we could go on for quite some time about, but it was a humbling and rewarding experience, just being a guy with an idea that went out and figure it out how to make it happen.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 27:41

Yeah. And in the end that sort of cliche we describe as entrepreneurs as being problem solvers, right? Solving a key problem. And on that sort of very stereotyped doctor's office visit. Here's your script. You've got Parkinson's, here's some levodopa. Carbidopa. I'll see in six months, take it three times a day, make an appointment upfront. changing the paradigm, and there's no doubt, and I'm just curious what you guys are seeing, but it's like worlds colliding because. attended for example, the American Academy Anti-Aging Medicine, a4m. Las Vegas last December. And that's, I think where I met you guys and they said it was by far their largest annual meeting by far ever. So there's this subculture, if you will, of functional and regenerative practitioners who understand, have seen the light. Some of them are much more advanced in how they're approaching problems. Some of them are. In the early stages of the learning curve, but they know that medicine has to be different than it is today. And yet, just a few months earlier, I attended the International Congress on Movement Disorder and Parkinson's Disease in Philadelphia, biggest worldwide con meeting for movement disorders. And while there are innovators that are there, there are scientists, there are people getting up on the stage talking to. Thousands of people in the audience about things like mindfulness based meditation and diet. It's still to them theoretical. It's they did the study and that's important. I'm not in any, criticizing that. But what I am saying is at some point it has to move from the research paper and the controlled trial into the everyday practice in the clinic. And what that really tells me is while we have many people who are following this principle of what we're discussing today, there are still many more people who are not. Yet they are not even, and when I say people, I'm talking about practitioners, medical administrators, people who are really moving the mark and defining what is medicine today. What is your experience like when you are going to the doctor? And so I'm wondering what on your end, what you guys are seeing. How do you see. medicine changing in terms of the adoption of your platform and are wanting when they ask for customizations and what's been the trend.

Dave Korsunsky: 30:06

Yeah. Just a couple things there, Dr. Sharlin, before I specifically dive in, I've also been going to the a4m conference for seven plus years now, and I remember many years walking into that exhibitor hall where you and I met, and most years it was largely empty. The practitioners were in session getting educated and getting their credits and literally you could hear a pin drop in that exhibitor hall. And last year, for some reason, it just. Blew the doors off and maybe that was a tipping point moment in the industry. It's encouraging and exciting to see more interest in this regenerative, anti-aging preventative market. That's the market that we're seeing the most interest from. And the way we look at it is three buckets. We have these integrative and functional medicine. Practices that are coming to us, and they're typically working on complex chronic conditions, and they're using a lot of integrative and functional approaches. They're running a lot of functional diagnostic testing. And so they really need help taking all of that functional diagnostic data and getting that organized and structured and ready for analysis. They are also the first community of doctors several years ago that came to us and had an actual clinical need.

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Dave Korsunsky: 33:17

To get the sensor data from their patients, they wanted to see the blood sugar readings at home and they had the time and the resources to request information on things like sleep and blood sugar and blood pressure at home. So they were the first ones that were really motivated'cause this data helped them in their approach. So that was the first community. The second area that we're seeing a lot of interest for is in what's called concierge medicine direct primary care, where you're essentially working with like a VIP type doctor almost, where you still have your insurance if you have to get a serious procedure done, but most of your primary care is being delivered through a doctor that you're paying out of pocket for. And again these clinics all are operating outside of the insurance system which by default means they have more time. To invest in the treatment plan and understanding the patient and working on all the optimization stuff that, that just doesn't fit into the insurance model. And so a lot of the work they're doing is looking for ways to further enhance the health of their patients. So that would be the third group that has a real interest in understanding more about their patient's health. And then the last one I'd bucket is some. Longevity medicine, which is really looking at how do we extend the health span and the lifespan to the greatest degree possible. And these clinics are starting to run a lot of advanced diagnostics early where you may not have any health issues at all at age 40 or 50, but they're gonna run a an early detection cancer screen. And they're gonna run a baseline, MRI and a baseline clearly scan on you. And so they're gonna look for anything that's like an iceberg that you might not know about. And then they're gonna start working on all of the more advanced areas. To optimize health. Everything we're doing, Dr. Sharlin, at least for now is outside of insurance medicine. The one exception to that would actually be some of our clinics that are billing insurance for remote patient monitoring. And so that is an insurance reimbursable. Event. And so with that one, you're monitoring people who have a chronic condition, let's say hypertension or diabetes, and that individual patient, if they're measuring at home, I think it's 16 readings per month or something like that, transmitted electronically by an FDA approved medical device. Then there's reimbursement for those types of monitoring use cases, but that's a small part of our business.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 36:03

