Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: You're listening to the Doc Lounge Podcast. This is a place for candid conversations with the healthcare industry's top physicians, executives and thought leaders.
This podcast is made possible by Pacific Companies, your trusted advisor in physician recruitment.
Welcome to the Doc Lounge Podcast. Today we're diving into the world of healthcare innovation and the rapidly evolving landscape of payer transparency. I'm Stacy Doyle, Senior director of marketing at Pacific Companies and I'm thrilled to introduce our guest, Dilpreet Sahuta, the co founder and CEO of Trek Health, a trailblazing company that is revolutionizing how healthcare providers optimize payer contracts and maximize their revenue. With an impressive background, as a graduate of Stanford and UC Berkeley, Dilpreet has a proven track record in the health tech space. Before founding Trek Health, he led strategy and analytic teams at high growth startups like Health IQ and Big Health. Both companies have raised significant capital to disrupt the healthcare industry. Now with Trek Health, which has raised over $5 million, Dilprit is empowering providers and healthcare systems with innovative solutions to automate billing processes and bring clarity to financial insights. We're excited to hear from Dilpreet today as we discuss how payer transparency is reshaping healthcare, how providers can better understand reimbursement trends and what the future holds for healthcare tech. Welcome to the Doc Lounge podcast, Dilpreet.
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks Stacy. Thank you for the introduction. Great to join and glad to be on.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: So tell us, it sounds like you've had a career in tech and then very healthcare specific, but how did you come up with the idea around Trec Health?
[00:01:50] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, my background is really only been at the intersection of technology and healthcare. As you mentioned, prior to starting Trek Health, I had worked at a handful of health IT companies trying to sort of take a look at where we can add value to the provider chain of value that is, you know, today has leakage and has issues. Everyone loves talking about the issues. But where we started Trek Health really comes, you know, full circle from a very personal place. When I was seven years old, my mom was diagnosed with leukemia. Thankfully, as a blue collar family we had insurance and unfortunately she passed away a few years after that. But I had decided from a young age that healthcare was where I was going to be spending my life. And being in California, in Silicon Valley, going to Berkeley and Stanford, sort of, you know, you throw a dime and you run into a couple founders around here. And so we started Trek Health really with the intention of, okay, from a provider angle, you know, there are a lot of points of Revenue leakage on an ongoing basis. We started off taking a look at the RCM space and found that back in 2020, the transparency and coverage rule that CMS put out and HHS put out at that stage was something that was just new and it was very fragile. I mean, we had started to hear that data was going to be published by payers and by hospitals. And there was a big push that CMS was putting out around transparency. And Seema Verma at the time, as the leader of cms, had a lot of exciting plans around what this is going to do for patient consumer navigation and providers. And then as the dust settled and we actually started to sort of see what payers and hospitals had to start publishing, it felt a lot like another one of those, oh well now what type of moments where this rule is in effect. But so what? What does it actually do to my practice? What does it actually do to my hospital? And that's where Trek Health steps in. I mean, as a starting point, this transparency and coverage rule that was put into effect in 2020 led to 2022 being the first year where every commercial health insurance company across the country has to now publish all fee schedule data. So at an NPI tax ID level, for every billing code, you can see how much facility X is getting paid for this DRG code or how much physician X is getting paid for this CPT code. And although it's available, payers are doing what, you know, a lawyer would do during a deposition, making it very hard to access this data. As an example, just in this month's batched Data set, in October 2024, UnitedHealthcare has put out about 50,000 terabytes of data that we would have to sift through to work through. This is millions of dollars of compute that would be required and data storage costs that would be required for the average private practice to really access and use this information. So that's how we started the company. Comes from a place of passion. We want to see healthcare be truly more transparent and better for the patient and provider. And seeing this rule and the potential impact that transparency can have on this industry, we've decided to double down on helping actually make this transparent data available to providers.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: Love that. So it sounds like this law basically made, you know, this data now a public data set. Is that correct?
