Israeli Innovation -Turning and MVP into a Most Valuable Product with Avi Rosenzweig, Co-Founder and CEO at Newfield Advisors was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best audio automated transcription service in 2020. Our automated transcription algorithms works with many of the popular audio file formats.
Saul Marquez:
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Saul Marquez:
Welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket, Saul Marquez is here and today I have the privilege of hosting Avi Rosenzweig. He has spent the last decade as business development and strategic planning consultant, working with private and publicly traded health care companies and helping them gain an in-depth understanding of their markets while providing insight on how investors think and what they look for. In addition to being an expert connector, Avi excels in taking early and late-stage health care startups to the next level, leveraging his extensive network, knowledge, and experience. A native New Yorker, Avi’s expertise is in helping startups reach their target markets and helping young companies expand and develop. That is the focus of the work he does at New Field Advisors. And today he’s speaking to us from Israel, where he’s doing a lot of work in helping a lot of the Israeli companies be discovered here in the US health market. So, Avi, it’s a privilege to have you here on the podcast, and really looking forward to our conversation today.
Avi Rosenzweig:
I appreciate that Saul. It’s wonderful to be here.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah. And so before we dive into what you guys are doing at New Field, tell us a little bit more about what inspires your work in health care for today, especially what’s going on today, really watching the health care providers worldwide as literally put their lives on the line to save others. It’s incredibly inspirational. On a personal note, my wife’s OB-GYN. I’ve watched her for years working 85, 90 hours a week, chasing after patients in the middle of the night. But the truth is, my focus dedication really started when I was young. Sadly, two classmates, one elementary school, one in high school, both died of cancer simply because it was caught too late. And the other problem, I don’t deal with blood. I see blood. I pass out face first in it. So being a doctor was never an option for me. But I do know the business and I do also understand the focus of how the health care business works as much as I can. And they use those to really try to focus my career on improving health care through my business skills.
Saul Marquez:
I love it. That’s so great, Avi. And you know your niche. You know what you’re good at. You’re tackling it. And so let’s hone in on it. So talk to us about New field advisors and how you guys are adding value to the health care ecosystem.
Avi Rosenzweig:
Absolutely. So one of the things I learned a bunch of years ago is that the ecosystem in Israel is specifically focused on health care innovation, it’s incredibly broad and strong. But while there are tremendous ideas and IP developed over years incredibly well, most of it fails to move the needle in the US. And there are a bunch of reasons for that. But we really identified three core factors which we as a team help to resolve. The first one is a simple lack of understanding of the healthcare system in the US is complexities. We can go to this for hours, but at the end of the day, too many entrepreneurs go to a hospital with a parent or the child and they see a problem. They think I can solve that with technology. Technology isn’t usually the problem. The problem is reimbursement, It’s regulatory issues., It is the willingness of hospitals and payers and providers to take outside solutions, especially if there was a single solution provider that doesn’t integrate with others. So how do you bring a single solution? Have you been a problem which they don’t even know how to work with the IT systems in place, the EMR’s and the different opportunities? How do you bring that from a very distant country into US health care? That’s problem number one. Problem number two, which is related is the lack of access to resources, to connections. You and I know this very well. It’s very difficult to reach physicians to have a conversation to give you, even as a patient, to give you the time of day.
Avi Rosenzweig:
If you talk about that, forget about reaching hospital executive C-level executives or even harder, insurance executives or industry executives to also be very difficult to reach. So how do you create a systematic approach where you can build those relationships and explain the succinct manner, what you’re looking to do, what you have, and how you do that over a period of time while you’re developing the technology and the last is coming from literally across the world, is there is a significant cultural and language barriers. Even many Israelis Hebrew fluently, but they miss social cues. They miss the nuance. And when you do that in a meeting with an executive and you miss their main point, not because it was said, but because it wasn’t said or the eye roll or the glass between two VPs of a company, if you don’t notice those things, you’re going to fail to integrate your message in a way which touches them, which reaches them. So beyond that, they’re also corporate cultural gaps. It is still a large company, might be 500 employees, maybe a thousand employees. That could be a CEO, a VP, and a director maybe. In America, we’re talking about big industry companies, we’re talking about hospitals. There are 15, 20 levels of management. How do you manage that process from a director to a senior director to a VP to an SVP to an EVP to a GM? How do you create a situation where you identify your champion, work with them to go up and down that scale, to find the right people, and make sure that your message is hitting the right target.
