Effective leaders have strong organizational skills and the ability to prioritize — for themselves, others, and their organization. It is also critical for an effective leader, and her/his leadership team, to have the ability to see beyond a current situation and leverage that vision to inspire and lead people – in good times, in tough times, and for the long haul. One such visionary leader is John Hervey, the CEO of Cota Healthcare. His innovative mind, work intensity, and risk-taking appetite has brought him to where he is today.
Initial Journey
John’s career began as a research analyst on Wall Street, where he learned to evaluate how companies perform against goals, strategy, and marketplace variables. This foundation assisted him in a progression of growth opportunities in investment banks, focused on the technology and healthcare sectors. These vital exposures led him to Cota Healthcare where he was initially inducted onto the board before becoming CEO.
Source of Inspiration
Cancer has touched John personally as both his parents had cancer. With Cota, he realized there could be a better way to enable both the understanding of an individual’s cancer and to enable the optimal decisions along the treatment path. “Losing my father, to cancer, is my daily inspiration for what we do and what we will accomplish,” asserts John. He feels lucky to have the opportunity to bring all his experiences together to help drive a sea change in how cancer is treated.
About the Company
New York based Cota Healthcare is a real-world data and analytics company that enables providers, payers, and life science companies involved in diagnosing and treating complex diseases to optimize the outcomes of individual patients and lower the overall cost of the patient population served. The company does this using the patented Cota Nodal Address™ (CNA) system, a unique digital classification methodology built by leading physicians and data scientists. Cota’s breakthrough CNA system is the first and only system that precisely categorizes patient factors, their diseases, and intended therapies, enabling precision medicine at scale.
Cota’s technology abstracts and enriches medical records to create research-grade data and joins it with a suite of analysis, visualization, and management tools. This enables providers, payers, and life science companies to analyze report on and research outcomes, costs, treatments, and quality at any granularity and stage of the patient journey. The analysis permits comparisons of clinically similar patient cohorts and their treatments and outcomes across physicians and sites of care. The clinical provider can evaluate/optimize treatment plans using multiple longitudinal outcome measures such as overall and progression-free survival, response to treatment, side effects, functional status, and more. Cota’s real-world evidence sets are being used by life science companies to expand the application of precise clinical data to broaden the efficacies and lower the costs of clinical trials.
Courage at the core is John’s Biggest Strength
“It was challenging to leave an industry and role that I knew extremely well and had remarkable success in, to embark upon something new that no one had ever done before. The risk was to be accountable to take it to the next level of development and operationalization.” asserts John. While describing his most notable risk, John says, “that risk was well worth taking and the reward is the result of what our team, investors and partners have created – and the impact of this on so many.”
Company’s Achievements
The milestones Cota Healthcare has already attained show that confidence is growing in its unique approach. They are the Real-World Evidence partner for Memorial Sloan Kettering, Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, IBM/Watson, and IQVIA – the largest healthcare data company in the world. As well, the company has enabled pioneering bundled payment options with one of the strongest regional payers in the country and has a growing customer portfolio of health systems and cancer treatment centers across the United States.
Industry Overview from the CEO’s Perspective
There is increasing interest in this part of the healthcare industry- and with good reason. Finally, there are real world approaches to analyzing and grouping an enormous amount of data that can be applied to develop treatment options, test those options, make treatment decisions, and optimize a treatment path. While a number of companies are now selling treatment data to life sciences, Cota alone has the mission to first help the patient and the care provider. John adds, “While our CNA has application to other diseases, we have started with cancer. Cancer is one of the most complex diseases on the planet and the need for a system to analyze data and provide treatment decision support is high – so we are tackling it first.”
“Our approach is both disruptive to how treatment decisions can be made and enables those decisions to be based on real world evidence places in the hands of the oncologist,” concludes John.