[00:04:52] Speaker B: That's correct. So based on this law, two big things happened. Every hospital and health system across the country has to publish something called MRFs, machine readable files that include their charge master and every payer. Now every Every health health plan has to actually publish their further in network providers and their out of network providers what those allowed amounts are. So the combination of what you should be receiving from insurance as well as what you should be receiving from patient responsibility as a single line item, that's all available now. So you can actually see, you know, when a payer proposes in a contract to you that they're going to pay you X dollar amount on your fee schedule.
Previously that was something that you weren't really allowed to talk about with colleagues. You weren't able to really use information about what the market had to offer in payer negotiations. But now since this data is public, you could first just actually reference what's going on in the marketplace and then you can actually even use that to your leverage in negotiations as well.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: Interesting. So it sounds like obviously being able to mine through that data, I mean, that's quite a feat that probably an average, you know, physician group or even healthcare system, like that's going to be, you know, a hard thing to do. So tell us a little bit about kind of the role of health, you know, your company, Trek Health, and how it's helping to make that simpler.
[00:06:09] Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely. Like I said a minute ago, payers are really doing what a lawyer would do in a deposition, making it as hard as possible. The data is there, but it's buried in these stacks and stacks of data. And just one anecdote that I would share around what payers are doing to really make it tough to actually access this data is they're publishing what many in the industry are calling ghost rates. Effectively, they're combinations of billing codes and providers that, you know, maybe have a fee schedule amount where this dollar amount is listed, but it's not actually being billed for. So as an example, one example I like to give that resonates with folks is you'll see like psychotherapy codes for a surgeon. Clearly, you know, an orthopedic surgeon would never actually do a therapy session. But what Aetna is saying is like, hey, this is just on the fee schedule. This is just a standard dollar amount. And so Track Health has had a role really in two parts of making this data usable for folks. The first is it's what we call a big ETL pipeline. To actually get these massive chunks of data and actually make them in a, you know, available in a usable format. That's the first thing that we do. Every quarter, every three months, we actually go out to all these sources of information, the payer files, the hospital files, ingest all that data and, you know, put it through a pretty rigorous system to make sure that we're taking out duplicates and all these other things that payers have done to create noise. And then the second becomes the interpretation layer. That's, that's the second big step. And what we do is we've created a lot of out of the box reports for hospitals and for providers to do things like take a quick look at a market scan to figure out, you know, as a benchmark, am I at the 50th percentile or at the 90th percentile in terms of what I'm getting paid in the marketplace? Is this fair? Are there others that are getting paid more than me, even though they're the same size?
We've done a lot of work to make this interpretation layer very strong. And that's really where we've been focused over the past few years, from the capacity to do what I just said, benchmarking. But also if you have a specific competitive entity, you know, an analog here for myself, I'm in Northern California. If I wanted to see, you know, what UCSF was getting paid for the specific surgery, or what Stanford Healthcare is getting paid for this specific surgery, or what that ASC across the street's getting paid, you can also start with that entry point, a specific competitor in mind, and go see not only where are they in network, but what are their contracts look like.
[00:08:23] Speaker A: Well, this sounds like it's really powerful data and something that you're making easy to analyze and then kind of come away with some key insights. So tell us, what is something that you're seeing in this payer data that a provider wouldn't probably typically, you know, know of or notice on their own?
[00:08:46] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. Thanks, Stacy. I mean, one thing that I would call out, just right out the bat is that you can often expect, based on the service line, 300 to 500% variance in rates by providers. So that can mean a private practice for the same service, maybe the same immunization, same vaccine, or whatever service we're taking a look at, it might be getting paid one third or one fifth of what the regional health system is getting paid.
