Oakkar Oakkar, CEO of Keona Health, joined us on this episode of The DocBuddy Journal to discuss patient access, the consumerization of healthcare, and how good technology can have a positive impact on patients, providers, and even payers!
Plus, get Oakkar’s thoughts on one of his favorite subjects: artificial intelligence in healthcare.
Click to expand and read this episode's transcript.
Erik Sunset: [00:00:00] All right. Hello and welcome back. I’m Erik Sunset, your host of the DocBuddy Journal. This is episode 43. We’re recording it on Friday, November 10th, 2023. We’ve got a very special guest today. We’ve got Oakkar Oakkar, CEO of Kiona Health. For those who may not be familiar, Kiona Health is the healthcare CRM that harmonizes patient access and allows you to be the healthcare provider patients want.
Erik Sunset: And need a car. Thanks for joining us today.
Oakkar Oakkar: you, Erik. Thank you. Thank you.
Erik Sunset: And I understand that you’re based in Washington, DC. What else should listeners of the pod know about you?
Oakkar Oakkar: Oh, yeah. So you know, I’m an entrepreneur at the core software development background. And of course, you know, any software developer love, you know, solving very difficult problems and very passionate about, you know, turning an idea on a piece of paper into a product that, you know, being used by millions of [00:01:00] people, right?
Oakkar Oakkar: That’s what I thrive and live for. And you know, been doing this for a while. This is, you know, 13 years into QAnon Health and you know, the, the idea that, you know, we have to solve difficult problems, there’s no shortage of healthcare, right? So we pick the best field to do what we’re set out to do. A little bit of background, I was born in Burma. You know, had a big inspiration to become an American entrepreneur. You know, this is from reading Bill Gates books and, you know, Steve Jobs. And it just, this is my dream, you know, just to do something impactful like that. And I’m very grateful that, you know, living the dream every day. So grateful to get up in the morning and do what we do so very stoked and very stoked to be here talking to you, Erik.
Erik Sunset: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Same here. And after, after hearing that, I didn’t know that about you. I mean, that, that is you know, what we would like to call it the American dream, you know, there’s opportunity at every corner and healthcare there’s more than opportunity just at every corner. There’s opportunity to [00:02:00] optimize.
Erik Sunset: There’s opportunity for efficiency gains, essentially every step of the way. So if we if we can want to take a look at the rule of technology and healthcare and it won’t be it won’t be news to you, but for some of our listeners that are maybe newer to the space or don’t have a good understanding of, you know, why we’re talking about technology and healthcare at all, we’re coming up on about.
Erik Sunset: 15 years of the advent of the A. R. R. A. 2009 that had the high tech act that had all of our meaningful use incentives and penalties at the outset. And we’ve obviously since evolved from there. But you ended up with a bunch of second order consequences for technology foisted on providers where maybe we didn’t know exactly what we’re doing.
Erik Sunset: And I’m kind of being generous to our friends in Congress there. Yeah, Not only did they not know, I don’t think they had any consideration for what they were doing. So let’s, let’s take a positive spin on it. What’s the role of good technology in [00:03:00] health care, either what it is or what it could be?
Oakkar Oakkar: Yeah, so, Erik, you have a deep background in healthcare, so, you know, just for the the viewer perspective, I’m going to try to like, you know, take a little step back and make sure that people are following our conversation. Let’s not assume that everybody is, you know, healthcare, right? You know, the health care is really complex, right?
Oakkar Oakkar: There’s a, you know, exercise delivery side outcome, you know, so the technology that I would like to focus on today is, you know, very relevant to what we do around patient access, right? And the role of technology is just huge, right? So, you know, you mentioned a few segments there or patients and the providers you know, from the patient perspective, right? The access been so behind. Yeah. And you know, just past few years, I think COVID changed everything. Also the patient access has been totally disruptive and we started seeing a lot of good things coming out of it. Right. at The end of the day, right. We all book you know, [00:04:00] to go to favorite restaurants, right.
