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 Today I'm really excited to have Dr. Cave savi and Brian Callis with Accenture Health join us and they're gonna share some of the research they did around digital health gains pre and post covid, and it is a great discussion. I'm looking forward to having that. Before we get there, I wanted to share some of the things that's going on our social media channels.

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Welcome to this Week in Health It where we amplify great thinking to Propel Healthcare Forward. My name is Bill Russell Healthcare, CIO, coach and creator of this Week in Health. It a set of podcast videos and collaboration events dedicated to developing the next generation of health leaders. This episode and every episode since we started the C Ovid 19 series that's been sponsored by Series Healthcare Now we're exiting in that series and Sirius has stepped up to be a weekly sponsor of the show through the end of the year.

Special thanks to Sirius for supporting the show's efforts during the crisis and beyond. Today we're gonna talk about how Le Healthcare leaders can make the recent, uh, gains in, in digital health last and go forward. And we have two gentlemen on the show who have, uh, done the research around this. So I'm excited to have the conversation.

Dr. Cave savi. Senior managing director for Accenture Health. And Brian call Managing Director for Accenture Health. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. Thanks, bill. Well, thanks. Good to be here. Yeah, I'm, I'm looking forward to it. And, uh. I, I, I love the background. I know I said it before the show, but I have to say it again.

It's such a, that, that is a, a fantastic office for someone in, in your organization. It's, it's a real office and I like it 'cause it reminds me of places I used to travel before Covid grounded me. Yeah. And you were, uh, one of those, one of those like. Platinum. Yeah. Players on one of the airlines. I they, yeah.

They miss me. They miss me. . I, I would imagine, I'm looking forward to this conversation. You guys went out and did the research that we've all really wanted, it wanted to have happen, uh, around this topic of digital health. And we interviewed, like during Covid, we interviewed 40 some odd CIOs. And we heard things like telehealth.

We heard adoption of chatbots. We heard usage of the portals and online scheduling just skyrocket and went through the roof. But we have since heard it come back to not, not to pre covid levels, but come back down to earth a little bit. So I wanted to explore that a little bit with you. Mm-Hmm. . So talk, talk from your research.

Talk a little bit about digital health adoption prior to Covid. Sure. Yeah. And hey everyone, so I'll start by just describing what we did with the survey. So for the past few years, we've conducted a survey to understand consumers wants and needs for using technology to manage their he and healthcare.

Mm-Hmm. , yeah. We looked broadly at a set of technologies. So we looked at to the use of mobile health apps, wearables. Attitudes and preferences towards the use of chatbots or clinician assisted machine intelligence, as an example, uh, as well as virtual health as a broader category. And, and Bill, to put it in context, if you look, we do every two years and every two years, the average kept going up.

And what happens in the last two years is that the, the seniors, for example, stayed about one out of five and the younger people. We're like at 60% are drifting down to 50%, and then in the middle it's hanging in the thirties. But in aggregate, what you're seeing is a leveling off, which is why we call it a plateau.

And that's very different than the the previous trend. And then we use the survey to really dig into that and figure out why in fact that leveling occurred and then Covid occurs. So we had to then reinterpret what does that plateau mean, given what we've discovered in the flattening of this adoption curve that's been occurring over half of a decade.

So that's really an interesting thing we should talk about. Yeah. So Covid does hit and it really does change things pretty significantly. You were mid study, uh, how did you adjust and then what did you find as covid was progressing? Sure. Brian, why don't you take that? Yeah. What we found was Covid forced a surge of adoption in the use of technology to help people with their healthcare, and that was really because of necessity.

People needed to shelter in place and stay safe in their homes. As a result, you were seeing clinicians recommending a set of digital technologies as a way to diagnose and treat, as well as manage their health and healthcare. Mm-Hmm. as an example, if you look at virtual health, . Prior to Covid, you were seeing maybe 200 visits a week.

Each system was slightly different, and that skyrocketed after covid, where upwards of 10,000 visits a week were coming in per system. Mm-Hmm. . In fact, I'll, I'll, I'll recharacterize that a different way. What if, if you looked at the total number of visits in the United States pre Covid. Somewhere in the low to mid single digits was the number of total visits that were done through a virtual kind of a platform.

And in May of this year, when we had the maximum impact of the shutdown and only the covid cases and emergency cases were being seen in person, the snapshot reports were that we were in the mid fifties. Of all healthcare being delivered virtually. So that was essentially going from, let's call it five to 50.

