David Bardan of CLEAR Gets Clear on Healthcare

Melanie Marcus: Our guest today is David Bardan, Head of Healthcare at CLEAR. And yes, it’s the same CLEAR you see at airports in line for security. 

But what does CLEAR have to do with healthcare? Well, that can be summed up with something David says on the episode. And I quote: “CLEAR’s experience in the airport has proven that secure, fast and user-friendly identity verification is possible. And healthcare deserves the same standards.” 

And I’d add that healthcare deserves these high standards because that’s what patients deserve.  

Today, David lives and works in New York City, where CLEAR is headquartered, but he grew up in southwestern Minnesota. 

At family gatherings, the subject of healthcare was—and is—front and center. And there’s good reason for that: David’s family is made up of physicians, pharmacists, dentists, and really, providers of all stripes. David followed in their footsteps, but not as a provider. He has learned that the business of healthcare can have as big an impact on patients as the providers who care for them. 

David says, “It’s been quite rewarding to be in the industry on the business side.” And our listeners are about to find out why. 

I'm very happy to have you as a guest on our show, David, and I'm looking forward to a deep dive into the subject of identity in healthcare. 

David Bardan: Thank you, Melanie. I'm happy to be here. 

Marcus: We can think of identity in healthcare as really the universal ecosystem or identity ecosystem that's used to streamline patient and provider experience. So we make sure each patient or provider is who they say they are, and it's important to protect health data. 

So, let's start with an overarching question to lay the groundwork for our discussion. My question has to do with the 2023 feature in Forbes titled, “What Do Airports and Emergency Rooms Have In Common?” You took part in this feature with your CEO at CLEAR, Caryn Seidman Becker. So David, what do airports and emergency rooms have in common? 

Bardan: Look, I think both have a fundamental challenge, right? Verifying identity in moments that are high stakes, high pressure, and quite frankly, time sensitive. And in both environments, identity is foundational. CLEAR's experience in the airport has really proven that secure, fast and user-friendly identity verification is possible, and healthcare really deserves the same standards. 

Marcus: Oh, I love that. High stakes, high pressure, time sensitive. That makes total sense.  

We are going to come back to that shortly, but first I think all of our listeners really enjoy hearing, and I do too, a little bit about what brought you to where you are. I know you went to the University of Minnesota and then you went off to get your MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Did you grow up in Minnesota? 

Bardan: I did. I actually grew up in a small town in southwest Minnesota called Worthington. 

Marcus: Was there anything in your growing up that sparked an interest in healthcare? 

Bardan: Yeah, I actually grew up with a number of different types of practitioners in healthcare—a whole family of physicians. 

My parents ironically met in medical school. But in terms of my broader family, we've got everything from pediatrics to oncologists to pharmacists to dentists. So it was a number of family gatherings where the topic would always be about healthcare. 

Marcus: Wow, that's a lot of healthcare in your family! And yet you didn't go into the provider side of healthcare. You went into the business side of healthcare. So how did that happen? 

Bardan: That's right. I actually nearly did. In high school I actually applied for a number of pre-med and pre-dentistry programs. This was something I had agreed to with my parents that I would at least try. And I actually did get into a few, but my passion was just truly not there as a healthcare provider. 

I knew I could be in healthcare and really make a difference on the business side. My dad actually went ahead and got his MBA later in his career through an online program, and this was roughly around the time that I was in middle school. I was actually able to take part in it and really enjoyed the content. 

I remember one of my favorite courses was a course around systems thinking, and this was the early days of the electronic medical record.  

Marcus: You must have had some exposure or experience through your family in the early days of the electronic health record to see that there was actually a business side of healthcare where technology was going to play a role. 

Bardan: Yeah, absolutely. I saw firsthand as the electronic medical record was coming forward, the challenge [that it was for] my dad and other family members to adopt it, to learn how to utilize it, and the constant change that came with it. And as we're seeing now, 15+ years later, the difference it's making for care professionals. 

Marcus: Oh, that's great. And it must be just a fascinating place to be with such a family of providers, to be in health technology and have those discussions around the Thanksgiving dinner table. And you've got your own built-in focus group right there.  

Bardan: Yeah. There you go.  

Marcus: I love it.  

