Nestor Carrillo 00:04
Welcome to the risk management and patient safety podcast presented by Medplace, we're excited to bring you conversations with top risk and patient safety thought leaders. For organizations across the country, please subscribe to get the latest news and content from us. And if you found value in this episode, please share it with your colleagues to create meaningful conversations in your community. And if you're interested in participating as a guest, please send us an email at marketing at Medplace.com. Today I'm joined by the CEO of Medplace, Jared Bailey, Medplace is the first medical expertise exchange that connects organizations with top practicing doctors and nurses for claims reviews, peer reviews, expert witness testimony and more. Jared holds over 20 years of experience in venture backed technology companies. He's an expert operator across technology development, user experience, branding and marketing, capital raising and go to market strategy. Jared has helped launch over 100 technology startups with corporate new ventures like American Express, Intel and other notable names. Welcome, Jared,
Jerrod Bailey 01:09
Hey, I'm glad we're doing this. This is pretty exciting. We hear a lot as we interact with people on the risk and patient safety quality sides across the spectrum of questions around technology, things like that. It's just good that we're doing this and opening up the space to have this kind of conversation make a little bit less scary, a little bit more approachable for everybody.
Nestor Carrillo 01:32
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a that's a big thing in the in these industries, that technology may seem daunting, but it's really not. it's meant to help
Jerrod Bailey 01:41
It's kind of earned, right? I mean, anybody who's been in healthcare, usually the software they're working with is really difficult, right? There's like a reason why they're scared of technology. Because, you know, more often than not, they get burned by it. So, hopefully, we can give some best practices and introduce some technology players that we find really interesting along the way. And then ultimately, it's not a technology conversation at all, it's just how do you build a risk, or claims or a patient safety program for the modern world? Because things are different right now than they used to be 10 years ago.
Nestor Carrillo 02:19
Right? Absolutely. Going to technology, though, Jared, can you provide your perspective on technology? What's the value of it overall?
Jerrod Bailey 02:27
Yeah, well, really good. Technology should just sort of disappear. Right? You shouldn't even have to think about it. And, you know, if you've used like apps like Uber, right, there's a lot of technology there. But we're still ordering a taxi cab. And yet the technology is enabled to facilitate a much better experience. So, you know, technology does a lot of things, right? It can do so many things that it couldn't do 20 years ago. We can build so much automation into things that a busy physician should really not have to do a bunch of overhead. And yet, we're still requiring them to do it. So there's this gap between what technology is capable of and being used for another industries and what it's what it's doing in healthcare, for example. But then technology is also not just like automating stuff and making one system talk to another system and automatically do something that a human is used to have to do. But it's also about how humans interact, right? The technology. So that gets into a realm called the Human Centered Design. Now you're getting into user experience, designing customer experience, but you're getting into how does a human with all of our flaws, and our limited thinking and ability to make mistakes? How do we interact with technology to get the optimal use out of it? And that ultimately gets into how does the technology itself disappear? And it becomes more of an organic experience? I look at technology from that entire stack of, can you do hardcore AI and algorithmic thinking and natural language processing all the way too? Can I build an interface that a busy physician can interact with? And in that age, someone with a very little technology background can interact with somebody that is processing a claim. How do you how do you meet those users where they're at is another big part of technology.
