Newsday – Rohan D’Souza – Chief Product Officer for Olive at HLTH 2021
Episode 45627th October 2021 • This Week Health: Conference • This Week Health
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tel room. We're at the Health:

If you aren't aware, we actually have two podcast channels. We have this week in Health it, which you're listening to, and we have today in Health it, which is our daily channel where we drop five to 10 minute episodes every weekday morning. And if you want to catch the other interviews, head on over and subscribe.

We talked to a lot of great companies. We talked to Avia, said Sign Health, Verizon BlueJeans. We talked to Definitive Healthcare Impact Health, Ochsner. Lots of great content and none of this is paid content. Here's what I did. I walked the floor and talked to people about what they were doing and tried to identify those things that I thought would be relevant to you, the community.

So go ahead over to today and catch up on some of those other shows that we've started releasing them on Wednesday of last week. On this show, we sit down with the chief product Officer for Olive Rohan, dea. We do that in the big purple bus that was on the floor. This is one of the most exciting companies in health it, and we discussed their platform in some depth.

uh, interview from the Health:

Rohan, the chief officer for a welcome to the show. Thank you. And thank you for stopping by. Go on our lovely bus. It's impressive. I mean. I've seen the, the social media. This bus will pull up in front of a health system and you'll have a whole bunch of people out there and whatnot. I, I think it's indicative of your culture.

First of all. You're going out to your clients and there's so much I like about Olive, so that's why I'm looking forward to this conversation. Yeah. Awesome. But I want to, I wanna start with the last time I talked to Olive was Sean Lee. CEO was about four years ago, and. We primarily talked about RPA, primarily talked about computer vision, applied to RPA, some of the interesting things that were going on there, but it's, it's really a different company today than, than what I talked to Sean four years ago.

Yeah, it definitely is. And I think, um, technology moves so fast these days, right? We were, we were used to the 10 year Gartner hype cycles where things move in decades. Today we're moving in the form of two to three year cycles, so. I'm not surprised. Four years ago, Sean's message was probably all of, is the defacto, uh, computer vision, more specifically UI based RPA.

'cause even RPA as a whole has matured, has created a category for itself. Uh, I think today we stand on that as the corridor, our foundation. Uh, we're at a point though where that's been commoditized. It's in, it's ubiquitous in the fabric of the company. Right. It's one of the arrows in our quiver. We will pull out the UI based RPA, uh, arrow from the quiver, but we have a lot more arrows today in that quiver of automation as a whole, and that's really what we're focused on.

So it's automation on the administrative side, on the clinical side, on the where, where are you focused? Yeah. It honestly, good question. And this is also a little bit of a misconception that Olive is very much focused on the revenue cycle space. While I'd say that there is a, there's a genuine interest in, in going very, very deep in, in the revenue cycle space.

Um, we're a horizontal and a vertical, right? So we fly across the entire enterprise. It really is a play. Uh, it's really up to our customers to decide where we wanna start. And we've matured to the point where in the past it was, uh, pay customer. We have some really cool tech. We've invested a lot of r and d money in building out what we believe to be best in class platform components, but we might not necessarily understand the problem, so why don't you point us to the problems and we'll go fix those problems with our solutions and we'll end up building out solutions today.

We've gotten so good though at identifying symptoms from problems, so we're able to come in and say, I think that's actually a symptom of a much bigger problem. You should start your transformation journey with us through a set of repeatable artifacts that sit in our solution layer. We did a press release yesterday where we announced the library, think of it as essentially a marketplace, a true marketplace where developers and and Olive can benefit from customers transacting against the marketplace.

And we guide them through this process. So while your question is. A lot of it happens within revenue cycle. It isn't necessarily the place that we start today. It was the place where we started a couple years ago. Well, you, it's, it's interesting that, that play of, I'm gonna use the, the term that we always throw out, which was the app store for healthcare.

Right. So you are, you're taking that underlying . Complexity and you are abstracting that le that level of complexity. And you're saying, look, we're, we're gonna, we're gonna hook into all these things. We have the technology, we can do that. But on top of that, we're going to start building these libraries, I guess what you're calling it.

Yep. But these components that take the, the functions that every new startup is gonna do, you know they're gonna go out and develop it, then this one and this one, and this one. And you're saying, look, just build on top of all of it. We go in there, provide this infrastructure at a, at a boost. You're shaking your head yes.

