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Saul Marquez:
Hey, everybody! Saul Marquez with the Outcomes Rocket. Welcome back to the podcast. Today, I am joined by a very amazing leader in healthcare. Her name is Christi Coleman. She serves as the Chief Customer Officer for Proactive MD, a rapidly growing advanced primary care provider dedicated to helping people live healthier lives, partnering with employers, and driving down costs of healthcare. As the CCO, Christi Coleman brings 30-plus years of industry experience to her role, which she currently oversees Proactive MD’s, client retention strategies, and growth initiatives. There’s an opportunity in our country to better scale primary care, and with the shortage of physicians, and nurse practitioners, and providers in general, it’s solutions like this one Proactive MD provides that helps employers and really our country be healthier. So, Christi, I’m so excited that you’re joining us today to tell us a little bit more about you and Proactive MD. Thanks for joining.
Christi Coleman:
Thanks, Saul.
Saul Marquez:
So Christi, a lot of times in healthcare, especially, it’s the North Star, the thing that drives us to do what we do. We’d love to really hear what inspires your work in healthcare.
Christi Coleman:
Yeah, Saul, that’s, it’s a great question, and at my core, I love serving others. And ever since my initial career aspirations and I was deciding on what I wanted to do, I wanted to find something that I could make a difference. And finding Proactive and understanding and now experiencing our company’s mission to transform primary care and impact the American workforce come to life, it’s been like a homecoming, and it’s really filled that need for me to serve and help others. I also cherish my relationships. And after 30 years in the business, I’ve built amazing friendships, and they fill my cup.
Saul Marquez:
That’s awesome. Yeah, and look, having somebody like you that is so passionate about people relationships, I’m sure there’s high retention. And so, when you think about the company and the organization, how are you guys offering value to the healthcare ecosystem?
Christi Coleman:
Yeah, healthcare is complex. It is a strain on the American people and the American workforce, and our mission is advanced primary care. And at its core, it’s, what’s built to solve so many of those healthcare woes from encouraging prevention, right, let’s identify those risks early, to providing affordable access, because when someone doesn’t have the funds to access healthcare or their social determinants of health, where there are things that are going on in their lives where they’re just not willing to deal with their diabetes or whatever the situation might be, at the core, building a trusted care team and giving them access to that trusted care team, right, breaks down those barriers, and that’s where we thrive. We’re proud to have pioneered a program that, there are patient advocates, and the patients are more than a 3D medical chart, right? We get to the heart of who that patient is and what their needs are, and instead, we see them as unique individuals. We don’t shy away from the complexity of healthcare. We embrace it, we pull the patients in, we help them understand how we can help them, we understand what their situation is, and we guide them through whether it’s a cancer diagnosis, whether it’s, right, they don’t have access to housing. It runs the gamut, or down to the simple “I need an MRI, and where’s the best place to get it?” So, again, helping each individual patient navigate healthcare is at the core of what we do.
Saul Marquez:
That’s fantastic. And is there, so there’s the navigation piece, and one of the common questions that comes up with a service like this is, do they need insurance, or is part of what you offer a plan that covers a certain amount of coverage? Can you share more about that?
Christi Coleman:
Yeah, Saul, that’s a great question. And at the basis of our model is the employer pays a comprehensive fixed fee for access to our services. The employees in a typical workforce have free access. In some situations where they have a high deductible health plan there’s a fair market value that they pay to access, but it’s a very low amount, and it’s a huge benefit from a retention from a recruitment perspective and to encourage the access to primary care, which we’ve talked about in it really being the answer to improving America’s health.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, thank you for that. So, it really is an adjunct to an existing plan and an employer that wants to have their employee base take advantage of primary care.
Christi Coleman:
Absolutely. And kudos to those employers that are willing to invest in their employees and see the value in primary care, and then they see the value on the back end through their total healthcare cost spend, right? Their rates go down, right? So, our goal is to reduce total cost of care for the employers we serve.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great, yeah. And a lot of care goes unaddressed. And so, I think services like yours really enable employees to take advantage of it. If you had to point to something that you believe is better or different than what’s out there, what would you say that is?
