Today in health, it interviews from the chime

conference in San Diego.

My name is bill Russell.

I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in health.

It a channel dedicated to keeping health it staff current and engaged.

Just a quick reminder.

I wouldn't be dropping interviews over the next couple of days and into

next week from the chime conference.

And then I'm going to have some more interviews from the next conference I

want to be going to, and then eventually I'll get back to Florida and to the studio

where we'll start looking at the news.

Once again.

Hope you enjoy this interview.

All right.

Another interview from the chime floor.

And we are here with a member of the class from welcome back Kotter.

We're here with Corinne Edwards.

That was a great picture of you up there.

You did.

I'm sorry.

I didn't finish with the Korean Edwards, Quill health CEO, but the the opening

for chime, you were up on stage.

You're a chime board member.

I am a time board better.

We did this whole skit for welcome back hotter.

Yep.

The new Yorker in me had to come out and they showed my

really big hair in high school.

It was, are

you originally from New York that explains to the New York giants?

Totally.

Yes.

But you lived in Boston.

I did.

So I was born in Yonkers.

I grew up in New York and I went to school in DC and then my first gig was in Boston.

So it just became this thing where I always held on to the giants,

the giants, but not giant.

I was

never that big into baseball.

And so now, because of my basketball, legions was also not strong.

So I'm a Sixers fan and I'm a giants fan.

That's my two sports, but I thought

you followed.

Yeah, don't worry.

You're Phillies.

You're not missing much.

I'm sorry.

I'm sure somebody from Philadelphia is watching.

I'm originally from Pennsylvania.

And so I grew up a Phillies fan, an Eagles fan, Penn state fan, all those things.

But what I found is when you move around the country yeah.

It's.

It's kinda neat to root for the team where you live.

I'm always going to be a St.

Louis Cardinals fan.

I lived there for 20 years, but when you move to a city, it's, there's

something about connecting with it and being there and it's great for

me coming to Philly.

Cause I think Philly is very similar to a New York city.

So it's just a, it's a fun, it's a gritty city, but it's close to New York so I can

get to the Meadowlands really quickly.

So for me, I'm still rooting for a local team, but I can't

wear any blue on the streets.

And

the good news Saquon Barkley went to Penn state.

So

a little tiny in there.

I know we're going to talk well, hell don't worry because it is.

I want to hear your journey.

It's been awhile since I, since we visited, but.

New York giants.

They've got problems.

They do.

So a Cowboys game, I have to give them credit.

So 70% of the offensive line was in the locker room.

Injured.

Danny Jones got that bad whack, but I give them credit because they had grit

to come back and score a touchdown.

And just I know they didn't win the game, but they showed grit.

And last week, the Panthers, that was fun.

You really are a diehard fan.

We're going to do it.

We're going to come back someday.

Maybe someday.

Maybe spring bill Parcells back, is that the last time you had.

Come on

now, we took two rings away from Brady.

That's true.

You had the Eli years and the catch over the head and that kind of stuff.

You really are a fan.

If you like to.

You'd like, no, all this stuff ever since I was a kid.

Wow, fantastic.

Quill health.

Yes.

You guys are, when we first met, I was in Philadelphia and we actually

did it on location in Philly.

That was fun.

And got to see your location.

You guys were early on.

Maybe at signed pen.

Yeah.

signed a pen two months later.

And so you and I think I connected right in between that.

Yeah.

Just gotten started.

All right.

So you just got started.

That was a couple of years ago.

It was there's this thing called COVID in the middle.

This thing called COVID in the middle, that slowed things down

a little bit or accelerated

it accelerated some things for us.

So what happened was we had pen signed.

We also signed off.

And so we had Philly covered and we were looking to take our time to make sure that

the platform we had built was really going to produce the outcomes that we needed.

And we had time to tune it before we started scaling.

So that's been, that was the fun journey, but what happened in March,

2020, all of our patients went offline.

And so we had to say wait a second, we have this amazingly scalable platform.

It can do any journey.

So what's going on with.

And so we worked with Comcast and independence across our parent companies.

And there were so much misinformation going on.

We partnered with NBC news and the today show, we curated a COVID prepared

this toolkit and taught people how to work from home and had a homeschool.

Your kids had a caregiver remotely.

And so we spun that up in five days.

It was one of those moments where you're like, I hope it works and hope it works.

And so we brought in the Comcast scaling engineers, we've got our backend scaled

up and we launched a 1.3 million.

That following

Monday.