And we all know that the cost of services and the cost of labor is the same in both situations. And often the health systems that have been able to really capture a monopoly in a market have a lot of leverage, but the private practices might not. And that's as we look at this data in depth, one of the key things that we see is we've started to uncover what are those key variables that allow providers to actually negotiate higher rates versus stick them in a lower segment. And that's not enough. I mean, we're also helping folks figure out, now what do I do about it? As an example, you know, we just did a webinar last week with Scott Ellsworth. He's the former CEO of Centene and Excelis BCBs, and he came from the payer side, but now he's really helping provider entities and health systems negotiate with payers. And what we've really started to do is let's build that suite of information that you can use that is actionable for yourself. So when your contract today is up for renegotiation, don't just take what the payer is giving you. Really build a strategy out of it. I mean, if you're, if you're just looking at your fee schedules and then you're realizing you're underpaid, you're already a little bit behind the game. What we should do is let's build a proactive strategy. Let's take a look at which payers. You actually have a contract that's terminating within the year, in the next maybe one to two years. And let's build out a proactive strategy. I mean, payers will love to just keep you at the existing fee schedule and sort of maybe give you baseline adjustments based on where you're at in inflation and such. But we've seen successful negotiations as high as 20, 30, 40% on certain service lines. Not just because we say that, hey, like this is what the market averages and this is where I'm at. But it really takes building a story and building a case, and the providers themselves will know what, you know, they're best at. What we can do is we can arm you with the information to give you a very clear perspective on what is fair versus what's not. So long story short, I'd say the biggest and most surprising thing to us is that there's a lot of variance not only based on group size, but based on geography, based on how rural or urban a specific provider entity might be based on if they're serving a specific need. As an example, somebody that is delivering behavioral health services and are making, you know, ongoing 24, 7 suicide prevention available versus an outpatient behavior. Health practices are two very different set of services that will be looked at differently by a payer as those negotiations happen. So there's a lot of those variables that go into the variation rates, and we can at least help you uncover that so that as you build your strategy, you're going to do what's not only right for your patient population, but also what helps you make that case to get a higher rate with the payer.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: That sounds incredible. I mean, data really is power. And when you're able to have all of this data at your fingertips and be able to have something that helps, you know, a product and service like yours, where it's, it's synthesizing and really showing you kind of the trends, I could see how powerful that could be.
Now, obviously, we know, we talk a lot about, you know, on the Doc Lounge podcast how there is, you know, a shortage of physicians, you know, really across the board in every single specialty and across, you know, the nation, both in rural and urban settings.
So, I mean, really, are you seeing that, you know, this is once, you know, providers and health systems have this data, it's something that can be very powerful for them?
[00:12:30] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, one thing I think, given the position that providers are in, it's, you know, we often feel that if, you know, I'm in a certain state that, you know, BCBS is the big payer. If I'm getting this rate from the regional BCBS plan, often providers feel like, well, you know, it's like I'm fighting against a wall here. There's nothing that I can do. This is the biggest payer in my market. I would say the impact that we're going to be able to drive here over the next few years is first is just we're helping take data and actually create information insight from that. So, you know, as a starting point, I'd say where we are today is you can get a very clear set of insights on where you are within the marketplace and going forward. You know, there's many, many applications of this. You know, you mentioned there's provider shortages across the country. Very true. And I think that gets compounded in how big of a problem it is when the entities that are actually delivering care in a specific market aren't paid fairly. I mean, if you're, you're in rural Arkansas and the regional BCBS plan is paying you much less than what you deserve to get paid. You know, just because they think that you're too small to go out of network, that really is a situation where the only way out is to fight with the payer. And that doesn't just mean data is what's going to be necessary. We often work with consultants and legislators and others around the table that are going to help Build the right story and really push the right way. But we have to start with information. And data is sort of step one with that data. The next thing would be what are we actually going to do about it now? How do we actually put this in practice? And my recommendation is always, even if you are a small private practice or if you're on the flip side and you're a large health system with a big payer strategy team, you need to have a very clear strategy. What are you optimizing for? It's not okay to take negative margin in a certain line of business just because you're trying to serve the patient population. You are at the end of day running a business. And it's just the true reality here is that payers are going to be using you for their benefit if they think that they can. And the reason why the government has made this data available is to at least shed light on that. And I would encourage everybody to just figure out where you are and help build a strategy on what do you want to do with payers? You know, going out of network sometimes can be, you know, as tough as that can be, that sometimes it has to be the final string that somebody's going to pull when they're, when they're pushing back with pairs. And quite frankly, it's been an extremely successful tactic that we've seen.
