Outcomes Rocket – Alan Pitt : Video automatically transcribed by Sonix

Outcomes Rocket – Alan Pitt : this mp4 video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Saul Marquez:
Hey everybody! Welcome back to the podcast. Saul Marquez here. Today, I’ve got the privilege of hosting Dr. Alan Pitt. He is no stranger to the podcast. Alan, welcome back.

Alan Pitt:
Thank you so much, Saul. Glad to be here. How are you?

Saul Marquez:
I’m doing really well. Doing really well. It’s great to have you back. For those of you that don’t know, Alan, Dr. Alan Pitt is actually a neuroradiologist, entrepreneur, and serving as the Chief Executive Officer of Vitalchat. I am excited to dive into the work that they’re doing there and really wanting to uncover some of the technology and insights that you guys are working at Vitalchat. Alan, before we do, tell us a little bit about you for the people that haven’t had a chance, why is it that you do what you do?

Alan Pitt:
That’s a great question, Saul. You know, I tell you, I’ve been strongly influenced by Simon Sinek’s Start with Why; I think it’s super important to kind of communicate that. I’m a second-generation physician. My daughter actually makes three.

Saul Marquez:
Congratulations on that.

Alan Pitt:
Thank you very much. She’s in her fellowship in high-risk OB. I kind of, and this is a trite thing to say, but I kind of believe healthcare is broken. I think we need to change the way we care for each other at scale, so I’m constantly looking for ways to bring patients and providers together in different ways at scale. And I think it’s super important that we focus on the people and process first, and only then think about how technology can help us get to scale. But I’ve kind of built my career around those ideas. I’ve been involved with multiple companies, all of them with that kind of common theme. Can we change the way we’re taking care of each other at scale?

Saul Marquez:
I love that. And the thing I really love about your background, Alan, is really you’re a physician, but you’re also, I mean, just an incredible entrepreneur. You’ve served at medtech companies, software companies. Always love your perspective on ways we can make healthcare better. Talk to us about what you’re doing at your company now, Vitalchat.

Alan Pitt:
Sure. Thanks for the opportunity, Saul. I really appreciate it. I’ve been in the telehealth space for roughly 20 years. I’ve seen it go from very niche, very uncool, to where it’s top of mind, very cool, or just about everybody. Most recently, I was the chief medical officer of a company called Avizia, which merged with American Well. And after that occurred, the CTO of Visio came to me and said, you know, Alan, I have an idea of how to really get telehealth in the hospital at scale, and frankly, like every good idea. I basically crapped all over it for several months until he proved me wrong, and that was the knight of super Vitalchat. Vitalchat sits with the position that we can convert pretty much any device, be it a TV in the room, be it a nursing wow, be it a cart, or even a patient’s own personal device, into an endpoint where we can bring people together, allowing healthcare to be really a team-based approach. And I think we’ve done a really good job at Vitalchat, I think the market is really responding. We have a growing number of hospitals. We also believe that video should not only deliver visits but also to deliver business analytics to help hospitals better understand the patient in terms of issues of safety and other needs, as well as issues related to business analytics for spaces. How is my hospital doing with room turnover and other issues? And so the solution we built really accommodates both of those in a very cost-effective way.

Saul Marquez:
That’s awesome. And so, let’s hone in on some examples. Alan, I’d love to talk more about this. And specific to, like, how do we make it real, right? Like, let’s talk in a way that we can make this solution real for people listening.

