Outcomes Rocket Podcast_Nai Kanell: 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, and welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket. I want to welcome you to another episode. Today, I have an amazing leader. Her name is Nai Kanell. She’s the Chief Marketing Officer at MedTrainer. In her role with MedTrainer, Nai collaborates with customers, prospects, industry analysts, and other professionals to get MedTrainer in front of the people that could benefit the most from it. Nai regularly authors articles and presents on marketing, healthcare trends, leadership, women in technology, and parenthood, and she’s just a thought leader in her own right. She’s a first-generation refugee, holds a marketing degree from University of Utah, and is just an incredible person in healthcare that we all need to keep an eye on. So, Nai, thanks for joining me today, and excited to have a great conversation with you.
Nai Kanell:
Yeah, I’m so excited to be here, Saul.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, so look, you guys are doing some really great things at MedTrainer, digitizing the entire experience for many in healthcare. But before we dive into the work that you guys do, tell me a little bit about you and your story. I’d love to hear more.
Nai Kanell:
I’ve always enjoyed going into the different spaces where technology can have a huge impact to the efficiency of companies and the daily lives of people. When I was introduced to MedTrainer, healthcare was one of those industries that I was amazed to learn that you can spot a tumor in my body with the latest imaging technology, but that the people running the operations of the business were still required to use a fax machine. What other industry still uses fax machines outside of the government? And even they have made major strides.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, Nai, I hear you there. And there’s definitely gaps, and it’s companies like MedTrainer and leaders like you that are helping bridge those gaps. So talk to us a little bit, what, about what you, your team, and MedTrainer are doing to really add value to the healthcare ecosystem.
Nai Kanell:
There’s a lot of things that MedTrainer does, but when I think about things, I want to think about what is the problem that we’re trying to solve, right? And for us, when you hear things from, like according to the AMA, healthcare professionals now spend an average of ten plus hours per week on paperwork and administrative staff. And also from the AMA, 1 in 5 physicians are experiencing burnout, and they want to exit their practice or leave the profession within the next two years. And then, on top of that, 1 in 3 healthcare professionals say they plan to reduce their work hours within the next year. Why? Every time I talk to customers, their biggest issue is retaining staff and hiring staff, right? And so then, when you think about what does MedTrainer help solve, we’re here to help companies accelerate their compliance work from educating, documenting, and credentialing providers. We’re here to reduce that paperwork, document faster, digitize, automate as much as the world that they live in as possible, not just for the administrators, but for the actual staff. Those doctors, your assistants who have to do this required training because it’s required by regulation, who have to be credentialed and provide all of the hours of information to say, I am an actual doctor who can render these actual services. And we’re helping these back office staff stay on top of all those things that continue to grow, right? The regulations continue to grow, and the amount of staff and hours that they have continue to shrink.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, it’s a big problem, and there’s a lot of manual things, a lot of old-school things that are happening, and so there’s an opportunity here to really take it to the next level. Why do you think we haven’t done that sooner? You see a lot of this, and you work with a lot of companies that are implementing the systems that start working with you, but what has held us back so long in healthcare, do you think?
Nai Kanell:
I think the back office stuff is always like, important, but not a priority, right? It’s not that patient who came in with gushing blood on the table. They, these are all things they’re required and have to do, and it’s all important to patient safety, but it’s the last thing that is done that’s looked at. There are people who compliance is something they want to do, but they know that it’s the last thing they think about every day as they’re logging out two hours after they’ve already worked two hours of overtime. And so to go complete that Bloodborne pathogen training that you have to do and the administrators who, many of them were previous nurses or providers who’ve grown through the ranks, right? And now they’re clinical managers or trainers, and they’re trying to encourage their staff and a variety of different ways to get them to take these trainings. And I hear from some of our clients that half of the battle is just the reminders that they have to manually send out every day or every other day to get the teams to complete the trainings they need to maintain their accreditation.
Saul Marquez:
And how does the work that you guys do at MedTrainer help differentiate the experience for people?
Nai Kanell:
I think the reality out there is that what people are doing today is very manual or dated. They’re still doing things on paper, right? I had a client tell me that before MedTrainer, he said they had a surveyor planned to come in to check their accreditation and everything, and they were really good, and on top of all their training, like, he was very proud of the work that they were doing, but they recorded all of their training in a binder, a notebook, and that’s where they acknowledged it. And one day, when that surveyor came in, that binder disappeared. No one could find it, it was nowhere to be found. So if that doesn’t give you a hernia.
Saul Marquez:
I know, right?