But still important. It's the old money makes the world go round and it's not about necessarily getting wealthy, but it's being able to pay for the technology that really brings value to people's lives or, and value to the practitioners who are trying to help folks. I did want to ask you about these recent Medicare and insurance reimbursement codes for RPM look at it from both perspectives. On one hand, widening the potential to broaden the audience because, I get the question all the time, does my insurance cover this? Functional medicine, not typically right. But if I can open the doors. To more patients with, these functional medicine principles, I can truly create healthcare. So there's improving the upleveling, people's individual lives and the value that they receive from the healthcare system. And then there's this concept of value-based care, more on the insurance and reimbursement side saying, I'm not just gonna run a clinic where I can see how many patients I can see in a day. Because this quote, fee for service model really drives volume. It says, if I'm gonna get paid the more I get, more people I see, the more I get paid. And I have an expensive practice, so therefore I have to see. This number of people on a daily basis just to keep my lights on. and now we can start to say, Hey, I'm not seeing as many folks, but the outcomes I'm getting for your covered lives. Sort of talking to insurance company, so much better than the guy down the road who's just cranking out a patient every five minutes. I should be in reimbursed at a higher level. So I can sustain this business and improve people's lives and indirectly save the insurance company money.'cause people aren't as sick. So I think your company is really pivotal on both sides of that, of, helping doctors to implement the platform because there are financial resources for doing so and then helping patients. to understand that by then bringing value-based care and they can turn around and renegotiate contracts and it's really in the end about getting better outcomes for our patients.

Dave Korsunsky: 38:10

Yeah, and then hopefully that opens the door to start bringing a lot more of the treatments that are not covered. Into a covered model where there's incentives based on value-based care, for example and maybe there's a future where things like hyperbaric oxygen and physical activity and other things we know work really well, is there a future where those can start to fold in under the insurance model so that they're available to more people. It's not everyone can afford functional, integrative, concierge longevity medicine. So how do we start to bring those types of things down market? I think there's hope in the insurance world that value-based care can start to offer those kinds of benefits. It's not my area of expertise, but the little that I do know about it is can we start to move some of these health and wellness strategies into the insurance model?

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 39:06

Yeah, and we can, in our thinking about using HeadsUp Health at Sharlin Health and Neurology has been, even potentially having different tiers of engagement because everyone deserves healthcare, not here's a blood pressure pill. See you in six months. How long do I take this? Probably forever if I stop it. What happens? Your blood pressure goes right back up. And then of course, most of the time the drug doesn't even prevent the problem that they're taking the medicine for in the first place. So in the end, we have this platform that truly. Does change people's lives, does change the practice of medicine, does create true healthcare, and now we're at the verge of a whole other. We're at the beginning of another revolution. that is AI. And there's been some changes in your company globally, of course, in regard to AI. It was a few years ago. I didn't even know what that was. Of course. So it has changed really human existence entirely. Almost Steve Jobs inventing the iPhone are certainly equivalent, if not an even greater invention. Let's talk a little bit about AI and what's been happening at HeadsUp Health and the future of that and how you see AI ultimately being a critical part of this platform, this tool.

Dave Korsunsky: 40:25

Yeah, I think, as I mentioned earlier, AI didn't exist when I started working on HeadsUp, I just knew there's a future where we could extract a lot more value from this data. That's all I knew. Just based on my experience working in analytics, I knew that in healthcare the data was completely underutilized and the potential of it was completely untapped. I didn't know how we would fully unlock it, step one of unlocking it was. HeadsUp as it existed today, which is cleaning the data, building trendlines, creating reports and tools to go in and analyze it. And that's still important. That's like analytics as we've understood them up to present day. But with AI, we start to open up new possibilities and specifically as it pertains to working with data, for example, there are ways that we can start to interact with data using natural language. For example, so a practitioner can log in and almost have a conversational experience with all of the biomarkers on a specific individual. It makes it much easier and much less complicated to start asking questions and getting answers. We don't have to bring our SQL developer in and spend three days gathering requirements to build the report exactly the way the clinician wants it. That's the old way of doing things. Now we can come in and with a few simple prompts, we can build that same report for the doctor in a self-service model. And it's probably better than the way we would've done it before. So it makes data easier to interact with, first and foremost. It makes it less complicated to interact with. We're able to look at a lot more biomarkers, like you said at the beginning of the show, even 50 50 individual biomarkers on a lab report. It's a lot of data to process. And then you have the previous 10 results for all 50 of those biomarkers. And then you have to look at it in the context of all of the other data for that individual. So the computational power to be able to ask for analysis on the entire data set or make a treatment plan for a specific. Outcome based on all of the knowledge the system has on the individual that we can surface to you, the clinician, what you need to do is then review it all and overlay it with the contextual information that the AI doesn't have, but it can potentially do a lot of the. Heavy lifting where you get something that's 80% complete and potentially far more thorough and comprehensive than something you, you could sit down and build on your own because it happens so much faster and the system gets better and better at generating these things. So I think we'll be in a world where interacting with the data becomes faster, it becomes easier. The treatment plans we generate the. Mundane stuff that we have to do as, as part of this stuff is also easy to start automating and building agents to do a lot of the rote work. So can we eliminate a lot of the things that suck up your time that can be automated to let you spend more time on the stuff you really wanna work on. So there's that potential and then. The example you and I talked about at the beginning of the show is can we start to scale and can we start to build agents in a practice trained to do very specific things? And can we then potentially have a coach who is interacting with a set of agents all trained to do very specific things? And can that introduce a new level of. Service in a practice. This is all still very new and it's emerging and it's exploratory, but HeadsUp is now owned by and partnered with an AI company to help us do more of this work, extract more value from the data, enhance and augment everything a practitioner does, and most importantly is give each practice like yours. Access to all of the AI tools on all of your patient data in a secure and HIPAA compliant way, which means nothing you put into the system is going into any of the public models. It's your own private enclosed. Access to all of these AI tools that you can use within your practice exclusively. So gives you everything you need in a secure, HIPAA compliant container to do the kind of work you want to do. And then we can help, we can come in and help you build all the automation and all the agents that you want us to build to help you do the work you do more effectively, more efficiently and generate better outcomes.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 45:20

