Video: Optum's Michael Weissel Talks Data Analytics, Partnerships, and Wellness

Editor's Note: At last year's Oliver Wyman Health Innovation Summit, we partnered with Thrive Global to conduct a series of real-time interviews with healthcare leaders from a variety of sectors to learn more about health and healthcare from a holistic vantage point. Our conversations identified executive strategies, tools, and even garnered a sneak peek into different people's daily wellness habits. Here, we share an interview with Thrive Global's Agapi Stassinopoulos and Optum's Michael Weissel. Check out more Summit interviews here.

Michael Weissel at the 2018 Health Innovation Summit

Video Highlights

• [00:24] "It was a long journey [starting a practice at Oliver Wyman]. We officially got it off the ground in 2007. It's a proud moment for me to be here, to see how it's become something much bigger. The first one of these sessions was probably 30 or 40 people in Dallas, 7 or 8 years ago. You look at it now, and it's incredible. A 'proud father' moment for me."

• [1:15] "Optum [has] about $100 billion in revenue and 150,000 employees. We're involved in many different aspects of the healthcare system. Our mission is helping people live healthier lives and helping make the health system work better for everyone. We're heavily in the data analytics world, the pharma world, and we run and manage primary care practices and surgery centers of our own, and help with the healthcare infrastructure as well as working with payers, providers, and employers on the administrative side of healthcare.”

• [2:45] “Today inside of Optum we have 120 lives of claims data that go back as far as 25 years, and almost 100 million lives of clinical data."

• [3:25] "We use data extensively in helping hospital systems ensure they're getting paid correctly for the work they actually do."

• [4:18] "We're really excited to partner with [The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation] with what we call OptumLabs. OptumLabs is our research laboratory (not in the "test tube" sense, but in the "data" sense) of how we can use all our claims data (120 million lives) to do new kinds of research."

• [5:03] "Isolation can be as bad for your health as smoking a few packs of cigarettes a day."

• [6:43] "We have a [health] platform we call 'Rally'. On this platform, people can upload [information] from their Fitbits, track their physical well-being, [and] track what they're eating. We're looking for [ways] to help them, [like] wellness coaching, digital programs that help people make changes in their lives, and mindfulness programs."