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Bridging Healthcare Gaps for Underserved Communities
Episode

Arun Villivalam, MD MBA, CEO at Los Gatos Doc, Inc.

Bridging Healthcare Gaps for Underserved Communities

A California solo family practice can revolutionize healthcare delivery.

 

In this episode, Arun Villivalam, a family physician and medical director based in Los Gatos, California, talks about his experience with electronic health records and his initial vision of transforming healthcare through their implementation. He discusses his current practice set up as a self-employed physician with independent physician agreements and the importance of insurance contracts for patient care, mentioning his marketing partner and their role in maintaining a professional and elegant online presence for his practice. He talks about the challenges primary care doctors face, including the healthcare system’s complexity and the need for adequate reimbursement rates. Arun also shares insights on his involvement in Sprinter Health, a venture focused on improving care access and bridging healthcare service gaps. 

 

Tune in to learn about Arun Villivalam’s barrier-breaking career in healthcare delivery!

Bridging Healthcare Gaps for Underserved Communities

About Arun Villivalam: 

Dr. Arun Villivalam is a concerned and caring family physician and primary care doctor serving the community of Los Gatos, CA. Dr. V provides a variety of services to ensure the health and well-being of his patients. He offers annual physicals and exams for general well-being maintenance, as well as Medicare annual wellness checks. He also helps his patients to manage chronic diseases, provides blood work as needed, and provides counseling support to those who need to improve their stress management techniques. Same-day care is also available to established patients.

 

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Jim Jordan:
Welcome to the Chalk Talk Jim Podcast, where we explore insights into healthcare that help uncover new opportunities for growth and success. I’m your host, Jim Jordan.

Jim Jordan:
Our guest today is Arun Villivalam. He has a broad background, he’s a physician, he’s an MBA from the Wharton Business School, he’s the CEO of a physician practice, he’s the medical director of an emerging startup category, and he’s also an angel investor. Arun, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Arun Villivalam:
Sure, my name is Arun Villivalam. I’m a family physician based in Los Gatos, California, and I’ve been in private practice now for about seven years or so here, but I’ve been out of training for more than 20 years. And I’m originally from Chicago, went to college in med school in Pennsylvania, and came back to Chicago to do my residency in family medicine, then did a fellowship and informatics at Georgetown. And then, for the first ten years of my career was, mainly, I worked in industry, was a physician executive at Cerner and at chief medical information officer and medical director at another company which was called CHS, now it’s known as Premise Health. And then actually went back into practice, so back practicing clinically, and I’ve worked for a few different groups before deciding to go solo practice, and so that’s what I’ve been doing most recently.

Jim Jordan:
So it sounds like you were at the very beginning of electronic health records then.

Arun Villivalam:
I was, and I don’t know if it was around that time, yes, and there was a lot of idealism around electronic health records. I actually worked for Cerner, which is an electronic health record company, which was a fantastic experience, learned a lot, was there for about 4 or 5 years, and it was a great experience seeing how in the early stages, healthcare systems, hospital systems, healthcare organizations were starting to implement and make purchasing decisions around electronic medical record systems with the vision that these would dramatically transform healthcare in a positive way.

Jim Jordan:
So how far away do you think we are of that vision from your perspective today?

Arun Villivalam:
I think it’s a continuing work in progress because I think, a lot of the benefits that we all talked about even 20 years ago, they’re still things that we think are benefits, and we have realized some of them, but I think that there was some naivete about how to actually capture the information. And I think there was an idealism or a romanticism about what we could do with the information, with healthcare information that we collect on a patient, and how we can improve their lives in terms of quality and so many other factors. But I think that, again, the naivete was how do you actually capture the basic information that we need so that you can do some of these more advanced things, and there’s a big disconnect. I think there was a disconnect then, and I’m not sure that the disconnect is gone now, actually.

Jim Jordan:
Well, was the electronic health record really like a data warehouse at one point in time, and getting a data warehouse to do analytical or AI or machine learning kinds of things or a little bit beyond what it was designed for?