You've been in healthcare technology and it looks like a lot of time spent in telehealth even before the pandemic. So talk about your trajectory there.  

Bardan: I've really been in healthcare since the beginning of my career. At Deloitte, I served a number of healthcare customers. Being from Minnesota, it's a rather large healthcare ecosystem with major payers, med device companies, care systems. 

And so I think ultimately, what really has excited me and confirmed my decision going into healthcare was the impact I could make on patients and providers. For example, at Zocdoc, I had the opportunity to create more access for patients, creating more transparency in provider schedules and making it even easier for front desk staff to cross schedule. 

And TytoCare, this was really a remarkable experience. It was the first of its kind clinical product. It was a first-of-its-kind medical device that paired with a virtual exam. It actually could do heart sounds, lung sounds, gastrointestinal sounds, ears, throat, temperature. And what's most powerful about it was that it gave a nonclinical individual the power to actually use it in both asynchronous and synchronous settings. And so really anything you'd find at the doctor's office hanging on the wall, you could leverage this device for. And this was really the experience that I had firsthand to make a difference in patient lives. I think all of my prior experiences weren't as directly focused on the patient in a clinical way. 

And I remember hearing a story from a dad that worked two jobs. He was a prison guard. And he had three kids and he leveraged the device because one of his kids actually had chronic ear infections and he lived in a more rural community and they'd have to drive nearly an hour to see the ENT. And they could all manage this now with the device from the comfort of their home. 

So it was a really meaningful experience in how I could just see the device being used and it was really rewarding.  

Marcus: I mean, some of those telehealth and I think pharmacy and so many different providers had quite an amazing experience during the pandemic.  

Well, what took you then from that to CLEAR? What was it about CLEAR that caught your attention?  

Bardan: Yeah, I mean, I thought CLEAR was really interesting. I travel a lot for work and so I actually had CLEAR as a traveler for many years.  

I was always so impressed with the consumer experience. It was one of the few bright spots of traveling, right? It was a predictable and consistent experience. You'd fly through security.  

And CLEAR operated in a zero-fail environment. And I thought if there was a company that could do it in healthcare, it was CLEAR. I thought that the application of it in healthcare could be really interesting, especially given what I had seen at hospitals operate on razor-thin margins, but with extreme inefficiency. 

And so I thought there was quite the opportunity in healthcare. Also, firsthand seeing call centers being slapped on all these different problems as like a Band-Aid solution and not really thinking about the core of the problem and the core of the issues.  

And personally, I lived in New York and I had a number of different care professionals. First of all, I had a hard time porting all my healthcare data from Minnesota to New York. You kind of have a number of different doctors across the care system. So my primary care doctor was at one system. I had a specialist at another system. I had a different urgent care provider. And my data just wasn't really connected and I had to fill out multiple clipboards. It's just hard to piece all that together.  

So I thought CLEAR had this really compelling opportunity to make a game-changing difference in healthcare.  

Marcus: I gotta say, like your story, I moved from Boston to Washington, D.C. Same story. I ended up bringing a big binder of my own healthcare record because I knew it was gonna be an issue. This was a few years ago, and it's gotten a little better from an interoperability perspective. But still it's challenging, and what hasn't gotten better is that I'm still asked every single time I go to fill out a form with my history. When it's by hand, I will write on it “you have this in your EHR” and I'll sign it. But when it's on the computer, you have to go through it. And I know I've given different answers. I know I have.  

Bardan: Yeah, and it's frustrating because you have sometimes—not by design, right—you end up filling out all the information and maybe there's an issue with how your information is being linked back to your account. And so now you have two accounts in the system. 

We recently came across a care system that had 16 accounts for a patient. Naturally, because the patient got frustrated, they didn't remember recovering their account, they didn't remember their password. So instead of recovering their account, they just ended up creating new accounts. And it wasn't until they instituted CLEAR that they were able to clean some of that up. 

So, very similar to you. I was living in New York and just filling out a lot of different clipboards.  

Marcus: Wow. Inspiration comes from personal problems that we encounter every day, right?  

Bardan: Exactly.  

Marcus: So, let's address what I guess is the elephant in the room about healthcare data and the value of it and what could go wrong. 

