In this interview, John Beadle explores how venture studios can create synergies between health systems and tech innovators. He discusses strategies for identifying critical healthcare challenges, developing win-win partnerships, and scaling solutions that improve patient outcomes while addressing hospitals' operational and financial needs.
John Beadle, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Aegis Ventures
Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live
Intro 0:00: Welcome to Digital Health talks. Each week, we meet with the healthcare leaders making an immeasurable difference in equity, access and quality. Hear about what tech is worth investing in and what isn't. As we focus on the innovations that deliver. Join Megan Antonelli, Janae sharp and Shahid Shah for a weekly no BS deep dive on what's really making an impact in healthcare.
Megan Antonelli 0:30: Welcome to Health Impact, live digital health talks. This is Megan Antonelli, your host, and I'm here today with Jon beetle. John is the co founder and Managing Partner of Egypt ventures, a New York based venture studio with a background in private equity and investment banking, John spearheaded the Aegis Digital Consortium uniting nine leading health systems, and architected a $100 million partnership with Northwell Health. His unique approach combines financial acumen with deep understanding of Healthcare's complexities, positioning him as a bridge between innovative tech and traditional hospital systems. Hi, John, thanks for being here today.
John Beadle 1:03: Megan, great to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Megan Antonelli 1:06: Yeah, it was so great to meet you in New York and health impact. And really, thank you for joining us. It was, you know, so nice to you know, we always try to have the investor community on there, but it's such a unique time in the market, and that's such a great event. Oh, thanks. So, you know, it's, it's my pleasure, but I was, you know, it was a success because of the speakers and Neil. Neil carpenter did a great job with his panel and bringing those folks together too. Um, when you know, you know, I know your background a little bit, but I'd love for you to tell the audience, you know, I think Mark Paradise from Northwell actually said, you know, if we wanted to make money, we would, you know, be in oil and alcohol, not you know, healthcare is really hard and complex. So, you know, you had choices working in finance. How did you get to healthcare?
John Beadle 1:56: Sure, so great to be with you, Megan. Look forward to today's discussion. As you noted, I'm an investor by background. Have invested across a lot of different industries and asset classes, from private equity, infrastructure, data centers, renewable energy, venture capital, lots of different types of opportunities. But I think healthcare was always a calling for me, just given the way that I grew up. So my mom was a nurse, got incredibly sick when I was young from a traumatic brain injury. Saw her, you know, up until this day, struggled to access the healthcare system in the right way, and always wanted to try to prepare myself to be able to make an impact in improving quality, access, sustainability across healthcare. So I studied, you know, health policy and the business government relationship in the US at Harvard, ended up going into investment banking and private equity, as you noted, mostly to develop that really good, generalizable, dynamic set of skills that I could apply to a lot of different industries. And as soon as I got the opportunity to come back to healthcare, as I was overseeing the personal venture portfolio for the CEO and founder of the private equity firm that I was working for, and that was how we formed our initial relationship with Northwell Health, just doing minority venture investments. And as I was socialized more and more with the Northwell folks, starting about six years ago, just saw enormous potential for a venture studio model where you bring in house all of the different resources and capabilities that are required to ideate, validate, launch and scale healthcare businesses in partnership with some of the industry leaders. Just pitch the chairman and CEO of APL on CD, a new platform, which became Aegis. And from there, we've really been off to the races in building this new innovative outside in model of innovation, where we'll partner shoulder to shoulder with a lot of the leading healthcare systems across the US to build new companies that both serve as a source of revenue diversification and solve core business challenges. And healthcare, as you noted, is incredibly difficult. It's multifaceted. It's complex. First Principles often, don't, you know, get you to the right answer, unfortunately, but I feel like we've made a lot of progress in bringing all of the resources and talent and partnerships to be able to really make a dent in a lot of the biggest challenges facing healthcare. So it's a very exciting moment for us, and I wouldn't pick any other industry to drive impact in?
Megan Antonelli 4:22: Yeah, well, I agree. I guess that's why we're why we're here. And it is, it is a, you know, I think so many people have that personal story that brings them to healthcare, but it's also one of the areas, while it's hard and it's complex, there are, there's so much room for improvements, there's a lot, it's a lot we feel like we can do, right? And along those lines, you know, I think we talk about this a lot, that the incentives, you know, for the payers and for hospitals, you know, aren't quite aligned. And even through our journey at health impact, we really, you know, I worked in pharma for a long time. I worked in on the payer side, and I came to hospitals. As the place where, you know, healthcare happens and there is so much room for improvement. Tell me a little bit. I mean, I know the team at Northwell is amazing, and certainly Michael Dowling has been, you know, he's been incredibly visionary. But tell me a little bit about that, you know, sort of how that all came together and, and sort of maybe a little bit of, why Northwell and why Aegis?
