A Household Name

Why SOAP Health Matters to Me, & Should to All of Us

Steven Charlap, MD, MBA, CEO

Nine years ago, one of my older brothers, a practicing cardiologist, was diagnosed with two primary cancers a week apart. One year later he was gone. His cancer workup revealed he had a BRCA2 mutation, the gene mutation commonly associated with breast and ovarian cancer, but also associated with male breast, prostate, kidney, and pancreatic cancer, as well as melanoma. This should have come as no surprise given that my father’s two sisters, our aunts, and one of their daughters, his niece, one brother (my uncle), and our first-cousin, were all diagnosed with early breast cancer and other cancers between ages 17-55. In addition, our father was diagnosed with prostate cancer at age 79, alone not a major red flag. But my brother’s cancer did surprise us because no physician had ever inquired about my brother’s and even till today, my now expansive (12 cases in all, including at least four on my mother’s side) family history of cancer. If a doctor had, and he or she understood the clinical significance of such early age cancers and deaths from breast and other cancers on both sides of the family, that doctor may have instituted increased surveillance, which could have found my brother’s cancers earlier when effective treatment may still have been possible.

Fortunately, I don’t have the mutation, not that any doctor has ever bothered to ask. However, it is ironic that my brother was diagnosed with hereditary cancer while I was the Chief Medical Officer of a primary prevention medical clinic in Florida and was widely touting the impact of lifestyle over genetics for living longer and healthier to tens of thousands of people through TV, radio and speaking presentations. My brother’s diagnosis gave me pause to reconsider my attitude toward genetic predispositions and a realization of the need to better understand the science. It also made me really ponder why doctors didn’t collect detailed family medical histories. After my brother passed, I closed my clinic and went to Stanford for 3 years, and then Harvard for 2 years, to gain that knowledge and experience.

I then completed a National Science Foundation funded program that facilitated my interviewing 25 primary care physicians from Florida to New York to California. They described how hard pressed they are for time, which deters them from collecting detailed family histories and performing valid risk assessments. Basically, they shared that very few of them are collecting more than a first generation family history to fully assess early disease risk, and even among those few trying to do so, they admitted they don’t do it well. These physicians collectively admitted that they know they need help if the situation is going to change and would be excited to embrace a solution that is clinically validated, integrated into their workflows, and easy for their patients to use.

With 18-45 million diagnostic errors made each year, the most common among them missing early cancers and heart diseases, which cost over 250,000 lost lives, millions of disabilities, and nearly a trillion dollars, and with the National Academy of Medicine now predicting that every one will experience a diagnostic error, SOAP Health’s mission is clear: spare people from the pain and suffering of passing from or losing someone to a preventable or earlier identifiable genetic, lifestyle, environmental, mental health and/or SDOH driven adult disease such as cancers and heart diseases, reduce disabilities caused by errors, drive down malpractice suits, and improve physician productivity and compensation by augmenting physicians’ capabilities to perform in depth risk and symptom assessments and improve early disease detection and diagnosis.

SOAP Leadership: What Is Required

Serial digital health entrepreneur and C-Suite executive. Our master of technology loves meeting new people and making new friends.

Seasoned technology leader managing large diverse teams across borders. Loves reading., mostly non-fiction: philosophy, geopolitics and science, and multi-player video games

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