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October 7, 2022: Healthcare is an extremely emotional business, whether you’re on the providing side or you're on the receiving end. Kathy Azeez-Narain, Vice President and CDO discusses Hoag’s digital strategy which has transformed and innovated the delivery of both the highest quality care and exceptional patient experiences. How did her experience at AMEX translate to the healthcare world? What are the main focuses of a Chief Digital Officer in healthcare? What are the best tools, processes and methods for building out an intentional health experience?

Key Points:

  • If we want to move into a digital era, what does the technology look like?
  • How did you determine the problems that Hoag could solve for Orange County?
  • One huge problem is that healthcare feels transactional
  • How will AI play into the future of healthcare?
  • Hoag

Sign up for our webinar: Delivering Better Patient Experience with Modern Digital Infrastructure - Thursday October 13 2022: 1pm ET / 10am PT. When the pandemic hit, we suddenly had to decentralize the way we were doing healthcare. But the foundation wasn't there. We are now in a world where care delivery is primarily through digital means. How do we create and maintain a modern healthcare digital foundation with people and processes at the core?

Transcript

This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence. We believe in technology but understand that even the smartest robots can sometimes get speech recognition wrong.

Today on This Week Health.

If we wanna move into a digital era, what does the technology look like? What is that technical foundation that you're gonna build upon look like? Do you have an understanding of how cloud technology should really work? Do you have an understanding of how the API and the open source world looks like? And just having that understanding doesn't mean it's just take it and drop it into healthcare, cuz there's different sensitivities in this industry. But understanding that technology allows you to come in and really poke holes and say, how can it work and what should it look like within healthcare?

Thanks for joining us on This Week Health Keynote. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health, a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. Special thanks to our Keynote show sponsors Sirius Healthcare, VMware, Transcarent, Press Ganey, Semperis and Veritas for choosing to invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health 📍 leaders.

All right. Today we're joined by Kathy Aziz-Narain, chief digital officer for Hoag hospital, Kathy. Welcome to the show. Thanks.

Thanks for having me. How are you doing today?

Good, good. Looking forward to the conversation. One of the things my listeners. Require me to do now. They keep pushing me is to ask the question to tell us about your hospital or your health system. Because I know all about ho but sometimes the listeners don't. So share a little bit about ho and what you guys do.

Of course, ho is a healthcare institution. We have two hospitals and about 20 plus urgent care clinic settings in the orange county market. And so we are nationally ranked. So as much as we're focused in the OC region, we are part of the top 100 in the country.

And definitely one, I think number one in all of OC from a. Practice for the community. And so it's an awesome organization, I think, from both the primary care business that it has the urgent care business and then all the way into specialty, across AMI of specialty areas. Cancer women's heart and vascular neuro and then a slew of others, digestive, et cetera, that comes up quite a bit. And so, yeah, we are one of the premier health partners in the EE market.

Fantastic. And one of the things. If anyone's ever driven up Pacific coast highway you're gonna see ho hospital, especially when you get to Newport beach, you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna see it up there on the top of the hill. And I used to work at St St. Joseph health prior to the merger with Providence. And it was interesting to see the number of people that saw our doctors. But wanted to have their baby at ho hospital. Just the view is if you've been in some of those rooms, the view is amazing. Overlooking the Harbor, overlooking the ocean is pretty amazing.

It is definitely a beautiful facility. I am not gonna lie. I actually fun story after, and I'll tell you a little bit of my I'm sure. We'll dive into my background a little bit, but I had a baby late last year. And so I got to experience that delivery journey here at ho. And it was truly unique.

honestly the view. Yes, but also just the nurses, the doctors, the facility, the care you get, it was just beyond what I. Was expecting and doing, and, and fun fact. Second fun fact is I'm from New York. So my first child, he's seven years old now. I had that delivery experience out in New York. It was like night and day. I will tell you from then to now,

I'm not gonna ask you which, which hospital that was. That was it in New York? No, no, no, no. My father-in-law received care at hog. it was amazing. I mean, I got to, I got to be there by his bedside throughout that whole experience. And it really is exceptional care. Talk about your path to becoming the chief digital officer at Hoag. What does that path look.

definitely not planned. Right. So I Have always been in the digital world predominantly in financial services. And so I'm previous to ho was at American express and I was at Amex for 15 years. So I had a pretty long career in that sector and with American express, which I loved, I loved my time there. I loved my career and the growth I've had in that organiz. And I've always, either been in roles that are net new for the org. So they're like, Hey Kathy, we have this new thing we're trying to do.

