Tech Enabled Healthcare with David Dyke

george grombacher 0:00
I’m left with this Georgie and the time is right welcome today’s guest strong and powerful David Dyk David, are you ready to do this?

Unknown Speaker 0:22
I’m super psyched. Yes, sir. Good morning.

george grombacher 0:24
All right. Good morning. David is the chief product officer with relation to their leading patient scheduling and engagement technology company using a mobile first approach to simplifying access to health care. David, tell us a little about your personal life more about your work, why you do what you do?

Unknown Speaker 0:41
Yeah, personal life super fortunate. My lovely wife is in special education. My daughter is off the payroll and starting her career in commercial sales. And my son is wrapping up his undergrad in astrophysics. So I haven’t been able to help him with math homework since about fifth grade. It’s been pretty nice. Terms of relation. Yeah. And it really shouldn’t. You know, we really believe that people deserve a simpler experience with a healthcare system. And that whether those people are patients like us, healthcare providers, staff, family members, healthcare is massively complicated. And we do our best to try to bring simplification to just those right moments, those intersections where people and healthcare processes intersect.

george grombacher 1:28
Interesting, I think that that’s maybe a perfect term is intersection, as you made me think I bet there’s lots of opportunities where people and things fall through the cracks.

Unknown Speaker 1:39
It really is. And as I was catching up on your podcast, and congratulations on your success, over 1700 shows, that’s amazing. A couple of your recent shows have touched on health care you’ve had, whether it’s entrepreneurship, folks starting new businesses around health care, whether it’s obviously innovation needed, your show on regenerative healthcare was just really caught my attention because of the just amount of opportunity that we have to do things early. That was really, I think the catch of that, that whole episode was, if we could bottle up my, my genes when they were little and young and healthy, you could reuse them later in life when I’m approaching 50, and hurt something, or just the cost of health care, all of those things really do kind of our major complicating factors in how we interact with the healthcare system. And going back to your root question of why we do what we do, I think is because we’re all patients at some point in our lives, or we’re caring for people who are. And so those opportunities that we have to help healthcare organizations are trying to do their best to achieve the right outcomes for their patients, while maintaining, you know, financial performance, so they can be open tomorrow is essential. And so that for us, starts with scheduling, we aren’t trying to boil the entire ocean. So finding the right provider for you based on what you need, that meets your plans and meet your ability to have transportation, if you need help in any of those areas around getting to or getting back from your appointment, all of those factors are different for each of us. And it really does make that complexity of scheduling a difficult thing for a lot of folks, especially as you get into higher specialization of care, where you end up having narrower networks, limited access providers, fewer specialists that you can go to so healthcare is not a one size fits all problem. And so we really tried to optimize solutions that can help patients and providers that those points of intersection.

george grombacher 3:36
Yeah, interesting. So I it’s strikes me that there’s, there’s lots of problems to solve those problems of me as as a patient and would be consumer of healthcare, trying to understand what my insurance company offers, who’s in network, and how do I sort through all of this, and then on and then there’s a lot of people going through that similar experience. So it’s just a lot. And then it’s the very, very specialized people where man, or there’s just a few opportunities for me to get in there. And so I need to make sure that everything syncs up correctly.

Unknown Speaker 4:11
That’s exactly right. One of the things that people ask us a lot, we deal with that relation to not only scheduling but the reminder activities, all of the things that help you and I be ready for that appointment. And one of the things that, you know, people ask us a lot is How come healthcare is not as easy as getting an Uber? How come it’s not as easy as OpenTable to just grab a reservation for dinner? And I think because fundamentally, there’s more at stake. And there is a there are a lot more variables. If you had to make a dinner reservation months in advance and tell them then what you are going to order and how you are going to pay. It’d be a lot more complicated process in the healthcare system, how you’re paying or if you’re able to our major variables in how availability It was determined. And if it’s a simple, I’ll call it transactional healthcare like a vaccination, right? Those kinds of things still require people to be reminded and nudged and prompted in order to have the kind of, so they don’t miss the appointments, right? In a busy, chaotic world. So whether it’s helping organizations manage that capacity so that they are creating as much space as they can, we’re helping the patient in the moment of transition from I have this on the books months from now, how do I make sure I don’t miss it? All of those things are areas where we’re we’re able to add a little value and help take some of the abrasion out of healthcare.

george grombacher 5:45
Yeah, both both both both parties can probably use a little bit more efficiency me as a patient, making sure that I’m on time and I have my forms and my payment is going to be correct. And then from a medical office perspective, I’m sure that there’s probably some ways to optimize how they are calendaring and scheduling and taking.