Nai Kanell:
I’m at the, I’m very much beholden to that surveyor of whether they believe that we completed it or not. And that’s a, right, and there’s no redundancy in any of this paper world, right? There’s no visibility or accountability. And it’s not that your teams and employees don’t want to do all of those things, that’s, it’s sometimes what I hear from many people: that they were like, we had no idea this technology existed. Like, I’ll go to shows and events, and people will look at us, and they’re like, wait, you do this, you can do that, you can do this? And then they start hugging each other in joy that there was a better, easier way to do this. Like, I literally had this happen.
Saul Marquez:
So.
Nai Kanell:
NACH in March.
Saul Marquez:
My God.
Saul Marquez:
So Nai, give me an example. What’s one of the things that they were like hugging each other about? What’s one of the things that you guys do?
Nai Kanell:
I’ll take credentialing, for instance, because MedTrainer can help in a lot of different ways regarding to compliance, right? It’s, compliance is a big, and so MedTrainer helps on the training learning side where we curate a tight library of courses that we think are valuable to healthcare people and meet their requirements to keep their accreditation so they don’t spend time researching, tracking, and different things. The other side of it is we also do, we help automate a lot of the credentialing work and giving visibility into not just credentialing a provider, but also helping them enroll in the process of being paid so that you can have the revenue coming back in. And then we also have other compliance tools like incident reporting, documents, and policy management so that you can keep all of your materials in one place, one system. I had clients tell me that, I like that it’s all in one place, one system, because I don’t want to teach my staff and employees another tool, give them another login. That’s the last thing we need, right?
Saul Marquez:
Oh yeah. Oh, for sure. No, for example, it sounds like the main buckets that you guys have are credentialing, compliance, and education, like learning?
Nai Kanell:
Yes, learning, from your blood-borne pathogens to acknowledging a new operating procedure.
Saul Marquez:
Love it. So really the whole gamut, and as you survey the industry and think about what’s making things better, what would you say one of the key things you guys have been able to improve in the industry has been?
Nai Kanell:
I would say taking out the tedious, manual, monotonous tasks, right? Your clinical manager doesn’t want to be sending out a reminder every few days to tell someone, Hey, you still haven’t taken your blood-borne pathogen. Hey, you still haven’t acknowledged this new HR policy that we’ve rolled out, and having that piece alone just automated, can you imagine? That, hey, they’re still getting reminders to do it. You’re doing your part in that you’re keeping on them, but you’re actually not having to physically write up and send out that email every few days, right? The other part is giving visibility not just to the people working in it, but also management, right? And seeing, Hey, this doctor that we hired back in June, where are they in that credentialing process? Have they have all their credentials been verified, right? Right now, the credential provider, you’re looking at 10 to 15, just exclusion checks, right? You’re checking different databases, OIG, SAM, different places to verify that they’re not on these lists, that they’re in good standing. And can you imagine taking those 15 different places that you have to go look and verify things and having it in one central place, having it automatically pool for you to validate that they are who they are without having to leave the platform, and then move on to the next part, process, right? And move on to the things like collecting some of the information. Even that has been automated where our system, hey, you can send an email to a provider and gather their information. Or for someone who might not be as friendly to technology, you can also just sit down and fill that information in for them, but at least it’s in one place so then Sally can share with Susie that same information. I had a client tell me that, literally, she would have a folder with a provider, credential all the information, have to walk this giant binder to the enrollment team for them to start enrolling the provider with different payers. And then, when it comes renewal time, you’d have to go back and find that physical folder and flip through everything, the credential, that provider, and that process goes back and forth, and then they have stacks and stacks on it. So, depending on how organized this person was, it varies. I spoke to a credential here where she started a new job and had very little training. She said it was daunting to walk into her office where she had towers of paper surrounding her with a tiny path to her desk. And that was the world she was living in, right? And she was just buried in paper.
Saul Marquez:
I don’t want to live in that maze, and I’m sure a lot of people listening here don’t want to live in that maze either. So, thank you for sharing some examples that really, it really makes it real for all of us. And when you think about setbacks, what would you say one of the setbacks that comes to mind that’s been a big experience that’s given you and the team a lot of insights, Nai?
Nai Kanell:
I think it’s sometimes coming into it and misunderstanding the problem, right? Early on, my, our founders told me a story about how they came into it and thought credentialing was a pretty simple thing and they just needed more trackability. But when they started digging deeper, they realized it was a really complex situation. There’s no standardization in how things are done in any of the payers and their requirements, right? Every payer you go to has a different set of requirements of things that they want to see and information, and so it’s very hard to standardize everything that they’re doing. And because of it, it’s created more paperwork. And the reality is over time, right, because of ensuring patient care, the regulations of what’s required to credential a provider just continues to grow. And so I think the setback is always, are we understanding the problem we’re trying to solve effectively, or are we only just barely touching the surface of it?