Do you wanna come over and help us figure it out? And this was in the Amex world, always with a digital scope wrapped around it. I've had some time in digital marketing. I've had some time on. And big data. I've had time building new product. I've had time building design teams within American express, all the way to building actual products that people are using today.

As they think about the brand of American express. And so when I got the call from hog. It wasn't that it was the first time healthcare had reached out, but it was the first time that I was like, oh, this is an interesting one because of the size of Hogue and what I would say that was appealing about that.

I think digital transformation as a whole, for any industry. It's hard and the more legacy and the larger it is, you do need to figure out what are the real problems that industry has before you just jump into it and say, oh, I know what to do digitally. It's not a one size fits all what I did at Amex.

Wasn't exactly transferable. One to one into healthcare. And so I would say getting to this point, the chief digital officer chief product officer, well, within the skill sets that I was building in Amex, as it relates to healthcare, I think what's interesting in how to get here is healthcare does need a lot to me and can use a lot of outside of industry help.

When we think about those topics, innovation, digital experience Technology. Right. And the reason is some of those industries went through what healthcare is going through to some extent right now, quite a little. Before now. And so that experience and understanding how sticky and muddy and the grit involved in it, especially when you are an organization that's been around for some time.

I think this year Hogue is going to be 70 years, right? We're gonna celebrate our 70 year anniversary. When you think about that type of history systems, culture, process, workflow, all of that. You have to have people that have come out of industry. In organizations that have gone through similar things to say, Hey, it's not gonna be a, just.

One size fits all. I'm just not just gonna take this and plop this technology here. There's a little bit of grit in sticking through what change is gonna look like for the industry. So I would say it wasn't a plan. It was more of that skillset being really applicable to healthcare now, and me being really excited about the challenges that needed to be solved in healthcare to say, Hey, I wanna bring that experience from Amex into this industry.

Well, what does that, what does that look like? I mean, you've been in healthcare for a little while now. So what is the experience from AMX? How does that translate? Does it translate one to one in terms of building out an experience or are there just aspects that you bring in? And it's a, just a whole different problem set that you're applying the same tools to.

I think it's a mixture of things. One it's understanding, Hey, if we wanna move into a digital era, what does the technology look like? Right. What is that technical foundation that you're gonna build upon? Look like? So part of the role is really, Hey, do you have an understanding of how cloud technology should really work? Do you have an understanding of how the API and the open source world looks like? And. Just having that understanding doesn't mean it's just take it and drop it into healthcare, cuz there's different sensitivities in this industry.

But understanding that technology allows you to come in and really poke holes and say, how can it work and what should it look like within healthcare? Right. So you're not starting from ground zero. You're like, I've never worked with cloud before. Right? You have some of that experience and knowledge. So there's some of that.

That's definitely translatable and bringing that from my Amex days, there is the. And thinking behind what and how to do transformation when you think about digital and experience. Right. So I would say some tenants would. Customer centricity healthcare yes. Is a customer business, right? When you think about the patient and the experience, but if I take financial service in healthcare, there are two different emotional spectrums happening.

Healthcare's an extremely emotional business, whether you are on the providing side or you're on the receiving end of it. And, and if we are gonna be honest about it, no, one's like. When we put a new benefit on a platinum American express card or a Centurion card everybody's excited about that.

But if you tell someone, Hey, you're coming to the hospital for X and Y procedure. I, if we're gonna be honest, like, no, one's like jumping up and down fully about that. Right. Right. And so there's a whole different emotional edge that we have to take into account. When I think about healthcare, the reason I bring that up is cuz customer centricity.

And how we've done it at American express. Right? Every time we made product decisions, every time we were building, every time we were thinking about improving the journey for someone, we thought about how the customer was central to that. Right. And in healthcare, that's one of the principles that in my team that we're building strongly, as we think about digital, we're saying.

