OutcomesRocket_Jason Rose & Kal Vepuri: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Saul Marquez:
Hey everybody! Saul Marquez with the Outcomes Rocket. Thank you so much for tuning back in to our podcast today. I’ve got a treat for you today, two amazing leaders in healthcare. First, I want to introduce Jason Rose to the podcast. Now, you guys are probably thinking I’ve heard this name before. Yes, because he’s been on our podcast previously. He’s a high-performing serial entrepreneur who brings 25 plus years of business development strategy and leadership experience in healthcare IT. He’s a visionary with a proven track record of taking disruptive products from whiteboard concepts to sustain high annual revenues, to enable business success. Since 2018, Jason has been spearheading value-based care as CEO of AdhereHealth. The innovative tech company is focused on transforming healthcare by leveraging intelligent data analytics, promoting medication adherence, and working with patients to resolve social determinants of health. He was working in this space before it was even cool or before it was actually a thing. And we are also hosting Kal Vepuri on this podcast today. Kal is a digital health futurist and blockchain enthusiast. He believes low friction, user-centric design, and actionable use of longitudinal bio measures will transform care and quality of life. He has a rare combination of familiarity with both the human and technical challenges that come with medication management and caregiving. His deep understanding of digital health and health technology, combined with his business acumen as a prolific angel investor, makes him a leading authority to speak on solutions for these long-standing medical concerns. He is an outstanding contributor, before even Hero, he was an entrepreneur investor in more than 250 companies. We’re excited to have him here on the podcast as well. All right, and so with that, folks, I want to welcome both Jason and Kal to the podcast, gentlemen, welcome!
Jason Rose:
Welcome. Great to see you again, Saul.
Kal Vepuri:
Thanks, Saul, nice to be here.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, likewise. So, guys, two incredible organizations making some great change for healthcare and the recipients of healthcare in our system. What inspired your organizations to collaborate?
Jason Rose:
Well, I guess I can start with that, Kal. So on my board is a great guy, a gentleman named Brad Fluegel, and Brad is, has a fantastic background, used to be a top guy at Walgreens, also at Anthem and Aetna prior to that. And he had a relationship, or has a relationship with Kal and Hero Health, and Brad has been on my board for several years, and he thought it would be great for us to connect, and I usually do whatever Brad tells me to do because he’s usually correct. So that’s how I think it all started.
Kal Vepuri:
Yeah, and the only thing I’ll add is we spent a long time working through the marketplace of folks who we thought could be great partners with us in the context of pharmacy, and Adhere and Jason came up multiple times. So we’re thankful for Brad and the connectivity there.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great. No, I love it, and it sounds like there’s opportunities to get things to a better state here with your partnership. Kal, you have a personal story, right? What led you to create Hero?
Jason Rose:
Yeah, thanks, Saul. So my personal story is that I grew up in a healthcare household. Both my parents were immigrants who started their careers in healthcare, and my mother was a physician. She was trained as a surgeon and then became a primary, a PCP after I was born and spent her entire life really caring for largely geriatric patients. She, in the last decade of her life, started to suffer from chronic disease, and I saw firsthand how difficult it was for even a physician to manage medication on their own when they’re taking ten plus meds a day, multiple dosing, right, different source pharmacies, etc. So that became the original inspiration for what Hero is today. And we’re excited to partner with folks in various different parts of our business in namely in pharmacy with Adhere because of the fact that it creates a complete end-to-end experience for our members by integrating real-time information regarding what medication you have on hand and making sure that it gets to you without any gap days or any risks like that.
Saul Marquez:
Nice, thanks for sharing that, and for the benefit of the listeners, Jason, give us the high level on AdhereHealth if they haven’t listened to the previous interview that we did.
Jason Rose:
Yeah, absolutely. So AdhereHealth is a healthcare technology company. We’re centrally focused on medication adherence and what’s called medication optimization and all the quality measures that go along with that. And so if you think about the US healthcare system, over half a trillion dollars a year, which is 16% of the US healthcare economy, is unnecessary cost and waste based on patients not taking their drugs, which is non-adherence so massive problem, one of the top issues in all of healthcare, really doesn’t get the proper focus that it should. And so we built this company, AdhereHealth, to create a, I think, a first-of-its-kind healthcare tech platform, … platform to tackle that half a trillion dollars a year. And so we’re delighted to add Hero Health to our platform and have this fantastic relationship with them so we can both really meet, both, the goals of our company.