Now, if you nail all of that stuff, you can create workflows that are that eliminate 95% of the of the work that somebody is doing today. And if you can do that, if you can recapture all of that wasted work, you can do things like accelerating activities. So there's really critical activities in it when something bad happens at a hospital. That first few minutes is critical, probably the most critical bars response but that first day, the first 48 hours the first week, the first month, these are really critical timeframes for responses to happen. And those responses need things like discovery to understand what actually happened. And there might be a lot of people to coordinate, right? So technology can take that kind of really critical window of time it can compress it? As an example, if you're getting rid of all this overhead, or it can just make things more efficient. So you have that army of one nurse who's running risk, and maybe quality at, you know, his or her hospital, that's a lot to do. And in technology can often get in the way of that, because not only is it getting in the way of that nurse doing the job, but the physician, she's in other medical staff, she's requiring external medical staff or experts or law firms. It's coordinating around all those people that if your technology is not good, then there's so many places to that that process can break down? Or if you have no technology at all, if you're doing it all manually. That's sort of the realm in which I see technology helping now even more broad than that. It's developing analytics on what you're doing. And being able to so many great sources for research and for data mining, and for all kinds of things that can help somebody who's just worried about, you know, one particular peer review, can I inject data into my process? I'm recording this, can I inject the data that I'm recording back into my process, and keep the quality of my systems, you know, constantly going up? Those are things only data can do. There's not enough time in the day for a human to sit there and record everything. Or they may be recording it, but actually doing something with that is another step. This is like the realm of technology that I think we're going to be unpacking, we'll probably even expand that scope a little bit more.
Nestor Carrillo 06:57
I think you hit on a couple really important points of how technology can help these teams that are already stretched very thin, you talked about those nurses that are kind of like an army of one technology is really, really can help supplement a lot of the work that they're already doing and bogged down with them focus on the things that are important to not only them professionally, but as the organization as well.
Jerrod Bailey 07:20
Yeah, 100%! And we're all looking for patient safety. We're all looking to increase the quality of our care because that has so many great ramifications. One, we're delivering great care to fewer incidents happen that create liability for us. And, you know, in three, it just ultimately, it's our it's our brand in the market, right? It's our relationship to our patients and the pride of care that we provide, or that our, like our customers in providers actually provide and, and so all of that stuff is in the mix for you know, how do you continue to optimize the systems for great outcomes?
Nestor Carrillo 08:01
Right. Another point you I think you touched on was technology shouldn't be only for those that are power users. And it shouldn't be something that requires extensive amount of training, that that couldn't turn a lot of people off to it. Talk about that a little bit how the simplicity is sometimes essential for technology to be adopted.
Jerrod Bailey 08:22
It's funny, a lot of people who build technology, they just put the features in like, “here's 1000 features, and look, I got them all into my software”. But then it takes a training manual and ongoing training to get anybody familiar with how to use it. And then when they do use it, there's so many clicks, people don't realize you're a physician, and you're trying to maximize the amount of work that you're doing in the day, and then you're pausing to click 50 times just to get into a piece of software. That's a problem, right? And so if you put the effort into designing workflows around human centered design these some of these other concepts, and you simplify that and you make it so, ultimately, the best software doesn't need an instruction manual. If you need an instruction manual, you built it wrong, or there's still opportunity to optimize it. Those are design decisions. And those are thoughtful decisions that that you can build into your workflows ahead of time doing that work on the design side so that your employees and your users don't have to do the work constantly for the rest of the lifecycle of that that software,
Nestor Carrillo 09:36
Absolutely. Tell us where the idea for Medplace started. You've described quite a bit about technology now. Can you tell us a little bit about Medplace itself?
Jerrod Bailey 09:47
Yeah, so interestingly, Medplace was an idea that germinated inside of all places, a medical malpractice insurance carrier. There's a carrier in the US that has this front-end process to any claim that's created, if something bad happens in the operating room that might lead to a claim and that claim may ultimately come to their desk. And they needed to do a much better job of getting what's what called case review done right. So that means something bad happened, I get all the medical records, I find another similar physician or nurse with the same subspecialty somewhere in the world, someone who's got the credibility and the in the clinical expertise to really offer a good, current unbiased opinion- I need to get all my records to that person in order to find out what they see. Right? Did my doctor meet the standard of care? What are some potential issues with that? And what's my potential liability so that I know how to responsibly navigate the next phases of this. And now you've got things like CRP programs, communication and resolution programs, really resolution programs coming, where that process of, discovering what happened and really assessing what happened, not only is it moving up in time, closer to when the harm event happened. But it also has some requirements around speed. So I can't respond early if I can't discover early. So this particular carrier has a lot of CRP events and said, “Look, we need something that's better, something that's more efficient, and something that ideally can generate information back to our clients where they can improve their process”, and they can improve the quality of their care, if that's, you know, an opportunity that exposed in the process.