At the end of the day, it's important for providers to remember that you are the product for the payer. When they're taking their plans and they're selling them in the marketplace or they're selling them to employers, what they're really selling is access to you as a provider and that is valuable. What the issue is that, you know, the payers never really give you a chance to leverage that to get paid more or get paid fairly. But you are the product that they're selling. And at the end of the day to figure out how to right price yourself, you first just gotta understand what's going on.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: I'm assuming, you know, that there is an average of what, you know, providers are gonna get year over year. And I think you mentioned that with, in terms of inflation. So is there kind of this benchmark of what you'd typically get and then can you say from your current customers or clients what they can, you know, maybe are they seeing a larger increase than that?
[00:15:56] Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely. It's a great question. So I would say typically what we find is that payers are often going to follow Medicare's lead as they're doing their standard inflation Based adjustments. That's usually what we see once Medicare rates go live for 20, 25, a few months later, typically in early Q2, we'll see a general standard fee schedule adjustment. And a lot of the providers on this that are listening to this, I'm sure will just get a letter in the mail being told that they're going to get paid this much, but they weren't able to proactively actually dig in there. And from a different lens, if we think about it from a negotiation perspective, then the equation changes. And the way that we actually can help create that for you is you have to figure out where is it that you have leverage in this equation. And just let me give you one real life example here. We had a group that we were working with in the state of Texas. It's a large primary care and freestanding ER clinic that operates across the state. And you know, they were being offered, I think it was a 3 and a half or 4% rate hike based on the standard adjustments that were being made in the market for the year. But then they used data to really make the case that look as a primary carer, freestanding ER facility here, the only alternative that patients have is that expensive health system across the street where they have to go to the error if their child's ear is hurting and it's in the middle of the night or there's an acute issue that has come up now that is going to require the patient to go to care and telehealth isn't enough. They need the medication, they need the care in real time and situations like that we've seen. I forget what the exact outcome was, but it was certainly close to 20% rate hike in terms of what their standard fee schedule adjustment was made. And there was some compromise there. What that also meant is that to some level this entity went at risk for, you know, what the standard payment amount should be and if they render a service and then there's additional follow up that's needed, there's some, there's some specific clauses around that and they went back and forth. But at the end of the day, being able to create 20% upside for yourself because not only are you going to, you know, help decrease the total cost of care for this patient, but you're going to make care easier for the patient. That's really the key here is it's not just about the dollar amounts, it's about how are you making the life of a patient better by making care more accessible and creating more competition for these health systems. And with that, I mean, I would say we're still in the early days overall. TREC Health today supports over 120 health systems and private practices across the country. We also support MSOs, IPAs, IDNs, hospital associations. Really anyone? Even some private equity groups that are now using us to figure out how to reprice agreements. And you know, these are just some leading indicators of success. I think over the next two years we're really going to see how this all pans out. Given an average contract cycle for a provider with the payer can last three years. So it's still the early days. It's going to take a while for us to see this go into effect. But exciting leading indicators of success, surely?
[00:18:46] Speaker A: Yeah, those sound like great results and I'm sure, you know, some of our listeners are probably really interested in having this type of data and analytics at their fingertips when they are obviously negotiating with such large, you know, players. So tell us, you know, tell us a little bit about, I mean you're in the forefront of technology. Are you using AI and you know, kind of big data obviously to create this product? But what do you kind of see the future with that as well in terms of the healthcare reimbursement space?
