Outcomes Rocket Podcast_Juli Stover: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Saul Marquez:
Hey Outcomes Rocket Nation! Welcome back to the podcast! I’m so excited that you tuned in today. I have a special treat for you. I’ve got the amazing Juli Stover joining us. She is the chief strategy officer of eVisit. eVisit is a telemedicine and healthcare technology company. She’s an expert in this space with decades of real-world experience. She oversees eVisit’s growth initiatives by contributing to the product roadmap based on customer and market trends, as well as securing strategic partnerships. Prior to eVisit, Juli served as the Vice President of Virtual Health Strategies at Envision Healthcare, a national hospital-based physician group headquartered in Nashville. She has experience in both the provider space as well as business, and it’s going to be a great conversation with her here. Juli, thank you so much for joining us.
Juli Stover:
Thank you, Saul. I’m excited to be here with you.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, now, did I leave anything in the intro that maybe you want to touch on? You’ve done so much, and I want to make sure that if you want to highlight something else, I want you to do that.
Juli Stover:
Oh, thank you. Well, you know, I don’t know that I would call one of them out specifically, but what I would say is that I feel so lucky over the past ten-plus years that I’ve been more focused on the telehealth, been in healthcare a little longer than that, but in the telehealth space. That I’ve had the opportunity to your point to not only be on the technology side but also be on the delivery side of the market. I feel like when I come to the table, regardless of how I’m coming to the conversation, that it gives me a unique perspective because I’ve sat in the shoes of the customer, I’ve been the customer, and, but then I’ve also sat in the seat of the vendor as well, if, you know, if you want to refer to them as such, and so it gives me the ability to kind of relate to both as I enter into these partnership discussions.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, no, it’s a very valuable set of experiences, and understanding both intimately is a great advantage. What inspired your work in this space Juli?
Juli Stover:
Oh gosh, you’re going to get me to be really cheesy and silly here for a second. You know, what I would say is that I was working for HCA at the time, and I tell people, I wish I could tell you that it was intentional, Saul. It was honestly just pure dumb luck, it was like being in the right place at the right time. But I had an opportunity to get involved in what HCA referred to at that time as their outreach strategy, and that meant how HCA hospitals partnered with non-HCA hospitals, and one of the services that they offered was, was telehealth. In those early days, it was really just focused on tele-stroke and tele-mental health. Of course, that’s grown since then, but what I figured out is that any day that was going to include a discussion around telehealth was going to be a good day. And the reason for that is because, as I always like to share with folks, you know, people don’t access healthcare because they want to they access healthcare because they have to or because they need to. And so because of that most of the time, well, some of the time, I should say, it’s not always a great outcome, you know. And so what I realized is that telehealth was the opportunity where everybody that was part of the equation really benefited from it in some way. You know, it gave HCA the opportunity to extend their reach and partner with these secondary market hospitals that they might not have relationships with otherwise. It gave those hospitals in those communities the opportunity to broaden their scope of service and really care for their communities, and in some instances, keep their doors open, quite frankly. But then last and certainly not least, it was a win for the patients. The patients are able to receive care closer to home, which saves them time, money, stress, and strain on their, on themselves and their families, and sometimes it saves their lives. And so that is, when you can say in healthcare that everybody finds a win, that’s a good day, you know? And so I.
Saul Marquez:
I agree.
Juli Stover:
I just decided that was something I wanted to be part of.
Saul Marquez:
That’s awesome, yeah, serendipitous, right? I mean, you were just there, but it became the future. It is the present, COVID fast-tracked everything, here we are. So talk to us about eVisit, Juli. What are you guys doing to add value to the healthcare ecosystem?
Juli Stover:
Yeah, well, I will tell you, I was a customer of eVisit for a couple of years prior to joining the team, so I had an opportunity to get to see the team and see the platform from, again from that side of the equation. And so I developed a great passion for it and just it’s, you know, I saw all the usability of the platform and the flexibility, and it gave me the opportunity to go into a number of different programs that I was deploying and scale that across. And so for me, as I made the decision to come over and join the team, there was a number of things. It was not only that, it was just an appreciation for the platform itself, but also for the vision. And that’s just to simplify healthcare delivery to everyone everywhere. And I think that is really, that almost sums up the platform and the organization perfectly, because it is extremely simple to use, but at the same time, it is so robust that it really can meet the needs of so many different workflows that organizations are looking to deploy. I think that it’s a really interesting and exciting time for eVisit right now. We are in what I would consider hypergrowth mode, and so because of that, that’s given us the ability to really hone in on how to serve our customers and our partners best, and what does that mean. And that translates into everything from the product roadmap to engineering and what they’re developing and building to how our sales and marketing motions function out there in the industry. And of course, then for me from the strategy seat is how do we continue to grow and respond to your point, you mentioned COVID. It’s a different ballgame now, and COVID really kind of changed it for everybody and so just making sure that eVisit is on top of that and that we are ready and able to serve the needs and help our partners solve the challenges that they’re faced with.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, and so what are you seeing right now, Juli? What are some of the biggest needs? What are people running into?