This idea of, hey, in the day and age of Uber, can we create an app that that makes that entire workflow go faster, and can include third parties, and, you know, physicians and attorneys and others from outside of even the hospital or the carrier? How do you coordinate all those moving parts quickly? And so that was where the idea germinated from. And it since then expanded, but that's essentially where my place came from. We're an app that facilitates that exchange and other exchanges.
Nestor Carrillo 12:08
Like you mentioned, Uber a bit now. And I think when individuals think of technology these days, Uber is one of the most thought about companies that that comes to mind. So explain how that ties into Medplace.
Jerrod Bailey 12:24
Uber is at the heart of it. It's two things, right? It's a workflow automation tool. It's taken the workflow of getting a taxi and automated it. And it built some other really interesting technology into the awareness of where I am or what city I'm in I proximity to drivers, things like that. That's it, that's all technology, things underneath that. And then it's got a really great user interface. It's as few clicks as possible to engage a ride. And then it gives you all of these analytics along the way telling you where your drivers at, and all the stuff that we never had with taxis because of technology and because of interface innovation. But Uber is also a second thing, it's this big group of drivers out in the world, it's a bunch of people like you and I that decide we want to make a side hustle, and with nothing more than our car, we can do that all of a sudden. We can generate revenue for ourselves simply by having a vehicle or maybe we get a vehicle just to do that type of business. And that's really interesting, right? That created the ability to have lots and lots of drivers, it created the ability to have the sort of highly efficient marketplace that didn't exist before taxi cab companies have to have their medallions and their licenses to drive and all that stuff. And, and there's a lot of overhead to add more drivers to the supply. Whereas Uber eliminated that and overhead and really kind of democratize access.
Well, imagine that you apply that same model to healthcare, right? We have physicians that are overloaded, and yet we have this highly inefficient system. We have hospitals in the world that that are being overrun. We have physicians that are being sidelined, because of COVID. We've got other hospitals that are completely saturated. And yet we don't have an efficiency in that system to take those resources and use them on demand and other places. Imagine if you did have that. Imagine if you had expertise in the risk or quality or peer review areas that that could immediately come in and help with particular events. Everything, right?
So that's the power of Uber and we're just applying that to something as sophisticated as medical specialty, but the idea that that becomes democratized- that amazing surgeon that's at Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, well, his influence is really geographically bound to Scottsdale right? And yet if we could liberate that influence and else and he can influence whole systems or other systems or geographies. That becomes really powerful. All of a sudden, we're taking the best minds working together to make medicine better. And we're just using something like the concept of Uber Uber to do it.
Nestor Carrillo 15:16
That makes sense. Can you explain that? How does the platform work? How does Medplace work then in that sense? How does the how does the case come in? How does it filter through? How does it end up?
Jerrod Bailey 15:29
A lot of what my place does today are either for claims team, so working on claims and cases coming through from that perspective, or we work with quality and patient safety teams who have things like peer review. So most hospitals, all hospitals have to do peer reviews. A certain number of those peer reviews should be and often are done externally, right? Once you have to go outside of your employee physician base becomes really difficult to find specialists and things like that. What we do is either a peer review is created by hospital, or clinic, or it's a claim that's created, maybe also by a hospital or clinic, or by a third party administrator, or by Carrier. But eventually those things need someone external to look at that case and provided a non-biased opinion. So those come into us, somebody like a claims person or at risk manager literally logs in demand place, they enter the information, the some basics about the case. Then they say, “What is the specialty” that they're looking for. And then usually, at that point, if they've started that search themselves, it'll take days or weeks or more often that we see months before they find somebody. For us, it's by the next morning, they've got two to four actual practicing physicians, with great backgrounds that are, that are professional doctors and nurses, they're not professional medical experts. They're current in the medicine in 10 years or more of experience, they've just got great opinions and perspective on things that they get to see to the four of those the next morning, pick the one that they like, hit go, and then everything else gets automated.