And then we're already beginning to see that number settling back down. And one of the big discussions is where will it settle at? Uh, and the, our study actually identified three reasons. For why that the, uh, rate had been plateauing. One of them had been, if you have a bad experience, you don't use it again.

One had been because if your doctor doesn't recommend it because it doesn't fit their workday, you don't use it, and one had been, you don't trust who has the data. Covid specifically addressed the second one because it forced the doctors to actually have to use it. They had no other option. What we think is that Covid didn't really address the user experience.

'cause the technology was the same technology and Covid didn't solve for the problem of who has my data. All it did was it raised everyone's awareness of it, but it didn't address the issue of confidence. But it absolutely did drive it into the workflow. And so our sense is that whatever the natural curve it was of virtual healthcare, specifically telemedicine as a component of digital.

We definitely brought forward a number of years in terms of how fast it's gonna to stay. We, we think it'll settle around a third. Some people think it'll settle it more than that. We'll see. That's what I'm really excited to explore with you guys. So you gave three reasons, one being the, the physicians, one being experienced and one being privacy.

Is that Yes, that's right. Those are the three dominant reasons. Yes, it's. I've known this for years 'cause I've sat in front of physicians trying to have conversations around telehealth and I had, I've literally had physicians said over my dead body. And people think, oh, that can't be true. But those are difficult conversations.

You're asking them to change their practice. There is a financial challenges to doing that and, and quite frankly, a digital workflow requires a little different, not only technology, but a, a different right underlying infrastructure to make that happen. And, and so I, I see that, I, I understand what you're saying, that they were forced to, so health systems were forced to put that underlying infrastructure.

They were forced to put the technology in and that really drove it. So if financial systems stay in place and those things are in place, what's gonna cause it to come back? Yeah. That's the, so a couple of things happened. In some cases, people were being seen virtually. Because that was the only available option, but not the best option.

So let's just say for the example, for the case of, it would be great if I could examine you, get your vital signs, listened to your heart, or maybe I could obtain, uh, uh, a lab specimen or a culture or something like that. But if that's just too hard to do or not safe, then I'm gonna make my best guess based on history and, uh, maybe some show me point the camera at whatever you're complaining about.

Let try to guess. And we see some percentage of that rolling back because. It was good enough in the absence of no good alternative but not ideal. And that is an interesting area for future opportunity because if people figure out how to do some things virtually that they haven't done before, you can maybe close the gap of the ability to examine someone without them being in front of you.

I think that, I wanna go back though, and Bill, you made the point about how hard it was to get doctors to adopt. We actually saw. Health systems using the same approach they used for the adoption of the electronic health record. That level of personal support around the first days of use. Literally, where do I put my mouse?

What do I click? How do I turn it on? They had to take that approach and, but once the doctors got through the learning curve, just as with electronic health records, they started to see some of the benefits of it. And so we think that. Once they realize they could use it, they're gonna see some convenience aspects to it.

So in some practices, people are gonna go, wait a second. Now that I know how, and I've gone through the pain of learning how to use it, this is actually an easier way for me to organize my day. Yeah, and that's an interesting point. We found that the forced adoption, both for clinicians and consumers after they tried it, many of them

Where, Hey, this actually has a use. This wasn't that bad. And now it's figuring out how do we actually integrate it as part of care models in the future. But one of the things about, you talked about the experience A, a, it wasn't just a natural expansion. It's not like we had, we didn't have Teladoc in place and just expand it and everything was fine.

A lot of health systems were, they were using FaceTime, they were using Microsoft Teams, they were using Skype. They were using . Whatever they could throw together, which speaks to that experience. Some people had, there was an uneven experience in terms of an integrated scheduling doctor showing up on time, documentation follow up because we threw it together.

Did you find some of that in your research? Yeah. On the prior to covid, the area of consumer expectations and just the quality of the experience. Was a very important thing before covid. Prior to Covid, people were stating that a majority of people stated that a bad digital experience with a provider would ruin the entire experience.

Now, some of that was relaxed out of necessity during the Covid environment, but we predict. Some of those expectations will come back, and there's going to be a need to really more tightly integrate digital services into existing models and reduce some of the friction that existed out of necessity in the covid times.

In fact, what's interesting is about half the respondents in the survey said that if they had a bad experience, they wouldn't go back. And about a third said, if they had a great experience, they would go back. So this gets into this interesting conundrum of which is more important, not having a bad experience or having a great experience.