What are the true problems out there that we really are trying to solve versus what is everybody buzzing and talking about? And what does technology look like in healthcare? Where more so, and what does the experience need to be? What are the problems we have to solve? What does it mean for the patient, the consumer, the customer who I think of in three different lens, and then what do we build?

Not necessarily just bringing the tech in. And so I think that customer centricity is really important. And then building the right team. Right? So that's another thing from my Amex days that it took practice in learning. How do you bring the talent said that everybody's buzzing around, whether it be from big tech, health, tech, startup world outside of industry to come and impact the change we're trying to drive.

And it's not that easy because the culture of healthcare is very different than what some of the talent is used to. And so. Amex used to be the same. The culture of Amex used to be very different. And when we were trying to recruit that talent set in, it was, it was hard in the beginning. You really had to do some trial and error.

You really had to learn what was gonna be motivating for that cohort. And how does the organization evolve? To, to bring that type of talent set into the organization. Right. And so that skillset is definitely applicable now as we're on this journey as well. And so I think it's a little bit of all those things, right.

It's kind of like that technology experience that I've had at Amex, it's some of the principles of how we were building product. Now that I've learned it there not having to relearn it as we're trying to do it here, and then there's the skill of who. And how we, we need to hire to do the work ahead. It's not the same talent set.

📍 📍 We'll get back to our show in just a moment. I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you our next webinars. On October 13th, we have delivering better patient experiences with modern digital infrastructure. During this conversation, we're gonna discuss multi-cloud, how to modernize health it, and a blueprint for creating an agile digital infrastructure without impacting the quality of care. If all those things sound really complicated, we're gonna make them less complicated for you on this webinar. This webinar has five campaign episodes. You can view them before the webinar to learn more. You can find these episodes as they release and register for the webinar at this week, health.com. Click on the upcoming webinar section and top right hand corner, and I look forward to seeing you there.

📍 📍 All right. So let me ask you this. Let's delve into I think I wanna delve into the problems that you've decided to solve and how you unearth those problems. What was the process for unearthing those problems? at some point I do wanna talk about the technology set that had at AMX in the technology set that you have here and what, what that looks like to solve problems in healthcare, either the complexity or the new technologies that we're bringing in to address these things. let's start there. That's, that's a big discussion in and of itself. So how did you determine the problems that you were going to solve at Hogg for the orange county C.

Yeah. So step a was just let's listen, right? No talking, no bringing my own opinions in with a couple meetings

listening to whom

to the OC community. So we spent, well, I did two parts, right? I listened internally. I was new to healthcare and the journey's only been two years now. Right. So one when I joined. I was feeling blank slate as it relates to what does healthcare look like on the ground? Forget OC, forget anything. What does, what does it look like other than what I've experienced as a person consuming it on a daily basis?

Right. So first was listen internally my peers said, understand what they thought the problems were then listening to the provider world. Because to me, I see them as a, also a persona. And an audience that's highly important as we solution and think about what we need to do forward. Right. And so what were their thoughts about the problem space and what were they spending all their hours on?

And then we spent a lot of time with the external world. We spent time with people who have used ho I've been at houe I've used houe I've come to your organization for X, Y, or Z reason. We spend time with people who've never used the brand and we spend time with people who've heard of the brand kind of know, but never really had a serious issue yet to kind of move into any, any health relationship to that extent.

Right. And so listening to the customers and the OC community and the people that would be coming to hog was highly important in understanding the problem. And so we sat, we spent time, not just listening, say, tell me all your problems. But we, we said, tell me the problems. And then we brought back ideas and solutions to those same groups and said, what you said is this kind of what you meant if we were to do X, Y, or Z.

And the reason that's different is because many times people say, yeah, we did research. We did. We talked a bunch of people. Well, what we've learned. This I definitely learned deeply at Amex was what people say is not necessarily what you now imagined. They meant. And it's always important that you hear what they said.

Yes. But you bring back what your thinking solves the problem to them. And so uncovering those problems was a ongoing and it still is, by the way, we run research in a weekly cadence. With my team. We're bringing in patients that are using the product, not using the product. And just talking to them constantly to say, are we getting this right?