Arun Villivalam:
I think that’s one of the goals of what the electronic health record should be. I, on a practical basis, as a frontline primary care physician, I don’t see that really happening today. I think that there are a lot of other benefits in the healthcare system that I see every day, just in terms of being able to access certain information from one point. It’s not universally true, but there’s a lot of elegant solutions that have come into play. But I think a lot of what we have today is around the medical record system being a repository and having some checklists, those kinds of things. In terms of, again, this is what I see on the front lines, as a primary care physician, I’m sure that there are AI-type solutions that are out there, but they’re not changing what I do or how I work.

Jim Jordan:
I think that, so I had worked for McKesson and was involved in the non-hospital healthcare information technology system, and people would ask us all the time, you know, what spaces are you in? Why aren’t you in that space? Or, why are you in this space? And it all came down to when you’re a big company that you need the processes to be standardized, to be able to build upon them. And I think we’re fragmented, still, in many ways and don’t have it where we need to be. So when you came back to practice, how many years ago did you come back to practice?

Arun Villivalam:
It’s been around ten years.

Jim Jordan:
Okay, and so today, as a physician and you’re handling the administration, are you in a private practice, or are you in a group practice, or are you employed?

Arun Villivalam:
I am solo, self-employed, not affiliated with any group or any other entity. I mean, I have what are called independent physician agreements. I have IPA contracts, but I operate as a self-employed and solo entity. I own 100% of my practice.

Jim Jordan:
So can you explain those contracts for our audience that are more on the nursing side or the non-physician side?

Arun Villivalam:
Sure. Where to start? So as a practicing primary care physician, and I’ll kind of point it out from that point of context, in order to build a practice or have a practice, I have to have insurance contracts, the insurance contracts basically allow patients who have insurance to be able to come see me so that I can get paid by the insurance. And, of course, in many cases, there’s a partial fee that the patient has to pay. If I don’t have these contracts, then patients would have to pay out of pocket and get reimbursed from the insurance carrier. And a lot of patients don’t really want to do that or deal with that. And so given that health insurance in general, whether you have Medicare or Medicaid or a PPO contract or PPO health insurance or an HMO health insurance, these are all the different types you could have, most people want to be able to use their insurance and to receive care.

Jim Jordan:
As a podcast has a wide audience, let’s demystify the health insurance programs we’re talking about here. So an IPA contract stands for Independent Practice Association contract, and it’s agreement between healthcare providers like doctors, a group of doctors and independent practice associations, and the intention there is to have a contract that’s about collaboration and strength in numbers. And the goal here, by working together, they be able to gain more negotiating power as they can set fair reimbursement rates. And we also have Medicare, and that’s a federal program of insurance primarily focused on individuals 65 and older, although it does cover some younger individuals with disabilities and end-stage renal disease. Medicaid, it’s a joint federal and state program that provides health insurance to low-income individuals. And then, we have a PPO, which stands for preferred provider organization, and a PPO is a type of health insurance plan that offers a network of healthcare providers, including doctors, and hospitals, and specialists. And with these types of plans, you have the flexibility to be either in-network or out-of-network with these providers. Obviously, costs are a little higher when you go outside of network. And lastly, we have an HMO, that’s a health maintenance organization, and this is another type of insurance where generally the primary care physician is a gatekeeper. You go through that person for everything, and they’re the ones that give you referrals to any type of specialties that you need. These plans are generally attractive because they have lower out-of-pocket costs, but they also have more restrictions on your access to out-of-network care. So there you have it, a little pause here with the IPA contract, Medicare, Medicaid, and PPO, HMO, understanding how these insurance programs work and what they do. And the reality is it’s also evidence of how complex our healthcare system is. So as a solo practice, who keeps track of all this? I imagine in any given day, you could actually see patients from all five insurance companies. So do you do the billing?