Alan Pitt:
Yeah, so I think it’s super important whenever you talk about anything like this that you stay away from technology, and you talk about the business problem that a company is trying to solve, or an innovator is trying to solve. You know, there’s really the pre-pandemic and the post-pandemic world, and healthcare, like every other industry, has gone through many changes in the post-pandemic world. The biggest one is that the people who work in healthcare have really kind of opened up and have begun to think about, what do I want to do with my life? Where do I want to work? How do I want to work? Those types of things. The end result of that is that many of our hospitals are really struggling with staffing issues, particularly as it pertains to nursing. And perhaps the hottest topic in healthcare today, particularly from a hospital perspective, is how do I have enough nurses that I keep my floor beds open, that I keep my hours open, that I keep my ratios where they should be for patient safety? And frankly, many hospitals are really struggling to keep nurses working brick and mortar. Many nurses want to work hybrid like everybody else, they want to work virtual. The opportunity with Vitalchat and several other companies in the space is, can I provide a workforce from the cloud to supplement the bedside nurse? Can I relieve that bedside nurse of many of the administrative tasks? Can I provide that bedside nurse with mentorship so that they stay in their job? Can I provide that bedside nurse with other resources so they elevate their job satisfaction? If you look at the percentages, there’s about a 1 in 5 turnover for most hospitals. 20% of nurses leave their post after a year. That goes up to 30% for first-year nurses. And that’s generally because they have anxiety because they’re being put in these hyper-acute situations. We need the ability to make people comfortable with what they’re doing at all times, so they feel like they’re providing good care. Nobody wants to think that they’re not providing good care. I’ve given talks for a number of years on telehealth, and I tell people, I’m not really here to talk to you about technology or telehealth. I’m here to talk to you about reassurance; reassurance at scale for the family, for the patient, and frankly, for that less experienced provider. That’s my goal. And if I can provide an outside resource that really helps people through, whether it’s the patient or the nurse, in their time of need, I think we’ve done a good thing. I think we’ve done a really good thing.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah. That’s great, Alan. I love that. Now, go ahead. Please continue.

Alan Pitt:
Yeah. So I think as you look at how do I build a successful company today in 2023, hospitals are bleeding cash. You know, they’re getting less and less, and they have to do more and more. You really have to address a critical top-of-mind issue for that hospital if you expect your idea, your company, to be adopted by the hospital, and so I think virtual nursing workforce shortages is a top-of-mind problem for just about every hospital. There are some other pieces of that, you know, hospitals today aren’t really just hospitals. They’re hospital networks. And so, for instance, you know, I’m in the Commonspirit system. We have five hospitals in the Phoenix market. We can’t have a cardiologist at every site every minute, but we can put people in every hospital virtually to basically keep that patient where they are whenever possible, so I think that’s another opportunity. I think every hospital system is looking for a way to prevent patient leak, as they call it. They don’t want patients going to the other system. The best way to think about that is, can we have a clean handoff so that patient knows they’ve already met the doctor they’re going to see two days later for follow-up, and they’ve already started that relationship because that doctor came in virtually? And then also, I think none of us wants to be alone when we’re sick, it’s really scary, and we want our family with us as much as possible. And frankly, I hold that the family is the greatest untapped resource in healthcare today. If we can provide the tools for family to engage in the journey towards wellness for any patient, I think that we can save lots of money. We can get much better outcomes because family members, loved ones don’t have that denial aspect that patients do, right? They’re willing to do anything they can for their loved one, which is often different than patients who are often in denial. So bringing that ecosystem together is critical.

Saul Marquez:
That’s great, Alan. I love the simplicity that you approach this with, and sort of how you turn it upside down. It’s like, I’m not here to talk to you about technology. I’m here to talk to you about certainty and assuredness, right? And and the family, which is it’s the human element. And, you know, one thing that I find I’ve done a lot of these interviews, you know, the best at what they do. The ones that are at the top of their game always go back to the people you know, like it’s about the people. And that’s what you’re doing here today. And so, how is what you guys are doing at Vitalchat different than anything else that’s out there?

Alan Pitt:
Yeah. So if you look at the market today, if there’s any hospital administrators out there and they’re thinking about how do I come up with a collaboration strategy, there’s really been an evolution. And we’re really having kind of something of a gold rush for the hospital room of the future. What does that hospital room look like? So historically, you know, telehealth started in space with NASA, and then it evolved to universities over cart-based care. Cart-based care has been where we’re at historically, so often expensive. You can think of carts as TVs on wheels that were wheeled around the hospital. There would often be one cart per ten beds or one cart per 20 beds, something like that, relatively small installs. The problem with carts is that the carts required someone, usually a nurse, to find them, power them, clean them, manage the visit. And what people are beginning to realize is nurses don’t have the time to do that anymore. They don’t have the time to manage that event. So one of the things that Vitalchat that we’re super, super interested in doing is putting in fixed endpoints, converting stuff that’s already in the room into an opportunity for collaborative medicine. Now, we’re not the only ones doing this. We’re not the only ones doing this. There are a number of competitors in that space. We just think we’re doing it better. And how are we doing it better? Well, we pretty much started from scratch. We own the entire software stack, so we’re able to integrate and innovate very quickly on top of that stack. We’re also able to keep our costing structure very, very low. We built our own AI as part of that stack, which makes it again, so we can lower the cost and offer more value. There are other opportunities. Some places tend to fall back on, say, Zoom or Teams. I personally feel that those are great applications for something like this. For collaboration, I want to meet someone at a particular time and collaborate. They’re not great for care. They’re not built around the needs for healthcare in particular. There are a few other companies that are trying to get in this space. We’re also very forward-leaning at Vitalchat. One of the biggest problems for the healthcare system is they have these old hospitals with old bandwidth, and they’re not used to supporting video out of every room. If you look at the bandwidth requirements to broadcast. Imagine you want to broadcast a YouTube from every room in the hospital. The network of a hospital won’t support that. So we’ve spent a lot of time at Vitalchat thinking about how do I not only manage our devices but the hospital bandwidth as well, so you can get to scale where every room is lit up all the time. So there’s a lot of differences. Yeah.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah, definitely some nuances there that I think come from practice of the technologies and capabilities. Because man, you know once you get into the hospital environment, there’s so many things that can happen. And so when you go through that, you get the opportunity to have that experience, which sounds like you guys definitely have. Talk to me a little bit about maybe, you know, with that experience, something that you’ve learned that was a setback, but now is a strength.