Oakkar Oakkar: Open table. Right. And that is simple. And, you know, the, even the, the, you know, booking airline tickets. It’s, it’s, it’s pretty seamless at this day and age, right? But, you know, in healthcare, we can’t have the same experience yet, right? So the role of technology is huge because we want to make, you know, your you know, booking appointments as simple as OpenTable. And we’re almost there. You know, we, we have all the, it’s not really the the technology is an issue. It’s more like, you know, the regulations and, you know, type of thinking and the culture. And we really want to, to make it so seamless that every patient, imagine every patient, right, they don’t have to call anybody, they can just go online and book an appointment as simple as that. But the, the, the key here is, right, the challenges. thE biggest one that I can think of is the the patient issue, my patient safety, right? How do you know [00:05:00] that you need an appointment in a week? Not right now, right? From the utilization perspective, if you don’t know, if you’re not properly triaged, if you’re not properly assessed, You go online and book an appointment, and then, you know, you end up in the emergency room because, you know, you can’t wait a week or even a day sometime, right? So, that is the biggest consideration, and the triaging is, you know, something that we’ve been doing since the beginning of time, and it’s really important when it comes to patient access, right? And then another challenge is providers, right? You know, we want to focus on patients, right? Patients are the center of everything. You know, we got to take up the providers too, because providers are the, the ultimately taking care of us as patients. And if you make providers like really miserable, it’s kind of hard for them to, to take care of who they need to take care of. Right. So they have their we call it provider preferences on how they want to. practice [00:06:00] their medicine, right? They want to see when they want to see patients, what type of insurance they take you know, what type of patients they want to see based on the demographic, right? Pediatric, you know, geriatric, anything in between. And then how they do their procedures, time of the day, day of the week. All those things are really complicated. Imagine, right, permutations and combinations of these preferences that you have to address to make sure that they’re getting the right patient at the right time at the right location, right? And it’s also true for the patients, right? So again, back to patient safety, you know, matching that up with the provider preferences. These are the, you know, the major issues that we have to overcome. And that is why patient access is super important. And, you know, we, we can really use technology beautifully to be able to solve the problem.
Erik Sunset: Well, it’s huge. I mean, nothing happens in health care, whether we’re talking about [00:07:00] the, on the organization side to, you know, be able to recognize revenue and submit claims for reimbursement or on the patient side for achieving a better health outcome. Nothing happens until a provider sees a patient. And if there’s a roadblock to providers seeing patients or flip it in reverse to patients being able to see their provider, You know, you’re breaking down the value chain before you even get to step one.
Erik Sunset: Like that isn’t how it’s supposed to be at all.
Oakkar Oakkar: You’re absolutely correct.
Erik Sunset: And then looking at it from sort of the third party to this US healthcare system, we’ve, we’ve addressed patients, we’ve addressed providers. What about the payer? What’s the role of good tech in terms of the payer lens? We kind of sometimes leave them out on the side. We don’t want to talk about them too much, but they’re still an important part of the ecosystem.
Oakkar Oakkar: Oh, yeah, especially in you know, in the U. S. healthcare payers are huge, right? They’re, they’re the a big player. And, you know, again, you know, I’m going to try to focus our discussion around patient access. You know, generally by [00:08:00] providers, they want to make sure that the patients are healthy. They are at the hospitals, right? And they want to make sure that you know, to be correctly stated though, They want to make sure that the patients are properly utilizing health care, right? If you have to go to the emergency room, you got to go because that could be life threatening if you don’t do it, right?
Oakkar Oakkar: And if you don’t really have to be seen, then it’s good for you to stay home because You are overly utilizing the healthcare facilities and healthcare resources, while all the people might actually, you know, need that, right? So, again, back to triaging the proper utilization of healthcare is really big for peers, right?
Oakkar Oakkar: That’s why they exist. And You know, from patient access perspective you know, the, the payers can make a little bit more complicated, right? Going back to, you know, getting the patients the right appointment with the right provider at the right care, right time, at the right location. You know, the, the payers play a [00:09:00] huge part, right?
Oakkar Oakkar: Because we need to understand, right, you know, patients got to understand how much of that’s going to be covered by the insurance. Right. How much they have to pay out of pocket. The whole price transparency is huge right now. Right. We want to be able to book all the appointments. Right. The other day, right.
Oakkar Oakkar: I was trying to book an appointment for our anniversary and it was, you know they just, boom, you know, while you’re, you know, making a reservation at the restaurant, you know, just give us a credit card and it makes it so simple. And we want to be able to make similar experience for patients as well. And but we need to understand, right, how much they’re going to be out of pocket, how much they’re going to be covered, and also the how much it’s going to cost, right? And fundamentally, right, you don’t want to be booking, okay, you know what, I just got my you know, knee surgery and I want to do a PT and I want to book, you know, 24 appointments for next, you know, a few months. And, you know, we need to be able to help the patients and, Hey, look, your insurance only covers such much. So [00:10:00] you can have to this type of guidance very intelligent guidance to make sure that. They understand how much they pay out of pocket, how much is going to be covered by the insurance, and also what’s not covered. We want to be able to work with the payers and the clearinghouse to make sure that, again, they’re getting to the right level of care without, you know, oh. You know, all of a sudden, right. A lot of surprises when they see the bill, so we want to avoid that type of you know, back you know, trouble down the road.
Erik Sunset: Yeah. Do you, to take your. Your restaurant anniversary dinner analogy a step farther. If you go out for dinner and you order a couple of steaks, bottle of wine, some salads, how much is that going to cost? Oh, we’ll let you know when you, when we give you the check. Absolutely not. Like how much does it cost?
Erik Sunset: I don’t need a surprise at the end of my dinner.
