Twin Health’s chief medical officer shares how digital twins can improve health

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For five and a half years, Lisa Shah has served as chief medical officer and EVP at health tech Twin Health.

A hospitalist by training, she now oversees all patient-facing staff at the company, which is looking to fight metabolic issues using digital twins to help patients learn more about their health.

Around the world, an estimated 1.5 billion adults have some kind of metabolic issue like high blood pressure, obesity, or diabetes. Her first patients in the Twin program? Her parents, who both had Type 2 diabetes and are now off medications.

Shah sat down with Healthcare Brew to talk about her role, how the company helped her parents, and how clinical experience can enhance technology.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What’s your day-to-day like?

I oversee our clinical team, so our providers, coaches, nurses, medical assistants, sensor specialists, and our member experience leads. I oversee research at Twin, our innovation arm, our workflows, and our clinical products. I oversee marketing at Twin, so how do we communicate to our members? I oversee our implementation and our member experience team, making sure our members are staying in the program and are happy.

When we first launched in the US, the product was really targeting people living with Type 2 diabetes, which both my parents had…My dad was 76 at the time. My mother was 71. Now they both are A1C under 6.5 and off meds. That’s a really incredible thing to be able to say I’ve been able to help my family through my work.

What does the Twin program do, and why is it so effective?

AI digital twin is a new standard of care because it gives personalized information directly in an app. So nutrition, medications, stress, sleep, and activity. We use sensor technology to build the AI digital twin of human metabolism as well as labs…And it creates a replica of their unique metabolism, very precise to them.

That AI digital twin takes all of those unique behaviors—takes 3,000 data points a day on each individual from the sensors—matches it with those behaviors, and looks at what specifically makes your blood sugar go up, makes your weight go in the wrong direction, makes your heart rate recovery change, makes you [have] different glucose spikes, makes you feel sick with your medication. We analyze all that continuously and every day, we are able to give people three or four precise opportunities of things that can change in that day.

How important is it to bring clinical expertise into health techs?

I always knew I wanted to help people, but I think one of the things that was really frustrating for me in clinical practice was how impersonal the work felt. I had 17 minutes with a patient, if even, to talk about the last 90 to 180 to 365 days of their health. And some of the data I’m looking at isn’t real time.

The solution was always high-cost meds because we couldn’t really get people to change their lifestyle or point to solution ideas like keto diet. What I love about Twin is in my role, I really get to bring solutions to problems that have been around forever, that physicians and clinicians and organizations have been trying to solve, but in a really personalized way that allows the patient to be accountable.