Avi Rosenzweig:
So our team, led by myself and Dr. Jonathan Ringo, just recently moved to Israel. He was a former president of Sinai Hospital in Baltimore. So we work very closely together with our team and with our experience. But I will say point-blank his knowledge, clinical and administrative and health care management, experience, gravitas, connections. We resolve those first two issues. We’re able to get on straight to the right people at the right time. We’re able to use our skills, our knowledge to make sure that our message is being, that our strategy, that our refined notes are being acknowledged in a way which dollars and cents make sense for those hospital systems, for those clinics, for those payers, for the industry, of course. So we understand the dollar flow and how it works. So we create a business model that makes it attractive for the health care systems and of course, also attractive for the investors and for the startup companies. But at the end of the day, it all starts with us having to identify pain points and finding the right solution. So that’s the beginning part of the process. And at the end of the day, as Americans who live in Israel, we speak Hebrew fluently and speak English fluently. We can relate and translate the language differences, the cultural differences, and the medical specific cultural and business differences and do that in a way which helps them develop a relationship, refine the relationship and bring a much higher level of success to this company over a period of time.
Saul Marquez:
Now, you’ve captured it very clearly. It’s that lack of understanding of the system’s complexity, lack of access to resources, and understanding those cultural and corporate cultural nuances to really capture market share, get traction. And so talk to us about some of the results and how you’ve been able to improve business for some of these companies.
Avi Rosenzweig:
Sure. So we as a group we are actually brand new, With Dr. Ringo and myself, working separately for years. We united forces literally in the past six weeks. We can talk for many for a long time about his successes and my successes separately. But I want to kind of get on to what’s different about us today because of this combination because I think that’s a much bigger difference. Among other things, we’re springboard. What’s that mean? This means we’re literally trying to create the ability to jump higher and faster. And we do that by leveraging our own information, but more specifically, the contradictions and concepts that we have throughout the US and health care executives. And just as importantly, we also are part of a larger system that owns a telehealth practice which is already today servicing health care systems throughout the US hospitals, insurance companies, clinics, and all the senior centers. So we use that platform to also vet the companies that we’re starting to work with by doing pilots, US-focused pilots in US health care systems from our is really telehealth platform, which makes it cheaper, faster. But using real live data from the US systems is a company called Convergence. That’ our sister company, we’re looking at real-life data from the US platforms, which is not only understandable, but it also works with all the different administrative systems and EMR’s that we need to do from our Israeli platform.
Avi Rosenzweig:
So we’re utilizing our abilities to have ongoing conversations with C-level executives, CMO, heads of I.T. in all the different levels of health care, and then putting that together with our ability to be a very simple, localized opportunity to pilot locally from Israel into their actual own system and show them data live on their system, which proves the point to them without having to go through all the hoops of their local IT. Obviously, we do our best to do everything locally, but without having to go through their own hoops. We create the protocol, we create the data and the clinical endpoints, and we pilot them hopefully in the US. This incredible platform adds significant cost savings and clear value from day one.
Saul Marquez:
I think it’s definitely differentiated and leveraging the experience and the existing business that you have, the data that you have. I think it could be really meaningful to startups and companies that have maybe had already gotten some initial traction. So it’s a new venture. So right now, you guys are still and you have your wins from previous career lives. But right now you guys are wanting to get the message out. And our reason we got you guys here on the podcast. So talk to us about maybe a setback you’ve experienced and key learning that came from that and now why you’re developing this company.
