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Saul Marquez:
Hey everybody! Saul Marquez, and welcome back to the HLTH Matters podcast. I’m so excited that you’re here again. If you have never been with us, welcome. We definitely have fun and enjoy conversations with some amazing health leaders. All of these interviews happened at the HLTH conference right on the show floor, this year was in Las Vegas. If you missed out, this is a great way to get a feel for the thought leadership that’s flowing through this conference. In today’s interview, I have the privilege of hosting Kimberly O’Loughlin. She is the CEO of Health Recovery Solutions, responsible for leading HRS’s business strategy, serving clinicians, caregivers, and consumers with digital health monitoring and connected solutions and services aimed at empowering more efficient, effective care delivery. Kimberly joined HRS in March of 2022, bringing with her more than 30 years of experience in leveraging talent and technology to drive growth, innovation, and improve business performance and customer experience across health tech, and other industries. At HRS her portfolio includes award-winning remote patient monitoring and telehealth solutions and services that address the increasingly important healthcare needs, lowering the cost of care, improving healthcare outcomes while delivering better experiences for both consumers and clinicians. I’m excited to have her here on the podcast to discuss where care is going, hospital-in-the-home as a thing, and how are we empowering hospitals, clinicians, and patients to make the most out of these new access areas to healthcare. With her experience in various different companies, including Philips as well as AT&T, she has an incredible feel for what it is to have consumer first in healthcare. So with that introduction, Kimberly, I’m so excited to welcome you to the podcast today.
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
Thank you, it’s great to be here.
Saul Marquez:
It’s great to have you here. So I’m really excited to dig into the work that you guys do at Health Recovery Solutions. But before we do, I’d love to learn a little bit more about you. What inspires your work in healthcare?
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
Oh, gosh. Well, my personal leadership motto is really about making a difference, and I get jazzed about delivering results. But when you do that in healthcare, you actually get to affect people’s health and well-being, and it really doesn’t get any better than that.
Saul Marquez:
I agree, it doesn’t get any better than that. Tell our listeners more about HRS. What value do you provide to key stakeholders, including patients, providers, and payers?
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
So Health Recovery Solutions is the leading provider of remote care delivery. And in that capacity, we play a critical role in connecting the providers, the patients, and the payers with innovative solutions that let them really change the game. And so in each one of these constituencies, starting with the providers. For the providers, it’s all about how do we make their life easier, how do we have efficient workflows, leverage technology like telehealth, so that they can deliver care across settings, the right care, right time, right patient. And for patients, we know that they want to play an active role in their care. And so we want to give them a hand in helping them do that with easy-to-use solutions that enable them not only to deliver their own care but also stay connected with easy access to the providers and to caregivers, their informal ones.
Saul Marquez:
Love that, yeah, you know, and making it as frictionless as possible is sort of the win.
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
Exactly, that’s actually one of our top priorities, is how do we stay focused on making it easier for patients and frictionless for the clinicians?
Saul Marquez:
Love that, thank you for that. And so, what do patient-focused solutions look like to you as we head into 2023 and beyond?
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
Yeah, so what you see the trends that you hear about, so consumerism, patients really want to be involved in their care, they want it to be easy, they have rising expectations about the ease of use and actually the availability of digital solutions, COVID even actually helped that. So with that, as you go forward, you’ll see more and more interoperability just has to take the friction out of the system. And we’ll also start to see care plans really tailored at an individual level and optimized with inpatient and also virtual care.
Saul Marquez:
Thank you for that. And how is Health Recovery Solutions different than other remote patient monitoring companies out there?
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
Yeah, so, well, HRS is a three-time class award winner and that’s for a reason.
Saul Marquez:
Congratulations.
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
Thank you. What customers say set us apart is that ten years of experience that we’ve had working with clients to figure this out. That has translated into the workflows that we have, the clinical expertise that we have and best practices, and the designs that we have for both the clinician capabilities and the patient capabilities. And all of that together is enabling our patients to do things like deliver zero readmissions and, you know, that’s really transformative. And along the journey, it’s not just about the hardware and software, but also we’ve surrounded it with a set of services and because the customers are looking for that. So it’s really being a comprehensive partner for our customers that set us apart.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great, thank you for that. And do you guys also have providers, like meaning physicians and caregivers, that work there?