I wholeheartedly agree, and there's a lot there, and some of the listeners may not be as familiar with. What agentic AI is and some of the technical terms it use, but think the bigger picture is the ability to analyze data, to use just natural language, both on the side of the physician, but even on the patient. It's like I've had patients look at the or Ring app and I love the Wer ring, but I, it, that app is not straightforward to imagine. you click on an app and all that comes up is say a blank screen with a little maybe circle in the center that sort of goes ww, and you say. What does my heart rate variability data? Tell me about how I am doing today. And it goes tick tick, tick. And it goes, I noticed that based on da, and have you considered this, and this? And they don't even have they can go into the app if they want to. They can look under the hood and look at their data, but they can get that very global view in human language, in the way that they will understand. And then per these agents. Take action, right? It's always information should lead to an action step. Otherwise, information is just information. So I do think that piece of it is critical. But I also wanted to speak to something that you mentioned, and you may not have heard of this or seen it, but we, like a lot of people, my wife and I like to listen to podcasts and she brought to my attention and interview with Deepak Chopra Chopra developed his own. AI tool. I don't think he developed the actual language model that underlies it probably. But like many entrepreneurs created a, an AI engine that suits his philosophy and needs. And when he was being interviewed about this, the person interviewing in closing said, any final thoughts, any final suggestions? And he said, yes. He said, when you engage in an AI was chat Claude, whatever his, the first thing that you should ask is, who am I? And I thought that was very interesting. And I actually went on to the standard, the Chat and Claude and Perplexity and Gemini and so forth. And I asked, who am I? And I did it with his platform too, which you can get on and it was interesting'cause I got different answers and some of them knew a lot more about me than others. But my point is that to really at the heart of HeadsUp Health is this revolution in personalized precision medicine is that it's not just the ability to be precise, but it's the ability to be precise within my own unique biochemical genetic makeup, and even my. Belief system, my narrative. Who am I? What am I? Where am I going? What are my goals? What do I wanna accomplish? And the more these agents, the more these engines can really understand who that person is, the communication they get back, the way that data is then used and implemented and structured for action steps will be highly individualized as well, and fit within the narrative of who that patient actually is.

Dave Korsunsky: 48:31

That's beautiful. I wholeheartedly agree that it can really start to bring in the contextual information as well, just by bringing in more of that qualitative type of conversational experience. As well. And then working to integrate that in with the biometric data and in with the practitioner who then starts to help synthesize the ultimate recommendations. So there's really interesting ways that, that these tools will come together along with the data, the contextual information. And our goal is to deliver this to practitioners. First and foremost as a tool for them, and then you guys will be able to go in and make any tweaks that you wanna make and then just use that as part of the way you personalize the treatment for each individual.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 49:19

Give, be able to reach people who you know, the haves and the have less, if you will. Even if you're not able to afford that, whatever, how many thousand dollars you know, you wanna go see Dr. Mark Hyman and his fancy clinic and the Berkshires in Massachusetts and whatever, and I'm just making that up'cause he's well known, functional medicine doctor. But my point is that everyone should have access to data and everyone should have access to action steps. And yes, of course some people do get to drive the fancier cars for just using an analogy. But solidly built. Car can still get you from point A to point B. It may not have the, quite the, how many horsepower, whatever, zero to 60. But it doesn't really matter in the end, and we look at the blue zones, those are. People who live beyond a hundred or to a hundred at least. And the fundamentals of how they got there are really accessible to all of us. And I think this, hopefully this, the capabilities of this platform will also level the playing field. That yes, we can have some bells and whistles for those who wanna go that further step with it, but the fundamentals of what it offers folks will be accessible to everyone.