And for some people, each one works. But I think in healthcare, we've learned in general that a bad outcome is far more impactful than a good outcome is in terms of changing people's behaviors. That's interesting because it's, it's people are irrational. I, and I'm not talking to the broad audience. It's not like I'm Joe Rogan and millions of people are listening to this and they're gonna write me.

But just in general, it's. If I have a bad experience at the hospital, if I walk in there and I have a, you know, I meet my doctor and it's a bad experience, you know where I'm going the next time for care, I'm going right back there. That's my primary care doc. That's my insurance. Most likely I'm not gonna change, but if I have a bad digital experience, oh the heck with this, I'm going right back to the office.

But you wouldn't have the other, I had a bad office experience. I'm going to digital. Right. Well, we, we have some interesting data around who, uh, trust from an outcome perspective and, and patients still trust their clinicians. 70% pays the greatest amount of trust in the healthcare they receive. From a clinician.

And whereas, uh, from a digital perspective, that's more like in the thirties. We haven't gotten to the place where people are comfortable on a equivalent basis between the two. And, and that's why the, I think the important thing to think about digital health is it's really a tool that expands and augments the formal care system.

It creates optionality for certain things. It's not like we're gonna go from one to the other. It's really that digital is gonna become part of the, the way we do care and allow. People to have options in the way that makes sense for them. Yeah. I, I want to talk about this privacy and security and we focused it in a little bit too much on telehealth.

'cause there is this remote patient monitoring. We're seeing, we're seeing Mayo really drive this forward. We're seeing other systems, uh, especially with chronic conditions during Covid became very creative in terms of providing some devices locally. But a lot of that comes back to privacy and security.

What are we seeing? What are we hearing? Across the different demographics about privacy and security. Brian, I'll let you take that. Yeah. As it relates to privacy and security, there is, there's really a big opportunity to establish trust and there's a lot of concern related to who is a trusted source of your health information.

As you can imagine, the primary, the source of trust that exists is with. Clinicians and providers, and there's more skepticism and less trust. When you look at some of the new entrants into the healthcare space, whether it's the large tech platforms or other retailers in general, this kind of signals the need to figure out how do you communicate how you are being a good steward of people's data, uh, and how you use that.

Go forward to build trust. Mm-Hmm. , let me ask you this. So are, are, so in my local market, the health system is a trusted name. It's quality, it's, and, and my neighbors work at that health system. They're, they're trusted, but Apple's also a trusted name. So are you finding people trust Apple with their data more than they, they trust their local health system.

And given this week. We're recording this in a week where UHS has been compromised, Nebraska medicine's been compromised, the number of, there's just a number of systems that are getting hit with ransomware and those kind of things. Uh, is, is that playing a role in, in how people view their privacy and security of their data?

I, I think there's two different dimensions to that statement. One of them is around privacy and one is around security. So on the issue of security, meaning who's gonna protect my data from getting stolen? Interestingly enough, uh, people generally believe that the delivery system is the best at protecting their data from getting stolen.

And all of our empiric research suggests that they're the worst at protecting the data from getting stolen. And they generally would place the least amount of trust in the government and protecting their data from getting stolen. But the truth of the matter is that is the best entity to keep your data from getting stolen.

The different issue on trust is. Who's gonna do the right thing with my data? Who's gonna use my data for a good purpose? That's where we get into complicated issues about is someone gonna sell my data to someone else that's gonna try to make money off of it or market things back to me? That's where we start to get into trouble when third party companies who are not providers have my data because I don't actually know what their business intent is.

We're not talking about stealing, we're talking about purposefully using it in some fashion, and that's where I think, uh, the big tech companies have some work to do. And interestingly, when we looked at that, younger generations did have greater trust in tech companies and retailers than older generations to provide health services.

However, an interesting thing I think in our data is Gen Z. Has an interesting pattern where it isn't as strong of trust relative to millennials and Gen X. So that's something we're gonna be watching in the future. Yeah. Talk, uh, expand on the demographics a little bit. So I, I want to look at the demographics in two directions.

I wanna look at, you know, the demographics of people using it. Uh, I also wanna talk about the clinicians. How are, are we seeing adoption, and I don't know if you break it down in this perspective, but adoption for older physicians and younger. Physicians and those kind of things. Let's start with just the general population, digital health adoption.

You touched on this earlier, but yeah. What are we seeing in terms of, just broadly across the board is, you talked about Gen X and you talked, when we talked about 'em, we talked about the young Invincibles and then the chronic patients, right? These are two very different categories. Is is it better to look at it that way, or is it better to look at it based on.

