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Saul Marquez:
Hey, everybody! It’s Saul Marquez with the Outcomes Rocket, and I want to welcome you back to the podcast again. Look, I’ve got the privilege of having a guest that we’ve had on in the past. His name is Stephen Keeler. He’s the Vice President for payers and providers at Medocity. Stephen’s got over 20 years of experience in the healthcare IT space, having served in executive appointments for Provider Directory, HIE, EMR, PHR, and disease management firms. Most recently, he has served as the VP of Sales for six years for Medocity, and Medocity is a health IT software provider of Gartner Research called a highly composable digital care platform, complete with virtual assistant health assistants, and more. So with that, I want to welcome you back to the podcast, Stephen. So glad that you had the bandwidth to join us again.

Stephen Keeler:
Saul, it’s great to be with you again. Thanks very much, and congratulations on your continued success as well.

Saul Marquez:
Hey, thank you. Really appreciate that. Now let’s talk about the work you’re up to, and really, Medocity, the capabilities you guys have, and how they can help the listeners today. I want to do that. Before we do, though, give us a little bit on you and what inspires your work in healthcare.

Stephen Keeler:
Well, I come from a family of physicians, my father and my brother, grandfathers, that sort of thing, so it’s sort of always been part of the mix, as it were. My brother went into practice with my father for a time. I was sort of the, as you might imagine, the rebellious second son who was, at 16 said, I’ll never get into healthcare, Dad. All you guys are vending machines for the pharmaceutical companies. I said that obviously at a good distance away from him and with the clear fields to run to, but he understood what I was driving at. But now he has the last laugh, he says, because being in health IT says you’re the enabler now, sometimes of pain, sometimes of good things, but in health IT says we got you anyway. So he got the last there. It’s driven by how there’s so many issues at stake in the US particularly, but certainly globally from a sustainability point of view as well as access and just the inspiration of healthcare providers of sort of, you know, kind of drawn to wanting to find ways to do well and doing good, I guess. And that’s certainly been my privilege and joy to be in that space and looking at how technology can facilitate many of the challenges that we’re facing, both as individuals and aging populations, provider shortages, challenges with access, gaps, and equity, technology is playing is going to continue to play a very powerful and positive role. So I’m excited to be a part of that mix broadly.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah, for sure. And look, the tech is a core part of the healthcare now, so talk to us about Medocity. What are you guys doing, and how are you adding value to the healthcare ecosystem right now?

