Ricky Hsu, CEO and Co-Founder at Proveo Health

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Saul Marquez:
Welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket, Saul Marquez here. Such a privilege to have you tune in again. Today I have the privilege of hosting Ricky Hsu. He is the co-founder and CEO at Proveo Health. He’s a licensed pharmacist in California and extremely passionate about technology and health care. Prior to cofounding Proveo Health, Ricky managed multiple pharmacy care teams at specialty pharmacies and at two of California’s largest medical groups. The majority of his health care career has been focused on creating innovative care strategies for low income populations with complex care needs. Ricky’s experience at the ground level and managed care had a huge impact and allowed him to identify major pain points when providing care to. It was here that Proveo’s health mission and blueprints were drawn. And today we get to dive into the work that he and his co-founders, William and team are doing to level the playing field and around this area. And so with that, I want to welcome to the podcast. Ricki’s so glad you could join us today.

Ricky Hsu:
Hi Saul. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Saul Marquez:
Absolutely, my friend. And so, first of all, before we dive into Proveo Health and IRIS, the product, the digital product you guys have, I want to learn a little bit more about you and what inspires your work in health care.

Ricky Hsu:
Yeah, so I’ve actually always been really proud of the fact that in health care you can make a great living while helping people get better. So those few industries that you can do that. And I’m fortunate enough that health care is one of the. So as a pharmacist, I used to help one person at a time at the counter and then over the phone or so on. And when I entered managed care, I realized that the decisions that I make in managed care can now affect hundreds of thousands of people. And so now with global health, I’m constantly asking myself, how can we build something great and how can we build something that will end up positively impacting as many people as possible, especially those in the underserved population. So that’s what really allows me to enjoy the work that I’m doing right now.

Saul Marquez:
I love it. Yeah, I mean, it’s awesome. And with the digital health tools available today and some ingenuity and practicality and a little know how you could get really far in scaling what you could do one on one to population. So tell us a little bit more about Proveo Health, Ricky, and how the business is adding value to the health care ecosystem.

Ricky Hsu:
Yeah, so Proveo Health’s goal is to help health care companies save time and resources by fully automating their patient outreach Right.. So we do that by incorporating an intelligent chatbot with conversational and artificial intelligence on the front end. And then we pair that to a patient assessment platform that can automatically understand your health situation through your EMR records. And you’ve mentioned before, our chatbot name is Iris stands for Intelligent Response and Information System. It automatically screens and assesses the patients to find out which services they need. And then we can provide a platform for the providers, can then monitor and follow up with the patients all in one place. So it saves them a lot of time and makes it a lot easier. You can imagine if you had a super well trained health care worker, whether it’s a nurse, pharmacists or technician that’s put in charge of recounts your patients, and now all of a sudden they can read every patient’s records and your entire system reach out, talk to them simultaneously, ask the right questions, the correct service. Each one needs Right.. And compare that to right now where most of the stuff in this area are pretty much doing it manually. And those swamped and then can barely reach maybe a few percentage of the entire population that they’re in charge of. So just imagine how many more patients will get the help they desperately needed if we can automate this entire process.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah, no, it’s definitely an opportunity. So are you guys mainly interfacing? You said health care companies. So is it mainly employers? Is it?

Ricky Hsu:
Yeah. So it’s a it’s a B2B business model. And our main clientele is payors, providers and pharmacies,

Saul Marquez:
Payers, providers and pharmacies. So you have these different stakeholders using the system. How are you helping each. So walk us through that. How are you helping the payer? How are you helping the provider and how are you so pharmacy.

Ricky Hsu:
So the payer and the provider are very intertwined by both of them are very much involved in this whole patient outreach where they have to be proactive and whether it’s chronic care management or it’s just enabling services and reaching out to make sure that the patients get what they need. There’s a lot of food insecurity right now, for example, homelessness or mental health and depression in those areas. So there’s a lot of enabling services out there that are available to these patients, but they’re not necessarily getting access and getting referred to the Right. proper care that they need at any given time. So that’s important for the. Providers and the payers to be able to identify the patients, quickly, screen them, risk, assess them and get them quickly out to these services so that they prevent the deterioration of their care downstream. So that’s on the parent, the provider on the pharmacy side. It’s a lot simpler of a use case where if you can automate a lot of the processes that are being done manually tracking people for the refills, reach out to the providers before their medications are due, interfacing with the providers and keeping the patients, the pharmacists and the providers together in the same loop. There’s a lot of automation that goes on there that can save everybody time, make the patient have better experience, basically help drive some revenues for the pharmacy and improve care and appearance all at the same time.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah, makes a lot of sense, makes a lot of sense. And so on the one hand, for providers and payers, it’s kind of facilitating a social determinants of health screening and overall picture of the patient making sure that anything gets caught before it becomes a problem. And on the pharmacy side, it’s a solution to help streamline and automate and stay ahead of things.