So you're ready to scale now, is this like stuff that's just going to go on the shelf

or is this stuff that like proved out the

platform at the platform?

So it really, when it proved scale, we could do it.

And then two, it proved the flexibility of how we bring together

videos, articles, links, texts, emails, to engage populations

and bring them back to an expo.

So if I'm an ex affinity customer and I happen to be an

video customer, even though I'm in Florida, I think they're everywhere.

Yeah.

I can essentially talk to my set-top box and say what and access

Wilhelm.

Yeah.

So Quill is available on your mobile device or your or the web,

but you can also go to the Comcast box, they Quill, or you can say

what happens next into your voice.

Remote.

The quilt app comes up just like you pair your Netflix account or your Hulu account.

You compare your quilt account.

So on the landing page right now is a ton of great information about the

vaccine and why to get the vaccine and everybody should get vaccinated.

And then.

It's the, if you pair your journey whether you're one of our 10 customers,

you get 10 now, which is great of your, one of our 10 customers.

You can basically see your journey on the screens.

So we're doing a lot with the television when it comes to oncology, new diagnosis,

really sitting down with your family and understanding what it's going to

mean to go through head and neck cancer.

Another one that we're doing is a lot of PT, a lot of self-directed exercises.

You already have the screen hanging on your wall.

Why try to stand up?

So this is you go in and talk to, if I were at a health system, you

come in and talk to, I assume the CA CMO medical officer and others, and you would

say, here's what our platform can do.

And then they sit back and go, where we could use that.

We use that here and here.

And so that's, what's driving your content,

IRIS.

It is.

So we actually, we had a couple of core thesis on where to start.

So the first was where anybody's entering into value based

contracts are capitated models.

And so Medicare is your.

Where are those where those things are capitated and you have to control the 30,

60, 90 days post experience and getting patients prepared for the better outcome

is how we start them pre procedure.

And then we follow them through, post-procedure getting insights

from them along the way.

Interesting.

And then we pivoted to chronics cause that's for the ACS of the world.

That's a big one.

So COPD, diabetes, lupus.

How do we make sure that we can enable the PCPs?

And now we're also doing, fee for service.

Thriving.

And so for differentiating service lines, like musculoskeletal cardiology the areas

of bariatric surgery, the areas that are growing revenue for health system.

So we're differentiating to prove, can we reduce risk?

Can we improve patient compliance?

And can we actually deliver a consumer grade experience?

That's

fun.

I like about this.

The, I talked to Glen Tullman last week at the health conference.

The thing that Glen is a master at is he knows healthcare.

So he's able to say, okay, here's the soft spot that we're going to go in here.

We're going to solve this.

Here's another one.

And when I hear you talk like somebody who knows healthcare.

And when I walked around the health conference and I talked to some of

the startups, they're like, we think this, and we think that, and I'm gone.

You might want to prove out your thesis before you take

that $5 million or 10 or 250

million that the money is raining in.

I've been in this industry for 25 years.

The exciting part for me is we've proven outcomes with rigor.

And so we've reduced readmissions.

We reduce like the savings, improved discharge to home.

We've reduced ed visits.

So I know on the outcome side, the platform works and the way we

get patients through an episode of care is very differentiated.

Will you do studies like public?

You

are going to do a few of them right now.

That's that's good stuff.

And the other thing is, when you're at one client, I'm interviewing you

saying, Hey, I really like you tell me about what is it like being at a

startup, but when you're at 10 clients, that's that's validation in healthcare.

That

means, it's exciting.

And it's also we're we're partnered up in.

So I have a partner Pete care, who is the best in class

interactive in-patient system.

And so when you're hanging TVs on the wall and you're having your patients connect to

their television, we can do the prey, they do the bed, we do the discharge home and

it's this lovely care continuum solution.

And they've been great because they've been answering a lot of infrastructure

RFPs for wonderful new towers going up.

And so it's been a great route to market for us to provide you.

Sure.

Talk to me about the road to CEO because when you write.

We met when you were at Impravada you, weren't not a CEO, but you

were, you're doing a lot of stuff.

The interesting with what I see from the outside, because

I see you on social media.

I see.

Oh, Korean Edwards is going to be here with Dr.

Klasko and she'd be here with, and I'm like, how does she get the product done?

How does she get the board meetings?

How does she get sales?

This, the role of the CEO is a lot of, it's a pretty interesting dance, isn't it?

I think the first thing is you have to surround yourself with great.

And I've had the great fortune of having a few folks follow me that we have

a shorthand or any, which is lovely.