Is this still an issue? What are the real issues? And to be honest, these are not small issues that people bring up. The things that they're struggling with are big themes that you kind of have to get underneath. So spending a lot of time listening and keeping that continuous loop of feedback, even as we're starting to solution things is really important to the process and finding the problems.

Let's go down one more level and say what specific problem let's take one of the problems yeah. That they, that they identified. And then we're gonna walk it through from problem to ideation, to.

Yeah, one problem is healthcare feels transactional. Let's call it that, right? So this was one might not be surprising for everyone, right? If you think about it, you're like, oh yeah, I have to do an x-ray. I do an x-ray. I have to get my annual visit. I'll do my annual visit. I have an issue. I need to see the gastro doctor. I mean, to see the gastro doctor. And then you have the visit.

Maybe there's hopefully nothing serious comes out of it. There's a little bit of a plan. Maybe you gotta get some medication for this thing. Maybe you gotta start changing your diet on that thing and you kind of go off and that's what we heard in a slew of stories. Right? So let's take women's as an example to go even deeper on it.

One of the things transactional came up, you talked about birth. You hear a lot of people say Hey, I have my doctor here, but I still wanna deliver at ho how do I do that? Moms tell us all the time we spend a lot of time with the moms we say and they tell us I love delivering a hug. It was such a great experience, but then I left and it was very transactional.

It was that moment of birth. And that was it. And you start, you sit and wonder like, well, women go off and there's so many things that are happening after that birth. How are we helping you on that journey? Engaging with you? Not becoming this kind of like sick care only model or this model, when you actually only in the hospital setting or clinic setting that you're showing up or talking to us, not even showing up, just talking to us.

And so this transactional concept we took that, we said, okay, well, if healthcare's very transactional, what are the moments where it would benefit for it? Not to be transactional, not benefit. The organization would benefit the human. That's interacting. Right? Because these people were saying like, I love the experience, but it was so transactional.

I could have used more help after that instance, that interaction happened. And so what we are really thinking about is how do we win a relationship between the visit between the transaction? How are we supporting that patient? That customer not only when they showed up to us, but. In the moments where they didn't even expect us to show up.

Right. Yeah. And I really think when you start to push on digital and consumerism and these topics, you found a way to become relevant and, or top of mind for somebody when they weren't even expecting you to become top of mind or relevant. And so that's just one idea of like, Taking the problem. That's one of the many we uncovered and us then saying, okay, where could digital help with that?

Very transactional feedback that we got and where, and when is it applicable? Cuz it's not applicable for everything else. Some things will still be transactional.

Yep. Let's let's take that word digital down a bit as well. Cuz we hear we're gonna apply digital to the to the addressing the transaction problem that we have in healthcare.

And we're gonna make it more of an ongoing relationship, more touchpoint, more interactions, feel like your health partner in the community. And then we say we're gonna apply digital to that. What does that mean? I mean, digital could be phone calls could be a text. Could be, yeah. I mean, they were, they already receive a ton of stuff from us.

They receive the press Ganey survey comes in after and they get all, I mean, they get so many things from us. I think sometimes that they're like please, please help me with this. But yeah. What does, what does it look like to build that out with digital tools? And what are those digital tools to smooth out that relationship

that I think it's so interesting cuz healthcare has so much data, but if you asked me if I thought we were using it and by we, I mean the collectively the entire industry of healthcare, if we're actually using data effectively, I would say no and the reason I'd say no is not because we're not trying to, but it's because the way we use the data is still for the table stakes or basic things. So to your point, there's a million ways we're touching that customer. After whatever happened and we're different things are happening, it could be the phone call.

It could be a text message. I think what's missing from the equation though. It's that none of that is actually meaningful to the person after whatever's happened, happened. Maybe there's one or two things that they do follow up on, or they do pay attention to, but it's not at a personalized level enough to actually drive impact.

And or say that you're doing something different than all the other noise that's out there. And so what I think digital, if we break that up, cuz I agree with you. For me, the, the world of impact in that journey is not gonna just be some technologies that we plug in. It won't just be, Hey, you can reach the doctor virtually and Hey, you can text the health system.