Unknown Speaker 6:08
Yeah, they really are. I was on a not to say I was on different show recently. And we talked about how patients really see themselves rightfully as special unicorns, right. I’m a, I’m an individual, and my preferences matter. And from a healthcare organization’s perspective, how do they balance out the need to treat that unicorn like a unicorn, but also recognize that they’re running a stable, and they have to get horses in and things that look like horses, and sometimes it’s a unicorn, and sometimes it’s a mule. And we manage that the variety of kinds of things that come through that office where that hospital because they’re not all the same, the way that you need to be treated for what you’re there for could vary wildly from what I am, therefore, it might be a 10 minute appointment for me, and it might be a two hour appointment for you. So it’s that level of really having a deep understanding of that reason for visit and why people are there and how long that takes. And what are all the logistics that an organization needs to do to prepare for you versus preparing for me that make it super complicated.

george grombacher 7:13
Are most medical offices operations these days, pretty well set up from a technology standpoint, are there still a lot out there who are doing paper?

Unknown Speaker 7:23
Well, I’m, I’m an optimist, and a pragmatist. And I’ve been in healthcare long enough to see the rate of change. And we are, as an industry, notoriously slow to adopt those changes. We see in our own data, healthcare organizations still relying heavily on phone calls, to make reminders in a world where I don’t know about your phone, but mine doesn’t ring me if I don’t know the number. And if I if it does sneak through, there’s a 99% chance it’s going to voicemail. So you know, thinking about how people want to be communicated with and that kind of in the moment nudge that you can do to drive better adherence for me. And adherence for you requires a good understanding of, of our personal preferences, as well as having an arsenal of options, text messaging, email, phone calls, chat, those sorts of things, where we create new ways for you and I to interact with our healthcare providers. And I think we saw that recently, in we got to play a very small part in a study that was done by some clinical folks, excuse me. They were part of ascension. And during COVID vaccination periods, they were they ran a clinical trial that identified areas where they could nudge patients who were behind, effectively, they did hit were non adherent. They didn’t have the vaccinations yet. And they randomize the trial to say, well, what if we text folks who have and tell them that we’ve pre reserved a location for them, and we pre reserved a spot for them, and gave them an opportunity where your seat is available? And if you want to take it, you can if you want to change it, you’re welcome to and how does that influence the adherence? And how does that increase or decrease vaccination rates, and they saw a material improvement of about 5% when they did that sort of just in time prompt, where they were told not only that there’s space available for you, but we’ve reserved a chair for you. Right, and that that personalization had a real material effect. As you know, when in community health, population health 5% is a huge number, right in terms of driving improvements in the community response to things like COVID. So it was really exciting to see that level of innovation coming from a healthcare organization. It was we’re honored to be part of it.

george grombacher 9:57
Yeah, well, that makes that makes a ton of sense and fast. Today from a psychological standpoint that have moved the needle that much. Yeah. And what what it is that motivates people to take action?

Unknown Speaker 10:08
Yeah, I, myself, I had a dentist appointment yesterday and about 10 days ago, I got that first text message and said, Hey, put this back in your frontal lobe, right? Pay attention. Remember this thing that we set up six or seven months ago, this is a thing again, and it starts time to start thinking about it. You’re right, it’s on my calendar, I see it, I see, okay. And I was able to kind of think, Alright, you’re right. It’s sort of like having a vacation, that you’ve planned months in advance. But in that case of vacation is something I’m inherently going to pay attention to right? A medical appointment or routine when especially maybe something that I could easily blow off. So it’s those kinds of things that going back to your questions on how our providers and healthcare organizations doing, there’s still a lot of opportunity for folks to modernize their approaches to think about healthcare in a consumer oriented way, as opposed to traditional ways of much like the fax machine, it’s still a bastion of strength and healthcare. It’s my personal mission to get rid of the fax machine and healthcare as an aside. I hope to do that in two or three lifetimes. Yeah, so I,

george grombacher 11:24
I spent a good amount of time working for really large life insurance companies. And so I just understand that there’s these legacy systems that are hard to move away from and with the way that that insurance is billed and coded. Just I, it’s, it makes it I’m not interested in really thinking about that. So I’m super glad that you are. And I know that you’re not trying to boil the ocean, but I can’t help but wonder if there’s opportunities to help doctors to try to be a little bit more proactive when it comes to trying to reduce a lot of the chronic problems that we’re dealing with, like obesity and and all that.