[00:19:22] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. We certainly are using LLMs and AI in our approach here. I think there's a few big technical challenges in what we're doing. The first is that the volume of data that the payers are posting is large. I mean our CTO believes that we're actually working with as an early stage startup here, we're working with more data than some Fortune 500 companies will be to operate their big massive business. That's sort of the scale of operation here in terms of what we're having to do with the data. And for us as we go forward and as we think about this modern age of AI, what this really what we should all strive towards is information and insight should be available at the tip of our fingers. And up until just two years ago, if you were trying to figure out as a provider what a fair rate for a service was, there was no way to do it. Today that data is available, but it's not available easily. And that's really the passion that Trek Health is serving. Where we're incorporating LLMs and AI into our approach here is to make it super simple to create that packet that you're going to take forward and use to negotiate with your payer. We want it to be as simple as you're going to simply give us a brief description on what you're looking for and some information on who you are as a provider. And Trek Health will create that series of knowledge that you need to consolidate to make a case to the payer that you deserve a better rate and help facilitate that process as easily as possible. I mean, there's no source of information here. If you do a Google search on how to negotiate with payers, there's no real blogs, there's no information online that's available and we want to democratize that. And that's really where AI comes in the mix for us. That presentation layer and the efficiency layer through the data processing, that presentation layer at the end especially is a great application of LLMs. I mean, we're using things like ChatGPT and other LLMs today to be able to take this big massive set of robust data and then simplify that into, you know, a few charts, a few set of descriptions. And just, you know, the analogy would be if you're going to buy a property, let's say you're going to buy a house. Before you buy that house and you put in an offer, you typically get a report from your real estate agent that tells you, well, here's what a fair price looks like, here's what other transactions in the market look like. It's commonly called a CMA, a competitive market analysis. We think that the big 10x improvement is something like that, something like the CMA or the, you know, the fair blue book value that you get when you're purchasing a car so that you can help drive your decision. Providers deserve that. CFOs at hospitals and providers that are running their private practices deserve to know what is fair before they lock themselves in. Because payers are, you know, this is 80% plus of their revenue. This is going to drive the bottom line and that's really where AI comes into the mix for us.
[00:21:55] Speaker A: Tell me in regards to the codes and I'll tell us a little bit about that because I've heard, you know, from physicians that a lot of that can just get so overly complex that it can, you know, obviously I'm sure that has an impact on, you know, some of the, their profit margins as well. So what have you heard about that? Obviously you're so close to that with, with your product.
[00:22:19] Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean the data is structured at the billing code level. So today we have trillions of records of pricing information for pretty much every provider across the country at the, for every CPD code, HCPCs code, revenue code, DRG code, anything under the sun, even custom Value based arrangements are today available within the data. And what we do to help simplify that for providers is two things. The first thing is that if you're a provider and you're serving a specific specialty area, there might be adjacent codes that are relevant to yourself that you're not billing for today. These are services that you're not rendering that might be super low hanging fruit. As an example, we've had a handful of behavior health groups that we work with. These are mental health private practices that have added things like psychological testing and medication management to their practice where they used to maybe only do psychotherapy or ABA services. So these are net new service areas where they did have to hire new providers to do, you know, this specific thing. But they found that actually it's going to one, allow us to generate more revenue for every patient that's coming in. But more importantly, it's also going to allow us to consolidate more of the key behavioral health areas of care under our practice, under our roof, which makes a very clear case of the payer and the patient that this is an important place for me. I'm not just coming here for my, you know, therapy session once a week, but I'm actually coming here for all of my behavioral health services. And often providers hesitate to do that because they, they don't know what that looks like. I mean, they're used to billing for the codes that they have. They have their billing teams in place and they're content with where they're at. But as you expand into a new market area, understanding not only what the cost would be to hire the providers or expand your facility in that realm, but from a reimbursement perspective, what you would get, that's one big area we can help. And the second would be bundling these codes. I mean, since the codes are today presented at the individual code level, that's a lot of detailed information for a provider to go through for them to figure out, like, well, if I'm a hospital and I just want to know how much it costs for a child delivery from the prenatal care to postpartum care, everything in between.
Trek Health actually supports providers by helping pre generate reports where we'll actually bundle these events of care and we'll tie your utilization data to that so that you have to just with a few clicks you can get to that insight. You don't have to worry about going down to the billing code level. And that's something that we today are supporting with our customers as well.