Saul Marquez:
Love it, so let’s dig into the partnership. You know, how does this partnership add value to the healthcare ecosystem?
Jason Rose:
I’ll start, Kal, here, and then you can maybe jump in wherever needed. So if you think about Hero, Hero has got just incredible software platform and dispensing machine that’s FDA approved, and part of the issue with patients is that they just simply don’t get their drugs consistently throughout the course of a month. Typically, most drugs are refilled every 90 days or every 30 days, and patients that are going to be considered more complex and someone who would probably benefit from a world-class device like Hero, really most likely is going to have seven, eight, nine, ten, fifteen drugs a day. Those drugs are prescribed by five, six, seven different doctors and they’re probably getting them built from multiple pharmacies as well. Could be mail order, it could be local retail, Walgreens, maybe community pharmacies, but they’re seeing two or three pharmacies throughout the course at a time. And then to make it even more complex is that they don’t have the same date that they’re filled on each month. And so having all those drugs that they need to be taking every day, all filled on the same day, is a quite a supply chain conundrum, and it requires a deep understanding of all those drugs to make sure that they get synchronized to a single date so that when the patient has the Hero device on their countertop, they always have all the drugs that they need to actually make it work most optimally. And so one of the assets within the Adhere platform is called AdhereRx, that’s our dispensing pharmacy. We dispense in 48 states.
Saul Marquez:
What’s it called again, Jason?
Jason Rose:
It’s called AdhereRx.
Saul Marquez:
AdhereRx, okay.
Jason Rose:
That’s, that is a, it’s a retail pharmacy. It’s got a closed, technically, a closed-door retail pharmacy, which means that we don’t have patients coming in the front door. It is still considered a retail pharmacy like a Walgreens or a CVS, but we don’t see patients coming in our front door. We have two hubs for East and West Coast, both carry North Carolina and Phoenix, Arizona. We use robotic automation and other technologies to synchronize the drugs and also build them safely and effectively. We ship them to private couriers so that they can be delivered directly to the patient’s doorstep, ideally once per month. And that way all the drugs are delivered once per month so that when they receive them, they can pour them in the Hero machine and it can work most effectively.
Saul Marquez:
That is cool, you know, like, I mean, you think I mean, hell, I can’t find my keys sometimes, you know, for my car, and if I had 20 medications to deal with, like, I mean, it’s just it’s a huge problem. And so now we’re talking about simplifying it from acquisition, so the patient supply chain aspect, to now, they reach the front door, and now taking them is the next problem, and that’s where Hero comes in.
Kal Vepuri:
Yeah, that’s right, Saul. So, basically, we have this black box oftentimes as people who care for people with chronic disease, right? Whether you’re a caregiver or provider or just a concerned citizen, you don’t really know what’s happening once the medication is in the home, and so that’s where Hero comes in. We solve an actual daily challenge for these individuals and families and providers who need that visibility and transparency and certainty that people are happily able to take their medication with an experience that’s modern and comfortable and in many cases exciting, because a lot of the pain and friction that’s created by having to remember to take your meds or refill your pillbox, etc. is completely gone. So Hero is really at its best in the home where we are effectively invisible and become a habitual asset for these folks’ daily lives, where they have now complete peace of mind themselves, their caregivers have complete transparency, and their providers are able to monitor in real-time exactly at the per-med per-dose level what meds are being taken 24/7. So no longer do we have a situation where we have a black box, but we now have complete transparency without feeling, without making folks feel like they are being surveilled, right? They have a system in their house that’s really easy to use. They truly love it, and it’s solving a problem for them all day long, right? And it’s why we called the company Hero in the first place.
Saul Marquez:
That’s awesome, yeah, and look, so, like, in my head, I’m like, hey, how big is this thing? Is it like a size of a coffee machine? Or like, you know, like, I want to make this real for everybody listening.
Kal Vepuri:
The way to think about it is it’s sort of like it feels like a curated coffee machine or an espresso coffee machine that’s sitting on your kitchen counter. You know, it holds typically 90 days or more of most meds, and it stores 10 meds internally, but can hold any number of medications that are not pill form in its regimen. So for example, if you’re taking insulin or powders or refrigerated meds, that would still be in your regimen, and still get all the reminders for that through the device, and it would be recorded through the cloud as well.