So I just wanna make sure that I'm on the right. Yeah, no, I, I am. And, uh, that's definitely the v the vision and the doubling down of where we want to go as a company. We truly, we truly believe that we are building a generational company. Generational companies happen when you, when you build platforms, right?

And true platforms. It's like if I were to quote Bill Gates, like Bill Gates said it best. So the platform is really a platform when the, some value of the companies that are built on top of the platform are significantly more than the value of the platform itself, right? Until that happens, you're not a platform, you're mostly an aggregator and somewhat of a data broker.

Um, I and the team at Olive are really focused on how do we make this available to the incredible developer and the builders that are out there? The, the community that's building out niche, very focused, deep solution, deep empathetic solutions for the customer to come and build on the platform and not have to figure out the things that we've done over the last six, seven years.

So too. Provide more color around what Olive does. I wanna go into different use cases that I'm hearing, uh, you know, more with less is common. I think people think health systems did really well through the pandemic Health systems did not do really well through the pandemic. They, you know, very tight budgets.

So, I, I wanna talk about more with less. I wanna talk about the consumer experience. Yeah. What could be be done there. But I, I'd be remiss if I talked only about the consumer experience and didn't talk about the, the provider experience. And I, there's probably another use case, but I, I, we'll, we'll, we'll, uh, start, start there.

So automation is one of the first words that comes up where we think of more with less. And how, how is olive making things more, much more efficient so that we can, we can do more with. Yeah. So it's great question. And I think, uh, I love that you said automation and not necessarily RPA. Um, I think first of all, it has to be the

both for every single or all:

Are able to recite back a primary metric that we measure, which is human power. And it's this concept of what is the impact that we are bringing back to society through our, through our community of providers, eventually payers and then consumers. Uh, because it's crazy to think that out of the 16 million healthcare workers that exist today, a majority of them are towards administrative tasks.

If you can carve and then the math breaks out to a trillion dollars of overspend, if I can put that money back and if Olive can put that money back into the system, just imagine the therapeutics that might get created. Um, the, uh, excitement and the lack of burnout, you know, the classic, quadruple aim of healthcare so that it's very much in our DNA to measure things that are impactful back, uh, uh, back to the community.

And, uh, it's, it's a hard thing to do because. We don't, we don't necessarily measure traditional metrics of how much data is flowing through the platform, uh, or how many new solutions do I have, right? The more with the less is going back to our human power metric and constantly measuring that. Talk about, let's talk about the consumer experience, and one of the promises is that someday we're gonna get to significant personalization.

The, the messages I need from, from the health system. About my health and me being healthy is different than what, what you would be. Yeah. So is there any area that Olive's playing in terms of that personalization? Yeah, there, there are a couple areas that we're playing in that personalization. One. Uh, so one of the exciting things, so I've spent my entire professional career in health tech and there's this age old saying that, you know, technology and healthcare is always behind.

Um, I think that's unfortunate. Uh, but on the flip side of, because of that moniker that we carry, where technology's behind in healthcare, it's pulled a lot of folks who have solved similar problems in cross industries. So we're we at Olive today are getting people coming in. Majority of our inbound requests are actually folks that aren't in healthcare that either came from consumer-focused applications.

Uh, the retail space of deeply understanding the LTV of a customer. I mean, healthcare is in a consumer-focused business today, right? You have to deeply understand the, the lifetime value of that patient. And more importantly, you're living in a digital world where as consumers, . We are much more educated and we have a plethora of options.

I don't have to go to my primary anchor health system that might exist in, you know, in, I live in Seattle so I don't have to say much other than you know, who the anchor health system there is. Um, but so that as a consumer, I have a lot more information at my hands. And so what all of is doing is we're meeting the consumer where they are, which means we're doing very, this is a very tactical example.

But the, the message that we send to a consumer and how it's written, uh, in, in, in that text message that shows up has some intelligence behind what type of, what type of a consumer it is, right? We do some ab testing in the background to figure out what time should I text Rohan, who is mostly a morning person versus.

Somebody else who's an idol owl. Right. And so technologies today that thank God for the, the easy access to data and the easy access to the cloud, we're able to do a lot of this, uh, experimentation in the background, uh, to abstract away the complexity of getting to the consumer. The, one of the reasons that healthcare has the reputation of being behind a technology is the mess that the data is, or the complex Yeah.