Juli Stover:
Well, it’s, going back to just kind of how COVID changed the situation, I think of so many different other industries that have evolved over the years. I think of Uber and how it’s taken over the transportation industry. I think of now I can order a pizza and I can basically watch my pizza be made and then ultimately delivered to my front door, you know, and I think what we have.
Saul Marquez:
Who does that one?
Juli Stover:
I know. Well, I don’t have an actual sponsorship, so maybe I won’t call their name out.
Saul Marquez:
That’s fair.
Juli Stover:
But anyways. And so I think what we’ve seen now is, through the COVID, you know, the high peaks of the COVID time period, we saw the actual consumerization of healthcare happen right before our eyes. You know, patients have a different expectation now of how they want to receive care. Most of them have used it, they liked it, they saw the convenience of it, and as a result, you know, it was, in many respects, it was a nice-to-have before COVID for healthcare organizations, now it’s a must-have. In order to maintain the relationships with their patients that they want to have and not lose them to a competing organization, they have to have these types of strategies in place. So that’s the biggest thing right now that we are assisting our partners with.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great. Now, I understand there’s this Amazon Web Services Health Equity Initiative Grant that you guys have been a part of with the ET3 space, the triage, treat, transport. Can you talk to us a little bit about that and what’s happening?
Juli Stover:
Yeah, that is really exciting and that is one that truly is a game changer for healthcare. So ET3 is a CMS innovation initiative, and for folks that are familiar with what those are, you actually, you go in you apply to be an awardee of the CMS initiative and then, if determined so then CMS kind of grants you that right. And this one in particular, when patients call 911, maybe I’ll share this for folks that are not aware of this, but prior to ET3, when a patient calls 911 and an ambulance is dispatched to their home or to their office or wherever they may be, wherever they might need care, unless that ambulance crew takes you to the hospital, they did not get reimbursed for their services. So they’re actually incentivized in that regard to take you to the hospital, whether you need it or not. So when you start to talk about overuse of the system, if you will, and crowding and just capacity issues and emergency rooms across this country, that is a huge issue. When you’ve got ambulances coming up in there that may or may not need to be there. So what CMS did is they really stepped forward and they said, hey, we’re going to give these ambulance agencies that are participating in this program the opportunity to get to the scene and to make what they term as an appropriate determination of care. And this is fantastic for so many reasons. Number one, it helps reduce that waste or that unnecessary use of the emergency room, but it also allows these paramedics to practice at the top of their license, to get to the scene and actually deliver the care that they’ve been trained to deliver. And then there’s a couple of options that come into play here. So, of course, they can choose to do nothing. I should say, of course, they can, absolutely first decide to go ahead and transfer the patient to the emergency room. If it’s a trauma, a stroke, a heart attack, something of that nature, of course, they’re just going to go. They can decide not to do anything, of course. They can also decide to take the patient to what’s called an alternative destination of care. So that might be an urgent care, it might be a mental health clinic, it could be an FQHC, it could be wherever is most appropriate for the patient. But then the last one and where, even as it comes in, is that they can do what’s called Treat in Place. And so these ambulance agencies have not only partnered with technology organizations, but they’ve also partnered with provider services organizations to actually deliver care right there wherever the patient happens to be through virtual health.
Saul Marquez:
Love that.
Juli Stover:
And so therefore the ambulance crews are getting reimbursed, the patient’s receiving care right there, and also avoiding the expense of the emergency room when that’s not necessarily the best place they need to be. So when you start to think about the quadruple aim in everything that we’re trying to accomplish in healthcare today, this one really checks all the boxes.
Saul Marquez:
Hey, if you could keep me out of the emergency room, sign me up.