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
We have clinical advisory services, so we don’t really provide providers. Our customers are providers, our customers are payers, but we do help them with clinical advisory services to complement where they have staffing shortages and have a little extra need.
Saul Marquez:
Got it, thanks for that. You have experts in-house that help sort of bridge those gaps and coach your clients through the tough times.
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
Exactly, we help them set up. Here’s how new models work. Here are some best practices. We help them get set up, up and running with advisory onboarding.
Saul Marquez:
Got it, fantastic, thank you for that. And so what industry trends, innovations, and regulations are you following most closely and how will they impact patients, providers, and payers?
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
So there’s a lot of them, but one that we pay a lot of attention to is the trend towards value-based care. The shift of care outside those higher-cost settings into the lower-cost settings, and the solutions that we have are fundamentally delivering against the objectives of healthcare reform and value-based care. So we’re seeing increasing adoption and movement in that area. And our clinical team right now is fairly busy helping and supporting our home health agency clients because the home health value-based purchasing model is going into effect in January. So these are kind of the changing reimbursement and requirements landscape that’s unfolding that it’s important to support our clients’ success. Another key trend is towards health equity and how do you expand access to care, social determinants of health, and you know, again, the solutions can enable access in rural communities and in clinics, and that’s why we’re seeing some really strong growth in those areas. And from an innovation trend, I would say it’s really about interoperability and using AI and ML to drive and continue improvements.
Saul Marquez:
Love that, and it sounds like you guys are really focused on a lot of these trends and helping your health system partners get through the tough things. I mean, most recently it’s the Hospital-at-Home initiative, right? There’s a lot of people moving toward that, but it’s more complicated than just having a device that connects to an EMR.
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
That’s right, there’s trends to move towards the home in so many different ways. It’s, how can I do hospital at home? How can I reduce length of stay in the hospital? How can I avoid the, readmission? How can I help people recover from surgery, high-risk pregnancies, folks suffering with chronic conditions? And they all want to really live what we like to say with grace and dignity in the place they call home, but they want to be connected and they do want to have the right care at the right time.
Saul Marquez:
Love it, thank you for sharing that. And, you know, the healthcare workforce is the other side of this whole equation. So there’s shortages, there’s burnout, and they continue to make headlines. How can we leverage technology and implement virtual care in a way that doesn’t exacerbate the problem?
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
Yeah, it’s a really critical issue. You know, it’s sad what’s happening and our clients are stressed and burnt out. And so it really is about optimizing the workflow, and that means things like integrating deeply into the EHRs, having the data passed back and forth with interoperability, just taking the friction out of how they do their work today. And it’s also about enabling the adoption of these new models, so instead of seeing perhaps a person in-person six times, you might see them in person two times and have four times be via virtual technology that enable you to see many more patients than you would otherwise.
Saul Marquez:
So Kimberly, really appreciate that and the work that you guys are doing to help take this strain off clinicians is important. Talk to us about the full suite that you guys offer. What is it that you guys offer to make it possible?
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
Yeah, sure. Well, there are several components. One piece is the piece that we give to the patient, so that includes some hardware, it can be a mobile phone or a tablet, and a connected set of peripherals that are going to help them, so that’s hardware and software for the patient. We also have a caregiver app that helps keep them connected to their informal caregiver. And then for the clinicians, we have a clinician portal that helps them stay connected and communicate and understand the status of the patients that they’re monitoring and supporting. And then we wrap that further with some things to enable our client success. One of the things that we learned is we don’t want clinicians having to run around collecting hardware at the patient’s home, so we offer a full-service logistics offering, and the clinical services as well. There are the staffing shortages, so we try to supplement some clinical monitoring capability, might be out of our sort of support, but whatever it is that the client needs, so we give them a full suite of capabilities to enable their success.
Saul Marquez:
Thank you for that, Kimberly, sounds very comprehensive. And you really, are you guys also creating the devices and software to enable these services?
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
Yeah, we create the software, but we leverage best-of-breed hardware technology.
