One of the biggest hurdles an innovator faces is the quest to prove you have a solid product-market fit. (Especially because many innovators fall prey to their own assumptions that their innovation will be loved by the masses, without pausing to get the masses’ thoughts first.)
This quest is closely tied to another huge hurdle: getting traction in the early stages. In the vast majority of cases, the early adopters, or first users of your innovation, will be quite different than your mainstream users down the road.
And it’s absolutely critical to address this as early as possible.
On today’s episode, CarePredict Founder and CEO Satish Movva tells us about his savvy early adoption strategy. It’s clear that this early strategy led to the success of his multi-award-winning wearable device, which he developed to help care for his elderly parents. Satish shares:
- His early adoption strategy of testing his device in the smaller, more controllable environments of senior living centers vs. trying to scale too quickly with a commercial model
- That a B2B early adoption strategy doesn’t mean you can’t go B2C later — but it will help give you invaluable insights to iterate your innovation before your mainstream launch
- How the mindset of jumping straight to the B2C market is one of the biggest reasons that innovators never get off the ground
- Some of the key game-changers and differentiators of his device, like being the first wearable on the market to be able to track arm gestures
Satish Movva is the Founder and CEO of CarePredict, a wearable device that helps to predict serious health issues in seniors before they happen. CarePredict has earned several awards and accolades, including earning a spot in the Digital Health 150 and being named as an Honoree for Wearable Technology Developed Just for Seniors at the CES 2020 Innovation Awards.
Satish has spent nearly three decades working in healthcare tech, holding positions with companies ranging from large provider and physician corporations to household names like IBM.
To learn more, visit www.carepredict.com or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Episode Transcript
00:00:01:08 --> 00:00:40:06
Speaker 1: Welcome back, COIQ listeners on today's episode. I am really excited. We have Satish Movva with us. He is the CEO and founder of Care Predict. A couple of things I want to share with you that makes this episode really exciting is that they were recently noted or slated on the digital health 150 list as one of the most promising digital health startups. And then also recently, let me, let me make sure I got this right. You guys were just awarded the CES 2020 innovation award honoree for wearable technology development just for seniors. Congratulations.
00:00:40:22 --> 00:00:44:07
Speaker 2: Thank you very much
Speaker 1: Dr. Movva. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
00:00:45:00 --> 00:00:52:17
Speaker 1: So I think, um, I'd like to just start off with you telling us a little bit about your background and what you do for our listeners who don't know you yet.
00:00:53:07 --> 00:01:11:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I've been in technology now for about 30 plus years and 26 of those have been in healthcare technology. So, I mean very large provider corporations, physician corporations, all the way to working with folks like IBM, um, throughout my long career in healthcare technology.
00:01:12:00 --> 00:01:18:21
Speaker 1: Okay, nice. And so, um, a little bit about care predict and what you're doing there.
00:01:19:05 --> 00:02:04:22
Speaker 2: Yeah. So Kaepernick, um, I really started kit predict primarily to take care of my own parents. My dad's 94 this year and my mom's 84, they live about 10 minutes away from me and I speak to them every day. But when I show up on a Saturday, along with my kids in tow, I almost always find things that are completely new that I had no idea about. And more often than not, that led me to take them to the yard that day, or pretty much a mess up my following weeks. Work schedules, get them specialists appointments, looking to see if I could get some idea about what was going in their life because unpredictable in their health was causing havoc in mind. And that's how I came about to create care, predict, to essentially give me that heads up about what's going on.
00:02:06:02 --> 00:02:26:10
Speaker 1: So I think that's fascinating. And I think I told you on our pre-call, I want to buy one of these. I need a couple of them. So describe what it's like to be a healthcare entrepreneur today and a pioneer in this and in this space?