Those are tools it's really gonna come down to. How do you bridge that experiences that you're building through technology to give you access with human and it has to be humanized, right? I think healthcare is one of those journeys where people, yeah, you don't mind listening to your apple watch that says stand up for a minute right now.

But if you are dealing with something, if you have a chronic condition, if you are trying, maybe you're in the, not even chronic you're on the pre. You're kind of having some indicators that suggest that in a couple years, you're you are going to be dealing with a chronic condition. You don't want help.

That feels one size fits all. You don't wanna help. That is just talking about the institution and press Gaine surveys that really, to me, kind of muddled it's like, yeah, if you asked me, how was my delivery at houe, I'm gonna score you high. If you asked me the question differently, though, if you said, Hey, You delivered at hog.

Do you feel like ho is helping you as you recover from postpartum? Right? My answer might be very different, right? It it's that leveraging the digital journeys that we can build. Forget it's less so tech, but where the tech is just plugged into different journeys in my mind or different parts of the experience you're gonna have.

When is it applicable when to turn it on? And how it connects to the human person to bring some validity to the recommendations we're giving the suggestions, the advice, the treatment, I think is gonna, it's still very important.

and you have that big data background, right? So at, at AMX, you had that fake data background. So you've seen data be used effectively. In the consumer journey, how could we be more effective? Like give us some examples of where we could be more effective, the data that's available. We've been able to, to make it into something that becomes actionable and really personalize the experience.

Yeah. And to be honest, it was a hard journey with am because if you think now Amex, I'm gonna. Maybe mess this number up, but it's 160 plus 65 year old company, right? There's a lot of data dynamics. And if you use it as an example case, right, they had a lot of different relationships with us. One human could have a small business, they could have their personal journey with the with the organization.

They could use us for travel. And each of those relat. Prius thinking about big data, thinking about how data really gets centralized were independent, right? They were being managed independently, not so different in what healthcare does, right? Each of the programs that people spin up in healthcare, each of the entities that you might see, they too are also really in these little siloed boxes.

To some extent. And so at Amex, what I saw really happen and it took a, it was a journey. It was like a five to seven year journey. And they're still on that journey. What we had to do was all get really crisp and clear. Hey, we needed all the data in a central place, or at least accessible feeding to some central place.

So it now doesn't mean that you enact to scrape all. Independent systems, but you at least need to build some bridge that brings those independent system datas into some central source. Right. And that's terminology, people start talking about like data lakes and cloud storage that brings a data layer together, something like that.

The second is now all the data is in some central. Hey, by the way, there's duplicated data. There's one person spelled Kathy's name with a K one person spelled Kathy's name with a C how do you structure it all? And now that's where you're gonna have to hire some very different skill sets. This is where the data scientists come in and they, and data analysts, and really clean up the data and that alone and in of itself is a journey.

It's a massive investment of time and you have to be patient and dedicated to it, right. Once you get through that, which seems like just a lot of call it housekeeping, right? It's just like the table stake, housekeeping. Then you can really activate on the power. You could start to build models off of that data that get you into much more personalized, much more holistic view of Kathy you no longer talking to Kathy.

When she showed up at the urgent. On X date, you can now start to come to Kathy and say, Hey, Kathy, you've had two annual visits in last five years. You've visited the urgent care for XOR Z reasons, by the way, how's that knee doing that injury. Here's a few things you should get checked out in future.

You start to talk to me. In terms of the service you provided, but you start to talk to me in terms of who I, what persona or portfolio you've built up on me. Yeah. Where Amex is right now and what became even more powerful. Now you start to pair that with external data, right? What data could we get from the apple watch?

Like if you think about healthcare, you, all these devices, people are wearing the watches, the aura rings. How could that data help you draw more holistic insight? About the human and not to say credit card and healthcare are the same. They're not, but in credit card, that's what they're doing. They're saying we have all this data about you, transactionally that you've done with us.