Alan Pitt:
Setback that’s now a strength. Well, I think it’s been an evolution in our product set, right? I think that the majority of things that we’ve built into our software have come from the nurses and physicians, from our customers. We generally don’t build something additional unless we hear that somebody sees a problem in the way they deploy. So we’re constantly iterating on how do we add features that really matter. So some of them are, you know, pretty easy to understand. We had an ask for, you know, it’s great to be able to host video. But what about for a patient who doesn’t speak English as a first language? So we built on language translation inside the application. Whether that’s kind of closed caption NLP or it’s a professional translator, it’s inside that environment. We have an opportunity to do multi-view, this ability to see multiple rooms across the continuum, could be multiple hospitals even. We had a client just tell us, look, and we have this way of popping up the window, so if you want to send her in on one patient, you can look at that one patient. But our customer said, hey, you know, if you pop that window up and it blocks all my other patients, well, that’s no good. I have to be able to see all patients at all times, it’s a safety issue. I think this constant back and forth between customers, care, and technology is one of the things that we’re really emphasizing. I’m a doctor, right? I see healthcare in a certain way, and I think occasionally I get it right, and occasionally I get it wrong. So now we’re bringing on nurses onto Vitalchat because I think we need to really infuse the voice of the nurse into the product itself. I think physicians have a certain way of seeing care. I think, frankly, nurses have a much better way of seeing care because they’re often down in the trenches where we kind of float around and write orders and do different stuff. So…

Saul Marquez:
I think that’s a good call out, man.

Alan Pitt:
Yeah.

Saul Marquez:
A very good call out. If you sort of had to point to something that everybody should be thinking about right now, you know, when it comes to adoption of these types of systems, what’s one of the things you would advise them?

Alan Pitt:
Well, I want to talk about, you know, my space that I’m in, but I think more broadly the supplies, and I see this throughout my career, that there’s an innovator who has had a problem in healthcare. Their family has suffered. They have suffered. They’ve seen a process that’s broken. They know something about technology, and they want to build a company to solve that problem. I would strongly recommend that, and generally, by the way, it comes from a person with a technology background, but not necessarily a healthcare background. And so for all those innovators out there, for all those technical people out there, find a healthcare partner early, find a hospital administrator, find a doctor, find a nurse who believes in the mission that you’re on, the problem you’re trying to solve, and bring them in early to help you think through how I get product market fit. That goes for how do people use my product, and frankly, how does how does the hospital buy my product? I think both of those are super important, and they’re often lost on the technically savvy innovator who’s not lived their career in healthcare. It’s through that combination, and that’s why I’ve been super fortunate. My co-founder, Ghufran Abbas, wit and smart in terms of technology, like he could build anything, but he hasn’t had the pain and suffering that I’ve had of going through a residency and spending a career in healthcare. And so it’s that combination that I think really brings joy to both of us because he passionately wants to make a difference at the bedside, and I passionately want to see him be able to do that. And it’s that back-and-forth of conversation that I think really ends up building better product.

Saul Marquez:
I’ve seen it happen. You know, like, I started the podcast seven years ago. And, you know, it’s interesting, right? Because you’ve seen the companies that have had success, they’ve you know, gotten acquired or they’re, they’ve grown, and they’re doing their own thing. You’ve seen the ones that haven’t. And, a lot of times, it’s because this thought that, hey, you know what? We could do this. We’re tech experts. You need that healthcare background big time. So really appreciate that insight that you’ve shared for the entrepreneurs listening, we could all benefit from it. Alan, what, you know, this has been super interesting. What closing thought would you leave the listeners with as we close today?