Oakkar Oakkar: Oh yeah. That could ruin your anniversary dinner, right? Oh
Erik Sunset: Yeah, no
Oakkar Oakkar: The dinner just cost 5, 000.[00:11:00]
Erik Sunset: But, you know, to bring us back to a more, you know, the topic at hand, a little more serious issue, you know, patient access, you know, we’re, we’re all patients. We’re all consumers of healthcare to some extent, whether it’s yourself personally, your kids, you know, whatever, somebody, you know, as a patient, it’s not a commodity.
Erik Sunset: With patient access, there are very good experiences and getting yourself an appointment. And there are also very, very bad experiences and getting yourself an appointment. And just to illustrate the point that might be a web form, you know, and for us on the vendor side, on the technology side, You know, is that web form secure?
Erik Sunset: Where does my information go once I’ve submitted it? Is it going into somebody’s EHR? Or is this just going into a WordPress CMS that has no security measures? So you have a potential HIPAA concern. Not to mention the back and forth, phone tags, emails, you know, we can go all the way down the line here.
Erik Sunset: But the point I’m trying to make is that it is not a commodity. It’s not a standardized process to get to the end of that [00:12:00] access or to pass that access hurdle. So what’s the importance of an exceptional patient experience from the viewpoint of a health care organization when we’re talking about access?
Oakkar Oakkar: Yeah, so, you know, this is a really good segue here, right? And you know, let’s describe a couple of bad examples about the you know, experience, right? A good example of bad patient experience. You know, there are a lot of people, right. They go online and because of COVID everybody’s adopting technology like crazy, right.
Oakkar Oakkar: We have staffing issues. We have shortage of you know, the clinical people. So, you know, as a, you know, as a system, we finally realized that we need to rely on technology. And you know, it was a wild, wild west. Just people just. Throughout random stuff and nothing has been thought through clearly elegantly and holistically. So, [00:13:00] you know, they think, most people think that, you know, okay, just put pretty pictures of a provider and create a little beautiful profiles. And have them have patients book, um, so we started seeing a lot of drama from the patients and provider perspective, right? The patients show up for back problem and then the physicians go, Oh, I don’t do any pack. Why are you even here? Oh, I just book, you know online on your website. Well, I can help you. I’m a knee guy. I only do a knee and ankle. Right? Right. So. You know, those things are so common. These are the frustrations that we hear from providers on a daily basis. And then same thing, right? You know, somebody’s calling, you know what? I have blood and urine. And the color is, you know, bright red. It’s like, you know, red wine. yeAh, yeah, you know what? All the people who see that are told to book till for January next [00:14:00] year. So we’re going to see you in February, right? And that person… Ended up in the ER, right? So again, back to access and triaging and right. This could be life threatening. If you have a really bad experience or such a waste of time for you and the providers, right? So again, this is going to be a, the type of thinking requires a systematic approach and also a very holistic approach to create a very compelling, exceptional patient experience, right?
Oakkar Oakkar: And this is where, you know, we talk to our clients about, right, look you have to build trust with your patients. And the only way that you can build trust is consistency, right? When you’re calling to book an appointment, or you go on a website to book an appointment, that experience has to be identical, right? The experience has to be guided by this central intelligence that properly [00:15:00] triaging, properly calculating, and matching With the right provider, at the right time, at the, you know, right location. And again, it has to be all holistic. So that the patients, right, whatever channel that they want to use. They might be texting you. They might be going through the IVR. They might be going through your website and booking an appointment. They might be texting you, right? But they all have to end up at the same outcome, right? With the provider that they need to see and learn. And that is the only way you can gain trust from the patient experience perspective. And once you gain that, patient’s not going to forget that compelling experience, right? This is where you can have repeated customers coming back over and over again. And they just gonna, you know, they’re going to remember, you know, what booking for the appointment is so simple and so accurate and next time they’re not going to even think about going anywhere else because you build trust with the [00:16:00] patient, right?
Oakkar Oakkar: New patient versus existing patient. And that is the type of, you know, exceptional patient experience that we’re trying to create for our clients. And it’s a lot of work, right? A lot of people, they think that, you know what, I’m going to buy something, turn it on. Turkey. And wait for magic to happen. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. You get what you put into. At the end of the day, it’s just like your workout or your discipline or whatever you want to achieve in life, right? You get what you put into. If you’re afraid of hard work and if you’re afraid of, you know, committing resources and making things happen, you’re not going to move the needle, right? That’s why we talk about, you know, it’s very provocative. We say, who cares, right? You have to care. If you really deeply care about your patient, you’re You got to put in, put in work and you’re going to have a great outcome. And if you don’t feel like so and so, if you’re not too sure, let’s not even go to that route, right?