Ricky Hsu:
Exactly. Exactly. In both cases, our goal is not to reinvent the wheel and come up with a brand new solution that people have thought Right. where we’re looking at what the clinicians are currently doing. We’re trusting the system, but we’re automating the workflow and enabling them to be able to do that with a larger amount of patients. Basically.

Saul Marquez:
Makes sense. Makes sense. So what would you say makes you guys different than what’s available today?

Ricky Hsu:
Yeah, so I think there’s three main things that differentiates us Right.. And the first is, of course, our team. We’re very proud of the team that we’ve built full of health care insiders that have been on the ground and seen the problems firsthand, understand both the politics and the regulations and the nuances of the health care that a lot of digital health or technology companies don’t get Right.. It’s not like we came up with cool technology and we tried to then figure out a way around health care. So we identified a lot of problems and then identified which technology would fit that solution. Even our advisors all come from different walks of health care, basically, either their health care executives, medical directors or health care attorneys that have all kind of touched and been in this space. So I think that’s very important. My co-founder William is a is our CTO. He’s a technical leader on the entire company. And for a software developer, he’s been in the health and wellness space for the last 10 to 15 years, building and selling digital solutions to some of the bigger players in health care as well. So I think that’s definitely number one, because it’s important at this time and in our health care. And the second is our approach to the way that the way that we design and the way that we build a product because of the fact that we’ve all been dealing with new vendors, new solutions when we were on the ground in health care, we understand the frustrations that the silos and inefficiencies, learning new systems, the list goes on and on. And so our approach is to make sure that we’re here to truly make life easier for the clinicians and the operations of health care. It needs to be totally easy and seamless. We don’t want to solve a problem but create two or three new problems downstream because of what we do, as we often see again in many of the technology services that we see today. So it takes a lot more thought to actually design and work through that design, the workflow so that you can actually achieve that. But for us, it’s a worthwhile approach because that’s the type of service that we will want. If we were in those clinicians shoes, that’s what we want for ourselves. And the final one, which is kind of related as obviously our product. So our product really reflects both our team and our approach to solving the problems that we’re targeting. It’s the only product that we know on the market. That’s it’s a it’s a chatbot, one hundred percent customizable. You can fit into any EMR system on the market within a couple of weeks time. And we really provide that one stop seamless integration for the entire clientele and their entire company, basically as a technology platform,

Saul Marquez:
That’s great. And I appreciate you walking us down the different areas that differentiate you guys. How do you say the technology and the team have improved outcomes or made business better so far?

Ricky Hsu:
Yeah, so we’re an early stage company. We’re still in the pilot mode, but the prospects that we’re talking to all have the same thing in mind. They all want to improve the efficiency of their workforce at a low cost. And we can say that across pretty much across the entire healthcare spectrum. That’s been a priority right now. But when we approach our customers and our prospects and they look at the product design, that’s really the number one thing that they’re looking at. And they want to use their nurses that are highly trained to do more than just chase after patients on the phone all day and be on hold or call a bunch of patients with no results. So they want to be able to serve more patients and do that in a sustainable manner. As well. Well, they want to cover more data about their patients than they actually have the times they can afford to do that right now. Right. So we’re confident that we can help all of our health care organizations achieve those things and basically enable them to exert greater effects and benefits on their population.

Saul Marquez:
It makes a lot of sense, and I totally get that you guys are early in it, but nevertheless adding value to those people that really need that optimization. And really the niche is maybe like lower income, trying to give that niche of patients a better treatment and a better care management strategy that’s automated and less costly Right. because that’s the challenge.