Arun Villivalam:
Theoretically, it’s not really limited, but in the case of my practice, I have a contract with Medicare. I have contracts with 5 or 6 of the major payers, and I also have contracts with a couple of independent physician associations, and they operate more under the banner of HMO-type contracts. So we have a few different IPA contracts, but two of the main ones that I work with operate under that banner.

Jim Jordan:
So as a solo practice, who keeps track of this? So you could in any day see someone from all five insurance companies, and you would have to call it a chargemaster in a hospital. I don’t know what you would call it in a physician practice, but you’d go to your chargemaster and say Patient A goes to insurance company B is contract whatever. And who builds all that for you?

Arun Villivalam:
So in our world, we call this super bill. And the short answer to your question somewhat flippantly is, I have key partners. So I don’t do any of this fully myself. I have a billing partner that I’ve been working with for several years, she’s excellent, and she helps make sure that I have the contracts that I should have, that the insurance bills. She has a team, she has her own company, so they make sure the super bills, the electronic super bills that I complete through my electronic medical records, are sent out to all the insurance carriers that all that money is collected. And if there’s any issues, she and her team help track that down and make sure that eventually, the practice gets paid.

Jim Jordan:
So when you talk about your organization in your community, are there big institutions and big physician practices that you’re competing with?

Arun Villivalam:
Absolutely. Where I am, I’m in Los Gatos, California. We’re about an hour south of San Francisco and 15 minutes away from San Jose. So in my area, the major hospital systems or health systems include Stanford, UCSF, Kaiser, Sutter Health System, which also is known as the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. So these are major, major players in the space, all of whom have significant primary care presence in general, although to varying degrees in my area.

Jim Jordan:
So how do you get your patients and your referrals? Where do they come from?

Arun Villivalam:
The referral sources that I have are probably, … 3 or 4 main areas. One is patient referrals, so other patients refer to me. The second is through the physician network that I’ve developed over the last ten years. I have specialists that I work with and even other primary care docs in the area, we all support each other with an ecosystem of, if a patient doesn’t have a primary care physician, a lot of the specialists that I work with that I refer to will say, hey, you know, you can go see Dr. V. He’ll be able to be your primary doctor. The third source is often just through the insurances. The insurance companies, patients will go to their insurance companies. A fourth source is actually through the hard work of my marketing partner. Again, it’s another company that I’ve hired, the CEO of that company does an excellent job working with her staff to make sure my website, that I have articles that are published and kind of drive patients to see what I’m doing in practice and how I practice. And I think the fifth thing I would say is the staff and the quality of the experience that I think patients have when they come to the practice. I think my staff do an excellent job in very challenging situations, working with more than ten different insurances and oftentimes with ten different systems, not just the electronic medical record system, but a billing system. And you know, we use email and so many different services that they have to track to make sure that patients actually get the care they need and the attention they need.

Jim Jordan:
So tell me about your marketing partner, for those physicians that think about going out on their own, how did you find them? Did you intuitively know this from your business experience that you needed a marketing person? I know you usually want to hear somebody, in a single practice saying they have someone more than a social media person.

Arun Villivalam:
Well, it was a very painful process that I went through before I found the marketing partner that I have, and the way I would describe that process was I started off saying, if you do it on my own, I’ve dabbled with making websites, 35 years ago, I actually had some friends and a couple of friends of mine and I, we started on web Internet service provider and thought I could tinker and do it on my own. And there are certainly a lot of tools to do that, but it gets very complicated very quickly. If you want something that is professional and elegant, I mean, it’s not something I can do, and I think that’s the thing that I’ve learned in the last ten years of being on my own is, you have to have the right partners. And it doesn’t make sense for me to spend time focused on designing a website, that’s just completely useless in terms of my time and expertise because that’s not what I’m here to do. And so I can’t do it better than somebody that does it every day, you know, and does it for a living.

Jim Jordan:
So if you were telling others what to look for in that partner, sort of your circle of learning to find the right, what were the questions that they should be asking?