Saul Marquez:
Beautiful, and folks, you didn’t see it, but we’ll leave a link to it. Jason was holding up the Hero dispenser. It’s slick, you know, it looks really nice, it’s not big, so very cool, exciting work. And, you know, this is the type of partnership that needs to be happening, you know, in healthcare where you have somebody like Jason, you know, taking care of that last mile pills to the door, and then somebody like Kal, those last few steps, actually taking those medications. These types of partnerships are what we need to make healthcare better for all of us. So, okay guys, exciting stuff. What trends do you see emerging that will change healthcare as we know it?
Jason Rose:
Well, you know, the stats show that there’s a huge shift to home care. This is not new, it’s been going on for a very long time. But over the course of the next several years, I think McKinsey wrote that there’s a four-fold increase to home care by 2025, and that’s comprising up to $265 billion dollars of care services, which is a quarter of just the Medicare fee-for-service and Medicare Advantage membership. So think about the hospital without walls, that’s what they used to say. I’m not sure if that’s the most common term now, but what can we do as a society to keep patients out of the hospital, out of the emergency room, at home? And this delays that potential nursing home issue, too. I can tell you on a personal side, I can tell you my mother-in-law came down with a very serious health condition in her early fifties, and that caused her to need to have, I think it was in the … Of 13, 15 drugs a day. And I remember watching my father-in-law every day, or every week really, line up all these Dixie cups for each day of the week and then for each moment of the day, and then fill in 13, 14, 15, 16 drugs, which changes every couple of months, too, because there’s all kinds of changes in their medical condition. And they had to diligently place the drugs into each Dixie Cup and then hand them off to her throughout the course of the day, and he did this for 15 years. This was highly complex. And you just think about something like Hero, it eliminates all that, and then with AdhereRx, it gets the drugs there so we can actually be maximal. So that is daily life for a lot of the caregivers. It is a major, major problem. Imagine you put the wrong drug in the wrong Dixie Cup or doubled up or something. It’s just ripe for error and ripe for missing drugs, and it’s such a critical aspect of transparency too, that makes sure that the caregivers, as well as the care team, are aware of everything. So we see this type of technology, and this type of relationship is really the path forward with home care because it’s such a major important trend with improving quality and reducing cost of care.
Kal Vepuri:
And I would add a couple of things. I think Jason summarized it really well. I would say there’s a couple of things that are worth noting. One is that the tie between adherence and reducing medication dispensing errors, which happen as a result obviously of anyone trying to set up the quintessential sort of Dixie cup or pillbox or whatever method you’re going to make mistakes, and that’s just a part of life. So if we can eliminate those and drive adherence, which our system does over 95% adherence across our population at the per-dose per-med level, right? With that unlocks is a whole new world where all of a sudden you can tie adherence to actual outcomes and cost reduction. So as a result, the government via CMS has released RTM codes this year, remote therapeutic monitoring codes, which validate the actual value of ensuring that providers are monitoring this type of activity in the home. So adherence falls under the auspices of remote therapeutic monitoring and is now incentivized by the government.
Saul Marquez:
That’s awesome, that’s pretty cool. Yeah, no, I had no idea about that. And it makes so much sense for adherence to be lumped into that remote therapeutic monitoring category along with the basic vitals and things that physicians need to know about these chronically challenged folks. So super, thank you for sharing that and these trends too. Like, hey, man, kudos to governing agencies that did a lot of learning through COVID and made shifts and changes that are helping with this trend, and home care, enabling that so that folks like Jason’s dad, folks like my father and mother don’t have to do what they have to do. So awesome.
Kal Vepuri:
But also get access to the Hero platform at little to no cost as a result of the new RTM codes that have been launched by CMS this year. So it’s transformational in the sense that anybody who really needs this needs medical necessity and is Medicare eligible, could now get Hero for effectively free.
Saul Marquez:
Wow, that’s huge. That’s huge, and worth noting here. So how do people get this, right? You know, got a physician leader listening to this or a provider executive. How do they engage with you guys? I just want to know. They need to know how. So tell us how.