Traditional demographic breakdowns. The way I think about it right now, the cohorts that are the most natural are the baby boomers and older, so call them 56 years old and older. And then you see the, the Gen Xers that sit between their, their 40 and mid fifties. And then you start, and then you see the younger cohort, which Brian made the point, the very young, the people.

The people under the age of 25 are actually different than the people between 25 and 40. What? So what we see, for example, is if you're a baby boomer, and this is actually, I used to talk about this, where the older people were the. Post-baby boomer. And then I realize I'm a baby boomer. I'm in the older generation now, and every data set I'm considered older because baby boomers are older.

They're sitting in that kind of one out of five range for using these kinds of technologies. And then if you go to the Gen Xers, so the people in their thirties and their forties, uh, and early fifties, they're sitting more in the mid thirties, 30 to 40% range. Then when you go under the age of 30, and this is all technologies put together, it just think about it as digital and totality, wearables, apps, virtual healthcare.

When you get to the younger than 30, that's where you start to see 50%, 50% plus using something for digital. And then what Brian's point is that the issue of who do you trust with your data is interesting because in that young group. They're very young. They're just as skeptical as the middle aged people as to whether the data's gonna be used and monetized in some fashion.

Um, so they still use it, but they have a much keener awareness of the fact that they're trading their data for something and they're not exactly sure how it's gonna get used. Is there a breakdown by doctor, by type of practice or complexity of the ? Of, of their practice or by age in terms of their adoption of digital health.

Yeah. Our studies didn't take on the doctors. It was strictly through the lens of the consumer. Uh, but I will tell you that it's, when you look at the doctor side of the equation, it is more complicated than you think because the workflow issue confounds a discussion. So if you were to look at doctors as users of digital technologies, not technologies for work.

Doctors are actually some of the fastest adopters of digital tools and toys in their life. Look at, for example, the introduction of an iPad as an example, or an iPhone. They used it. They were one of the fastest classes to use, even for just their daily life. I think the challenge has been that digital health technologies don't fit into the workforce workflow, and because they don't fit into the workflow, you get very different kinds of adoption.

So if you're primarily . A hospital-based doctor, you might get one experience. If you're an office-based doctor, you might get another experience. The act of having to type data in has been such a drag on productivity that it's really caused a lot of doctors to just hold off on using technology in their workflow until they can solve for that problem.

I want to get to what will make digital health stick. One of the reasons I think a video visit makes the most sense is I, I can sit here and be typing right now. I can be taking notes on this and it would appear to you that I'm looking at you. Whereas that was one of the biggest drawbacks in, you know, in going to an office, that they were staring at a computer while you're sitting over here.

We've done a lot of things to enhance that. We have nuance and we have other types of technologies for, uh, voice and, and whatnot, but still there's that impersonal aspect of it. Whereas with this, I could be looking at it, but let's, I, I think the thing everybody wants to, what did your findings show in terms of making digital stick moving forward?

What do we need to do to, to really see those gains? Mm-Hmm. , yeah. Plateau at a higher level. One key thing we need to do to make, uh, digital adoption stick is really leverage the trust of clinicians to get those recommended and trusted recommendations to consumers. What we found prior to . Covid is a majority of people really wanted their clinician to recommend quality solutions.

Like over 50% were like, I really would like that trusted recommendation of what's good versus not good. Help me manage my health. But only 11% of people were receiving that type of recommendation from their clinician. Now, what Covid did. Is now you had out of necessity recommendations were coming for clinicians to use a collection of digital tools, right?

To help people ca stay safe and healthy in the safety of their homes. So the question is how can we, you know, continue that momentum of that trusted recommendation and referral from clinicians to consumers? Interesting. And I think we knew this, the, the physicians are a extremely important piece of this puzzle.

They, they are trusted. When your physician tells you, Hey, you know, here's your prescription, go to the pharmacy. You do that. And one of the things I've said, uh, a couple times is very few people have seen me naked. My doctor has seen me naked. It's that level of trust. We have a close bond, so when they say, Hey, I'm gonna use telehealth for this visit, don't worry about it.

It's pretty common. It's just a follow-up. I'm gonna trust that recommendation. That is probably the leading indicator of people's use, isn't it? It's the physician's recommendation. Yep. Agreed. It's also important to think of the other side of the equation, as Kave was alluding to earlier. Kave, do you wanna talk about just the workflow integration and how to make that work?