[00:24:41] Speaker A: That sounds really powerful. That is really really? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because there's adjacent codes that you may not even be and it is something you may be already providing or you could provide. So super powerful there. Now tell us, I mean given your experience at health IQ and big Health, what lessons did you carry forward into TREC Health's mission and strategy?
[00:25:07] Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely, it's a great question. I would say overall there's been an over investment in Silicon Valley and in the venture capital world in points of healthcare that I think are too disattached or they're removed from the actual patient journey. And what I mean by that is there's a lot of innovation that's happened in the payer space. There's a lot of, a lot of folks. There have been reports that have come out over the course of this year that I've showcased how like denials based on prior authorization requests have gone way up amongst a lot of markets because payers are now using AI within their workflows. And there's a lot of technology and innovation that's been happening there. Within the self insured employer market there's a lot of point solutions that go to large employers and help those folks out by giving their employees access to health related tools or information. But where we've really lacked is these two areas, providers and patients and specifically providers. I mean even within the patient realm there's a lot of folks that are actually just wrap around providers or they're just private practices wrapped around in telehealth and they call themselves technology companies. But if we think about the provider stack after EHRs were forced upon the marketplace a decade or so ago here, there's really not been too much innovation. I mean what do providers actually have access to today that allows them to either have less administrative work, get paid more or do more within their practice outside of their ehr? Basically nothing. And that's where we step in. We think it's important to create a series of tools for a provider and for private practice and for a health system that will allow them to take use of the innovation that's happening in the broader marketplace and apply that to their systems. So you know, ChatGPT, a lot of voice technology, AI technology has been in the marketplace. Big data has been sort of well known in Silicon Valley for the past 15 years. But as we think about what that means for the provider, the average provider is still stuck doing what they were doing half a decade ago, one decade ago, 15 years ago. And I see Trek Health's mission to uniquely support the Providers. That's where we're focused. We think that more competition in healthcare is better for the patient. It's only going to lead to prices coming down. This is why the American free market system works. If we have more competition, it results in a better consumer experience. And I think that our success will come with expanding the GDP of the, of the private practice, expanding the GDP of the health system. If the new entrepreneur that is a provider or wants to, you know, expand within the provider market has less barriers to access that market and actually set up a practice and do so profitably, that's not only better for the, for the, for the person that's starting that business, but it's better for everyone in that market. It will only lead to more accessibility. And that's our mission, is we want to enable. That.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: Makes a lot of sense when you break it down in that, you know, easy to understand way. So thank you for that. These are obviously complex, you know, issues that you're solving for. Now tell us, how does it, you know, if a health system or a provider group or physician group wants to work with you guys, how does, how, how, how is it set up?
[00:28:18] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So our, our platform is a self serve data platform that you can get access to and play around in this sandbox and use the data that I'm, I've been referencing on this call today at your own will. And the first place to start would be just to go to our website. It's Trek Health IO T R E K Health IO the letters IO and what we'll do as a starting point is our team here is happy to support you in showcasing within the market for free at no obligation. As a starting point, what this data looks like, what you can and cannot have access to, what limitations there might be in the data. We're happy to do a free diagnostic sort of session with you at no cost for you to examine what we have and really stress test this platform to see if it's going to be able to serve your needs. We will then, according to what we find in that initial call, do two things as a starting point when we get set up. The first is that we'll help create a series of reports for you that will require you to not do anything within the platform. You know, the way that I talk about it is point, click go. If this is going to be sufficient for your private practice, we'll set you up with 5 to 10 free custom reports in the tool. Once we get going that will allow you to, you know, remove yourself from the Details and just get to that level of insight that would be helpful for you right away. And in terms of cost, the way that we structure pricing is we try to make it as fair for our partners as we can. So it's totally scoped down to the markets that you serve. If you're a private practice in one state, the price will be aligned to that. Or if you're a health system that operates in 15 states, the price would be aligned to that. It just comes down to volume of the data that you want to access.