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, and I think that those types of assumptions are, happen very easily, and we could all fall victim to that type of thinking. Are we really approaching this outside of our own lens and our shoes? And we just have to be brutally honest with ourselves, right? And you just have to, what’s a good way to do it?
Nai Kanell:
I think we all need to be okay with failure and that you’re going to want to dip your toe into technology, and just because it didn’t work the first time doesn’t mean it won’t work again. There’s a lot of different circumstances, maybe you have a different staff. The team’s come a long way, right? I think I was listening to someone say that, in one of your former podcasts that, hey, 50-year-olds get technology. Maybe 50-year-olds, 20 years ago, technology was hard for them, but 50-year-olds today have grown up with technology for the last 20 years, so them using tablets and technology is normal because they’ve been using it. And so it’s that curve and that society has now come to a new point where we’ve accepted technology more, how we use it in our lives, and I think we all need to embrace, like thinking through, how it can help us rather than fearing all the things that could happen.
Saul Marquez:
Totally. Yeah, Nai, that’s a great call out and certainly a good approach. One of the things that always fires me up is learning from leaders like you, and in particular, what makes you most excited in today’s healthcare environment?
Nai Kanell:
What makes me most excited, I think, is AI is a little scary. It’s a little scary, but I also think it’s really exciting to be able to research and understand a vast, a faster amount of information at a faster pace and get to a better conclusion quicker, right? Those are all the things that are exciting, is giving back ourselves time rather than spending three years to research maybe some clinical trials and things. We’re able to condense that into a year because of how quickly the AI can go and combine and comb all of the information out there for us to make information readily available to make better decisions. But I think we do also need to be careful in how we’re vetting where that information comes from. If you think of AI as a renaissance that’s happening, I think of it similarly to like the Internet. When the Internet came out, it was all new, had a lot of great information for us, but at the same time, we have to trust the source of the information that’s coming through. And so, with AI think we have to trust how was it built, what parameters do we have in place, what type of information is it ingesting. And I think that’s really exciting because it’s crazy, the things that it will be able to do in spot.
Saul Marquez:
Agreed, and it’s moving so fast, and many companies are embedding it into their current offerings, and new products and services are being born out of it. Couldn’t agree more, Nai, it is an exciting time, but yet, also a time to be cautious about it and just be mindful and have a plan while we try these new technologies, in particular, the hottest one right now, generative AI. Yeah, Nai, I love it, and I love your approach. How about from the marketing side? Any tips or tricks for the healthcare marketer out there looking to make an impact?
Nai Kanell:
I think, for me, I always start with, what is the pain someone’s feeling, right? Whatever space I’m in, what is the pain that they’re feeling, and how does your organization help solve that problem? So if you’re a community health center, for instance, and you’re looking for ways to reach the right audience and those who are underserved, you start with, Where are they? Where is that underserved? And then how do you come up with a message that really helps them understand that you care, that you’re here to serve them regardless of who they are? And to me, it’s all about what is the message, and how are you relating to the pain that they’re feeling.
Saul Marquez:
Love that. Yeah, it’s so simple, but so powerful. And folks, as you think about the things that you’re doing in your marketing efforts and your business, it’s a really great takeaway. When’s the last time you thought about it? Because your niche might have evolved or shifted, maybe it’s the same. It’s a good opportunity to dive into it and reassess and validate, perhaps. Certainly appreciate that takeaway, Nai. All right, we’re here at the end. I’d love to ask you just one more question, and that is, what call to action would you leave people with listening to this podcast today, and what’s the best place they could get in touch with you and your team?
Nai Kanell:
Yeah, so to the CEOs, the board, and the management staff out there, have you peeled back how much time your team is spending on this administrative work and compliance, right? Have you actually considered the resources that are being wasted on doing things on paper without technology that can really automate what they’re doing? Do they think your coffee mug isn’t going to cut it? What actually cuts it is giving them time back, enabling them to make it home for dinner. So think about that, because I hear all the time from our clients that there’s a talent shortage. I get that, but what are you doing to help your teams do more with less? If you want to get in touch with us, follow MedTrainer on LinkedIn or visit MedTrainer.com. Follow or connect with me on LinkedIn as well.
Saul Marquez:
Love it. And Nai, you said it so well, a coffee mug is not going to cut it, folks. So when you take a look, it’s opportunities like the one Nai is presenting to us today and investing in our people to simplify the flow of their paperwork, their admin burden, to do some actual employee retention. So, I strongly encourage everybody to take a look at MedTrainer, we’ll leave the website in the show notes and, as well as a way to get in touch with Nai in the show notes as well. Nai, can’t thank you enough for spending time with us today. Thank you.
Nai Kanell:
Thanks for having me on.
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