Yeah, because, and you made this point, bill, if you, if there's no natural way to fit it into the day, for example, then it becomes a distraction to the way the doctors are working and everything from, do I go between, do I have all physical visits and virtual visits, or do I go between? And what happens if I decide in the middle that I have to order a test or I need to examine you?

And so the more that we can. Address those, the more likely it is that they're gonna use it without it being a distraction to the way they do their workday. There is a lot of that side. And then the other side, and we saw this with the forced adoption of virtual health, is it the technology on the patient's end isn't perfect and seamless.

And if you talk to clinicians, they'll tell you what percentage of their, essentially a telemedicine visit with video bombs out and becomes nothing more than a phone call because the patient side. They just can't figure out how to make it work or they can't get connected. So you've got, let's call it, you know, workflow issues on both sides of this equation in order for everything to try to work.

And I think that to Brian's point, people were forced to use it. They saw some of the benefits, but they also see some of the warts and the ability to get it to stick is directly related to now going in and trying to make those things better. In order to take advantage of it. And I think what you're going to see is a split.

You're gonna see a group of physicians and providers who recognize that actually a physical digital blend is a more optimal way of providing care. I can allocate my resources better. My doctors can actually see more people without adding more doctors. They'll make the investment. Others will look at it and say, you know what?

I've got an office. I've already paid for it. I've got staff. I don't really need to go to the effort of trying to sort all that stuff out. Just come back in and so you'll see some percent slide back because they don't, they're not ready to make the additional investment. And then others will see the return on investment in the future and continue down that path.

They'll take advantage of the accelerant. So I expect to see separation of behaviors post covid in terms of who makes the investment to persist and who basically rolls back. Yeah. This whole concept of care to distance, I think is gonna be something we look at as a covid generated thing. We've talked to health systems where even within the hospital, they're limiting the number of touchpoint, not only with infectious, but with with other patients as well.

And they're finding ways. I, I would assume so that would be one aspect. If I were making the case to physicians, that would be one aspect of. It, it's safer and in some cases to do care at a distance. And then the second I would make is, look, we've been talking about quality of life and getting you home by five o'clock for a long time.

How about we get you home by noon? You have office hours during the week that are, you know, 8:00 AM to to 12, and the rest of your visits are telehealth from home because there's no viable reason for you to be, we, we could really make a . If the, again, a lot of this depends on the financials, the, the reimbursements, and a lot of it depends on the tools and technologies and the workflow as we talk about.

But if we can solve those problems, we can actually do rounding this way. We can do, there's a lot of things we can do with these technologies as we've proven during Covid. I think, yeah, go. We've written specifically about the fact that. Physical distance as a requirement and a benefit is now in the calculus for virtual.

It used to be that you, you thought about virtual healthcare and you had to do a return on investment, and it was strictly either access, preference, or financial. Now, safety is a new return on investment calculus because I think our society is now accustomed to the concept because of this pandemic. That infection spread and separation is one way to control it.

And the longer we deal with this pandemic, the more that will get burned into our psyche as a way of doing work. Just like physical security became part of our mentality after the, uh, nine 11, even though we don't have continuous acts of terrorism, no one would expect physical security to to be absent in any, in, in a number of settings.

It's just taken for granted. Distance and disease contagion gets baked into the way we think about healthcare, maybe the way we think about, uh, travel, the way we think about hotels. All these kinds of things suddenly have to deal with physical distance and contagion as just a normal part of doing business.

And that gives doctors the opportunity to do this. Waiting rooms we're seeing, we're seeing health systems now say, I eliminated the waiting room for Covid, but if I really think about it, who needs a waiting room? And they're actually redesigning. The office experience to eliminate the waiting room for everybody forever into the future.

And caves really pointing out the opportunity. And this is an opportunity that we call out. In the report and that's, this really creates an opportunity for healthcare enterprises to not just think of, am I adding digital or adding a virtual channel to connect? It's really how do we rethink the care model?

How do we rethink the care model to blend digital and physical, to change the nature of different roles being incorporated in that, to address many of the items Kave mentioned. What are some other things that we need to take into account in order for these digital gains to stick? I don't know which one of you wants to answer that.

Yeah. One important thing we need to consider as digital increasingly becomes part of care models is the digital divide, and that's because consumers are not benefiting evenly from digital health. We need to think through who has access to broadband access, other forms of technology, and how do we ensure equity and equitable access to the technologies.