I think I've heard you and others at CLEAR talk about the fact that in 2024, 259 million patients had their healthcare data breached. I mean, I've gotten notices in my mail, but what is it that makes healthcare so vulnerable? 

Bardan: Look, I think healthcare organizations rely on complex and fragmented systems, and it actually makes them a prime target. A lot of these systems are disconnected and they span across their hospitals, their clinics. And you've got the payer databases, the pharmacies, the electronic health records, and it makes it harder to really enforce a consistent cybersecurity standard across the board. And it makes it that much easier for bad actors to find a weak link. 

I think most recently, and I won't name the EHR, but we're seeing issues where, for example, if a bad actor targets a front desk staff member who maybe isn't as trained as a call center agent to verify identity. They're calling the front desk staff and they're basically telling them, “Hey, I'm so-and-so patient. I wanna update my phone number.” And the front desk staff proceeds to do it. And now the bad actor calls the call center and they go through the process of answering a few questions. They do the one-time passcode, and of course now they've changed it to the phone number they have. And they're in.  

Marcus: What makes this data so valuable on the black market? 

Bardan: Look, I think medical records as a whole are rich. They're unchangeable information—full names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, insurance details, medical histories—data that can be really used for identity theft. And in some cases, if you think about the type of profile of the patient, right? If you're a healthcare system in D.C., for example, you likely have a number of, quite frankly, high-profile individuals that potentially consume care at your system. And bad actors would probably really enjoy getting that type of healthcare information on a government official.  

So there's a lot of value just depending on who the profile of that person may be and the type of information then they can reuse to game the system, maybe in the context of financial services, if they can get their healthcare information, 

Marcus: What's the No. 1 reason we need identity verification in healthcare? 

Bardan: I think it's to protect patients and unlock a more connected healthcare experience. Every critical workflow in healthcare assumes you know exactly who you're dealing with. But today that assumption is honestly too often based on easily faked information and strong verification changes that. Identity is the foundation of almost everything in healthcare, right? Whether you're trying to streamline access, share a record, prevent a breach. And so, again, identity verification. Getting it right can really make a difference.  

Marcus: And what are the biggest obstacles to that identity verification in healthcare? 

You talked about the fragmented systems. Is that really the biggest obstacle?  

Bardan: Yeah, it's the fragmentation of the healthcare system. It's every organization having its own systems, its own intake process, its own way of identifying people. There's no consistent thing we've seen across the board. 

And there hasn't been a common identity layer that works across these healthcare organizations. And also there's a fear that adding security means that you're adding friction. And I think that's where CLEAR has really stood apart from the crowd and that we've proven that you can actually have both. You can have a higher level of security and a better experience. 

Marcus: Oh, that's a great point. Absolutely. Two-factor authentication and that kind of thing takes me out of workflow, adds more seconds to my time. And so, do I really need that or not?  

We at Surescripts are working with CLEAR around identity verification. We've had some really pretty amazing results having gone through the process of two-factor identification now working with CLEAR. 

Bardan: Yeah, it's been a great partnership with Surescripts. Just in the early days and early results that we've seen, Surescripts effectively replaced its legacy solution with CLEAR. And we've seen actually an improvement of roughly 40% faster verification. This is time saved across clinicians, patients, admin teams. And beyond the speed, it also highlights the big reduction in the risk. 

We've effectively reduced drop-off to a faster process verifying securely with biometrics. We're also helping prevent impersonation at every critical point. And we've also meaningfully improved past rates. I think we've seen what used to be a 40% failure rate in the verification stack that you used previously to something under now 10% failures. 

I was on a different podcast with Judy Hatchett, your CISO, and she had shared on that podcast that 98% of prescription fraud is due to identity. It's exciting to meaningfully make a difference for the organization.  

Marcus: For sure. I'm interested in the technology behind what you're doing at CLEAR and how it relates to innovation in healthcare. 

So, you characterize CLEAR's offering as instant secure verification for seamless healthcare experiences where people can verify their identity without ever taking out their ID card or doing two-factor identification, etc. So how does it work?  