00:02:26:24 --> 00:03:25:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, I, I think, uh, there are a lot of really smart people looking at this issue, you know, well the bride, the number of seniors are growing at a tremendous rate. The number of caregivers who can care for them and the number of payers who can pay for the care has been decreasing quite a bit because a lot longer than we expected. So a whole bunch of really smart healthcare entrepreneurs are looking at this. I think they're coming at it from multiple different ways. Somebody like me coming from within the industry are trying to fashion a solution that fits into their current workflows of the physicians and the current healthcare system and can fit into that reimbursement model. And some of the other entrepreneurs coming from the technology side out of the Valley are coming at it from this, is this really nice technology? Is that an application in senior care? So both of those are coming together and dovetailing together to really create the best in breed solutions out there for technology. For aging seniors.
00:03:27:17 --> 00:03:44:04
Speaker 1: yeah, yeah. Um, and I, I think that it's great because I, that's I think what's going to help transform the industry is the convergence of those two, um, mindsets. So do you have experience in other verticals and your past career?
00:03:44:15 --> 00:04:08:16
Speaker 2: Uh, I have actually, I started out actually as a very, uh, lead technologist. I was working in operating systems and networking, uh, Cardinal stacks and things like that for IBM. And then I went down to work with IBM in, um, uh, in, in different verticals in insurance verticals as well as law enforcement, uh, verticals, uh, in Scotland and New Zealand before I came back into the healthcare system here in the U S
00:04:09:01 --> 00:04:19:16
Speaker 1: so how would you, um, you know, what would, would be some of the differences or how would you describe what it's like to develop and innovate technology and other verticals compared to healthcare today?
00:04:20:13 --> 00:04:55:02
Speaker 2: I think, um, I would say that healthcare has always lagged other verticals in adopting new technology, mainly because it's the kind of problem we are dealing with. Real lives are your people and people are always going to be a little bit more conservative in how they adopt new technology. But as in some of the other way it goes like law enforcement or insurance, it's very much a dollar cents, cents equation on investment and they can deploy it very, very quickly. That is, there aren't any bad consequences there rather than healthcare. There could be bad consequences if you get something wrong.
00:04:55:11 --> 00:05:17:15
Speaker 1: Yup, yup. Absolutely. Um, you know, it's interesting, there's a lot of lip service, um, going on about healthcare innovation and you know, everybody's talking about it. So it seems like, um, for the, the, the level of talk that's happening, it seems like there's a lot of adoption. What's your perspective on the difference between talking adoption?
00:05:18:20 --> 00:06:05:03
Speaker 2: I think that's very perceptive of you by the way. There is a lot of hype around digital health and a lot of innovation going on. I think the way to look at it is, you know, how many of those really get out of the pilot stage where they are proven to have a true return on investment and have the efficacy that people are looking for versus you know, how many actually get into commercial and come all the way through. That's a large drop-off, right? From pilot to actual commercial in the digital health space. So a lot of the new innovators that are coming in are coming in, not necessarily with the domain expertise of health, but the domain expertise of technology and sometimes what they think will work in this space. Dustin, you cannot make a, you know, around peg fit in a square hole.
00:06:05:19 --> 00:06:33:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I would just add to that, so you were talking about those two segments that are kind of coming together. So you've got those technologists that may not be familiar with the domain of healthcare and then you've got those folks in healthcare who have lots of expertise right there. A lot of times they're living with the problem that they're trying to solve. Um, but often they get so in love with their solution. They think everybody's gonna love it just as much as they do. Right?
00:06:33:09 --> 00:07:02:02
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean that's, that's every founder you ever speak to will believe their solution is the panacea. It's widespread, but you really have to let the market decide that that's the market is the ultimate, you know, judge an arbiter of this Intel, how many of these digital health platforms have been adopted and have gotten to commercial success versus those that haven't. And that's a meditator indicator to you. Um, you know, what is working, what is not working.
00:07:02:13 --> 00:07:10:15
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, so help us understand, what has been your process for developing your early adoption strategy?