Nestor Carrillo 17:10
I think it's very convenient compared to the standard you described.
Jerrod Bailey 17:13
it's great. And they get a chat with them. And they get to do a video call with them. It's there's no throwing things over the fence. And so, our customers get really a bench of experts, and that they can use on demand. It's pretty nice, pretty convenient. And, ultimately, they end up having either zoom call or reports generated for peer reviews, for example, and then everyone gets rated: I rate my doctor, how was my review? Just like an Uber, the doctor rates me how I was. My claims professional right in the process? And that just drives such great virtuous behavior across the platform. But that's it, I just did in usually nine days when it took, a few months to accomplish just because of technology.
Nestor Carrillo 17:57
A common question, I think that would come up in this, we could tie back to Uber, right? Why do the drivers do it? Probably for the money. But as we think through the wider the physicians work on Medplace, obviously, they're you talked about they're being compensated, and they treat this as extra income. Is there anything else that that you've heard from these physicians on why they're interested in that place?
Jerrod Bailey 18:19
Physicians, in general, across the board are interested in what other kinds of non-clinical work can they do that pays well, that leverages their backgrounds and their experience? That's one of the reasons we started Medplaces: to create a platform where physicians can start to be known and discoverable and discover for themselves those types of non-clinical income sources, because they do have to balance. They are redlining, I talked to more doctors that are walking away from the profession than anything else. And it's really scary, right? We can't handle a 10% reduction as a country of our of our specialists. And so many of them are looking for income to help balance and figure out how to find balance in their lives. And I think that's great. But I would say, more than that, at least the doctors on our network are here to improve medicine. They find the work interesting. This this idea of deconstructing and sort of forensically looking at what happened and developing an opinion on that it's just very stimulating work for somebody who's been in the industry for a long time. But they're also interested in seeing systems improve, right? If their influence can help a critical access hospital in the middle of Wisconsin, act in serve their patients at the same caliber that a large system can do like that's really fulfilling. That's really going into the areas of medicine that don't normally have access to them and filling that gap is really, really rewarding for them. I would say that probably the number one reason all of those three reasons are the top three for everyone maybe in slightly different order.
Nestor Carrillo 20:06
That's fantastic. On a related note to that, we've talked about the type of individuals and professionals on the platform. A topic that's on everyone's mind that we keep hearing about is nuclear verdicts, and how to mitigate them. What role does Matt place play in that?
Jerrod Bailey 20:24
Well, nuclear verdicts, if you watch what's been happening with like medical malpractice cases, over the last few years, you've seen it ratchet up. Cases have gone down, but the, but the payouts have gone up. And these nuclear verdicts are really devastating. And that's essentially, when you finally go to court, and you lose the case, and all of a sudden, you've got multimillion dollar liability. If you think about it, you hope that no case should ever get there. And there's this pervasive in this is driven by a lot of reasons, and certainly not all carriers are like this. But so they deny and defend at all costs sort of mentality certainly has led to some of that. And what you're seeing is a lot of carriers, a lot of hospitals is really being led by the hospitals, you're seeing a lot of early resolution programs and things like that CRP programs come into play, because if you can start a dialogue with the patient early and you can ultimately avoid both sides and their cost of litigation and yours, which seem to go for years. And by the time years are up, you're at five years into a case people are ready to battle, and to get the most as possible, whereas it's probably better for both parties If something's happening earlier to try to resolve things.