That's our data. What are other things that Kathy's into externally that we can pull from to really now speak to her beyond the Amex relationship only. And so. I see that to be where healthcare will need to go. If you are going to really impact a more personal engaging conversation with, with people beyond what they're thinking of you for right beyond what they might already say, Hey yeah, my stomach hurts. I'm going to the doctor,

right. Yeah. It's personalizing that experience. So it's interesting bringing all that data together. I'm not gonna go down this path, but bringing all that data together in healthcare, I wonder how much it mirrors the world of finance. I mean, we, some old systems in finance, some really old systems in finance, but we tend to have A lot of systems in healthcare and, and bringing all that stuff together.

Let me, let me ask you this question though. So chief digital officer for ho hospital, when you're building out your team, what are some of the key roles that you put in place in order to build out that team for ho.

Well there's two paths when you think about the digital world there's a path of innovation. Do we test new product out there in the digital health space, which is a buzzing business right now and just thinking through it. And then there's a path of digitization. There's a lot already in this system that you can say, Hey, we can digitize some of this because it makes sense. It might drive efficiency.

It might drive better patient experience. Right? I would say those two sides of that fence, it's different talent sets. So on the innovation let's break through, what are the problems we're trying to solve? How do you solve those? The talent sets that I'm looking at is a mixture, right? There's definitely outside of healthcare.

And I'll tell you, I'll come back to it. I'll tell you my reasoning for that. Peered with some inside of healthcare. Right? So what I need is I need talent sets that have built product. So it'll be Product thinkers, engineering backgrounds. A lot of my product thinkers. I like to hire with actually any kind of computer science or human interaction type degree backgrounds.

Right. And so the reason for that is because product really needs to represent the customer constantly as you're thinking about solution. So in my team I have product thinkers with some of that very stem backgrounds. You have creatives, cuz I need people that can really think about experience.

I really think in healthcare, one of the big differentiators for organizations. Will be the experience because the tech that everybody's talking about is kind of the same. So whoever's gonna figure out that full experience line and how to really make it easy, seamless, and frictionless for the person using it.

They're gonna be the ones that are really step up in the mix of saying, oh, no, no, no, no, I'm not leading. There, because what I'm getting is actually feels very differentiated in that way. And so there's a mixture of, for me engineering, creative product, very heavy stem background across the board between the product and engineering side.

And then, like I said, there's a mixture of outside of healthcare for the reasons that I feel like Thinking about that talented coming into healthcare is important. Like for me that set can really bring and draw from other industries. So whether you're hiring X, Googles, X, Amazons, X, apple X Amex which is, I'm thinking about where the team has come from X startup world, they're gonna bring.

Experience and actually taking an idea and bringing it all the way to fruition. Right. And how to think about the technology in that, and then some healthcare backgrounds because healthcare, to your point, it's really complex and you need talent that kind of understand some of the operational things, the workflows, why things were built, the way they were built.

What systems is everyone using? And so the DNA of the team is kind of made that way. With a lot of focus on that innovation transformation end. I call that distinction because on the digitization end, the talent set looks a bit different.

Yeah. So. Talk to me about demographics a little bit. Do you take demographics into account as you're building out the the patient experience that you're looking to develop?

I mean, cuz you guys have an orthopedic. I don't know if it's an orthopedic Institute, orthopedic hospital. I, I'm not sure what I would categorize it, but it's You could see young athletes and you could see older patients and that kind of stuff. Do you build out based on different personas? What the experience should be?

Yeah. So we have an orthopedic Institute at ho and. Absolutely. I mean, healthcare, thet of healthcare you have babies all the way to young adults.

it's people, it's everything

use people. Right. And what we try to think about is the tools personas the word more importantly, we call it archetypes. And the reason I'm gonna use that word is because many times when people create a persona, they'll say. Here is John and John is 70 years old, so he is not gonna be interested in anything tech forward. Well, that's not necessarily true. And so personas sometimes become so definitive to age and what we believe the person is capable of that I don't find it to be the right tool necessarily when we're trying to think about demographic.

What we try to look at is more of an archetype. And the reason I, it, I feel it's a different use case is because we basically say, well, we're gonna look at the types of people. Their comfort level with using tools, technology, more traditionalist path. And so we ended up forming archetypes that said, Hey, there's gonna be a cohort of people who are very much traditionalists. And the age bands in that are going to span, you're going to have a 70 plus person.

so let's, let's take an easier. Delivery women giving birth. Yeah. And that spans not as large. are you able, like what, what kind of tools have you found work for reaching that population with a more cohesive experience across maybe that 15 to 20 years of a woman's.