Stephen Keeler:
It’s pretty exciting. The company’s ten years old now, so we’re way past startup, in fact, and we have a great set of clients in three verticals: payers, and providers, and life sciences. And it’s really all about connecting patients and providers, and with the tools, and analytics, and whatever our sponsors, our clients want to do in terms of doing more for their patients with perhaps at the big picture technology as opposed to encourage and enable doing more with less. And certainly, as you have, you’re faced with a provider shortage, and the automation that occurs in a part of our robust digital care platform that really helps to reduce the burden, allows our providers, be they case managers for payers, providers in a health system or clinic or an ACO or a provider program, or even connecting investigators and clinical trials. You do away with paper, you can scale easier with automation and AI, you can you can handle a lot of things automatically. You’ve got all sorts of voice recognition and tools, for the lower-level acuity and guidance questions, empathy issues, understanding where people are; you can really deploy technology to capture the data, capture the inputs. It’s very patient-centric in its approach. So we’re bringing in mounds of data about the patient into the ecosystem. So, from social determinants of health to understanding their preferences and teaming up with what we have on the providers, we call a digital coaches or active case management. Gartner called it most recently in their July 2023 Hype Cycle report, Virtual Health Assistants. So it’s really kind of incorporating this concept of another layer of care and guidance at the redundant issues. We’re, technology, in any industry is applied tremendous value that allows for the more complex, the more acute situations to be triaged up to different tiers of providers to handle that, the complex situation. So it’s really helping to mitigate that gap between healthcare demand, which is increasing of course, with aging population, and supply, because one of the things that you don’t want to do in any industry is have a high-cost unit of care like an MD or DO, you know, doing something that a lower cost provider or unit could deliver on, and we haven’t really been able to massage that arbitrage effectively. That’s what it’s doing, at a very big picture. It’s really allowing to very with great precision because a lot of it gets automated to really handle those interventions. And what we’re also finding is contrary to a lot of folks, everything’s a distribution curve, but we’re finding that more and more people under the meat of the curve who like that automatic guidance, you’re always going to have outliers at either end, great early adopters and never wills. But most people, especially when you’re in a chronic condition, which is really our bread and butter, it’s helping our provider clients and payers clients handle and manage complex co-morbid chronic conditions. They have ever more complex technologies, ways to assess biometrics and other inputs and data. And you’d be surprised, most people are surprised when they learn just how great the uptake can be if done right, where in the past, they had a problem at 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning, they denied themselves care in the main because they knew they had a human only at the other end of the line. And I’m not going to call my case manager, I’m not going to call my nurse, it’s 3 a.m. They have a life, too. I’ll tough it out. Well, of course, toughing it out means what? There’s a readmission that happens that could have been avoided if they had a mechanism like through our platform to get some insight, some intel, some guidance specific to their condition. And we’ve done some really complex deployments. We have one thing with a large urban academic medical center, a lot of Medicaid eligibles, multilingual deployments, and there they have LVADs. They have a mechanical heart in their chests. It used to be a bridge therapy to, waiting for heart transplant, but now it’s a destination therapy. These folks don’t have to wait ’till there’s an available heart transplant. The technology is so good by the manufacturers of the LVADs that they’re going to have this device in their pump and blood for them for the rest of their lives. So there’s maintenance issues, there’s all sorts of things that you can automate and get, be there 24/7 on a 365 basis, and that’s really where we add a lot of value.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah, thank you. There’s a ton of value there, Stephen, and it’s really finding that sweet spot where providers could practice at the top of their license, patients could get the care when and where they need it, and ultimately, done in a way that is cost-effective, right? Because at the end of the day, if you align all the resources and people correctly, you’re doing it in a cost-effective way, avoiding readmissions and possible missed opportunities to care for people, so I think it sounds like a brilliant platform. What’s the best way for people to see how it works, get a demo, or just kind of how do they engage with it, if something you said sort of perked up their ears or a possibility to learn more?

Stephen Keeler:
Sure. They can go to our website, www.M E D O C I T Y.com. We used to have sort of a kind of a do-it-yourself on there, but, you know, people’s time is very short, and they need to really understand value quickly and how it applies to them. So we go through actually a very short understanding of exactly what is top of mind for them for my use case; I mean everybody’s different. So we talk about our platforms, more or less take the football analogy, and we’re just about anybody out of the box because we got ten years of IP behind us and millions of lines of code. And the beauty being in my position is there’s this integrity of the software because our founders still our CTO, he’s a tremendous business leader; and Raj Agarwal he’s my chief technology officer, I know he’s been there with him from the get-go. So from a roadmap integrity point of view, you can kind of really say, all right, we’re pretty much very closely in the red zone for just about anybody, because they’re leveraging easily 80% to 90% of what we’ve already created for other clients. That’s the beauty of SaaS-based applications, right? You know, you don’t have to start everything from scratch because if you’re, sure, if you’re a big a Google or Microsoft, you can throw 800 engineers into this sort of thing and have that to spend. But for the most part, our customers don’t unless they kind of want to take a very siloed approach. But for us, we’re our value to our clients is, you know, sort of a rebuild it with you, as opposed to saying, hey, here’s our, here’s the devices you need, here’s the clinical pathways you got to use, you know, take that approach. We’re software people. We enable the providers to do what they need to do better, cheaper, faster. We want the payers to do it better, cheaper, be it their own case managers or supporting their networks, but it’s really a function of understanding. What do you want to know about your population in real-time? That’s the big thing. That’s really another big value add is because we’re pulling in data in real-time from the patient that is, complements the data of an EMR, the data out of the legacy claims management systems, all there, the historical data sets that they have. Now, we’re adding this tremendous real-time data flow into the equation. And then we want …. understand, what do you want to do with it? Who’s going to be there to monitor, measure? And then what’s the response going to be? How much do you want to automate? Who do you want to automate it to? How many linguistic challenges do you have? Do you want to assess the literacy, the health literacy levels before beforehand? And the use cases can be clinically driven, as I mentioned, say, for heart failure, it could be operational or business. You know, we have programs where, you know, clients, I want my members to understand their benefits so that they maximize the use of their benefits that have already been paid for between them and their employer or whoever the sponsor. There’s a huge gap between people’s awareness of what their benefits are and their health plans that are already covered and paid for and what they use, so they go out because they don’t know. They do all sorts of different things that maybe are off the reservation clinically or somewhere, or it’s not optimal because they haven’t really engaged with their plan yet through a mechanism like we offer or through the provider understanding. Oh, I have that I can, and so you can see how coming out of the pandemic, behavioral health has been a huge driver for us in that regard, because the stigma is off, which is a great, great thing, and people are integrating more into real whole person health, whole health perspective, and you can really help people close those gaps because, where do I go for help? The plan says we got the help for you already teed up here. Here’s a set of clinicians, providers through a video call, through the compliance, secure, through the Medocity program. We got providers on the other end, case managers, all the resources you need to help you and your family. Boom, done. So that’s kind of, we, you know, and because you can imagine there’s a legion of them that folks build on it like Legos, Legos on a building block. So we sort of like to start off very, you know, crawl, walk, run. What is it you really want to understand about your population, and what do you want to do with that information?