Arun Villivalam:
So just to go to that point, the simplest question is, when you call, and this goes for any partner that I have, when I call or email, mainly call, I generally only work with partners that I can call, if he or she does not have the time, the CEO of the company doesn’t have the time to talk to me, or somebody that they work with who’s very, very responsible and stable, then I think I’m done. Like I don’t work with that partner anymore, because I’m not a big organization, it’s just me. So if I’m calling, it’s because I need something. And so I can’t spend my time talking to three different layers of people to get what I need. I mean, that just doesn’t make any sense. But the flip side of it is I try not to abuse that either. Like, I don’t call any of the partners that I have in the evenings or weekends unless there really is something. So the partner that I work with for my marketing, this company called Webtage, and the CEO, her name is Snigdha Mazumdar, and she’s excellent. As I’ve said, I’ve been working with her for the last three years or so, three, four years. The previous company that I worked with was a nightmare, and they were a large VC-funded company in the space, and it was just miserable because there would be all kinds of problems I was having, and anytime I called, the problem would either get worse, or I’d be told that there isn’t a problem. And so, since working with Snigdha at Webtage, they’ve been excellent. It’s a very professional organization. She has writers, she has staff anytime. When the pandemic hit, as an example, I needed to put something on my website immediately, so I was able to reach her, which, it sounds like a very small thing, being able to reach somebody that you’re paying for service. But even outside of the pandemic, I’ve found that to be very non-consistent. But it was really important that I was able to reach her, and she was able to make the changes on the website because that’s the way I had to communicate to my patients. And so the example of a small but really critical thing in terms of how I feel my partner should work with me.

Jim Jordan:
So in your practice, how many people are working for you? Not your consultants and your contractors.

Arun Villivalam:
So currently I’ve got about two full-time staff and one part-time.

Jim Jordan:
And how do you keep current on all the rapid changes when you’re smaller, and you don’t have a big staff?

Arun Villivalam:
I think the main thing to rely on is the partner network that I have. So whether it’s Snigdha, the, who helps me with Webtage, with the website, or my billing partner, her name is Prerna Marwah, and she’s with Braddock’s Billing. So she owns her own billing company. I rely on partners like this to really kind of keep me up to date on what kinds of things are going on in the industry, when I should update information, how it should look, how to communicate those things, how to make decisions about the practice in terms of the revenue or the economics. I also rely on a informal network of the physicians that I know who are in the community and the specialists and other primary care physicians, being able to listen and understand and adapt. Some of that is also tuning out the noise. Sometimes there’s things that are said that aren’t really relevant to what I’m doing, but I think really being able to listen and be open to what’s happening and what people are saying and at the same time taking some calculated risks and being thoughtful about the process. And I think part of the, the other picture of all this is, I think I try to have a lot of respect for the people that I work with. So when they say something, it seems like I’m willing to learn, willing to listen, so that we keep the lines of communication open.

Jim Jordan:
So you were talking about flexibility and transition. Besides Covid, what’s the biggest transition and adaptability you’ve had to do since you started your practice?

Arun Villivalam:
It’s been one of the major transitions, and it’s been something that’s not necessarily as dramatic, but it’s there. You know, when I first started off, I was trying to figure out how I could increase my patient volume, keep the revenues of the practice going. And now I’m getting to a phase, and this is a transition that I’m in the process of making, where I need to think about how to really sustain what I’m doing, and this is not just about growth anymore. And so I think that this is a change in mindset from sheer growth in a way, or heavy growth, to now more heavier on how to continue to help patients have good quality care and good quality experiences in the practice. You know, as I’ve gotten busier, it’s gotten harder, and I think I have the same challenge that so many other doctors have, which is, we would love to be more available to our patients and spend more time with them, but the pressures of the system, the health insurance industry, the regulations, and just a lot of the practical day-to-day challenges make it difficult for us to provide the kind of care that we really want to, and, you know, the reason why we went into medicine. And so that’s at a high level, one of the major changes I’m trying to grapple with right now.