00:07:11:03 --> 00:08:04:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, so when we started this, um, I was trying to really build a solution for people like me, adult child of a senior, really struggling with their parent care. So it was more targeted towards consumers. But along the way, in 2015, we realized that trying to put this technology in, you know, hundreds of homes is something that at our stage was not scalable. You know, as a startup we cannot go to a hundred different homes and support a hundred different seniors and have eyes on a hundred different seniors to understand how the devices performing versus their own, you know, activities and behaviors. So we somewhat pivoted the company to say we're going to go after senior group living, independent living, assisted living dolls. I'm a dementia care centers where they're, you know, a hundred or more residents in a facility altogether and you have 30 to 40 staff that are there to take care of them.
00:08:04:24 --> 00:08:57:08
And what that gave us really was a very controlled environment where we could deploy our product and actually measure how well it's working because we had the staff there who had eyes on the residents and we can compare what they are saying was is what our devices saying. And it also allowed us to send out notices into the facility to collect data, to label our data. We use AI extensively in our platform, but for you to do AI correctly, you need what is called labeled data. And you know when somebody you felt you need to know when somebody had a urinary tract infection, you need to know when somebody was depressed. So you could train your AI training, deep learning training models to know well these were the initial conditions that led to this consequence, that labeling of the data that fall. Being in that senior group living facility really allowed us do that extremely well.
00:08:57:19 --> 00:09:29:03
And I look at my peers out in the industry that kind of went out after the consumer model first. They were all struggling and they are still all struggling because it's not scalable to deploy it in a mass quantity and see how well it works. Whereas in a controlled environment you have really good and most importantly you have the same group of people going through the vessel and you have this long term. I voted to look and see how your product is changing them. I'm changing their activity behaviors and really truly making a difference or not.
00:09:29:23 --> 00:10:19:03
Speaker 1: So I want to pause here and really dig deeper into this because I think that this is a topic that is so important to innovators, to our listeners, um, that very often there's this decision between B2B or B to C and a lot of folks that I talk to, they want to circumvent the bureaucracy and the red tape, right, of reimbursement rates and go straight to B to C and, and feel like, you know, Hey, I'm going just going to do some Facebook ads. I, I, you know, and, and I'm going to expand and get this market, uh, get this adoption in the market. And so help me understand what you're saying on what you decided and why you decided it early on. And then what was the thing that made you pivot and change?
00:10:19:18 --> 00:11:05:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would say that you're absolutely right and there's a whole lot of people doing it for B to C just trying to get engagement through Facebook ads and so on. But I think I would differentiate that by saying there are certain pieces of technology that are maybe only software mobile apps that may benefit from that drug. But if you have any kind of a wearable device or any kind of a hardware component or something that's a little bit more sophisticated that requires, um, essentially a curated introduction of that product B to C is not going to scale for you. And you can spend a lot of money, you know, getting a lot to acquire consumers, whether Facebook ads or whatever, those things add up pretty quickly.
00:11:06:08 --> 00:11:07:04
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah.
00:11:09:00 --> 00:11:21:03
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's not cheap. And uh, and, and kind of roll that out all over the country or in geographical region or whatever, but you're going to be like a pinball going to all these places trying to get, figure out what's going on.
00:11:21:18 --> 00:11:33:09
Speaker 1: So do you think that that's because it's the early stage of the product development and you're still trying to, um, prove the safety and efficacy of the solution?
00:11:33:19 --> 00:12:06:08
Speaker 2: Even even prior to that, it's the product market fit product really addressed the question or not. And you will not know. Even in your mind, it may absolutely address it to the nth degree, but until it's in the wild on somebody's wrist or on somebody's mobile phone and they tell you that honest, candid, it's only in your head ready early segment that ready early adopters, the 40 50 80 people are going to shape your product for eternity and not necessarily for eternity, but at least for the next.
00:12:06:09 --> 00:12:07:08
Speaker 1: Right, right, right.