Ricky Hsu:
Yeah, that’s I mean, that’s pretty much the Holy Grail Right.. It’s how you can benefit the low income and usually high costs and high complex care patient population Right. because the 80 20 rule applies very much to the cost and the utilizers of health care in this sector. I’ve experienced that in multiple organizations that I’ve worked with prior to your health. And the interesting thing is that a lot of health care technology that you’ll see if it’s new technology is usually a large majority of them start out in more or less the commercial sector where there’s there’s less barriers to entry. You might see more adoption of technology because of the population there. They’re generally healthier. They’re higher earners. They’re more tech savvy, basically. The ironic thing is that population generally doesn’t need that technology to stay healthier. They’re doing generally pretty well. Not perfect, but they’re doing pretty well. And so the challenge is, how do you get either that technology to trickle down to the low income needy population or how do you develop a solution that can fit into the needy population, the people that need it the most and be able to get a viable business model right from the start. And so that’s our approach that we’re looking at it right now. And we’re confident, again, in the expertise that we have to be able to penetrate this market and bring those technologies that the people that actually need it of it.

Saul Marquez:
You know, and we typically like to ask, hey, what’s one of the biggest setbacks you had? Maybe that’s a question you answer or maybe you answer what do you think will be your biggest setback and how are you planning for it? Feel free to answer either. I just wanted to add two different ways, given the stage of the company and what where you are.

Ricky Hsu:
Sure, sure. Well, I mean, as you know, we’re we’re in the middle of this of pandemic right now. And and to be honest, not to be cliche or anything, but this has been a pretty big setback for us because in terms of meeting prospects, showing demos and connecting with the decision makers and the health care organizations that we really depend on at this stage for our company, the timing is crucial right now. And so not only is it tough to secure new meetings, but also the companies that we were engaged with, especially health care entities, they have to put a hold on all the new initiatives to focus on how to contain the pandemic in their own sectors and and rightly so, right., because totally that’s that’s totally what’s important right now. And so this thing hit when we were we felt like there was definitely some new traction around the corner. And so it was a pretty major transition for us. And I know a lot of other businesses and a lot of other employees are out there suffering just as much or even more. So we’re all in this together and we just have to work through it. But that’s definitely been a huge transition and a huge challenge for us right now.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah. And you know what? And the past few weeks, the same thing has come up, you know, and folks, you’re listening to this probably nodding your head, thinking, wow, yeah. Totally get it. I’m going through it myself. And so what are you doing to to overcome it Ricky? And what does the future look like?

Ricky Hsu:
The interesting thing is that during the pandemic, so we started looking at ways of how we can actually help these same health care companies that we were looking at before. How do we help them battle the pandemic? Can our solution actually be a pivoted or just be applied in some different ways so that we can actually make a difference in and serve the public health in a meaningful way? And then we found out that we were getting an onslaught of basically frequently asked questions on the covid-19 virus. What is it? How is it different than the flu? How do we properly quarantine and so on. And so we actually built our own COVID-19 chuppah within the short two week or so time frame, of course, is very simple to operate. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of our original services. Sure. But it gets the job done and that’s what the customers need right now. And so it was very interesting because as we start to look at the whole pandemic and the kind of the things that we’re needed now, then we started getting more requests like, well, can you help us screen patients to be eligible to receive free masks or develop a chop up to help employees return to work after the peak is over and so forth. And so there’s really kind of we discovered a whole vertical of informational services that can be posted on our chat about that provides for some people. And if we can help just a little bit, then we’re doing our part right. We’re still sticking to our original mission and helping alleviate some of the load off of these clinicians and off of the health care operations. And so that’s kind of what we’re focused on right now and running these two parallels at the same time.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah. You know, and just kind of thinking about the chat bot as an intake function that feels kind of like I mean, they know it’s a chat bot if they’re reaching out, but you feel like you’re getting a response and you’re venting out a lot of information that you need for whatever initiative you might have, like mask’s or providing services or whatever it might be. And so it becomes another intake process that you offload from their team so they could focus on keeping healthy and keeping the things running as much as they could during this time tonight. You guys are refocussed there. And that’s kind of cool that you uncovered that opportunity.

Ricky Hsu:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, it shows that especially in this time where there are a lot of companies might be short on staff, the sudden onslaught of focus on containment of the pandemic is as crucial. And so nobody was prepared to stop this many people for this particular operation. And so, I mean, it’s it’s definitely a challenge. But we’re doing our best to stand up to it and hope that good things come out of it.