Jim Jordan:
It’s always fascinating to hear about these transitions. You focus on increasing patient volume and maintaining revenues, and once you get all the patients that you need, now you’re shifting towards sustaining the quality of care and the patient experience. It’s a definite change in mindset from growth to maintaining excellence and, of course, having less time to spend with the patient, which flies in the face of having time to spend on patient experience. So since we’re wanting to have a long-term relationship with our patients, what is the average age of a patient in your practice?

Arun Villivalam:
50 plus.

Jim Jordan:
Okay, so that’s something younger. Yeah, that’s on the younger side. So what are the typical chronic diseases that you’re faced with in your group?

Arun Villivalam:
Diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, or high cholesterol, heart disease, heart failure.

Jim Jordan:
So what do you see is the biggest opportunity for growth or threat in healthcare today in general?

Arun Villivalam:
I think one of the major challenges in healthcare today is really this idea of how to navigate the system and how do you get the right care that you need at the right time from the right person. And one of the things that stuck with me since medical school almost 30 years ago, and one of the things that drew me to family medicine is, as a primary care doctor, I don’t have to know everything, but I need to know what to do in every situation. And that means to me that I may need to just observe things, I may need to refer to a specialist, I may take action, I may take action myself, I may need to refer a patient to the emergency department, and it could mean that I may need to focus on preventive care. So there’s a lot of different things that it could mean. Ultimately, though, I think that that philosophy or that idea is at big risk in healthcare today. And there’s a lot of sensationalism around the latest drugs or the latest scans or the latest therapies, but the reality is most people don’t need that, and what they need is, they need to do the preventive things to avoid problems in their life, and they need access to quick, basic care so they can avoid having more serious complications. And, you know, not to get too political or philosophical, but I think primary care is kind of in this crazy existential situation where doctors don’t go into primary care because they don’t make enough money compared to other specialties, and I’m making this a generation, that’s what a lot of people would say, but I think that’s what people have said in the past. But I think what it’s turning into is the quality of life is really what’s a challenge for primary care doctors. And so a lot of us don’t feel satisfied with how we are able to provide care and the limitations that we have, and we feel powerless because we can’t change the system, and there’s a lot of reasons for why it’s stacked against us, but we just don’t feel like we can change it. So now we’re in this situation where we don’t have enough primary care doctors. The system’s gotten more complicated, and where do the patients go? And the primary care doctors aren’t happy with it either. So you’ve got kind of this pretty significant storm, and there doesn’t seem to be a simple answer, although just to kind of go to the next step, what I see in the environment around me is that the solution that primary care doctors are taking is they’re all going or many of them are going concierge, and so they’re trying to solve the parts of the problem in a way that they can, their little piece of it. But I think that unless the system changes, it’s already very challenging.

Jim Jordan:
You know, they say if you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it. And so, the first step of healthcare reform was that it required a pretty significant investment in IT infrastructure that put a financial burden on a lot of physicians, causing them to gain employment versus staying independent. However, cloud computing technology is beginning to reduce those infrastructure costs so that some can become independent again. But the administrative burden, unfortunately, is unchanged, and this draws time away from the patient, for the physician. You mentioned concierge doctors as a potential solution, and they do provide an invaluable service to those who can afford it, something my wife and I have personally experienced. Our doctor takes blood tests every six months, and we make all these little micro-adjustments. And I’m reminded that 15 years ago, when I first started this process, there was a diagnostic test known as CRP, and it, a powerful test that gives you a sense of inflammation and, back then, also a sense of if you could potentially have cardiac issues in the long run. And so the test goes from 0 to 10, and my first test was 13. And within six months, my doctor got me down to 0.1, where it still remains 15 years later. And this test highlighted an issue that I had that I was completely unaware of. I had no symptoms, there was no reason for any primary care doctor to ask me to take that test. And so, as exciting as that is for me personally, this also highlights the issue of inequality within the healthcare system across our country.