00:12:07:15 --> 00:12:57:08
Speaker 2: Because they are going to tell you what works, what doesn't work. You know, you may go in with the assumption, yeah, every going everyone's going to wear my device. Well then you're going to find out, Oh, it's too big, or it's wrong. Color are, whatever it may be like we did originally with our very, very first versions. And that allowed us to refine the product market fit. And the early adopters are the ones that are going to shape and you want that to be a very diverse group, but you also want that to be a controlled environment so you can repeatedly iterate on the product, take it back to them and say, now does this fit your conception of what this thing is supposed to be measuring the functional aspects of the device or the software as well to see is it really changing or making the changes in their health that you thought it for.
00:12:58:16 --> 00:13:37:05
Speaker 1: So I think that, I almost want you to repeat everything you said, but I won't have you do that because it's, I just want to reinforce it for our listeners. You know? So it sounds like what I hear you're saying is you're not saying that you know, you or the company won't ever go to B to C. right? You're just saying that that is not your initial path, that for the reasons that you just described. So it's maybe still a part of your phase two or longer term adoption strategy, but doing B2B right now because you have a device with an app and you need to prove safety and efficacy and you need to prove product market fit.
00:13:37:17 --> 00:14:26:02
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah. So we launched the pilots in 2015 we ended the pilots in 2017 we had two years of solid data and then we started commercially offering the product and senior group living both here in the U S and in Japan. And it's been very, very successful. So we are all over the us now. And in fourth quarter of 2019 we actually launched the product through home care channels into the person's homes. So that's our B to B to C. again, you're taking that distribution channel, you're taking that person who has hands and eyes on that individual three or four times a week deploying it through that channel. So you're giving yourself the scalability of the channel. That's super important. Um, you know, you need to be able to use an intermediary to get to a couple of hundred consumers, not directly sell to the consumer because it's much more expensive.
00:14:26:11 --> 00:15:19:18
That's sad because of the award at CES, uh, that we received in January for the innovation in wearable technology. Um, we actually also deployed our product to direct to consumers as well. So we have a beautiful retail kit that's designed for a senior living at home. Um, and then you can put you as a drag on our website and very soon on Amazon as well. And they encourage, there was, and we are not doing any kind of massive advertising or anything about that product because we want the homecare channel to prove out that it works really well in consumer. And then those early adopters in the direct to consumers who have a such a pressing need that they're scouring the web looking for technology like ours. When they come to us, they're going to see it. These are the early adopters you want because they're motivated, they want to try them.
00:15:19:20 --> 00:15:57:13
They're also forgiving if there are any flaws in it because they are going to help us change it. And so it's a very soft launch and you always should do a consumer thing is a soft launch because there are going to be questions that you would have to answer and there are going to be problems that you did not anticipate that a consumer will find so much radiation out there in that in the world of consumers, you're going to have an expected things brought to your attention and you will have the room to make those changes, to define it and then do the big launch armed and mother's day or some other big event.
00:15:57:15 --> 00:16:11:12
Speaker 1: Right, right. And, and I think that it's even more important with a complex buying process like healthcare where you've got, um, you know, a buyer, uh, and then you've got
00:16:12:06 --> 00:16:52:17
maybe a sponsor and then you've got the user. I was talking to someone the other day that, um, you know, is doing something in the home. It's not like care predict at all. Um, but something to where they've got folks like you and I that are the actual buyer. Um, but then they've got a senior person that's the user and the like you and I, they were all over it. They were buying it, but when it came to the person using it, they didn't like it. And so, you know, being able to identify product market fit, which each person that plays a role in that buying cycle is so critical. And it sounds like that's what you're talking about.