Saul Marquez:
That’s great. Thank you very much, Stephen. And folks, the website, you’ll see it in the show notes. So if you’re looking to get engaged and learn more about the platform, ways that they could help, certainly take a look at that. Stephen, what would you say is a healthcare trend or technology that’s going to change healthcare as we know it today?

Stephen Keeler:
Certainly, artificial intelligence is what’s on top of mind for people. And clearly there’s, probably if I said five things, I’d be wrong out of four or maybe five out of five because it’s moving so fast. But at the end of the day, I see it all for the good in terms of being able to assess situations more intelligently, give providers greater control and understanding about what to do, and again, leveraging automation that’s sort of implicit in AI to engage with patients and triage earlier, sooner, faster, cheaper. And that’s what, when you can do things earlier detection, better intervention, further upstream, AI is just going to push everything up there and then provide the tools that we’re really going to be able to, I think, help bend the cost curve because that’s a huge issue still, and the more you can prevent. Now on the financial side, that’s still the biggest challenge out there is, you know, historically in the US, there’s no money in prevention, and of course, a lot of the value of AI and solutions like our digital care platform and virtual health assistance, interactive case management, digital coaching is to go upstream and prevent. So, but I think the acceleration, that trend is still there, and I think you’re going to start to see people finding more ways to really leverage that and bake that into the payment models.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah, no, I think that’s a great call out. I agree with you. Look, really appreciate you jumping on today, Stephen. Always insightful to think things through with you and hear about the latest. You’ve given us a lot to think about and also, folks, an opportunity to engage with Medocity, if you see it’s a good fit for you. Leave us with the closing thought. What do you think we should be doing and thinking about Stephen and the best place that listeners can get in touch with you?

Stephen Keeler:
Certainly, you know, our website is very robust at Medocity.com, best way to get in touch there, inquiry and phone calls and chatbots, of course, and all that, all that we deploy ourselves, we help out for our customers, get in touch with us. I’m at S Keeler, S K E E L E R @ M E D O C I T Y.com, I got to throw that out there. But I think the number one thing is, I think, to leave with folks mind is, when you think of whole-person health and whole-person care, it’s a continuum through time, and people’s conditions change. You need to be able to, because our bodies aren’t until they get the anti-aging stuff out there soon, but that’s right around the corner. But till then, our bodies are going to change managing the deltas, capturing the deltas, and giving that into a whole-life, a whole-person health scenario where you’ve got connect better the patients with their clinical care teams, with their providers. I think that that will always remain at the forefront and needs to be there because we’re only complementing and enhancing that as healthcare, a lot that automation can and will do, but all within that team-based concept to work with a person through their whole life. I think that’s really what the promise is, and I think we’re, it’s just to enrich that and to break down silos of data and workflows that have been impeding that more optimal way of giving care.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah, for sure. Big opportunity for us to tackle there, Stephen. Thank you for coming on again to share with us. Folks, take advantage of Stephen sharing his contact info. Reach out to him, connect. At the end of the day, it’s about what you do with what you hear on this show, so I encourage you to take action and improve those outcomes. Stephen, thanks for joining us.

Stephen Keeler:
Saul, I really appreciate it. Thanks very much, and congratulations on all your success.

Saul Marquez:
Thank you, likewise.

Stephen Keeler:
Bye bye.

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