Dave Korsunsky: 50:35

Yeah. I think if we can have the best of both worlds, Dr. Sharlin, it's learning what we can from these regions of the world that do have these wonderfully high life expectancies and probably none of them are wearing Oura rings and CGMs. But can we distill out the learnings from these types of communities and then augment it? With technology and then can we get a one plus one equals three type of a situation where we take the best of ancient wisdom and the best of natural, organic blue zone living, augment that with the best technology that we have, and then use technology to help it scale and potentially create outcomes that are even better than the blue zones.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 51:15

Yeah. And the reason the Blue Zones are successful isn't just because these people do the things that they do. It's because it is part of the narrative of that culture and how that culture operates. I'm sure if you brought an aura ring to, Okinawa and its community, and they'd look at you like. What the heck is that? And why would I even want that? But we are in the United States in this westernized grand culture we call the United States of America. We are very data driven. We make decisions based on different things than many people might make. we have a shared humanity, but what drives our decision making might be different. And so we tend to thrive on a platform. In our country where it might not even make as much sense in a different culture. That's not to say there isn't value. Of course there is. But then to your point, we can extract the fundamentals from the blue zones and then with data we can take it to an even higher level as well.

Dave Korsunsky: 52:19

I love it, and I think the data's getting easier and easier to collect. I think the technology's becoming more accessible. You can get. Extremely high quality blood work now run for a few hundred dollars. You can get commercial off the shelf sensors that provide in incredible ways to self calibrate health. And now we have the tools to start making more intelligent use of that data. You're right, I think we are in a society that has a. An aptitude and a desire to learn more from data. That's the world we're playing in. That's the future that, that we're creating where these numbers can be predictive and proactive and helpful and that's the mission for HeadsUp, is to continue pioneering a world where the data can help us and it can help. Make intelligent decisions and it can be proactive and predictive and preventative. So that's our mission. That's the work we're pioneering in the world, is just unlocking more value from the data that we have.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 53:20

It's wonderful. We've been talking to Dave Korsunsky. He's the. Founder and CEO of HeadsUp Health is a Scottsdale based digital health analytics company. I can tell you for a guy with the boots on the ground, we're really at the beginning of our journey. We've been working with them for a few months, developing, evolving, I should say, our. Our platform, the Brain tuneup protocol, and now putting it into this digital space that it's HeadsUp health. But I just see a limitless future with this, and I would certainly encourage providers or people who know, providers are listening to explore this for themselves. It is, without a doubt, it is the future. Dave. Any final thoughts and I do wanna say thank you so much for being part of the Healthy Brain Toolbox podcast.

Dave Korsunsky: 54:07

Yeah. Thank you Dr. Sharlin, and first of all, it's just an honor to be working with you professionally. And thank you for having us here on the show today. I do think you'll be one of the clinics that is gonna be very progressive on our system. You've already done a lot of thinking of what the future holds with data and AI and you're the type of clinic that we wanna work with to go out and pioneer and build these new models. So I think we're in the early innings of working together, but I'm excited to continue the journey and thank you for having me on the show.

Dr. Ken Sharlin: 54:36

Thank you so much. We look forward to the next episode of Healthy Brain Toolbox, with more exciting folks to chat with. Really appreciate the audience sticking with us today. And if you. Have any questions, you can certainly reach out to questions@healthybraintoolbox.com. Thanks again, Dave. Have a great weekend.

Dave Korsunsky: 54:57

Thank you, Dr. Sharlin.

COMMERCIAL BREAK: 55:02

Hi everyone. Dr. Ken Sharlin here with the Healthy Brain Toolbox. I'd love to hear from you. If you have general questions about brain health, neurology, or the science of keeping your brain sharp. Send them to questions@healthybraintoolbox.com. I'll be reading your questions on the upcoming episodes. Please remember, these need to be general questions, can't answer personal medical questions, or provide individual medical advice. So if you've ever wondered about brain health strategies, lifestyle tips, new research, or the future of neuroscience, send those questions in. I look forward to hearing from you and who knows? You might even hear your question featured on the show.

outro: 55:54

Thank you for tuning into the Healthy Brain Toolbox podcast. I hope today's conversation gave you new insights to protect and nourish your brain. Be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share this episode with anyone looking to take control of their health. Until next time, stay sharp and keep learning.