Oakkar Oakkar: You’re going to be a [00:17:00] mediocre and you would never be able to provide that exceptional patient experience. It’ll be a dream. You would never be able to realize that. It’s a lot of hard work and it all depends, right? How much you care about your patient. If you show that you care, they’re gonna actually stick with you, right?
Oakkar Oakkar: Your retention is gonna be huge. Your new patient acquisition is gonna be huge. And if you don’t care, tough luck right now. I mean, you mentioned the consumerization, right? And it’s, they have choice now. They have a lot of choices. They have a lot of options, and it’s just, you know, consumerization is already here, so, you know, you gotta take that into a big concentration, right?
Erik Sunset: It’s been really interesting to see that push because going back to pre COVID and, you know, way before the No Surprises Act, Um, there’s a big push for price transparency. You know, how can we get it? As a patient, I want to know what I’m going to pay. And, you know, the people that cared to use, as you said, who cares?
Erik Sunset: The health systems and the [00:18:00] practices that cared made that happen. They made that a reality for their patient. And then you get to COVID and you you know, you get through the first 90, 120 days of the, you know, the pandemic, the pandemic proper, I guess I should say, um, where patients need to be seen by their provider.
Erik Sunset: And they, patients did a really good job of kicking and screaming and saying like, telehealth, I don’t care. I’ll pay cash. I need it to be easy. I don’t care how I’m going to see you FaceTime on my iPhone, even, and you know, regulations were lifted to allow for the treatment of patients. But I view that as a really positive development in the consumerization of healthcare because patients demanded something As a consumer they got it but that doesn’t mean that everything is hunky dory.
Erik Sunset: There’s still a lot of a lot of ground to be gained to be able to treat healthcare like a true consumer product. What, what’s your stance on, on that?
Oakkar Oakkar: Yeah, definitely. So, you know, the, you were spot on on the regulations, right? The [00:19:00] regulations are, I totally agree. We have to protect you know, the health information, right? And at the same time, right? The COVID, you know, just again, we’re all over the place, right? FaceTime, Skype. And you know, people were taking pictures of, you know, all the interesting parts in the body and sending to their texting to
Oakkar Oakkar: their providers and, you know, you know, desperate times, desperate measures, right?
Oakkar Oakkar: They got problems that they have to address. So I get that moving forward, though, we want to really consumerized health care for patients and you know, make it really simple. At the same time, we want to make sure that we’re protecting their privacy, right? So it has to be a fine balance between innovation so that we could personalize the patient journey while protecting their privacy and you know, there again, it’s a health care is very sensitive. [00:20:00] aNd recently there are a lot of attack going on in healthcare, so we have to be vigilant, right? This is the conversations that we’re having with CIO and CTOs across the country because they are more alert and cautious than ever, right? So, we get that, but at the same time, we really have to, this, you know, now is the time. to really consumerize the healthcare experience for patients.
Erik Sunset: now, now is the time because as you pointed out, you will be losing patients shortly. You will be needing to consider selling your practice to the health system because you’ve lost so many patients. If you’re not taking these demands seriously.
Oakkar Oakkar: Yep. And also, you know, healthcare is another problem is, in addition to regulations, right? Again, we’d be able to find a right balance. Two other problems around the, you know, like a barrier for consumerization is healthcare is pretty fragmented, and at the same [00:21:00] time, healthcare is very monopolized by a few players, right?
Oakkar Oakkar: I mean, you came from healthcare world and you were in the EMR market, so you know that really well. You know, the fragmentation it’s not necessarily a bad thing, right? If we all follow standards and if we all follow the the industry best practices on data so that we can exchange you know, meaningfully for patient care, right? So, you know, it’s in a sense that the orthopedic and oncology, you know, dental these little subspecialties they have very, very niche products that they use. And sometime, you know, you don’t, from, as, as from the from an entrepreneur perspective, right. We want to bring everybody together and create a compelling journey for everybody. But, you know, the barriers are just fragmentation, right? So if you were to start anything in healthcare, right, what I’d like to recommend is the interoperability, [00:22:00] right? And whatever that you’re doing, right, the data is important, whether it is on patient data, health data billing outcomes, you know, imaging, whatever that might be, right, that has to be shared. Easily with the stakeholders and patient themselves in the healthcare, all their apps, all their value added services. It’s just so important that we follow standards in healthcare, right? It can’t be in a la la land, people just doing whatever they want to do, and nothing is, you know interoperable, right? That’s going to be a nightmare moving forward. So that fragmentation, although, you know, the, the competition, having a very competitive market is good, uh, but at the same time, fragmentation could hurt patient care. And on the other hand, right. Monopoly, right. People you know, a couple of big EMR companies, right.