What you don't want, is you don't want to have a case where there's a clear issue that everyone missed, or everyone overlooked, and then everyone decides to go litigate it, and you end up on the courtroom steps. And now that issue is front and center. And now, not only did you pay for law firms, both sides paid for legal expenses all the way through, but now you're going to be settling. There's time lost and all sorts of things. Well, if you can get, if you can figure out that chink in the armor early, then you might have made different decisions. If you could have figured that out day one that might make different decisions. So getting your case worked up early, is really critical. Really assessing it not in oftentimes, you'll see there's certain law firms, many of them will come in already bias to we're going to litigate this thing. And that's probably not the best decision for anyone, including the provider that was involved. So if they're coming in bringing in their expert that they've used for years, or you're using your expert to use for years, and there's the sort of built in bias to “hey, let's fight this”, you may miss that. Or you may just be encouraged, encouraging your own internal systems, not look at it. And if it takes you a long time to do that, the other side is already getting ticked off and mounting legal in getting their plaintiffs attorneys involved. And there's a lot of vitriol, there's a lot of stonewalling.
And, if you can avoid all that, by doing these things early, within a couple of weeks instead of six months, you're already ahead of the game, if you can inject into that, accounting for bias. And in bringing in like unbiased reviewers and doing your reviews in a way that helps you mitigate bias, all of a sudden, you're starting to get a lot better view a lot faster of what's going on, and you can make better decisions earlier. And it's all hoping to avoid that that nuclear verdict, but it's also trying to do the right things sooner by everybody. And the right thing can still make sense from a business perspective and other things, but you can't do any of those things. You can't make a better business decision, or do the more of the right thing if you don't have the information, and you'll have it early enough. So, you know, I think it's really important. That's one of the reasons we were built is to help assess these cases better early on.
Nestor Carrillo 24:24
Right. And I think you touched on an important point that resolution doesn't necessarily mean monetary resolution. We've heard that quite a bit that resolution can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people in organizations. But it sounds like those insights are critical no matter what to getting that those insights early on and making sure it's from the right professionals in the right experts.
Jerrod Bailey 24:45
And we'll bring in some of our customers and some others in this space that are managing risk four. It will do from a small clinical critical access hospital to you know, something large, like Ascension. What ascension does from a CRP project. Active is really outstanding in the model that they've presented and the data that they can show around it. When you talk about it's really not payouts that are the vast majority of what happens in CRP. There's so many other things that are available. That, once you understand the particulars of the case, you can start to make those decisions.
Nestor Carrillo 25:21
So how are risk managers risk leaders and patient safety leaders responding to Medplace?
Jerrod Bailey 25:30
Well, if you've ever been that army of one, and you've been sitting like, you just got your annual audit. And the Joint Commission, and wherever you're using is saying, “Look, your independent peer reviews, or that your process is broken”, and you know it because you've been sitting on these things for months, and you cannot find a doctor who won't ghost you. I just need another cardiologist to review my current cardiologist. But many of our armies of one, risk managers, or quality folks have run into that problem right now. When they use us for the first time, they log in, they type some basic information and then hit enter. And then by the next morning, they're picking out their favorite physician, and they're interacting with them and then they're done with within a week and a half. The thing that took months, it's a really rewarding thing for us to do and to hear from our customers. But we had a claims person that’s working at a carrier. And she said, out of 100 reviews, I've never had a bad doctor. That's really a testament. We put a lot of effort into how we recruit and all that kind of thing. But I love hearing that, because that means the technology is getting out of the way. And they get into bedrock on these decisions they have to make, and they're doing it efficiently.
So yeah, our customers are really important to us. And I think we're really important to them, as I say, to everyone in the company, we have two things to live by: empathy and essentialism, right? Are we building an essential tool for people? Meaning if I lost it, It would hurt, right? This is this thing helps me. And empathy, meaning that we have a lot of stakeholders involved are we empathizing with all of them. And that is empathy reflected in our design and in our efficiency, and even just in how we talk about ourselves and how we talk about our customers.