Complex mess that, yeah. The data is. And so, uh, that, that has to be one of the big values that you bring. Are you just working with, with healthcare data or are you working with, uh, claims data, payer data? I mean, what, what data sets are you working? Yeah, so, uh, we, uh, you know, we could spend an entire hour on data, so I'll try to summarize it very quickly.

Uh, we honestly don't care what the source of data is, but the things that we talk about is we care about the footprint and we care about the fingerprint. And so there, there are two ways that we look at it. We . Just like most other places we're, we're a data heavy organization. Uh, but we're, we don't have a dependency on the way we receive the data.

And that's the beauty about us owning an automation category rather than saying we're an RPA player, right? If I go in into a health system or, or a payer, um, that has a standards-based approach to giving me their data. I'm not going to try to shove RPA in front of us. I'll take a standards-based approach.

Right. I'm one of the original, um, early creators of the fire specification and fire has done some amazing stuff for us. The challenge though is the, the adoption cycle of something like fire. More importantly, the challenges of allowing the cultural allowance of allowing, uh, systems to write back data without a human being in the loop.

That's just us. It's, it's actually not a technology problem. It's a cultural problem. Right. Um, so an interesting stat, it takes about 18 years for, um, data to actually get to the bedside. From the point of a research study being kicked off, COVID completely changed that. Right? So we went from the early, uh, signs of Covid within a year, having a vaccine, and HHS and CMS having real-time data to bed availability.

Unfortunately we had to have a global pandemic to do the kinds of things that, from a technology perspective we've had for 10, 15 years. It's the adoption cycle on the cultural aspect and the cost of the false positive that keeps healthcare behind and adopting these things that, you know, I'll be the first one to tell you.

We're not doing any real rocket science, right? We're we're able to put William Shatner on a rocket and send him up to space like. We should be able to do the, the basic things in healthcare a lot faster. I, you know, I didn't find sending Shatner up into space, all that impressive, I found bringing him back alive to be really impressive.

Too cliche. Yeah. 90 years old. Yeah. That's, that's pretty, yeah. Pretty amazing. Um, you know, there's, there's two GA categories that I think Olive has a message for. So I, I, I want, I want you to talk first about healthcare providers. What's the message to healthcare providers where. . Where, where do they utilize olive?

Where do they, you know, start, start the relationship. Uh, don't be afraid of, uh, dipping your toes into the, the digital workforce. Uh, the digital workforce is here and the digital workforce is here to stay. Um, there's a reason why we have invested so much on the empathetic approach to delivering all of where we have humanized her.

And we, we want you to treat her. As an extension of your team. And the beauty about the investment that we're making in the company is Olive has a bunch of friends and she talks to our friends every single second. And so that's the, the reason why we're not traditional RPA, we say when one olive learns all olives do, because we've built this mesh connectivity and network to say like, I can trust Olive to do her do to do her job.

Because although to me she's an N of one. She's a one of end behind the scenes, right? She's talking every single olive worker, the digital worker that is working in the trenches, uh, of these provider organizations. And I would think the other group of people is people who are here, who are developing their platforms and doing those kind of things.

They're always struggling with, how do I stand up my first health system? How do I get to scale? And all those other things you Yeah. Really give them a path to scale though. Yeah. We not only give, give them a path to scale, uh, we give them the ability to ride our coattails on the crazy sales cycle that exists in healthcare.

I mean, we have, we have plowed the way of today being in front of the majority of health systems in this country in some shape or form, take advantage of the massive investments that we made. In order to go through the procurement cycle, it's in order to go through the, the process of being a trusted, uh, vendor provider extension in the organization and come, you know, bring your solution to life.

The long tail for Olive is extremely long, and if I explode that long tail out, there are, there are companies and developers that are agonizing about those small minute things that we as a, we as a company are not going to do. So I want to just. Give, give the ability for, for what we see as the long tail to be unlocked by the hundreds of thousands of developers, uh, that exist today, both here in the US for global as well.

Rohan, thank you for your time. Really appreciate it. Yep. Thank you for having me. That's all for today. You know someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. We would thank our show sponsors for today's Sirius Healthcare and Worldwide Technology.

We appreciate their investment in the show. And we also want to thank our channel sponsors for investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders, VMware Hillrom, Starbridge Advisors, McAfee and Aruba Networks. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.

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