Oakkar Oakkar: They, They, need to [00:23:00] understand that you know, they’re making their customers drink the Kool Aid set. Oh, we are everything you need in the world, right. From anything under the sun, we’re going to take care of you. That’s, that’s not true, right? There’s so much innovation going on, so much creativity, and the brilliant minds in healthcare are coming up with some really amazing solutions, and if you’re telling your customers that we’re all you need, you don’t need anybody else that is actually making Patient care miserable, right? So they have to be also open minded and they have to let innovators come in and walk with them. Other than like, you know, everybody says that, Oh, the patient at the center, you know, everything is around patient again, who cares, right? That’s why we have this community group called who cares because we care, right?
Oakkar Oakkar: We want to make sure that [00:24:00] when you say that you care about patients. You know, let’s, let’s really show, right, not just, don’t just talk about it, let’s do it,
Oakkar Oakkar: right, prove it, right, and how do you provide this exception of patient care. So for us again, right, around patient access. And can you actually prove it? Right. So that’s the, the, what we’d like to see. And so back to the you know, you know, monopoly on just telling everybody that we can take care of you. You know, that is far from reality and far from the truth. So, right. Educate all your customers. Think about patient care for real, and let’s try to find, you know, calibration, a true partnership, and true interoperability to make sure that patient care is The real deal and the patient care is the center of everything, right? So we have a [00:25:00] long way to go for that. For now people have this, I mean, a lot of the EMI companies, I don’t want to blame the monopoly. I love the EMI companies that, Oh yeah, we want to do it all. And they claim that they have all the interoperable stuff, but in deep down, right, they just want to do it all. And they want to just you know, kind of kill the innovation and creativity. Just want to maintain that control, right. Which is not good for patient care.
Erik Sunset: And Oakkar, what they’re, what they’re killing is the physician drive to remain employed as a physician. When you look at any data from any source, whether it’s class research or the AMA or any of the specialty bodies, the number one self reported factor for burnout is health IT. Who delivers the bulk of health IT and it’s the EHR vendors.
Erik Sunset: So we certainly don’t want to, you know, discourage people doing good work in EHR land, you know, which I know happen to know many of them, we need to be realistic about it too, that we’re approaching a cataclysm in [00:26:00] us healthcare. We are, where we are not going to have enough physicians, not enough providers.
Erik Sunset: We’re already feeling the crunch to some extent with anesthesiologists, but before the decade is out, we’re gonna be under that critical mass of physicians to treat enough patients. And one of the biggest problems is the healthcare technology in use, the legacy vendor, right? So when you make the point that the legacy vendor, meaning EHR vendor, needs to walk with partners, that’s obviously what both of our organizations do, is we’re not striving to be the next great EHR, we’re striving to ease physician workflow, we’re striving to ease patient access to their provider.
Erik Sunset: So I’m a little bit on my soapbox here. I don’t mean to steal your thunder, but it’s a very
Oakkar Oakkar: no, no.
Erik Sunset: and it’s one that can’t be overlooked because there is a very clear issue with health care in the U. S. And it is the legacy technology being used,
Oakkar Oakkar: Yeah, you’re right. And they’re [00:27:00] not really designed to create, right omnichannel intelligence, you know, AI driven you know, the, the recommendations for patients to, you know get to where they need to go.
Oakkar Oakkar: right?
Oakkar Oakkar: It’s I mean, EHRs are super important, right. But there’s gonna be a lot of very powerful Value added platforms gonna be, you know, sitting on top of EHRs and all the, you know, the EHR vendors, they have to be okay with that.
Oakkar Oakkar: They have to really adopt work with other innovators and let’s disrupt the healthcare together for patient care, right? Not just you know, I wanna just control it all. Have it all, do it all right. A bit greedy, right? That’s a bit greedy and it’s not good for, it’s not good for patients and it’s not good for the providers either, right? They just have to stop preaching that you know, for people who are you know, in a leadership role for healthcare organizations, right? They have to be a little bit more I don’t want [00:28:00] to say skeptical about these Kool Aids, but they have to be a little bit cautious and write common sense here. So we, you know, we’re trying to educate what we can to our clients. And, you know, to who cares initiatives and like, again, your platform is so powerful. So, you know, grateful to be part of it. We’re doing what we can to, you know, spread the message again. You know, we, we got to care about patients. And I’m a patient myself, and I take care of my family, right? So going through that journey on, on, on our own, right? We know that there are a lot of things that we can improve.
Erik Sunset: Well, and to that point to bring us back on topic here, you know, I like your phrase, who cares? Sometimes I care a little too much. Sometimes we get a little long winded discussing what what ails us, but there are a lot of really positive developments around the consumerization of health care for patients, you know, for consumers of the service.
Erik Sunset: Everybody wants it, but I’m not sure that everybody could really tell you [00:29:00] why they want it as a patient. So in your words, why does the consumerization of healthcare matter for a patient, for you and me?