Arun Villivalam:
Definitely, yeah, definitely. And it’s been, you know, a lot of questions. How do you grapple with this? What do I do? My background and my training, I trained at a public hospital, at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, and I’ve seen cases there where people didn’t have access to care, and it’s horrible. Some of the things are just extremely sad, things that we could treat, that conditions that we could treat, we could have intervened if they had had access to care, and they didn’t because they didn’t have health insurance or, in some cases because it took too long to get certain treatments for them. But I can’t reconcile this with what I’m doing now in an easy way. I can’t make the economics work by seeing patients who have insurances that don’t really work with private practice business model. So I think my goal is at some point to be able to give back, but to do it in a way where, you know, take 10 or 20% of my time and I just donate that time, I’ll go work in a free clinic or offer services in a facility that is outside of my practice, but continue to contribute and provide care. That’s how I’ve thought about it, and had a chance to do it yet, but part of that is, how do I balance that with my practice that I have?

Jim Jordan:
So we had a conversation before we started this interview about a new venture that you’re working on, and it seems like the spirit of that new venture is a little bit about access. Do you want to just give some broad strokes on it? I know you get some proprietary stuff going on as you’re starting it, but what could you share with us?

Arun Villivalam:
Sure, so Sprinter Health is a startup that’s been around, a little over a year. I’m the current medical director, I’m on the medical advisory board, and in Sprinter Health, what we do is we really help bridge the gap in terms of helping patients get access to care and services that they’re not able to get to today. And the reasons why they can’t, there could be numerous, there could be physical limitations or economic limitations, different reasons, or in some cases, we have some clients that are doing it as more as a convenience. But the basic idea is there are folks who should have blood work done, or should have a diabetic eye screening done, or a diabetic foot screen done, or a EKG done to look at what’s going on in their heart rhythm, or have their vital signs checked, or any numerous other specific and basic services and they’re not able to get this care. So what we do at Sprinter Health is our organization has created a system and is building a team that will be able to bridge this gap in care. We currently go into people’s homes and work with hospitals, health systems, home health agencies, we work directly with customers, where we will provide these services. We’ll draw blood, we’ll check their vitals, we’ll do EKG, we’ll do a lot of these things that I mentioned. And the idea behind this is that we are reaching those patients and getting to those people who would otherwise not really have access or be able to share their health information with the system, with the broader healthcare system in a way where some entity or provider in the system can intervene and provide care. Because currently, the way the system is typically set up is unless you come into the doctor’s office or the hospital or the clinic, we don’t really know what’s going on with you, and we can’t.

Jim Jordan:
There was some data, I think, during healthcare reform, something to the extent that 68% of the actionable, preventable data was outside of the acute care setting, and, to your point.

Arun Villivalam:
Yeah, and we have had patients, and ultimately, it’s always about the patient. And we have had so many patients really appreciate the fact that we have been able to come into where they are and provide them care. And I think the other part of this as a primary care physician, which is near and dear to my heart now, my thinking has changed over the last 20, 30 years is that we’re not in a separate service. We’re not trying to be a separate or an additional service to their current provider. We’re trying to help their provider with more information about them. So we’re an adjunct, we’re a augmentation of what their current providers are trying to do to take care of them as patients. And so I think that’s really powerful because we’re not trying to break the system or add another piece to the system. We are trying to really strengthen and, in some ways, fill a major gap that it isn’t filled today, and it hasn’t been filled. So I think it’s really exciting work, and Max and Cameron are the co-founders of Sprinter Health, and it’s been great working with them. Their background is not in healthcare, but I think that their background, along with their willingness to really listen and include healthcare expertise, really makes what we’re doing very powerful.

Jim Jordan:
So what is their background? They come from the information technology industry or supply chain?