Bardan: Yeah, so biometric verification enables the user with their unique physical traits, in this case the face, to confirm their identity. At CLEAR, someone can verify themselves with a selfie in literally seconds after having gone through a one-time enrollment where we effectively match a user's selfie to a government-issued ID, driver’s license, it could be a state-issued ID, it could be a passport. We accept over 180 across the world and it's that simple. 

Marcus: Thus the selfie at the airport.  

Bardan: Correct. Same type of selfie concept. Whether that be the selfie at the airport with our pod and/or your mobile device in a context like we're talking about it with Surescripts.  

Marcus: Right. OK. So then let's take all of this discussion and go back to what you talked about at the beginning about healthcare being managed on a clipboard. 

So how does all of this replace the clipboard?  

Bardan: Eliminating the clipboard means eliminating those redundant, unprotected, and call it frustrating paperwork that we talked about earlier. I think patients, generally speaking, shouldn't have to write their name and birthday five times in one visit. 

CLEAR effectively helps verify that person instantly and securely so that care can start that much faster. It's also your health identity, right? When we think about identity in healthcare, it's not just your driver’s license or passport. We're much more than that, right? We're also your insurance card. We're also your prescription card. We're also your HSA/FSA payment. As a workforce member, for example, your license to practice, your diploma. And what we can do effectively is bind these elements of who you are directly to your identity, and depending on that experience, provide that directly to, for example, for the purposes of check-in to the care professional. 

And so these are real experiences that we can unlock. But under that framework, there is a real possibility that in a flow, a patient can consent to allowing a healthcare institution to go and pull information from the qualified health information landscape, including Surescripts, and pull in a “golden record of the patient” so the patient doesn't have to fill out the information. It can pre-fill it out and the patient can simply review it and make sure their information's still correct. 

Marcus: So, just to put this in context for a moment: The security of our information, whether it be us as patients or us as a provider, couldn't be more important. I myself went through identity theft just a few weeks ago. It is amazing how insidious it is and how it happens. You're never quite sure where the data comes from, and you don't want the leakage in your health information.  

So, we are in the middle of this digital transformation in healthcare, and as we do that we have to be so, so careful about the security of this information. Just like financial services, just like the airport. You say that's a zero-fail environment. I love that, that language. I hope that that's where we are or are heading in healthcare.  

So, what makes healthcare right now different than these areas that I just mentioned? What makes healthcare different right now in terms of the stage of the evolution that we're in?  

Bardan: I really think it's the stakes. I think in healthcare, identity isn't just the convenience factor, it's also the safety, it's the compliance, it's the care, it's all of those. 

Marcus: It goes back to your high stakes, high pressure, time sensitive. Those things, right? 

So, what did you learn from your work at TytoCare and Zocdoc that you brought to CLEAR?  

Bardan: A few things. I learned, one, the importance of the adoption curve. I actually read the book “Crossing the Chasm” years ago, and it's so true. You have to select the number of partners that are willing to take those risks with you in the early days and bring your product to market. And you really need to lean into those partners because they're the organizations that are willing to take the risk and have the patient. So that's critical. And it's so true. In every one of my experiences, there are always those early adopters.  

Two, I really believe implementation is an art. To make a product successful in market, you need the trifecta of technical, operations, marketing. You cannot be successful without all three and optimization, even post go-live, is so critical. I think too often something is live and then we walk away from it. No, you have to keep investing. Don't be fooled that because you're working with a multi-billion-dollar organization, that they know what they're doing, that they have the right resources, that they have the expertise to implement your product. 

And three, I think building is not for everyone. You really need to make sure you have the right people on the bus as Jim Collins famously wrote in the book, “Good to Great.” No matter how great your product may be, having the right people will ultimately make or break your ability to make your product successful in market. 

Marcus: Oh, that's great perspective. Thanks for sharing it. And you spoke my language. You can't let it go once you've actually gone live. Optimization's important.  

How are we doing in the digital transformation of healthcare? How far along in the journey and what's left to do?  

Bardan: Look, I think it's still early days. I would still very much consider it to be in the infancy. I'm glad that we're seeing some of the EMRs like Epic deeply investing and bettering the experience for the workforce and the patient.  