Oakkar Oakkar: Yeah. I feel like patients been kind of ignored in the, in the equation for decades. Right. You know, recently. We were, we, you know, we start calling consumers and customers back in the day, just all, when we started the company just patients and they were never in control or have say in their, even their own healthcare, right? So customization you know, now it’s patients are getting very vocal. They have a lot of choices. And there are switching providers more than ever, right? They are like, you know what? I don’t want to call. And if I can’t find what I need online or on my phone, then I’m going to go somewhere else. Right. So again, COVID changed everything. And also the the behavior, [00:30:00] right, as we have more and more new, new people not new younger people coming in they are very uh, they like to use technology to do everything, right? So it’s, it’s inevitable now that we have to really focus on consumerization and trying to do everything. And, you know, it’s the end of the day. And the patient’s going to do what’s best for them, right from the healthcare perspective and from the financial perspective. And consumerization means having a very guided approach and very transparent and then also very trust based guidance to get them what they need will, will win the race. Right. So you can just, you know, back to my point a little earlier you’re like, all right, you know, we have to consumerize everything. Let’s, you know, deploy a bunch of disconnected technology solutions all over [00:31:00] the place and the patient’s going to stick. No, they’re not right and consumerization means building trust, uh, consumerization means building consistency and you know, also the repeatability, uh, and if you can really truly do that holistically, then the patient’s going to be coming back to you over and over again.
Oakkar Oakkar: Right. So for me, that is a true consumerization. Right? That’s like, you can think of, you know Amazon Prime, right? How crazy is that, that you order something that you know that it’s going to be here at the store the next day, right? It’s crazy, right? It’s, and then, if you’re on Amazon Prime, how, why would you ever leave that? Right. That’s the type of trust that we need to create, whether you’re, you know, just ordering from your phone or from your computer or, you know, with Alexa, it doesn’t matter, right? It’s going to be at your door, [00:32:00] uh, regardless. And it’s just so predictable, That is the true customization that we want to create.
Oakkar Oakkar: We are almost there.
Erik Sunset: prime is the perfect example. And then not to drag us too far off track, but we’ll be something that I’m watching or that I find interesting is there is very much a generational divide in how you define ease of access to healthcare, right? Like we have so many baby boomers and we’re, you know, hopefully we’re going to have them for a long time.
Erik Sunset: That generation can certainly navigate technology. They’ve got iPhones, they have Prime memberships for that matter. You know, you pick up the phone, I gotta make an appointment, I’ll call my dermatologist, I’ll call my primary care guy, whatever, that’s fine. That isn’t going to be satisfactory or acceptable as Gen Z starts to become in charge of their own health care.
Erik Sunset: You’re seeing that to some [00:33:00] extent with straddles the technological divide to some extent. It almost seems to me that if your health care organization is not undertaking steps to make access very simple and digital, you will be due for an extinction level event at some point in the not too distant future.
Erik Sunset: Thank you. And that may be a little bit dramatic, but just think if your source, if your primary source for patients decides that they’re going to go next door because they can use their phone or use an app to create their appointments and then go see their provider, that means there’s no revenue for you that chose to keep their phones their phone bank active or whatever the case may be.
Erik Sunset: So this is a little bit out of my area of expertise, but curious your thoughts on this, you know, as we pass through time and new generations. Sort of become the prime stakeholder for their own health.
Oakkar Oakkar: Yeah. So I think the the cost is a, a big factor for them. And it’s kind of crazy that, you know, they [00:34:00] more and more people are also, you know, having. High deductible and insurance plans, right? A lot of them are, are just, they don’t want to deal with the insurance completely already. They just want to let her out of pocket, right? And they might be making a lot of money, but they just don’t like that. You know what, I can only go to certain providers, you know, within my network. So what we’re seeing here is, right, you know, we, we set up a patient subscheduling across the country, right? We set up the, we help our customers with their contact centers. So we have you know, healthcare, very specific healthcare, specific CRM customer relationship management that runs on their, all their call centers. So we’ve seen the data the patients are, you know, getting really, really especially younger patients. You know what I see? You don’t want to see when I want to see them. And then of course, with the, you know, guidance on their safety and out of my opinion, out of pocket, right. And high deductible. So [00:35:00] that trend is going to continue. So so we have to really ready for that generation to be able to. Choose you as a healthcare provider, right? And so they are for them, that’s far more important than, Oh, yeah, you know what?
Oakkar Oakkar: I have whatever health insurance plan, and I’m gonna stick with the whatever comes in my network. I think those days are gonna be pretty gone in the, in the near future, right? So, it’ll create a, a really competitive marketplace. For healthcare providers, and I’m a big believer, right that that healthcare providers should stay independent, other than getting gobbled up by a bunch of healthcare systems and… They get a little bit you know, too much bureaucracies, right? So again, that’s like a lot of admin and, and bureaucratic stuff that takes away from patient care, right? So I’m a big believer that people are really trying to stay independent trying to thrive in that environment. It’s awesome. [00:36:00] But one thing that you have to keep in mind is consumerization, right? You have to consumerize everything for your patients. And make it super simple for them. And again, trust building, right? Consistency. You have to be thinking years ahead. And do everything holistically. Again, especially around patient access. And if you can do that that, you know, that generation of patients will be just flooding in your gate because that’s what they’re looking for.