Yeah. I mean, there's Aton there. Right. And we actually underestimate that market and what, and how invested women could be. But the reality is there's so much on their plate. So the way we think about that group is how do we take the burden of work off of mom? So, like you're saying we know they're busy, we know that mind share is going on to different things, especially as you becoming a mother, there's different worries and, and there's different demands on your time, especially after you deliver like the, like, even as I've was trying to like, figure out my new norm.

You're like, oh my God, this is messy. And so we are constantly thinking about that demographic in terms of how do we make the burden less. For them, if we're gonna put a product out for that cohort, it has to come with less work for mom. And that we're actually helping them regain time for themselves, regain time to do the invisible, to do list that every woman talks about in that cohort.

So we're not only thinking about it as, oh, there's this female that's giving birth and it's just about pregnancy. We're trying to think about that full continuum of care and. We're also being cognizant that some parts of that journey is extremely saturated in the market. So why even bother them with more noise?

So for instance, pregnancy, as they're going through pregnancy we're here, we have a ton of programs to educate mom on that journey. They have a relationship with us, with their physicians and their OB GYNs that they love. They know they're delivering here, but when it comes to progress in the birth and there's a, the slew of apps on the market.

Is that the right place for hog or, or me and the team to spend the energy there's moments, but there's other areas that are completely underserved for them that we wanna make sure that we're not forgetting are just as important as that pregnancy stage. And so I would take that cohort and I would really look at the full continuum of care.

Starting if we were to really hone in on that segment, right. Starting from unpregnant all the way to after pregnancy and what life and milestones look like. And then we'll plot, where do we feel like we're not adding more noise? Or burden of work on mom that we can really come in and solve a problem for them.

And that's how we've been looking at the mapping as we think about the demographic, a segment and how to go forward with an idea.

Is there a specific technology that you are looking at either now or in the next couple years that you're excited about that you think? Yeah. That could have a significant impact on building out the experience.

I mean, I'm, I'm always super interested in how AI is gonna play in all of it. Right. I think as it relates to tools like telemedicine, like to me, those are already table stakes and it's not, while we still have a road to go in making sure we know when it's applicable and giving people the most frictionless journey as they're trying to use these tools and not just everybody vying.

Plugging away at the same message. For me, as I think about all the products we're bringing out. So speaking of women we launched a product in August called Nona and it's centered around mom's postpartum phase. And it was really on that theme of transaction you've delivered. But then what we know you're at home.

You need a support system. How do we give you a support system to take home with you? So we brought that a product out that gives you 24 7 access to the to these care guides. And they're basically backgrounds are lactation, previous RNs, previous labor and delivery nurses might have P pediatrics background, etcetera. and you have 24 7 asked us to ask them questions as you're on that next three to six months of I have a baby now at home, I'm recovering from birth, et cetera. And so when I think about a product like that, I'm curious at where AI could actually even help further. Right. There's a lot of self-serve questions that come up and sometimes moms just need the quick answer.

And if I'm really being Holding myself accountable to that theme. I said of, are we able to help mom not give them burden of work? Right. Not have to have them think of the question first. How do I get proactive in that? Getting to the point of like, Hey, I know this could be on Kathy's mind. Why don't I serve it up?

I think AI's gonna be interesting. And obviously that's a very simple use case. There's so many advanced use cases that I'm interested when paired with the right human expertise, how it's gonna work.

Yeah. We're still working on the simple use cases. As you said earlier, we have so much data. AI is interesting, cuz if we can get the data. Because you have to do that first. And we're able to gain insights from that data. Now, all sorts of things are possible. A little text message here little outreach there, whatnot, but it really does start with knowing the person on the other end of the line and reaching them where they're at, right understanding how they wanna be reached and reaching them in that place. Kathy. I wanna thank you for your time. It was great. Getting to know you was great catching up with you and I look forward to seeing you in person at some point in the future.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. Bella was a great conversation. I appreciate you having me 📍 here today.

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