Unknown Speaker 12:08
Yeah, that’s it’s a big part. I think one of our goals in relation is to help organizations move, not move from if they aren’t already. Out of those, what I’ll call operational opportunities, how do I ensure George that you make it to your appointment on time that you’re prepared that you have filled out your paperwork or that you’ve had the opportunity to if those things are important to you? And if not, we can do that for you in the moment when you arrive? Those are really sort of those transactional moments of healthcare when you are intersecting with that, that provider telemedicine face to face however it happens to be, then there’s a second sphere, right, which is that sort of relationship management around health care, which is how do they keep track of me over time, I don’t have an appointment tomorrow. But it’d be neat to hear from them about an underlying condition that I have the nudges, to take my medications, the nudges to help me be aware of educational programs that may meet a condition that one of us have, or things that are available for my family like the expiration of a vaccination for one of my kids. And whether that’s the health plan, doing that a provider or just a service that I would say as someone who might be self insured and are uninsured? How do I have access to that level of information, whether it’s from my provider, or not to keep me abreast of the things that need to be done to manage our long term health because I think healthcare sits today just under 20% of GDP, which is a lot. And that does speak to that level of complexity and expense and cost that many of your other guests have talked about. And the the challenge of how do we take those most expensive problems in healthcare, and really try to innovate our way through not only the treatment and the management of those disease, but the prevention and the early detection, the early identification. So we use the term campaign on purpose. It’s not dissimilar from a marketing campaign, to how you identify, Target, engage, nudge prompt, relate to those individuals that are managing those kinds of conditions or need to be managing those conditions so that we can as a society, kind of bend the curve on on costs and quality of life.

george grombacher 14:35
So as the chief product officer, I’m sure that that you get wonderful ideas thrown at you all the time for new ways to add and make the thing better, but you need to prioritize, prioritize your resources. How do you think about that?

Unknown Speaker 14:53
Well, I really tried to put my prioritization hat on with a I think my LinkedIn profile motto is customer’s first product second. And to me, that’s a fundamental philosophy that says, My product is in response to customer need, whether it was the original iPhone that was in response to unarticulated needs, or if it was, it’s the next way, we think about how we deliver targeted messages to the right population at the right time. That level of sort of insight really comes from deep understanding and deep customer conversations. So we try to take a very methodical approach, develop a hypothesis, test it with our customers, get feedback, sharpen the saw, if you will. And then as we go, kind of back to the boil the ocean perspective, different slightly different metaphors. If I chase two rabbits, I’m going to lose both of them. So we’ve got to pick something and do it, and then adapt and keep our priorities sort of grounded on what our customers need to do. How do we test our hypothesis quickly, and then adapt based on what the data is telling us?

george grombacher 16:10
Yeah, fascinating. So many opportunities. But if we start if you start saying, Hey, George, you know, I know you’re trying to lose that 10 pounds, you know, I don’t know what you’re eating today, I’d be like, you know, what, why don’t you leave me alone, I’m gonna get out, right, that’s given me just the right amount.

Unknown Speaker 16:30
It is, it’s a difficult balance. The health plan that I’m a part of ATT relations, has a program where if you sign up, they’ll give you an Apple watch, and allow you to track your activity, and sort of they’ll make your payments. So they don’t give you the watch, but they will make your payments, which, again, I think is an exceptionally great way of putting it out there. Which is it could be free, but it could also be yours. Pay for it. Right? If you’re not going to get David, you’re not going to do your part. And it has been a motivator, right for me to get up and to be active and to stand up and to be mindful. And those sorts of things that that program prompts me to do throughout the day. Is it materially different than what I was doing beforehand? It is in the sense that it’s top of mind, right? It’s 830. At night, I haven’t closed that red ring yet. And the dogs haven’t been for walks, I’m gonna get up and go walk them right just to make those efforts. So those little things are our material, they can work, they do work, they’re proven to work. And I think finding ways that we can create channels for our customers, to support their patients in new ways to be responsive, without adding volume to the system is a really important part of our mission.

george grombacher 17:55
Yeah. I love it. That That all makes perfect sense. And that gives you something to keep working on. David.

Unknown Speaker 18:03
It does. There’s going to be more to do tomorrow. So I’ll be back for sure.

george grombacher 18:07
I love it. But David, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you and relations?

Unknown Speaker 18:13
We are@relationship.com which is our e l a t i e n t.com. And we’d love to hear from you. And thank you, George for all you’re doing and appreciate you having me on the show.

george grombacher 18:26
Yeah, it’s great talking with you. If you enjoyed as much as I did, so David, your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas go to relations.com r e l a t i e and t.com and check out everything that they’re working on. Thanks again, David. Appreciate George. Have a great day. And until next time, remember, do your part by doing your best

Transcribed by https://otter.ai