Erik Sunset: I’m with you there. So along with consumerization of healthcare, obviously that’s a fight that’s being fought, you know, continuously, but sort of a new, a new entry to this healthcare arena is AI. And whether your stance is that it’s so called alleged artificial intelligence or just really short machine learning, it’s a hot topic.
Erik Sunset: What, what are you seeing on your end of things, Oakkar?
Oakkar Oakkar: Oh, Erik, it’s my favorite topic. [00:37:00] And you know, we’ve been doing this since the very beginning and you know, imagine 12, 13 years ago, right? We were talking about machine learning and AI and, you know, the predictive analytics and people thought we were crazy, right? Oh, and you’re in healthcare, you’re going to kill people. You know, you know, fast forward, 12, 13 years later, right, we’re doing this. And you know, we could do this better than anybody else right now. It’s just… It’s just such an exciting time to be in healthcare, right? I’m sure you heard about the the, the LLM, the large language models. The thing is, though, you can’t just use a public domain to build LLM for healthcare, right?
Oakkar Oakkar: Healthcare is rightfully so very fragmented, right? You’re gonna have to have a bunch of models. You know, for us, right, when you think about LLMs urology, All the pedics, cardiology, women’s care, pediatric, right? These are totally different set of problem domains [00:38:00] and the patient demographics matter, these specialty matters and and there are a lot of other facts that are going to be matter to be able to just in a, not even a care delivery, right.
Oakkar Oakkar: Just from the. The patient access perspective. So you know, we’re not going to say, Oh yeah, you know, just use your GPT, LLM, and just, you know, just customize the model you get that I can warn you, I’ve tried that already. Right. You know, that’s what I did in my grad school. And all around healthcare specific machine learning, data mining, AI, natural language processing, uh, just trying to have the generic model and customize and hope that you’re going to get the a great outcome. I can tell, I can save you like many years of pain and suffering. That’s not going to work. Right.
Oakkar Oakkar: So, uh, you know, back to the regulations and such. The, so it’s really hard to build LLMs for healthcare. And again, it’s even harder to build LLMs [00:39:00] for a specialty specific type of models. Right. And we’ve been doing this for a long time. You know, I don’t want to reveal too much. Otherwise, you know, my CTO is going to yell at me, but you know, we’ve been doing this for many years and the future is going to be pretty amazing. Right. Again, trying to harmonize, The whole patient access as in a one umbrella, whether a patient’s gonna be calling you, they’re gonna go through the IVR, they’re gonna go through the app, or they’re gonna come to your website. It’ll be all guided by this, you know, very powerful central intelligence that knows everything about the operations, right? That knows your prescriptions right inside out, all the rules on prescriptions, and then. Additional use case comes up and the system can, you know, do a probability and going to get you right the most probable pathway to get you what you need.[00:40:00]
Oakkar Oakkar: Right. Same thing with scheduling. Same thing with triaging. Same thing with building questions, right? Same thing with, I don’t know, anything that you can ever imagine. Imagine that we have really powerful intelligence. On specialty sub specialty and we can do a lot of powerful recommendation on for, for patients, right? And you know, it’s not gonna be in healthcare. It’s not about, okay, let’s put a little AI chat bot and doesn’t know anything about your practice. Right, or organization, right? Hi, whatever, and it’s going to have a mediocre natural language processing and it means nothing, right? Healthcare, you know, we spend so much, we waste so much in technology that it’s not really impactful for patients and providers and the staff, right?
Oakkar Oakkar: So we have to. Think holistically, I use the word like maybe I’m overusing it to be able to bring real value to the patient care, right? So that’s where, that’s what we’re trying to [00:41:00] do. I think we are like, like on the verge of something like magical. With AI, but we’re going to go through a few things to make sure that LLMs are super fine tuned for, you know, the, you know, start with the specialty, right.
Oakkar Oakkar: And then for the particular practice and then try to, you know, just. Deploy with unbelievable patient experience across the board, again, call, text, IVR, right? Apps, websites, whatever. It’s gonna be pretty cool.
Erik Sunset: And it feels like we’re so close, you know, if you pay attention to the health IT news, there’s a lot of sort of chat GPT, you know, a problem in search of a solution to your point that these models need to be very specific, very highly tuned to a specific issue. Did you see that in the last two weeks in in the UK, they [00:42:00] put chat GPT up against the NHS general aptitude test.