And they have an amazing team.

My CFO, my chief people officer, my chief of staff, they are

they are aligned to the mission.

They help us drive to the

outcome.

So you're not looking at code every day.

I just brought in Dwight rom to look at code every day.

But what I mean?

So there's an operation component.

There's a marketing, there's a sales component.

You're the F you end up being the face of the organization or is it Al Roker?

W

it's really important.

So I've always been, so my role at Impravada was I ran all of our

customers and our post-sale experience.

So running and being integrated in where the clinicians work and

understanding the workflow and seeing the outcomes that's business outcomes.

And so being the front end of this, to know the specifics of the journeys,

to understand how our customers are using it, like when you and I met back

in the day, or you were a CIO at St.

Joe's and you were a customer and getting in there to understand

your business challenges makes us.

So when

you're sitting across from a CEO, you're saying, look, these are

the results we're getting here, and here.

And you already know their challenges you already, before you

go in and sit down with that CEO.

How much of their population is at risk.

How much of their population is Medicare, Medicaid, all that stuff.

That's public.

And so you're ready to talk about what you've done

and also where they need help.

Because I think everybody across the provider side is at a

different stage of this journey.

And so when I think the most, the worst term we're seeing everywhere

is the digital front door.

And we assume there's one.

All right.

We're going to have to edit like five of my episodes.

Now

go ahead.

Because I think it goes back to, there's probably not one digital front

door, there's different experiences.

You have to spin up for different patients on different parts of

their journey and the pane of glass that they use should be irrelevant.

It's what's more convenient for them and the consumer, and more importantly,

what's more convenient to their caregiver.

That's it?

Yeah.

It's interesting.

This is really being driven by the consumers.

Expectations have really changed during COVID.

Are we tracking that.

Because a lot of times we get anecdotal in healthcare.

We go everybody wants a digital front door.

And the reality is when we look at the data, we go, you know what?

They respond to tax a lot better than the newer digital front door, maybe.

But we don't tend to look at that data.

We just assume, oh, digital transformation means a really cool

app or a really cool something.

Are we tracking that?

How we're interacting with.

We

are, and I think it goes back to, everyone's

got different digital personas.

And when you're on different parts of the journey, getting a hip replacement

is completely different than going through head and neck cancer.

Or if you're going through head and neck cancer, you have to have surgery.

There is something where you have your family's impacted, you are impacted.

Your life expectancy is impacted.

So getting prepared for that mentally and having a good outcome is tied

to preparedness hip replacement.

Do you know, the fundamentals, do you need to show up prepared and then

recovering from that it's getting moving and making sure patients are moving.

So sometimes getting moving means a TV and exercises, getting

ready for head neck cancer.

That means a lot of other offline conversations.

Just understanding the information when you're ready to hear it

on whatever pane of glass you

want.

What about, so w we have a lot of conversations about health

equity and those kinds of things.

Communities.

Philadelphia is one of those.

Cause the interview I did with Dr.

Klasko taught he very much.

Hey, that's zip code?

It's going to die five years quicker than that zip code.

And he wasn't talking like a hundred miles away.

He was talking like, yeah.

Yeah.

In Philadelphia it was pretty stark.

Does the set top box.

That's a phone.

You have a lot of different ways

to tone the texts and the emails really resonates.

So we have, one of our customers is AmeriHealth Caritas, and

they're a Medicaid provider and we serve 187,000 Medicaid lives

in Philadelphia, five county.

And really for them, we're really driving up health literacy for

caregiving, just on the notion of if you're caring for someone in the

Medicaid program and you they qualify for being a longterm shared services.

And what are the benefits?

How do I navigate Medicaid?

How do I make sure that the person I'm caring for it gets the right care

at the right venue at the right time?

So it's been really interesting understanding their text, email

adoption versus long form video content.

And then also with that population, we promote the Comcast internet essentials

program where any household that qualifies for Medicaid can get $10 a

month internet and a hundred dollars PC.

So we can start connecting homes in a different way, especially in urban

environments that have connectivity.

Brianna, we could talk for another half hour easily.

You're stepping off the board next year.

Yeah.

My term is over in December 10 year five-year it was five years.

It was phenomenal.

It's a great organization.

What we do here, I'm really excited for the Vive conference coming up.

I think it's going to be a great

marriage.

Of course I was worried about.

Sometimes you and I, this is the only time we get together.

So we'll have to, we'll have to make it a little bit more next year.

So thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

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