Christi Coleman:
Yeah. So it’s not a build it and they’ll come, right? We hear story after story of employer-sponsored health centers where they’re not seeing the engagement. Our patient advocate is proactively outreaching to the high-risk individuals to start with, and they’re pulling them in. They’re meeting with them where they are. And it’s not a, oh, we know you have diabetes, come see the health center. It’s, hey, we haven’t seen you yet in the health center. Have you met Dr. Conard or, right? And again, meeting them where they are and encouraging to come in and continuing that pursuit? Our goal is 80% engagement, and that’s 80% engagement with the high risk seeing a provider four times in a given year. We can’t impact health if we’re not engaging with the employees. We want to keep them out of the ERs, we want to keep them out of the community, and we want to, right? We want to build that trust so they want to come back time and time again, and we want to reduce gaps in care, and we want to increase medication adherence. So again, that patient advocate is core to what we do because if you have a provider and an assistant, they’re there to serve, they’re there to care for those patients when they come in the door. The patient advocate is out on the manufacturing floor, out in the school districts, touching people, meeting with people, helping them appreciate what’s within the four walls of the health center so that those folks will engage and we can impact health.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great. No, thank you, Christi. That’s fantastic. And certainly, we, that advocacy is a big part of it. If you guys are providing insurance for your employees right now, does the plan you have include an advocacy and navigation component that encourages those touchpoints that Christy was sharing? If not, this is something to think about. This is something to consider, right? On all of our podcasts we, Christi, we talk about, Hey, you could stop at being inspired and listening about something, but the real outcomes happen when you take action. So I’m encouraging everybody that’s listening to this to take action on this. If your plan currently does not provide your employees the benefit of advocacy and navigation, certainly something to consider. And we have links in the show notes for you to check out the work that Christi and her team does. … Look, none of the stuff that we do comes without setbacks, Christi, so what’s a big one that happened with you guys, and the learning that came from it?
Christi Coleman:
Yeah. So the sales process, Saul, is, it’s fairly regimented. It starts with an RFP, we get spreadsheeted, and the consultants that are driving the process, right, they pick best and final for finalist meetings, and we get to know the customer to some extent. And there’s certain terminology that can be intertwined, and we had a situation where the client expected one service, and we thought we were delivering a different level of the service, right? And so pulling our team together and working with the client, after we had won the biggest around, right, level setting on what was good and right and helping the customer and the care teams deliver the service at the level that we know was right for that employee population. It was a big hurdle for us and our team.
Saul Marquez:
It sounds like you were able to get around it. You know, communication, like being in communication is key, especially in those kinds of moments.
Christi Coleman:
Communication. And so many times our clients, right, they know their culture better than anyone, right? But we know medicine, and we know that it’s, a provider is not a provider. We want a provider who’s passionate about taking care of patients. We want a provider that wakes up every day and wants to spend time with that patient and get to know them, because it’s not just the headache that they’re coming in with or the fever that they’re coming in with. It’s much more than, right, just the ailment, and it’s helping the customer appreciate the value we bring and us, vice versa, appreciating the customer and what they know about their culture, right? And marrying those two is really important.
Saul Marquez:
It sounds like you guys did in that perspective. So that’s a great share. And we oftentimes get criticized in healthcare for being behind the ball on technology adoption. I think, you know, COVID for, in many ways, helped us accelerate, and I think we’re getting better. What would you say in the primary care space, Christi, is a healthcare trend or technology that’s going to change healthcare as we know it today?
Christi Coleman:
Yes, so I would say during COVID we had a huge adoption of virtual care. And nothing replaces the face-to-face, right, the relationship, from so many aspects of our lives, family to friends, and healthcare is one of those. But access to virtual care and it, right, wherever they are, right, is crucial to, again, meeting that patient where they are. So that’s one of the more exciting aspects of primary care that we can extend out to additional populations. We have so many customers we serve with concentration in one area and remote employees all over the country. How can we reach them, impact their health, guide them through their healthcare journey, whatever that might be, and help them manage their health and the customers’ healthcare costs?
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, it’s a big opportunity. I totally agree with you, and there’s a lot of ways to do it now, too. There’s wearables, there’s ways to take vitals remotely. There’s a huge opportunity here, and it sounds like you guys are taking advantage of it. Look, I really appreciate you sharing the ways that your company can help employers reduce costs and take care of the people that work so hard for them. I’d love if you could just leave us with a closing thought, Christi, and what you want the listeners to take action on and the best place they can get in touch with you.
Christi Coleman:
Thanks. Well, Saul, we are excited about doing it different, right? About providing healthcare and a concierge level. And again, from serving our clients to serving our patients and holding to our patient promise, right? Everything we do is focused on what is going to impact that patient because if we take care of the patient, everything else is going to fall in line. Super excited and appreciate you giving us this opportunity today. The listening audience can find us at Proactive-MD.com. They can find me at CColeman@Proactive.md, and my phone number is 8173013519 I’d love to hear from anyone who is interested in talking further.
Christi Coleman:
Amazing Christi, thank you so much, folks, there’s Christi Coleman for you. The top of the top in service and healthcare; certainly, take her up on the opportunity to connect and explore how her company and the work that her team is doing to improve healthcare can do it for you. Again, it’s Proactive MD. You’ll see all the ways to get in touch with her as well as the team in the show notes. Christi, thank you so much for your time today. This was a very informative and fun.
Christi Coleman:
Thanks, Saul.
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