To enable digital care models. It's interesting, I had that conversation on social media just this week. 'cause one of the things I've been, I've now said twice on social media is if the government wants to fund something, one of the things they might wanna consider funding is getting everyone a cell phone.

Because that's, and a data plan, because to a certain extent, I don't know how people function anymore. That's how we look for jobs. It's how we get directions to things. It's how we find a doctor. It's how we visit with a doctor. It. There really is. And broadband access is one of those, one of those really challenging topics to talk about.

Everyone feels like the government should solve this, but it feels to me like SpaceX is gonna solve this . There are some commercial as well as government ways that we can get everyone broadband access. But at the end of the day, if I don't have that device that gives me, that is the endpoint for that. I, I is.

You're seeing those divides? Are there solutions out there? Are there are people talking about how that is gonna be solved? Yeah, I think it's interesting 'cause on one hand, digital actually solves an access problem that existed before digital technology. It makes it possible to, uh, reach distances that you couldn't reach or to spread out resources in ways that you couldn't spread out or.

Maybe break the link of time to two people can't be in the same room at the same time, but they can have a conversation. So arguably digital has improved access, but it doesn't guarantee access because at the end of the day, you still need the technical ability to interact. And for example, in some developing countries where there is no broadband connectivity for that very last mile, you're seeing interesting models where you take a.

Uh, a lay person, train them a little bit, and then give them a smart device, and then they can physically go into a setting. In fact, it's even being used in some low income communities in the United States where a local healthcare worker with a smart device essentially closes that last mile digital access for some people.

We also see this as a unique room for collaborations, and we're starting to see some of these materialize in the market today. So recently, uh, Centene has announced a collaboration with Samsung to distribute phones for free to people of need. And we're seeing things like that in different ways of trying to address the gap.

Yeah, let me, so let me close on that. This has been a great discussion. I, I really appreciate you guys coming on. . And at the end I'm gonna provide some information on how to access the the report. And I think it's a must read who is, I'm looking at things and I'm constantly talking to healthcare systems about being dis mediad.

Allowing people to come between you and your customers. Now there's a lot of things in terms of networks and whatnot that require people to keep coming back, but we keep seeing these moves by, by players. Uh, acquisitions and just little pieces that organizations keep getting in between health providers and their customers, providers, payers, retail tech companies.

There's . Lot of movement here. It digital is probably one of those ways that people can really disrupt, or we know that they can disrupt the market. Who's gonna lead the way in terms of digital disruption of healthcare, do you think, this may not be in the report. This might just be an opinion. That's okay.

Yeah. Brian, you wanna give your thoughts and then I'll give mine. Yeah. I, you know, I, I think there . The opportunity to lead the way is coming from incumbent health organizations and really those that are seeing this, seeing the current learning as a way to rethink care models and how do we both deliver care differently and finance care differently.

In many cases, that will come also through collaboration with many of the non-traditional entrants that are entering into the market as a way to . Complement to create a new ecosystem. Mm-Hmm. . And Bill, the way I think about it to add to that is I think you have to separate out the technology from the sponsor of the technology.

And when you ask that question, uh, clearly. Technology companies will build capabilities, but the question as to who's going to own and use that technology is, I think, wide open right now. And it honestly, it's for the delivery system to lose. Because what we're seeing more and more of is just like, uh, when we wake up in the morning and we have a question about anything in life, oftentimes we start with a search of some sort, and the majority of those searches are done on Google Health.

Actually, inquiries start the same way, and the simple question is, where's the first place I start on my journey? That doesn't necessarily mean that I'm, I'm not gonna go to my doctor, but let me figure out what my options are. And the sponsor of that can be a health provider organization. It could be an insurance company, it could be a government, it could be a third party company, a brand we've never heard of.

It could be anybody. But if people don't recognize the fact that if you just the journey, there's an opportunity. To use a digital platform to be the first thing people think about, to start their journey, then you lose the opportunity to be in that flow. And I would say right now to the provider organizations listening here, if you take it for granted that people are gonna come to you as the first stop, you'll find out that there's a stop before you and someone, anyone other than you could step into that if you don't step into.

Fantastic. Gentlemen, this is, uh, this has been a great conversation and, uh, I, I really appreciate you doing this research and coming on the show. It's, it's really been fantastic. Thanks. Thanks again for your time. Thanks, bill. Take care. Bye-Bye bye. That's all for this week. I want to thank our guests for sharing their research.

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Please check back on Tuesday for news Wednesday for solutions and Friday for interviews with industry influencers. Thanks for listening. That's all for.