Nestor Carrillo 27:38
Awesome. Well, what process improvements can these risk managers and risk leaders and patient safety leaders expect by using Medplace?
Jerrod Bailey 27:50
First of all, this podcast is really it's not going to be a commercial on Medplace. Long term, this is really going to be a space where we bring in all sorts of people so but to help introduce people to who we are just the why do we care, I think is important. Why? Why are we opening up a space to talk about these things? But, as far as Medplace goes, anyone who uses our tool they've ever had to request insight from a physician or nurse that they don't employ, even if they had to request it from one that they do and employ, they know the difficulty of that process. Our platform works with both you can use our doctors, you can use your doctors. It's always a shock when they did when they do something and that thing is done a few days later, through automation. It's always a surprise. So I would say the one thing to expect us to be surprised. We really have spent a lot of time designing around humans to make this thing delightful to us. So that's probably one.
Another one is just the quality of the folks that we use we're not a directory of professional medical experts, right? There's Juris Pro and seek and all these like services that are built to sort of give you what I would say whether earned or not kind of mercenaries to tell you what you want to hear. In its again, that's not always the case. But I think that that too often that's been the case with those types of companies. We're not like that. We're just practicing physicians that want to give back. And they're trained to give unbiased feedback, because they know the importance of that later downstream in the decision making. They're just busy doing really good medicine all day.
So that's the other thing too, that I think, to set expectations. Anyone who uses us: Get ready for some great doctors. That your doctors that are being reviewed will be proud to be reviewed by. that's one of the questions we asked our docs is when they sign up is: they say, “Well, should I do this? Why should I do this?” And we say If you were being reviewed in any capacity, would you want yourself? Someone at your quality doing it? And inevitably, they say, ”Yeah, I would”. So that's part of how they get back to their peers. So anyway, I think those are some of the expectations.
Nestor Carrillo 30:13
Funny enough how you describe it, sometimes they'll describe their ideal reviewer and it ends up mirroring exactly their resume.
Jerrod Bailey 30:23
Funny how that works out, right?
Nestor Carrillo 30:26
No, I want an Ivy League doctor. X amount of years of training.
Jerrod Bailey 30:33
But I might want a doctor who's practicing in a rural setting, because I want that peer. With going back to empathy. It's somebody who's got all the resources in the world in the middle of Manhattan is going to have a very different perspective. So it's not just can I find the top doctors in the world, but can I find a great practicing physician that's that has empathy and understands where I'm at, in my practice and what I have access to.
Nestor Carrillo 31:01
All right. So that's great. Is there anything else you'd like to let the listeners know?
Jerrod Bailey 31:06
Let us know what you guys want to hear about. You'll see us introduce over the coming weeks and months, lots of speakers. We're going to have people that are running risk quality programs. We're going to have people running CRP programs. We're going to have technology companies that are injecting really interesting technology into different parts of the process. We're going to have thought leaders will have carriers and TPAs and other people within the sort of the constellation of stakeholders out there coming in and talking about how they view things. So if you're interested in any of those topics, let us know in the comments. Let us know message us directly. You'll have a way to message us through this. And if you want to be a speaker yourself, by all means, we encourage you to reach out and we'll set up some time with you and find out where you have a point of view on things. If it looks like we've got a slot open, we'll invite you.
Nestor Carrillo 32:01
Absolutely. Thank you guys for listening to the risk management and patient safety podcast presented by Medplace. Like Jared said, If you got value from this episode, subscribe and share. If you'd like to participate, we're always open to that and send us an email at marketing@Medplace.com or reach out just anywhere on our website. We are happy to take a look at that. Also, feel free to follow Jared on LinkedIn and follow Matt place will post a lot of content on there as well. And Jared is very easy to reach there via email. Thanks, Jared.
Jerrod Bailey 32:32
Great. Thanks, Nestor. Appreciate it. Thanks, everybody.
