People behind healthcare innovation: Interview with Arun Gupta, Chairman and CEO of Big Health

As part of our work, we have the privilege to speak with many inspiring innovators. Although the business community usually focuses on companies, pitches, and valuations—and less on the innovator—we thought it would be interesting to learn a bit more about the people behind healthcare innovation. In this series, we’re sharing some of our conversations with innovators in a condensed format to gain insights into their experience, their opinions, and their learnings.

This latest conversation is with Arun Gupta, Chairman and CEO of Big Health, a digital therapeutics company providing safe and effective non-drug treatments for the most common mental health conditions.

Amy: What’s your story, and how did you become an innovator in health care?  

Arun: It has always been about purpose for me. I never set out to become an entrepreneur, and I most definitely never saw myself going so deep into healthcare. I was assigned to work with several pharma and payer organizations when I first started at McKinsey. What struck me right away was how healthcare as an industry was so excruciatingly complicated, yet held so much opportunity for innovation and enormous potential for social impact. Most people search for years before finding rewarding, purposeful work; a lot of people never do. It just so happens that technology entrepreneurship plus healthcare provided me the perfect opportunity to attempt massive, positive social change by building innovative companies.

Amy: Where do you see digital therapeutic offerings moving to in the next ten years? 

Arun: We have a significantly inadequate mental healthcare system, not just in the US but globally. We need to start by acknowledging that. Patient demand is far outstripping the supply of trained clinicians. Most patients get little to no care, and of those who do, there is an eight-to-one ratio of prescription-medication-only versus therapy. This is not consistent with accepted clinical guidelines and scientific evidence that clearly shows many patients can successfully manage these common mental health conditions and live full lives. I can think of no other area of medicine where we so frequently deliver non-guideline medical care.

We desperately need a new, expanded treatment paradigm. I believe digital therapeutics will undoubtedly play a big role in meeting that need. For ten years now, innovators have built leading digital therapeutic products, proving their safety and efficacy in peer review and clinical trials as a much-needed frontline form of care. The next ten years will be about scaling across the healthcare ecosystem, with universal adoption in clinical practice and widespread reimbursement. It’s a standard diffusion of the innovation process that unfortunately takes longer in healthcare, but appropriately so, given we are dealing with patients’ mental health. 

Amy: Looking more broadly, what are the biggest opportunities and obstacles you see for innovation in the healthcare environment?  

Arun: To date, much of the innovation and increase in healthcare spending has gone toward chronic disease and the extension of life. For example, we’ve seen a renaissance in both pharmaceutical innovations and acute/episodic surgical interventions, such as advances in cancer care. What I see as big opportunities over the next couple of decades are interventions that improve the quality of life throughout a person’s lifespan. Those are the innovations that will garner larger pieces of this ever-growing market, and they are worthwhile, in my opinion, relative to the funding we are putting into health systems globally. As one of the biggest drivers of overall health and wellness, mental health is clearly one area that will receive heightened investment in this trend.

Amy: When you look at the health system as a whole (providers, payers, regulators, doctors, patients), where did you see the most/least openness to innovation? 

Arun: In our experience, both employers and pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) have embraced the innovation of our digital mental health therapeutics—collaborating with us and co-creating new partnerships. These two groups have served as powerful third-party proponents in demonstrating the value of digital therapeutics, as they can directly realize the cost-benefit of addressing unmanaged mental health across their populations. Working together, we’ve crafted tailored programs to help employers and health plan customers provide their employees and members with “anywhere, anytime” access to our evidence-based digital therapeutics for the most common conditions, such as insomnia, anxiety, and adolescent depression.

Amy: In your opinion, what is the single most important change that will better enable digital transformation in health systems?

Arun: More than just my opinion, let me touch on something that patients are increasingly demanding and voting for with their feet [1]. Seamless, patient-centered integration between digital and physical modalities is not only critical but in my view, inevitable. Digital therapeutics are not here to replace physical healthcare modalities; however, they’re effective, they scale efficiently and can be delivered conveniently. For these reasons, the best-of-both-worlds integration of digital and physical is undoubtedly going to play an important role in enabling a newly evolved mental healthcare ecosystem to take a big bite out of the unacceptable care gap that now exists. How fast that integration can occur remains to be seen, but based on the collaboration and receptivity we’ve encountered from Big Health’s partners and other stakeholders across the board, it could be happening faster than anticipated. And with the mental health needs of so many people hanging in the balance, the prospect of faster, yet surefooted, progress is a very good thing.

Amy: What do you know now that you wish you had known when you were starting out as an innovator and entrepreneur?  

Arun: Healthcare is hard, really hard. It’s complex, fragmented, regulated, and often stalled by the inertia of outdated processes and legacy workflows. In reality, it is way harder to innovate than I ever anticipated—especially compared with my earlier endeavors in the worlds of consumer or enterprise software. But it is so worth it. I did not appreciate the full cycle of rewards that I would experience helping companies scale and provide superior experiences and outcomes within healthcare. That’s such a privilege to partake in and worth all the painful slogging required to innovate in this sector.

For more information, see Arun Gupta and Big Health.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and her guest contributor and do not reflect the views of McKinsey & Company.

[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200713005099/en/Change-Healthcare---Harris-Poll-Research-Half-of-Consumers-Avoid-Seeking-Care-Because-It%E2%80%99s-Too-Hard