But look, there's a long way to go. I recently attended the Health Evolution Summit in California. And one of the speakers struck me, Sandeep Dadlani, he's the chief digital officer and CTO of the UnitedHealth Group. And he talked about how he views digital transformation and he actually gave the here-and-now areas of focus by simply looking at their call center and the top 10 reasons people call. And it's things like scheduling, “what am I gonna pay?” So transparency of price, right? “Does this doctor accept my insurance?”  

Look, healthcare has a ways to go. I think at the end of the day, I don't remember the last time personally, I've called an airline to book a flight. Do you remember travel agents? Right? I think we're still in the infancy and we have a ways to go.  

Marcus: Oh, that is a great analogy. Calling a travel agent. Never. Never anymore. It's all online.  

Bardan: Exactly. But I do think that today, what's making healthcare executives move more quickly on this transformation are these, call it quick wins and ROI of the programs that they have instituted. So, we talked a little bit about the ambient AI and the difference that's made for physician burnout. But it's also remote patient monitoring, bringing hospital into the home. These are all giving provider systems quick wins. 

Ambient AI is such an interesting story, right? It's automating the tasks of documentation, but it's also actually improving the coding and the claims processing, which is ultimately how they get paid, right? And there's actually been quite a bit of a gap there because not every provider is created equal in terms of their ability to document. 

And in many cases there are coding mistakes being made and payment not fully coming to fruition. And so this is a real improvement across the board.  

Marcus: Great. Yes. I spoke with one physician using some of the ambient AI and he explained that one patient actually came to him and said, “Doctor, your notes are so clear.” 

So anyway, do you see AI playing a role, a different role maybe, in the work that you're doing at CLEAR?  

Bardan: Yeah, I mean, we're embedding AI everywhere across our workflows to deliver verification insights that can help us speed up our issue resolution time. 

We're also very focused on improving a more guided user experience. I mean, look, bottom-line is we're obsessed about AI and how it can improve our entire business, marketing, operations, implementations. It's all about working smarter, not harder.  

Marcus: You've been at CLEAR for three years. What are your biggest priorities now as Head of Healthcare at CLEAR? 

Bardan: Look, I think there's still the hill that I need to climb, which is once people see CLEAR, they know us from the airport. They don't know that we're in healthcare. And so, continuing to get the word out about our work and really getting more key studies out there with the incredible data that we're seeing in market,  

Marcus: Right, in the end does it matter if the patient knows CLEAR’s there as long as it's happening?  

Bardan: I think it does. We are a fully opt-in solution, so we always want to make sure that the consumer knows that they're actually opting in to use their biometrics. And we have very strict language that specifically talks to our privacy and member terms that state that CLEAR will not sell or rent your data. This is a unique stance that CLEAR has, right? We don't have a marketplace, for example, that altruistically markets to you. We're not a credit bureau.  

I think it's important and it's something that struck me recently. I was with Nandan Nilekani, who is one of the co-founders of Infosys and actually founded Aadhaar in India. This is the largest biometric platform in the world. They have 1.4 billion people on this platform and they have streamlined everything including payment. Where in countries like the U.S., we have things like Zelle and Venmo. Well, they actually used their Aadhaar platform to process payment, all with the biometric. And I asked him what was the secret sauce in such great adoption, and he actually said it's what CLEAR's focused on. It's being consumer obsessed. It's really thinking about, “What kind of value can you deliver back to the consumer?” And so, I do believe strongly that if we're going to meaningfully drive this technology in the U.S. and get patients and consumers as a whole to feel comfortable about leveraging their biometrics to unlock things or pay for things, it's going to really be important that they know who they're engaging with, who they're trusting with their data.  

Marcus: Right. It's all about trust  

Bardan: That's exactly right. And look, I think there are a lot of opportunities. I know you had asked me what are some of the priorities. There are forward-looking things that I'd love our company to work on. And we actually have an announcement that we're looking forward to with a credentialing company, where we can now work with that company to bind identity directly to the process of credentialing. This is a huge pain for the U.S. healthcare system. It can take months, in many cases, for a practitioner to get onboarded.  

And there are a lot of exciting updates. Regulatory guidance, even from the Joint Commission, where an IAL2 level of assurance can verify the person is who they say they are. We can buy-in things like the person's diploma or their license to practice to their identity and help streamline the enrollment flow so that they can get more easily credentialed through the system. And that's something that really can make a difference where we have, from the U.S. at least, a shortage of practitioners and have needs around more efficiency. 