Avi Rosenzweig:
Sure. So it’s funny, I tell my kids for many years, fail early and fail often. Success breeds confidence, which is wonderful to teach us a lot. When I first started my first consulting business, twenty-four years old. And what’s the real value to a bunch of companies early on? But at the end of the day, I couldn’t figure out how to model it for myself. So even though some of the companies I worked with were succeeding, I earned literally zero dollars and zero cents over a six month period. It’s a pretty big failure when you’re working your rear end off and not earning a penny, despite the fact that those around you are making money. I realized at that point you can’t rush experience. At the end of the year, we have to see, do, teach. And that simply happens over a period of time. One of the things that you learn as you do it is that the more you open your eyes, the more you open to learning from people around you, the more you explore, the more you read into things that you don’t know how to do and you learn along the way. It creates the sense of I can do anything because I started with zero and I learn how to do so. When you do that, when you’re twenty-four, you don’t know how to do that. But when you do that over a period of years after that and you really start building processes that help you dive into new industries, new experiences, it allows you to understand that, OK, I don’t know what I’m doing right now, but I have the resources, I have the capabilities, have some knowledge, and I have people who can guide me in the right direction. So my consulting business, 10 years later, 10 years ago with a few ups and downs, but honestly, mostly up and the trajectory has been phenomenal for the last couple of years.
Saul Marquez:
That’s awesome. And some good learnings, too. You can’t expect to know everything upfront. And you certainly captured that in your message as you think about this venture that you’re up to and how you could leverage some of the experience that you and and your partner, Dr. Ringo, have. What are you most excited about?
Avi Rosenzweig:
Honestly, I am so excited about my team and the opportunities that are presenting themselves every single day between our core team, which includes a Ph.D. in health care economics with tremendous experience, a young woman who came out of Austin who joined our team with tremendous knowledge, the background of how hospitals work from within and a lower level. But we also have direct access as part of our greater team to 60 level hospital executives. And we’re building an advisory board, which is simply incredible, made up of geographically spread out hospital executives, payor executives. So the internal team, the external team, and then honestly has blown me away is the opportunities from US health care systems that are literally knocking on our door, pulling us on a daily basis, asking us to find ways to cooperate. We actually have an Israeli hospital, ask us to cooperate as well. I said to my wife at the beginning, the first test of the first few weeks is to see if we’re going to grow some legs. I didn’t anticipate that we were going to grow into a centipede and that’s honestly what’s happening. It’s shocking and blown me away every day. And it’s incredibly exciting.
Saul Marquez:
That’s awesome, Avi. Well, it’s a testament to what you guys are building and connecting the dots between innovative geography over there and Israel and in an area of need across really the globe. But obviously, US health care it’s a great opportunity. It’s fantastic. And I’m really excited for you guys to really see that you’re creating the traction you’re creating so early. So, folks, if you’re curious about the work that Avi and his team are up to it’s newfieldbd.com. we’ll also put the link inside of the Show notes. But Avi, why don’t you go ahead and leave us a closing thought and the best place that the listeners can reach out to you and your team if they want to continue the conversation?
Avi Rosenzweig:
Sure. As the world changes so quickly, given what’s happening today with this crazy pandemic and the lack of travel, the lack of closeness between people, I think the health care world is one end suffering the most because of that need to constantly be at the forefront and be challenged with what’s going on. But what’s happening on the innovation side of health care is remarkable. We’re seeing new paradigms that normally take a decade or more to happen, happening almost on a weekly basis. We see the FDA, which is one of the slowest moving organizations, having to move and make decisions to literally change telemedicine and diagnostics on a daily basis. The things that we were all hoping to see in five, 10, 15 years we’re already seeing today. So from my perspective, that adds incredible opportunity, not only for Israeli innovation, but for worldwide innovation to really take a huge step forward, whether it’s in digital health or in telehealth or in health care I.T., I would say our focus has been in population health management, in creating efficiencies, cost-saving efficiencies, and in chronic disease management. All areas are really suffering tremendous setbacks because people aren’t going to their physicians and hospitals. But there is a tremendous opportunity on almost a daily basis for us and for a lot of other people around the world. So very, very trying time in the world of innovation. It’s also an incredibly exciting time and opportunistic time. The best way to reach me. You mentioned my website. I’m also very active on LinkedIn. We’re starting to build a nice community. We put some new data. We’re starting to build a blog as well. So you can find me under Newfield Health care consultants of Rosenzweig’s pretty active. And look forward to meeting you there.
Saul Marquez:
Love it, Avi. I really appreciate you jumping on and sharing the exciting work you guys are up to. And and folks take Abbie up on the connection to reach out there if there’s a way that you could benefit from the work that he and his team are doing now. The opportunity, so I appreciate you coming on and really, really looking forward to seeing how you guys progress here.
Avi Rosenzweig:
Thanks so much. Appreciate the time. Look forward to being in touch.
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