Juli Stover:
Absolutely.
Saul Marquez:
Oh, my God.
Juli Stover:
And patients love it, I mean, they absolutely love it. And so.
Saul Marquez:
And why not?
Juli Stover:
It’s a real win.
Saul Marquez:
And so, and with the use of 5G and now, you know, the StarLink becoming more possible, that’s the Internet service, that’s the Elon Musk thing, right, Starlink? Or is it, yeah, yeah. I walked out of the house one day, Juli, and I saw these satellites, it was dark, and they were all one behind each other. My son points it out and I’m like, oh, this is it, we’re dead, the aliens are here, but then I found that it was StarLink. So do you guys use 5G? Use StarLink? What do you, what are you doing?
Juli Stover:
We do, yeah. So to your point, it’s, you’re kind of at the mercy of cell service. So of course, you’re going to have challenges with that, just the same as you would using your cell phone, but yeah, it runs right through cellular connections, which is fantastic. So basically as long as you can use your cell phone, you can make these visits happen.
Saul Marquez:
I love that, and folks, this is a reminder that innovation is everywhere. Like, the opportunity to care for somebody on the spot is just an incredible opportunity. And then you peel back the onion on some of the incentives, you could create some real value out of doing this. So fantastic, congratulations on that. Excited to see how this unravels and adds value to people. What would you say, I mean, look, the question that I always ask, is a trend in healthcare technology that’s going to change healthcare as we know it? How would you answer that question?
Juli Stover:
Oh, gosh, yeah, I mean, I think we are living now, we have the generations that want everything at their fingertips. And so I think that you’re going to only continue to see that evolve. And we want everything right now in this moment. We want it to be as convenient as we possibly as it possibly can be, and so I think it’s, it’s going to continue to evolve in that respect, just as what we’ve discussed here today. And again, I think there was a hesitation by some folks, you know, you like to have a relationship with your provider, but now your provider is the one who’s actually delivering these types of programs. And so, again, it is the best of both worlds. And so I would say what you’re, how you’re going to see that evolve from a provider perspective is some of what we’re seeing today is you’re going to see the providers quality of life continue to improve as well because now they can see and treat their patients from anywhere they want to be, you know, not just bound to their office. So you hear this term hybrid care. You know, I think what you’re going to really start to see is providers starting to flex their schedules and where they physically are located in person more and more and more. And hopefully, what that will do is that will encourage more folks to go to medical school and to become providers because as we all know, we’re going to, we’re facing some pretty significant shortages in this country over the coming years.
Juli Stover:
Man, so cool, I love that idea. Juli, you know, keep these clinicians in mind. With these improvements, it’s not only good for patients, it’s good for clinicians. And clinicians are burned out, hospitals are losing tons of money because they’re paying for temporary workers. There’s opportunities today with businesses like eVisit to optimize how care delivery happens, and it’s never been more exciting than now. So I love your point, Juli, I love it. So, okay, just fantastic work that you guys are up to. I appreciate you guys jumping on today. Leave us with a closing thought, Juli. What do the listeners need to be thinking about as they take on these new technologies, and what’s the best place for them to reach out to you to learn more?
Juli Stover:
Yeah, so I would say the number one thing, the number one I guess challenge that I see organizations face is not building for sustainability. So build for the future. And I know that there are some uncertainties around that for organizations that they’re challenged with today, but let’s do as much vision casting as we possibly can. What happened during COVID is that you saw a lot of people try to solve problems really quickly with certain types of technology solutions that won’t carry them forward in the future. And so I think to the degree that you can build for sustainability and determine what those success metrics are, and at the end of the day, when you say, was this program successful or not, you’re really clearly defined what that means and what that looks like. That’s how people should be approaching these programs and that’s how we help them build them. So, yeah, if you want to talk more, you can tell I’m slightly passionate about this, so I would love to talk to anybody and everybody that wants to dig in on that a little bit more. You can go to eVisit.com. You know, honestly, you can email me if you want too at jstover@evisit.com. I’m fine with that too, so, yeah. Thanks for having me, this is always so fun.
Saul Marquez:
Oh, my God, it’s a pleasure to have you. Folks, we’ll include the links to eVisit, Juli’s contact info, so you can get in touch and make a difference. If something today moved, you do something about it, don’t just listen. Juli, thank you so much for joining us.
Juli Stover:
Thank you, Saul.
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