00:16:52:23 --> 00:17:33:04
Speaker 2: Absolutely. That's exactly what I'm talking about because it's the user is different. So in senior group living, you know, you have a hundred people wearing our device, you have the 40 staff wearing our device. It's pretty much a conditional residency and it's not out of the ordinary. People are expected to wear it because it's also the door key in these electronic doors. That's how you get back into your apartment or condo. Um, they are, it makes absolute sense, but he now you suddenly go to a single senior living at home that aren't other eyes and ears out there. Um, there are families and coming in all the time looking at them and no family wants to give this, you know, you and I wanted to give this to our panelists for our peace of mind, but you have to look at it from their perspective
00:17:33:24 --> 00:17:36:18
Speaker 1: and those elderly folks can be really stubborn.
00:17:38:23 --> 00:17:45:19
Speaker 2: I'll be in denial that they need anything, even though you and I know better because we know truly what's going on.
00:17:45:20 --> 00:17:47:09
Speaker 1: Yup, yup. Exactly.
00:17:47:20 --> 00:18:02:11
Speaker 2: It might just feel it's a burden. Wear it. I don't want to wear it, you know? So you have to be really tactful how you go about social engineering them into wearing it. And the secret weapon I, I can share with all of your listeners is the grandkids
00:18:04:07 --> 00:18:13:03
I think grandma or grandpa will not do for grand grandkids. Call and say, you got to wear this for me and she will wear it. I guarantee you
00:18:13:18 --> 00:18:21:21
Speaker 1: I can just see your ad campaign in the future. Right. The grandkids are on camera and they're saying, come on grandma, put this on for me.
00:18:23:18 --> 00:18:33:03
Speaker 2: You know, it's all to keep them safe and all to keep them living long enough to see all the goals that the grandchildren are going to meet. Ultimately. That's what it's all about.
00:18:33:12 --> 00:19:04:15
Speaker 1: Sure. The other one that I think of is just the physician. Um, you know, I, you know, when we were talking before I told you that my 91 91 year old grandmother lives with us and I'm telling you, it doesn't matter what I say, but whatever that doctor says, I mean, you write it, you take it to the check and cash it at the bank. I mean the doctor has so much influence, whatever that doctor tells her she's going to do, which also would be another factor at play with a B2B versus a B2B strategy.
00:19:04:22 --> 00:19:55:18
Speaker 2: Right, exactly. You need a blessing in authority. He also, part of it is also, you know, as we all get older, we live aspirational. You know, we say, you know, you might want to do two miles of walking a day and stuff like that. Um, and sometimes we communicate that, but he as well. And so we find a lot of seniors when they're speaking to the physicians are not necessarily upfront about how active they are, how that they are not. And so sometimes the, the physician is kind of operating under a misconception. The person has a lot more active than the truly are. The physicians need objective data as well to take care of and physician telling grandma you gotta wear this because then I'll know a lot more about you if you're skipping meals or if you're eating less and I can help you, you know, live longer and make sure you can see all of your grandkids goals.
00:19:56:09 --> 00:20:35:07
That's powerful. But the doctor needs the information and that's one of the messages we are communicating in the B2B. Whoa. You know it's not only from the care side but also from the payer side. The Medicare advantage plans. What about, you know, they are working in a capitated model where they only make money if they keep you healthy. The minute you will go to the ER they lose and they've lost all that money. And so they are very, very interested in learning more about what's going on in that individual's life and how can they help at the earliest signs of, you know, fatigue or malnutrition or risk of a fall or just go for UTI.
00:20:35:20 --> 00:20:52:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So Sateesh, I want to ask you, you know, as you kind of think about the last few years of your journey, what do you think some of the decisions or that you've deployed that have been just game changers for you?
00:20:53:12 --> 00:21:47:02
Speaker 2: I would say that, um, the very first instance of this product where we put on the dominant Dom and started tracking gestures of the arm, that is something that's very novel. There's still nobody doing that. So you're getting that actual forklift to the amount of drinks up to the mouth. That is truly a differentiator that still nobody has really caught up to. And we think that's a game changer because that's directly measuring a particular activity or behavior rather than using a proxy of, say you opened the refrigerator door so I can assume you ate. Um, that's the old world and this, you're right, they eat or not. That's been a game changer. The other thing that really came, and this goes back to, that's the whole product market fit. Our original first version had an enclosed matter and it would last anywhere from five to seven days, but then needed to be taken off and put it on their wireless jogger to be charged.