Arun Villivalam:
Yes, so their background is, I think, they worked more for other organizations like Google, Facebook, you know, so they come from more industry in terms of their background. And so I think that they bring the technology and methodology and that experience and systems of how to take those things and really simplify what we do. So as an example, you could theoretically get some of the care and services that Sprinter Health offers through other organizations, but they’re usually private entities, kind of mom-and-pop shops in each city. What we do at Sprinter Health is we’ve created an app, a platform where our customers for a direct patient can download the app, click a few buttons and say, okay, I want these services. I’m blood drawn at 7 a.m. on Wednesday, and we show up, Sprinter shows up and takes care of it. And so it’s this real simplification of a healthcare service that usually is so complex.

Jim Jordan:
This is where your IT and medical background must be so helpful to combine with their talents. I like to describe our economy as a doughnut where the hole in the middle is the healthcare system, and it roughly takes up 18% of our economy, and those on the outside have so much to contribute and so much scale that if they can just sort their way through how to apply their expertise within the norms of healthcare, we’re going to see some great results. And I think we’ve seen that over the past 25 years of Amazon trying to perfect this and having early mistakes, but now I think they’re really doing well. And lately, Oracle’s showed you the cost of moving too quickly and not understanding the industry norms with the Veterans Administration and understanding the complexity. I think some of the barriers to adopting these new technologies came down rapidly due to COVID. I mean, imagine you used to wait 45 minutes to see our primary care physician, we were moved around the queues in the office, and sometimes the physician didn’t even know it. And with COVID, we received a text in our car when we could come in, and the times were very accurate, we weren’t waiting in line, and I think the cat’s been out of the bag a little bit. And I think people are going to have expectations going forward. So as it relates to Sprinter Health, how does that model work? Is it self-paid? Is it a little bit of concierge? Is there insurance model or both?

Arun Villivalam:
We can operate in a few different paradigms. We certainly have a self-pay option as something, but we currently are partnering with several different health systems and larger organizations. We have provided services to all health agencies, so we operate on a few different levels. And certainly, you know, Medicare Advantage plans are interested. We have insurance company clients that want to know more about their patients, and we’ve had conversations with health plans as well. So we were talking with entities across the board. I think that the need is there.

Jim Jordan:
It sounds like as pharmacy benefit management is the drugs, you could potentially be to the traditional services business filling in the gaps, very interesting.

Arun Villivalam:
We could be that model.

Jim Jordan:
Yes, excellent, excellent. Well, is there anything else you’d like to share with our audience?

Arun Villivalam:
I think there are a lot of challenges in healthcare, but I am optimistic that there are solutions in terms of how we can get this to work and work well for patients. I really hope that we are able to adjust the system in a way that patients are back in the center of what we’re trying to do in healthcare. And that would be my hope. And I’m excited about what’s possible and just wish the best of health.

Jim Jordan:
Fantastic. Well, thanks again. Appreciate it very much for your time.

Jim Jordan:
Thanks for tuning in to the Chalk Talk Jim Podcast. For resources, show notes, and ways to get in touch, visit us at ChalkTalkJim.com.

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Things You’ll Learn:

  • AI in medical record systems has limitations, such as the inability to capture contextual information and the potential for errors.
  • Access to quality healthcare remains a challenge for underserved communities, and technology can play a role in bridging this gap.
  • Patient-centric care is essential for building trust and providing personalized healthcare experiences.
  • Innovative use of AI and technology can improve chronic disease management and enhance patient outcomes.
  • Elderly populations require specific attention and care in healthcare delivery, considering their unique needs and challenges.
  • Individual healthcare practitioners can significantly impact the industry by adopting innovative approaches. 

Resources:

  • Connect with and follow Arun Villivalam on LinkedIn.
  • Follow Los Gatos Doc, Inc. on LinkedIn.
  • Visit the Los Gatos Doc, Inc. Website!
  • Follow Sprinter Health on LinkedIn.
  • Explore the Sprinter Health Website!
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