Live at #NSGC22: Fireside chat with Myriad Genetics president and CEO, Paul J. Diaz

Hello everybody, we're live here at the National Society of Genetic Counselors annual education conference in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm Susan Manley, I'm senior vice president of medical services at Myriad Genetics and I am a genetic counselor. I'm joined here with Paul Diaz, who is our CEO at Myriad Genetics, and this is Paul's first time. But it's been really fun to be here.

Well, I you know, it's obviously a challenging time, but boy, the energy here at NSGC has been really high. The opening reception, there were 700 new grads. Clearly a lot of excitement about the profession and the community, and we're just proud to be and excited to be a part of it. In terms of our journey of Myriad Genetics, it's just a continuation of our learning process of listening and learning to the community, and the role of genetic counselors is so integral to our mission. And I've again, I've spent two days and probably 30 great conversations just learning and taking it all in and thinking about ways that we can be better partners.

I did. I mean, I saw a range of genetic counselors that by training, but they're doing education now, they're doing advocacy work, they're obviously working for companies like Myriad Genetics, and I think that's great. I'm pretty proud as we look at our team and our executive officers and people, their influencers in our organization like Susan, and Nicole Lambert our CEO, and Chris Ho who runs a payer market, that we've got a lot of people in the group to really understand. And our understanding is growing. Like we're doing some focus groups today on workflow with a whole host of genetic counselors, and that's a big part of the opportunity I think still for the community, as well as for Myriad Genetics. So as we've talked about, to me there's sort of three pillars that we're really focusing on, but I think they're really aligned with NSGC. One is continuing to evolve our products and the way we try to do with MyRisk, expanding our gene panel, adding risk score for patients of all ancestry, the excitement we have about launching FirstGene, our combined prenatal carrier screening product this year, all of the advancements in the science. But really what I heard again and again is unless we can make the science operationalize it in practice, in workflow and ease of use issues and challenges. And then thirdly, the third pillar, make it accessible to people from all socioeconomic backgrounds. And so we've added direct pay options, more financial assistance programs, more transparency at the point of care. So these are not just opportunities for Myriad Genetics to be better, but I think for the community as well. So we're excited to partner with NSGC on everything from workflow to education to clinics, and making at the end our shared mission and goal of making genetics more available, the genetic insight more of a routine part of the healthcare ecosystem.

Yeah, and I think the innovation around ease of use and technology, leveraging technology and more telemedicine, at-home, more home-based kits testing, can quite frankly raise the profession and the scope of practice so that everybody is working at the top of their license, which I think everybody in the healthcare system needs to do if we're going to address the wide variations of care and the extreme disparities of access that we see. And I think that's a core part of the opportunity we see for everybody in the community. So excited about that, and a lot of those things NSGC is really passionate about too, so it's a really nice opportunity for us to all partner together to do great things. And we've been having those discussions today. I think the list is long of the collaborations and partnerships of people not only NSGC proper, but a whole wide range of folks that we've talked to over the last couple of days about how we can collaborate more. And again, that's one of the things that Myriad Genetics that we really focus on is being more patient-centered, more patient-focused, more provider supportive, and figuring out how we can really fit into the broader healthcare ecosystem and expand access, because I think that's a huge challenge for us all.

Yeah, and we're having a reception tonight, and that'll be fun too, and bull riding. So everybody should come out and do the bull riding, so that'll be fun. Work hard, play hard, right?

Thank you, Susan.