00:21:47:19 --> 00:22:26:10
What we found very quickly was when it's taken off, it's really hard to get them to put it back on cause I've forgotten about it. And that moved on. Our next iteration was a game changer where we made it a replaceable swappable battery without having to take it off the rest. And that completely changed the adoption rate because now there's no reason for you to take it off. And you know, you look at, yeah, you look at something like an Apple watch, which you have to take off every night to charge. You know, that'll never work for a senior because what are they going to do? They're going to put on the bedside. So when they go to the bathroom at night, they fall. They have no way of calling anybody for help.
00:22:26:13 --> 00:23:01:18
Speaker 1: I forgot to put it back on because it's on my charger and my nightstand. Exactly. Yeah. Wow. So, um, what have been some of the lows and your experience? You know, I know a lot of people don't want to talk about it, but we all know that entrepreneurship is not all rainbows and butterflies. It is a tough, tough gig out there. So what have been some of the share, you know, just candidly some of those moments where maybe you thought this is not gonna work, um, or you know, whatever it would be. What would be some of those examples?
00:23:01:22 --> 00:24:11:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the toughest, the earliest, I mean, there are always highs and lows throughout the journey. And we've been at it for five plus years. The earliest lows were rarely around the gesture recognition. Can we ever get to a stage where we would have a high accuracy in the earliest stages. It was disheartening because we spent about a year and a half working on that. Um, there's a lot of variation in how people eat. So at the end we had to come up with brand new algorithms that had never been done before and a machine learning model on our radar that can actually track that, um, that, you know, that could have killed the company if we weren't able to do that, you know, and all these bright PhDs and they figured it out and so we were able to get there. Um, subsequent to that, you know, the product market fit, all of those have been very good. Customer adoption has been very good. Pilot results have been good. I would however, say the one area that is still somewhat of a struggle is getting, um, the venture funding for technologies that are addressing senior care needs. You know, if you are creating, I don't know, an Uber for cats, people are going to put hundreds of millions of
00:24:13:22 --> 00:24:35:15
if you're doing anything meaningful in the digital health around to take care of aging seniors. There aren't a whole lot of venture capitalists who are specialized in that. So there's not a whole lot of people you can go to, especially if you've got a hardware as part of your solutions. It's nearly impossible to get funding in Silicon Valley. They really should rename it to software Valley. Now
00:24:37:10 --> 00:25:15:14
it's an app, they'll fund you. But if it's anything to do with real tangible stuff, it's very difficult to get that. And that's been a struggle. But now we are seeing more and more, a lot of the VCs themselves are aging and now they're thinking about, well how do I take it on my dad and mom? And so that light bulb has gone off. And so, especially since about, uh, last quarter, 20, 19 through now, we are seeing big shifts in how people are looking at aging demographics throughout the world. We have people from all over the world and how we investing in senior care technologies. And it doesn't have to be an app because they all realize, you know, seniors don't use apps.
00:25:17:19 --> 00:25:17:21
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:25:18:00 --> 00:25:31:19
Speaker 2: And maybe the new cohort of seniors coming through, we'll use apps. But in general, you know it's difficult for them to use an Apple iWatch or Apple smartphone type device or a smartphone app right now. So we are seeing a lot more influx of interest now.
00:25:32:03 --> 00:25:49:00
Speaker 1: What, what do you think is triggering that? You know, if it's just happening last quarter, um, you know, is there an influx of VCs that have just hit that point where they're taking care of their parents? I mean maybe we don't know what the correlation is, but what do you think?