Erik Sunset: Yeah. And it bombed it, it wasn’t even close to passing, it got a D minus, and the average grade is like a B,
Oakkar Oakkar: Alright, well, I’m not surprised. Yeah, I’m not surprised. I’m sure you’re not surprised either, right?
Oakkar Oakkar: It’s very specific, yeah.
Erik Sunset: I’m not surprised either, and the things that are, that were a little surprising to me, going back to some press releases from HIMSS earlier this year, is the embedding of chat GPT, not just an LLM, but a chat GPT proper into electronic health records. As a, as a patient, I’m not sure I love that.
Erik Sunset: And as a provider, I think I love it even less because we’re, we’re not talking about treating a patient in LLM, we’re talking about responding to a patient. We’re talking about generating documentation using an LLM. And the thing that goes back and forth in my mind is that I’m a provider. I already don’t like using any of the technology.
Erik Sunset: Most of the technology I’m forced to use. Because it [00:43:00] takes too long. I’m wasting my time with it. So now, sure, I can click a button and generate text, but who’s going to review this for me? It’s not, it’s not just done there. Who’s going to read it? Is it going to have to be me? Yeah, it is. So, um, I’m excited for what the future will hold.
Erik Sunset: The examples that you’ve given are meaningful, are powerful, are applicable. As opposed to look what we can make this LLM do. Like, oh, okay, well, it’s like a monkey doing a trick at the circus. Like, congratulations. It doesn’t change anything in healthcare. And on the, not to sound like I’m a total negative guy around AI in healthcare, the other one that’s kind of fresh in mind is New York University’s NYU tron, where it’s able to scan handwritten notes and generate structured data out of unstructured data.
Erik Sunset: That’s cool. That’s powerful. And that makes a difference.
Oakkar Oakkar: cool. Yeah, that’s very cool. Yeah. And a [00:44:00] lot of people. So to your point, though, a lot of people are trying to look for use cases to use you know, generative AI GPT. But I think a proper way should be trying to find a real pain point, right? Real problem, business problem and care delivery problem and access problem. And, you know, that should be part of the solution addressing a real pain point, real problem. Other than trying to find a little huge cases here and there and trying to find, you know technology. To fix your use cases, it’s not very sustainable, right? And you’re not going to get a whole lot of value. So, you know, we, we know our problem, right? We want to attack the problem and we’re using AI as a tool. And we have very specific, very difficult problems to solve. we’re almost there, right? And we’re already doing that [00:45:00] not in the LLM perspective, but we have, you know, machine learning, AI all kinds of really sophisticated, you know, AI assisted stuff happening in our platform already. And it’s going to be a, you know, next generation, right? Once we The specialty pieces and very, you know uber personalization for each practice. That’s going to take the AI to a whole new level.
Erik Sunset: Love to hear it. Well, we’ve got to have you back on when, when that’s released, you can tell us all about it. Is that
Oakkar Oakkar: Love to. Love to. Love to.
Erik Sunset: And then with, with that said, Oh, car, is there anything else we wanted to cover that maybe we didn’t get to?
Oakkar Oakkar: Not really, Erik. It’s a great podcast and it’s just so happy to be part of it.
Oakkar Oakkar: We discuss a lot and hopefully that’s pretty useful for the viewers.
Erik Sunset: I know that it will be. This has been a fantastic 50 or so minutes with you on your. On our way out the door here, how can listeners [00:46:00] connect both with you personally, and where would you point them to learn more about Kiona Health?
Oakkar Oakkar: You can go to keonahealth. com. And you know, you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter. You know, my handle is just OAKKAR, O A K K A R. And I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback.
Erik Sunset: Yeah, listeners of the DocBuddy Journal, be sure to connect with Oakkar. If you have any differing takes, I know we kinda, you and I, Oakkar, we ended up on the same side of LLMs and healthcare, I think, for the most part. If you’re listening to this and you’re punching air going, these guys got it all wrong.
Erik Sunset: Tag us X or the artist formerly known as Twitter would be a great place to do it. We’re DocBuddy app Oakkar is now x. com slash O A K K A R. We’ll keep, we’ll keep Keona health out of the dog fight for you on that one.
Oakkar Oakkar: I’d love to hear, I’d love disagreements. That’s, you know, that’s makes you really fresh and, and also see different points of views.
Erik Sunset: Yeah, that’s just it. You know, they, if you look at them [00:47:00] the right way, you can get better from a disagreement. And it’s sort of a lost art these days to be able to hold an opposing view in your mind and not have it offend you. So we welcome that as well.
Oakkar Oakkar: I see.
Erik Sunset: And with that, Oakkar, thanks for joining us.
Erik Sunset: This has been a pleasure on behalf of the entire DocBuddy team. Thank you for listening. Be sure you’re subscribed on Apple pod, Spotify, and YouTube. Until next time, I’m your host Erik Sunset. Talk to you soon.