Saul Marquez:
Wow, that’s pretty cool. Kudos. And so where is the company going? I mean, you guys become like a health care customizable health care chat bot service. I mean, that that’s kind of interesting.

Ricky Hsu:
Yeah, that that’s certainly a possibility. And the avenue that we’re considering. Right. It’s up in the air. But what I will say is customization has always been one of our main selling points. And by producing a lot of these assessments and a lot of these smaller products on the covid-19 and helping the containment and helping these efforts, you know, we’re doing our best to prove the customized ability aspect of the chuppah and the platform itself. We’re so focused on. We’re so hopeful that we can continue to offer services on what we just talked about, all the other workflow issues, social determinants of health sectors that we want to focus on that we were originally targeting. But at the same time, you know, it’s what the health care organizations need at this point in time particularly that’s important. So if we can showcase that, then it allows us to build better reputations and build better relationships with those that we can help in the future for sure.

Saul Marquez:
So what would you say is your favorite book, Ricky? What book would you recommend to the listeners?

Ricky Hsu:
Yeah, so one of the books that I read a while ago actually was called and this I think is a pretty well-known book is called Delivering Happiness by Tony Shea.

Saul Marquez:
Oh yeah. Yeah. What a great book.

Ricky Hsu:
It’s kind of an oldie, right.

Saul Marquez:
Oldie but goodie. Yeah. Yeah. And I like it. I enjoy it because it’s obviously an entrepreneur spirit in there as well. But it tells you kind of the craziness that there’s some humor in it as well. Right. some irony and some sarcasm and stuff like that to outline the grind of an entrepreneur basically Right.. But yeah, I mean after reading it, it kind of inspires you to just continue putting your head down and working hard and doing good things.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah, I agree with you, Ricky. It’s a great book. And if you folks haven’t read it, it’s a great read. Delivering Happiness. Tony Shea, he was an early investor in Zappos and Right. took it to where it is now and being acquired by Amazon. Just one of the moments that sticks out to me was that moment where he sold his condo and it was like almost done, like the company was about to die. And they made a simple shift from drop shipping to actually carrying inventory to make it work. And it just skyrocketed. I mean, I’m so intrigued by those small tweaks that can make such a big difference. And that kind of reminds me of what you guys are doing with this chap. Who knows, maybe that’s the term your company makes and it becomes a huge success.

Ricky Hsu:
Yeah, I was actually just going to say, you know, when you mentioned that, it’s like in hindsight, we can always look at these stories that these famous entrepreneurs and successful people, they can tell us in hindsight. Right. But I’m sure when they were in it, they didn’t realize that they were making a key decision that would pay off. Right. So it’s Right. in a way. It allows you to really think that, OK, just kind of stay on your path, focus and do what you believe in. And if you look back maybe a year or two from now, it may become the right decision. It may not, but it may pay off. Right. So it just kind of tells you to just keep your head down and focus. We hear a lot of stories like this where Elon Musk was on his last final rocket launch and if that failed and everything was going to go bust as well. Right. So I’m sure at that point you didn’t know that that would become what it is today. So you never know. So it just kind of gives you that inspiration and gives you a little bit of faith to just keep on going.

Saul Marquez:
Stay with it, listeners. Stay with it. Great message, Ricky. And I’m taking it to heart as well. I love if you could just share a closing thought with us all. And the best place for the listeners could find out more about you or continue the conversation.

Ricky Hsu:
Yeah, I mean, I think I’ll close with you know, we talked about a silver lining out of the global pandemic right now. And my hope is that somehow health care technology gets accelerated as we work our way out of this pandemic going forward. People are starting to realize that we can accomplish a lot more with telehealth, remote access to services. And I’m hoping that adoption of these technologies boost the efficiency and production become the new norm. That’s kind of my silver lining out of the all the negatives right now that everyone’s going through.And the best way to contact me is by email. Really. Just send me a message at Chat’s at Prove Health dot com. That’s chat, proveo health dot com. Send me a message if you want to learn more about proveo health or if you just want to get in touch on top of it.

Saul Marquez:
There you have folks. Ricki Hsu Proveo Health. Thanks so much for tuning in to the podcast today. And Ricky, just want to give you a big thanks for contributing.

Ricky Hsu:
Thank you, Saul. It’s my pleasure.

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