00:25:49:14 --> 00:26:45:16
Speaker 2: That's certainly one reason they themselves are looking for their personal side of things. Yeah, that'd be other aspect of it also has been this real big increase in Medicare advantage plans and in the seniors in those populations and how it's based on keeping them out of the hospital. There's been a lot of high profile IPOs in that space. I mean you look at, look at folks like Longo and other big name companies like Oscar, Clover, one medical. These are all the companies that are coming into the space that are saying there is, you know, there is a really good big market in senior care. Prior to that people kept thinking about, well it's healthcare, healthcare reimbursement. That's a ball of hair. They did not want to touch because it's not a really clean reimbursement process. Now they're understanding there are different modalities and then CMS center for Medicaid services has been very, very forward thinking about this stuff.
00:26:46:04 --> 00:27:49:16
You know they, they released a new billing codes for remote patient monitoring that are no longer connected to chronic care management. So you have a whole slew of remote patient monitoring companies coming up. We tried to fully monitor the individual, their heart rate, their weight and pulse ox, but now they're looking and saying wait a second. Activity and behavior is the new Wydell sign. That's something we want to monitor. Well who does that? The only ones who are doing that right now today is us, you know, that's our tagline. Know activities and behaviors, pre-seed out day plans. We can catch that. And so there's been a lot of thinking about, you really have to think about the senior holistically, not just their wide goals. You've got to think about all aspects of their life, their social determinants of health that's important and all that has been quantified under the Medicare system under Medicare advantage. So people are saying, okay, now there's financial support for innovation in this space. We should start looking and seeing who's operating in this space and who are the ones we should find.
00:27:50:03 --> 00:28:38:19
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I think there was also, um, you know, a lot of VCs that thought that, you know, because of the explosion of innovation in healthcare that it was just going to be a guarantee, kind of a quick win. Um, because there was good technology out there and I think that there's been, from what I've heard at different conferences, this kind of, um, PTSD around me and I invested in all these solutions and it just didn't turn out right. The, the long sales cycles, the reimbursement challenges. And so it sounds, you know, the companies that you just listed I think are phenomenal examples to demonstrate that. It can be done. Yeah. And it is being done and there's a lot of financial return on making these investments.
00:28:38:22 --> 00:29:47:01
Speaker 2: Absolutely. I think to your point, when, when that whole boom occurred in this, so how it, a couple of years ago it was all app based. Um, you know, there was an app for everything and what people didn't realize is app is only one part of the equation. You need a code behind you. I mean, you look at Livongo or any one of those guys, it's not just a diabetes app, it has care coaches behind it, real humans that are giving really concentrated one-on-one attention to that individual with that condition to help them change, you know, the outcome that kicks a lot of money to do that. It's not just an app that does it. And so I think they kind of had a little bit of a reckoning where they, you know, doctors not going to prescribe 500 apps for you. A lot of these apps that are just languishing in the app stores with nobody using them. But those apps that have put themselves into the workflow of the traditional clinical model, put human resources behind it for the care coaching and close the loop between the symptom and the treatment and actually measure it everything they had doing well and they don't just screen going forward. Sure.
00:29:47:05 --> 00:30:08:23
Speaker 1: That makes sense. So let's talk about some other strategies that you think have been, um, influential and your success and where you are today. Um, I, I see that you're getting a lot of media attention and you're winning all of these great awards. Um, how do you think that this is affecting your commercialization process?
00:30:09:08 --> 00:31:04:03
Speaker 2: Um, yeah, I, you know, everyone's a wonderful, we loved them. You know, CB insights is still one 50, top 25 companies in the world for AI and they're all wonderful in raising the profile of the company. But to be honest, I don't know necessarily that they influence our end user customers. Um, these are folks in the healthcare world who are looking strictly at outcomes. So another thing that me are very proud of is a 24 month outcome study that was performed by one of our customers where they deployed our product in three facilities they had and and measured it against three facilities that did not have our product over a 24 month period. And with our product they found that 37% reduction in falls, 21% reduction in hospitalizations, 85 day increase in average length of stay in these private pay XSLTs where length of stay needs to be increased.
