Five Questions with BEKhealth Founder, Jason Baumgartner

In our latest blog, Jason discusses the impetus for starting BEKhealth, the company’s overarching mission, and the role he hopes BEKhealth will play in improving access to clinical research for larger portions of the population and accelerating approval of new life enhancing medicines.

What inspired you to start BEKHealth?

Throughout my 20 years in the healthcare industry, I’d heard about issues related to identifying the right patients for the right clinical trials in clinical research but had never actually been in a medical center or seen for myself how research was being conducted. When I finally had the opportunity, I was surprised by how manual and time consuming of a process it was and realized a massive problem existed. For clinical research to impact society more positively, there needed to be a better way to provide research sites with products, tools, and automation capabilities. In creating BEKHealth, I saw an opportunity to be part of something that could improve people’s lives.

How would you describe BEKhealth’s mission?

Our mission is to provide more patients with the option of participating in clinical research and help speed the introduction and approval of life-improving therapies. In most situations, a clinical study can be the difference between a person suffering with a chronic disease or enjoying a great life. Today, 95 percent of healthcare providers don’t provide any research options to their patients at all. We want to give a much higher percentage of the population access to clinical trials.

What impact do you hope BEKhealth will have on the clinical research industry?

We want to massively expand the number of patients who have access to clinical studies. We also want to make it easier for pharmaceutical companies to find patients and sites. Our platform has the capacity to connect all sides of the market. We can help Sponsors find the right patients and design better trials and allow research institutions to recruit the right patients more quickly, all of which will lead to the approval of innovative drugs with greater speed.

Why are BEKhealth’s solutions relevant right now?

The healthcare industry is under tremendous pressure, for many reasons. As organizations have broadly adopted EMR databases in the past 10 years, the challenge of extracting and interpreting the 70 percent of unstructured data residing in the form of physician’s notes is laborious and time consuming and has become a massive problem for healthcare workers who are burning out and retiring. Our product addresses these problems, making the lives and jobs of the healthcare worker a little easier. Separately, serious diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s are becoming more commonplace, placing an undue burden on the healthcare system. BEKhealth is accelerating the process of finding therapies to not only improve health outcomes but relieve some of those pressures.

What are your long-term aspirations for BEKhealth?

We are striving to create a new operating model in clinical research where Sponsors can rapidly and precisely determine where patient populations are to ultimately make better decisions on where to deploy clinical trials. We want to bring the markets together and change the way the industry has historically operated. Because of the richness of the data we have, we can influence trial design and site selection. For research sites, we want to help make sure they have the tools to select the right studies, recruit patients faster, and expand their trial portfolio, making it easier for more physicians to participate in research.