Alan Pitt:
Yeah, I would, I would tell anyone out there; I’m presuming you’re listening to this because you’re looking to make the world a better place. You’re trying to build something. You’re trying to learn something. I would tell that the technical people, the founders, anyone who’s a founder, really, it’s important to partner up with people who know healthcare. They’ve lived it. I would also tell healthcare folks, nurses, physicians, administrators, many of whom are in mid or late midlife and maybe a little burned out, Go find a startup that you believe in and go help them, even if you have to volunteer initially, show them why they need you. The worst thing is when somebody spent 20 years learning healthcare, and they just go, I’ve had it, I’m out, I’m leaving. I’m going to go work, you know, I’m going to be a barista or something. Go back and put some of that experience, those skills to work, and make healthcare better. There are other ways you can use your skills than what they’ve typically done.

Saul Marquez:
I love that, Alan. You know, I think it’s invigorating. And actually, I mean, I’m just going through it, right? I was, left Medtronic three years ago or three months ago, feels like years. And I’m doing Outcomes Rocket full-time. Man, it’s invigorating to be at a startup. It’s invigorating to see the action and to be, I love your advice. I’m feeling it myself. And folks, for all of you out there looking for that extra vitality, that vigor, you could find it by joining a startup that you believe in and think that’s a key.

Alan Pitt:
100%.

Saul Marquez:
Right, Alan?

Alan Pitt:
Yeah.

Alan Pitt:
For some of you, you’ve read this book, Strength to Strength, this idea of evolving. Oh, it’s a great book.

Saul Marquez:
Strength to Strength?

Alan Pitt:
Strength to Strength. And the short of strength, the strength is that our life is full of two hills. The first hill is building our professionalism. You know, we’re in college, we’re in professional school, we’re learning skills, and we rise up, but we reach a peak at some point. And then there’s this other downward side. And it’s, as you go down that hill, your skills are atrophying, you’re slowing. You can’t think as fast, but your experience has grown considerably. And it’s that second thing, that experience, that makes up the second hill. And if you can figure out how to use that experience on the second hill, you can really extend your career, offer mentorship, offer a lot of things to people on that first hill who are building those companies. So, you know, as a parting book, I’ve found that to be a lot of solace for me now, in late midlife, I don’t know how you rate me, but I’ll say late midlife that.

Saul Marquez:
You’re still a young man. You’re still a young man.

Alan Pitt:
Exactly. I’m going to say that as a young man, yeah, there you go.

Saul Marquez:
Well, I love it, Alan. Thank you. And, you know, actually, back in the day, like, man, it’s crazy to believe, but we’ve done over 1400 podcasts. When I first started the podcast, we would do book recommendations, and then I stopped doing them, but this is sort of like inspiring. I kind of like the idea of bringing that back. What do you think?

Alan Pitt:
I think that’s a great idea. I whink what people read tells you a lot about what they’re thinking about.

Saul Marquez:
I agree.

Alan Pitt:
And I don’t know if I’m the best reader, but I definitely read things that make me think. And I think Strength to Strength really has been something that’s helped me really reframe how I’m working with others at this point in my career.

Saul Marquez:
I like that, yeah. And actually, that’s one of the interview questions that I whenever I hire anybody. What are you reading right now? It tells you a lot about them. It tells you a lot about them. If somebody is not reading anything, I don’t hire them. I swear it’s a, like a disqualifier or a qualifier for me.

Alan Pitt:
Yeah. Okay, everybody, listen to that, don’t come to the interview without a book. You might even come with a free book. Free book for Saul. That’s the best way to interview.

Saul Marquez:
I like that. Yeah, I like that. Well, listen, Alan, always a pleasure to to connect with you. Folks, Dr. Alan Pitt here. Again, we’ll leave in the show notes ways to get in touch with them. And what is the best way to get in touch with you?

Alan Pitt:
You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, is probably the easiest way. Yeah, that’s absolutely the best way. And, happy to email me at Alan@Vitalchat.com, happy to respond that way as well. Anybody would like to talk about innovation, different things, send me a note, happy to talk it through.

Saul Marquez:
Outstanding. Alan, thank you so much. Appreciate your time.

Alan Pitt:
Saul, great to see you again.

Saul Marquez:
Likewise.

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