00:31:04:03 --> 00:31:50:16
That's where you want to be. You don't want to change the care setting to an acute care hospital or a skilled nursing facility. That is really what is changing things for us. So we just started publicizing those results and it's causing really big companies even in the B2B space to suddenly stop and say, wait a second, this is important. We need to look at it. You know, we are talking with Medicare advantage plans, we are talking with senior group living. We're also talking with very large health systems as well as healthcare companies out of the Valley. Very, very big companies that are suddenly saying this is important. You actually have demonstrated results over a 24 month period. That is the gold standard in health. I've already are wonderful, I love them, but every day of the week.
00:31:51:05 --> 00:32:29:19
Speaker 1: So I think that that is really important story as well because you know, as an entrepreneur and you know this, you've wear many hats and a lot of times you're bootstrapped, um, self funded in the early stages you can only do so many things and you can get pulled into um, pitches and you know, media opportunities and, you know, just trying to determine how much time do you spend on that to elevate the presence of the company in the marketplace versus putting some money, time and attention behind something that's really tangible, like an outcome study,
00:32:30:08 --> 00:33:08:09
Speaker 2: right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, all attention is good and B, you still love all that. But of course the study is, is an objective way of looking at it. I mean, if you look at some of those companies I mentioned, the earliest outcome studies were 30, 40 people using their product. Um, over over a six month period and then demonstrating that efficacy that more than anything is what leads to adoption in Texas. Cause healthcare, as we mentioned, is highly discovers industry for a good reason. They point to see that this works and you're not just using their patients as Guinea pigs. Yeah.
00:33:09:18 --> 00:33:57:14
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I think across the, across the world, in any vertical, you know, just as consumers, we don't believe what brands say. We only believe what other people say about those brands, right. Google reviews, Facebook reviews, et cetera. And you think in, in, in healthcare that it's really the data. Um, so one of the things that I think is really important to stress here is this 24 month study. So not only are entrepreneurs facing long sales cycles, but if the key to successful commercialization is the outcomes data and it took 24 months to get the study in place, then you haven't had a pretty long run rate and plan for that.
00:33:58:15 --> 00:34:12:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. If you're doing anything in healthcare, um, plan for twice the two cost twice as much and three times as long sales or whether it's development or what have you and especially if you've got hardware and another three X multiplier.
00:34:15:16 --> 00:34:36:03
Speaker 1: Definitely. So, um, I I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation today. I really appreciate all the insights that you have. I just have one last question for you. Um, there are many health innovators that are in our audience listening today. Is there any advice that you would want to share with them before we wrap up?
00:34:36:17 --> 00:35:50:05
Speaker 2: Yeah. Um, I think one bit of advice, and this was regarding our fundraising journey is in healthcare you want to raise as much as you can. We did it somewhat differently. We only raised enough to get us to the second next milestone and then we raised again and then we raised again as an entrepreneur that's tying you up a log into the fundraising cycle. So you are not out there leading the company, you know, really pushing the innovation and making the sale. Yes. And that really takes you away if at all possible and would get outside money in early. Okay. It's better to grow the pie than worry about the size, slice, size alive. Meet a lot of entrepreneurs who say, well, I don't want outside investors cause I don't want to give up equity in my company. So wrong way to think about it. Think about the equity is coming with expertise. It's not just money that bringing connections and the whole pie is getting bigger and having that reward chest in your is going to really serve you well in the healthcare space because it is a long sales cycle. It is a long outcome study sales cycle, so you really need to bank on that. You need forward
00:35:51:05 --> 00:35:58:01
Speaker 1: awesome. That is just brilliant. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with our listeners today. I really appreciate it.
00:35:58:12 --> 00:36:00:08
Thank you very much, dr. Thank you.