Saul Marquez:
Got it, thank you for that. There are so many options now, it’s just a matter of getting those and making sure that they communicate, right? They’re interoperable.
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
That’s right, and designing the interfaces so that it works for the patients and the clients in mind.
Saul Marquez:
Love it. We hear a lot about AI transforming healthcare, you just commented on it. What are some real-world examples of it actually taking place?
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
Taking place, yeah, in our domain, they’re really two key use cases that we’re focused on. One is of all the potential patients that you could have with remote care technologies, which are the ones that we should put on it, and how do we use algorithms and data and science to best understand which ones we should enroll in to make that enrollment easy? And then the second use case is for those that are actually enrolled in the technology, how do we continue to harness all the power of the data that we’ve collected over the years and the different patient engagement models, and the different treatment pathways? How do we take that with continual learning to assess risk, with prediction, and have that get better and better and better over time so that you predict which patients are going to move from moderate acuity to high acuity that then need intervention? So those are the two really powerful ones we’re pursuing.
Saul Marquez:
Got it, from my perspective, it’s important to really do that validation. And then once you move forward with those patient subsets that could actually benefit from it, how do you scale that, right? That then becomes, the question is, how do you scale that in a way that becomes impactful?
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
Yeah, so the technology can scale. So we have today the capability that can be used across a variety of use cases, a variety of settings. It’s really about the change management that you have to enable. And so a core piece of that is about education, sharing best practices about what works, and then also shining the light on the successes that you’re having along the way. So if you can in fact improve health outcomes and change behavior, if you can in fact reduce readmissions to zero, that’s really powerful stuff, and that can help enable the clinicians and others to adopt and embrace these types of new models.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, those types of results will certainly get buy-in. So looking forward, is there anything, in particular, you’d like to be remembered for in terms of impact on the healthcare industry?
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
Yeah, that’s a great one. At the end of the day, I want to be remembered for working with great teams and affecting millions of people’s health and well-being. And for the employees that I work with, I want to be remembered for having them say we achieved together more than we ever thought was possible because we worked together.
Saul Marquez:
That’s awesome, thank you for that, that’s inspiring. What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
The best piece of advice I’ve ever received was probably from my mother. I think she was quoting Shakespeare at the time, and she says, to thine own self be true. And I really believe that if you’re true to yourself, your values, your beliefs, and you bring the passion of that to what you do every day, you’re going to have a lot of fun while you’re achieving really great things.
Saul Marquez:
I love that, it’s the wise, wise mother there. And as far as advice you would share with any of our listeners, you know, there’s a lot of people out there looking to make virtual care a reality. What advice, after all the years you’ve been doing it, would you share with them?
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
What I would say is to go for it. The time for change is now. The tech and solutions are here. Folks like Main General are achieving incredible results, and so it’s not really about the technology having to advance any further, but it isn’t going to be easy. We do need to do the change management, we do need to educate, we do need to help people adopt new ways of operating, and then if we do that and we stay true to the vision of really delivering on the healthcare reform objectives, we’re going to be able to get there. So staying true to what we’re trying to do and realizing that the time is now and seizing the day.
Saul Marquez:
Love that, stay true. Do it now, folks. Now is the time.
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
Now is the time.
Saul Marquez:
Now is the time, and everything that you need is out there. And if you don’t know where to begin, and a good place to begin is by reaching out to Kimberly and her team at Health Recovery Solutions. So on that note, Kimberly, this has been such a pleasure to be with you. Where can our listeners find and connect with you online?
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
Yeah, sure, they can connect with me on LinkedIn or on Twitter, or happy to have them reach out to me directly at KOLoughlin@HealthRecoverySolutions.com. I’d be delighted to talk to anybody that shares our passion for making a difference in healthcare.
Saul Marquez:
Love it, Kimberly, thanks for the invite there, and listeners, be sure to check out the show notes where we post all of the resources, including the links to Health Recovery Solutions, Kimberly’s email. She’s offering a hand, so take it and create some change that is going to improve health for you and the people that you care for. Kimberly, thank you so much for spending time with us.
Kimberly O’Loughlin:
My pleasure, thanks for having me.
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