Kal Vepuri:
So HeroHealth.com is on and available 24 hours a day. It has all the information in every different pathway to become a Hero member and utilize our services which are connected to Adhere as well, so that’s an easy path. Increasingly over time, they’ll be able to talk to their provider about Hero, and their provider will be equipped themselves to basically send them to us directly as well. So the easiest, most failproof way today would just be to go to the website and basically click whether they’re Medicare eligible or otherwise, and then that will direct them exactly to the easiest path. At that point, Hero will be immediately shipped to their home. They’ll have it within usually 24 hours, sometimes 48, depending on where they live. They take it out of the box, they input their wi-fi password and they’re off to the races.
Saul Marquez:
That’s awesome, and so does this apply with the Adhere platform as well, Jason?
Jason Rose:
Yeah, what I’ll go to the next step further is that, so when they get the Hero device, they set it up, they’re also, it’s a full-blown software package as well that’s mobile device ready and everything well, but when they are enrolling or after they’ve enrolled at any given time, Hero has made it really easy, and I was just actually reviewing all the extensive marketing plans, make sure that their patients, their customers are aware of the relationship with our pharmacy AdhereRx is that they can, with a click of a button, they can request to have their pharmacies fill by AdhereRx and we’re, from a technology integration standpoint, an API integration between Hero and AdhereHealth is activated where AdhereRx, our pharmacy, receives all the necessary information to become their pharmacy, to become the patient’s pharmacy. We get their prescriber information. We get their insurance information, we get each individual drug, the dosages, the pharmacies that they currently exist at, and that becomes our source of truth to begin the med sync process so that we can switch all the drugs to AdhereRx and ultimately at the patient’s doorstep. So it’s a really incredible, powerful partnership. But that’s from the consumer point of view. Just to add one more quick thing, one of the other areas that Kal and I are really excited about is the other area where you think about managed care or Medicare Advantage plans or managed Medicaid plans, exchange plans in particular, where those health plans would like for their care teams to also be able to have the same experience with Hero and all the real-time medication alerts of patients missing their drugs or making sure that the device is even known to their membership because it reduced costs and improves quality of care. So through with AdhereHealth, we can also offer the entire Hero platform as well to any end of the managed care plans. So we’ve got multiple ways … on what type of stakeholder, if it’s in an RTM provider, if it’s a managed care plan or just direct to consumer, you can use this partnership to benefit healthcare economy and …
Saul Marquez:
Got it, got it, fantastic. No, thanks for that, guys. It’s important for us to know how we can use the amazing things that you guys are doing. So thank you for the multiple entry points. And folks, we’ll leave links in the show notes for you to find those avenues to engage with Jason and Kal’s teams on this amazing partnership. Guys, I’d love to chat here more, but obviously, we only have limited time, so why don’t you guys leave us with the closing thought and the best place that the listeners could connect with you?
Kal Vepuri:
I’ll just go really quickly here. I would say, yeah, really thankful for the time. We’re excited about increasing transparency and solving real problems in the home and translating that in partnership with Adhere to improved outcomes. So couldn’t be more excited about just starting to scratch the surface of what digital in-home care looks like in partnership with Jason and his team.
Jason Rose:
Yeah, I concur, and Saul, it’s great to work with you again and it’s just been such a great partnership with Kal and the Hero team. We are really just truly scratching the surface as the regulatory environment evolves, as more providers and managed care plans and patients are aware of these great organizations, it will just improve overall outcomes. And so this, the last thing I’d say is there’s a lot of fluff out there. There’s a lot of perspectives on what technologies work. This is actually in production and actually works, both companies are currently working together. We have patients that are using this technology, this is not a hypothetical, it actually is in production at scale across the United States. So really exciting to see something real and transformative like this.
Saul Marquez:
That’s a really great call out, Jason. So if somebody wanted this, they could get it today.
Jason Rose:
And get it right now.
Saul Marquez:
Put in the order today, 24 hours later, just like Amazon, to their doorstep.
Kal Vepuri:
Yep, Hero Health … kicks it off.
Saul Marquez:
Hey, that’s, you know what? That’s so huge. We do have to call that out because there’s a lot of vaporware out there and it’s great to hear that you guys have something tangible and that works and available for us. So look, I can’t appreciate both of you so much and your organizations, what you guys are doing. So keep up the amazing work. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Jason Rose:
Great, thanks, Saul. Thanks, Kal.
Kal Vepuri:
Thanks, guys. Thanks, Jason.
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