Marcus: That's great to hear. One of the roles I played early, early in my career involved a credentialing piece of software and it was something. 

Bardan: Huge pain point.  

Marcus: Right. It hasn't changed much.  

So, talk about the role of collaboration, if you could.  

Bardan: Look, I think collaboration is not an option in healthcare. Healthcare is too complex. It's too interconnected for any one player to solve its challenges alone. And I think the most meaningful innovation comes when healthcare platforms work together, not in silos.  

When we collaborate, we have the ability to build solutions, improve care, reduce burnout. It's not just about innovation for innovation's sake. It's about bettering experiences and bettering the system, building a system that we can all trust.  

Marcus: For sure.  

Well, now it's my favorite part of the podcast. It's when we look at the world through rose-colored glasses and we leave with a little inspiration. You can zero in on something specific or you can go big and global, whichever you'd like. 

If you could snap your fingers and have a major issue in healthcare solved. What would it be?  

Bardan: I think this one's pretty easy for me. It's cancer. I've lost family. I've seen close loved ones lose family to cancer. I really wish there were more options to treat cancer and especially for those that are dealing with it in the latter stages. 

And so, in simplest terms, I really wish in a snap of a finger, cancer would go away.  

Marcus: Yeah. I’ve got to join you there and thank you for bringing it back to patient health. We can talk about the technology all day long. At the end of the day, it's facilitating care for a patient who is either trying to stay healthy or is not and needs help. 

Bardan: That's exactly right.  

Marcus: Yeah. Well, what gives you the most hope and inspiration that healthcare can truly heal itself?  

Bardan: I think it's the people behind healthcare. I mean, in the U.S. I really do believe we have the best doctors in the world performing miracles daily. If we look ourselves in the mirror and recognize that we have opportunities for improvement, I think we can come together to really meaningfully heal this country. 

I think the spend is there. I think 18 or so percent of our GP is spent on healthcare. A lot of it, unfortunately, is inefficient spend. We have, unfortunately, a worse life expectancy than most European countries by like a number of years, five or six or seven years. And in certain neighborhoods across this country, we're not delivering equal care because of a lack of funding. 

And so I think there's a moment here to take a step back and to calibrate and to figure out exactly where the money's going. And how are we thinking about some of the core of the issues and the challenges that we're facing? I think nutrition is key. It seems like this has become much more of a topic in the last few years. We're seeing companies that are really focused on this. I just saw one recently raise nearly $70 million, which is quite exciting and I think that we've taken nutrition to be quite for granted and I think that's going to be a lot of the core of how we can solve, for healthcare, making sure we know what we're eating and how our foods are being processed and provided in this country. I think there's a massive opportunity there. 

Marcus: Absolutely. I'm actually headed to a food-is-medicine conference this week on just that topic. So, there's a lot of work to be done there.  

Well, this podcast is all about finding a better way using technology and we talked about this incredibly important element of making sure that as we do that, our identities are safe. Because if they are not, then none of this technology will actually work and help healthcare come to the place where we all know we need it to be, which is efficient and providing great quality care for all of us. 

So, thank you so much for spending time with us here today, David. We really appreciate it.  

Bardan: Thank you. It was a privilege to be here. 

Marcus: Healthcare, much like aviation, is what our guest, David Barden calls a zero-failure environment. And it's zero-failure because the stakes are so high. After all, healthcare is about the health and wellbeing of patients. And as David points out, today's healthcare organizations rely on complex and fragmented systems. And this makes them vulnerable to identity theft and cyberattacks.  

One way to address this is a common identity layer that works across systems in healthcare so that we know that the patients and providers who are engaged are who they say they are. And doing that should be easy with innovations like biometric verification. After all, as David says, identity is the foundation of almost everything in healthcare. Whether we're working to streamline access to share a medical record from one provider to another, or prevent a costly data breach, it's exactly this kind of innovation that can make a world of difference in healthcare. When we collaborate, David says, we can build solutions and improve care. It's about building a better experience and a better healthcare system. A system that everyone can trust. I could not have said it better myself. Thank you so much for joining us today, David.