[00:29:51] Speaker A: It sounds, you know, everyone says, is there a product market fit? So of what you've built and of those people that have come through and gotten the free reports, how many of them become a client?
[00:30:04] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. Today we're able to support from somebody coming on a call and actually working with us and figuring out if the data is available. About a third of our of the folks end up going on to actually become paying customers of Trek Health. And typically for those two thirds that don't end up working with us, it's really just comes down to maybe one. There's not a discrete need today, like if you're not in a position to renegotiate your contracts or you're not in a position to actually, you know, use the data for something specific, it might just not be a good fit out the gate. And that's okay. You know, we're not going anywhere. We'll be here for whenever you're going to set up your negotiations and actually go after this opportunity and we'll support you then. And the second area might be that, you know, we might mutually figure out that maybe, unfortunately, based on the circumstances at hand, you are not equipped to negotiate. And that can mean, you know, we identify that there is a market opportunity here, but perhaps you're too small of a practice in a market that, you know, you're already getting paid relatively, you know, much better than those that, that are comparable to you or a whole host of other things. And that's totally fine. You know, we definitely don't have any obligation in this initial call. We're just here to figure out if this data is going to add value to and if so, let's try to quantify that and get you set up so that you can go right after this and, and hopefully get what you deserve out of the payer.
[00:31:23] Speaker A: Love that empowering, you know, health systems and physicians across the country. It's great, great work. So really excited that we were able to have you on today.
Lastly, Tell us what, you know, advice you'd give to other, you know, entrepreneurs. Thinking of getting into the health tech space?
[00:31:43] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. I would say start with passion as a starting point. I think, unfortunately, a lot of the times when private equity folks or venture capital or startups are looking at the healthcare market, they look at it as, oh, well, it's 20% of US GDP and it's this big thing that we can go tackle. But I would say healthcare is a very, very complicated place to build. And if what you're trying to seek is simply, you know, potential profit and upside only without the passion, it's not a great place to be. I actually think healthcare is the hardest place to build. If that's what you're pursuing. There's a lot of other easier things to go do. But if you are passionate about healthcare, then what I would recommend is to really pick an area that fits your core skillset and a market need. You know, here at Trek Health, we're Silicon Valley based, you know, data software. This is sort of in our DNA and this transparency and coverage ruling happened to be a moment in time where there was a good fit based on what the market needed, changing regulations and our DNA and our passion to make healthcare more clear and more available for consumers. And so we're pursuing this. But if you're in a position where you have that mix, you have the passion, you have the interest, then I would go find something that actually is going to move the needle for those people that you're passionate about. And also pick, pick a stakeholder. I see often too many entrepreneurs are trying to serve the patient, but they're also, maybe especially software platforms are then trying to serve the payer and the provider and life sciences and pharmaceutical companies, et cetera. I think especially if you're building in technology, pick one stakeholder and be the best at that. The analog I would share is, you know, in most, you know, most of the economy, when we talk about startups, we talk about how it can really only be enterprise focused or consumer focused. And same is true for healthcare, I think, to build a good company that's actually going to add a ton of value for your customers. Pick the stakeholder that matters most to you and really serve their needs rather than a platform that's going to kind of support a lot of people.
[00:33:48] Speaker A: Smart advice, great advice.
Again, we're so happy to have you on and hopefully a lot of our listeners will go ahead and take advantage of that free trial with you to get access to the data that's within their area that they're serving to see how they stack up and what potential opportunity is on the board for them to grab.
[00:34:15] Speaker B: Thanks so much Stacy.
[00:34:16] Speaker A: Appreciate you being on today. Thank you so much.
[00:34:19] Speaker B: Likewise. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
[00:34:22] Speaker A: Thank you to all of our listeners. If you would like to be notified when new episodes air, make sure to hit that subscribe subscribe button. And a big thank you to Pacific Companies. Without you guys, this podcast would not be possible. If you would like to be a guest, Please go to ww Pacific companies.com Thank you.