John Beadle 5:21: Sure, so when we originally started working with Northwell, as I mentioned, it was on a minority venture capital basis, where we were looking to try to source better opportunities, have partners who could help us diligence those opportunities and then more actively add value and be helpful to the investments that we ended up making. And so started on that basis, it ended up being a great way to build the relationship. And at the time we began working with Northwell, Michael had just put in place a new leadership team to execute the for profit strategy of Northwell, which ultimately would drive margin back to the system to be able to make the types of investments they needed in order to execute against the core mission of delivering care to the communities that Northwell serves. And so we came in at a moment where there was a lot of energy and enthusiasm around figuring out how to take the extraordinary strategic resources that Northwell has, whether it's a business unit, to spin out a very large opportunity to execute a new platform that we built together data assets that were rich and generalizable and had value in the market to others looking to build products. How could we come in and help co develop a strategy to help Northwell diversify its revenue and move to higher value pools as a system? And so that was the genesis of the relationship, and the way we really did it was through a listening tour and so and this is what we do whenever we work with a new health system partner, we look at the five year strategic plan, we understand what other investments they've made, particularly in technology, and it what's worked, what hasn't worked. Where are there gaps that we can fill to help make sure that they get the full value out of the major investments they've made in erms, CRM system in ERP systems, EHR CRMs, all of the different major tech investments across the full stack of what they need in order to deliver care effectively. How do we fill in the gaps make sure that those investments are successful and that they're able to leverage them in the way they had hoped when they picked those large scale vendors? And so that was really how the relationship started. Ultimately, the way we've done it is through this very high touch boots on the ground partnership model where we will shadow different business unit leaders or service line leaders. They'll co develop these products with us, really shoulder to shoulder, participating in every layer of the feedback and validation cycle. They'll be the first end users actually using the product. And once we've developed strong enough ROI and proof of concept within Northwell, we use the consortium we've built to scale that and bring it to other healthcare systems, which is also great for the companies, because it gets them to product market fit a lot sooner, since they have a set of kind of ready made partners, investors and customers who are excited about the opportunity have been socialized about it for for, you know, a number of a number of months at that point, and are excited for the opportunity to invest in to be a customer and continue to participate in that CO development process. And so the models worked really well. As as you noted, we've now formed a consortium of nine health systems around the country that we're doing the same thing with. And so we're incredibly grateful to the folks at Northwell who were willing to put so much time, energy and resources into this was a brand new concept, and we started doing it together. And I think it's a testament to Michael's leadership and his willingness to do new things and let his people take risks. And now that it's been proven out, the amount of demand to do the same thing across the overall healthcare ecosystem is enormous, but if we had gone to a lot of those folks long time ago, it would have been very challenging to get them to agree to that first partner. So we'll always be incredibly grateful to the folks at Northwell for being willing to take that risk and CO develop this model with us,
Megan Antonelli 9:02: right? That's great. Yeah, no, it is. I mean, having watched kind of that strategy for health systems to, you know, one sort of dip their toe into the venture model, maybe, whether they have a venture's team or a ventures group, versus, really, you know, almost like an embedded partnership that you guys have done. You know, there is I, you know, certainly people that get into healthcare aren't often, you know, strong business background, certainly finance, venture capital. So, you know, it sounds like, you know, at Northwell and certainly, Michael came to this with a level of sophistication. But what you know now that you're going to different hospitals. Maybe, you know, smaller, mid size, you know, what are you finding? And how do you, you know? How are you able to kind of bridge that gap?
John Beadle 9:48: It's a great question. So I think the biggest thing about dealing with health systems is there's certain universal truths of partnering with health systems that apply across everyone that you work with. Right? But I think once you've worked with one health system, you've worked with one health system, they're all so incredibly different in terms of cultures, how they're organized, their strategies, etc, that I think it's incredibly important when you come in to approach every new partnership with a heavy dose of humility and a desire to really listen and understand how these different systems function, how they want to partner with us. And I think given the size of a lot of the systems we're partnering with, our target is really large. IDNs that our regional leaders have really strong teams to execute against. This can resource a, you know, an intensive high touch partnership initiative like this. And once we've gotten through that CO development cycle, that's really when we're very eager to bring it to out to the edges, to smaller systems, because at that point it's really a B to B software product, and not something that we are co developing and that the system needs to resource in the same way. And so I do think what we are hearing generally, though, is a lot of systems are facing the same set of core challenges. Obviously, they all have different ways that they need to solve those challenges, but I think a lot of what we've tried to do is create a set of generalizable technology solutions that can be white, labeled and customized without an enormous amount of consulting work attached to them, and let health systems use them in different ways. Some examples of that. You know, ascertain is one of our portfolio companies. It's an AI agent framework that you can apply to almost any business unit within the health system. And so if you want to start with discharge planning or pharmacy, we can do that with you. If you want to start with supply chain or procurement or call center, there's an opportunity to do that as well. Same thing with care, which is our AI agent framework for patient engagement, and the front end of the health system there, you can say, I want to start in the call center with a scheduling product, or I want to build out automated care journeys because I'm experiencing leakage and cardiology or orthopedics, etc. So we've tried to structure everything so there's different entry points for different health systems, just given that no two are facing the same set of challenges, and we want to be able to build products that can solve a lot of different needs and can enable us, over time, to aggregate point solutions and ultimately be a vendor of first choice for a lot of the different business needs that they have across the ecosystem. So it's always amazing to get to go spend time with these different systems. The last couple of months have really been be on the road doing listening tours at a lot of different places. And I think we see there's just enormous opportunity and desire to deploy AI in particular. And so it's going to be an exciting couple of years ahead.
Megan Antonelli 12:34: So as you're doing that, I mean, that's, you know, the sort of listening tours, I mean, and the types of information you're getting, I mean, what are you seeing in terms of the the most pressing problems, you know? I mean, has that changed? Obviously, the sort of appetite for AI enabled tools has, you know, increased exponentially over the last couple of years. But what are some of the, you know, big areas that that you see, hospitals, really, you know, needing the support in.
John Beadle 13:00: So there's a couple of big ones I would always highlight at the top access. I think everyone is having challenges right now with being able to maintain enough capacity to get patients in quickly enough. And so I will talk to health systems all the time that say it's a seven month wait for a cardiology appointment right now. It's five months for a primary care appointment. It's five months to get a therapy appointment. And so they're all community organizations. They all know that they're going to be successful by effectively serving the entire communities that they are stored up and so, but at the same time, they just cannot recruit enough clinicians to be able to meet the level of demand, particularly for the leading systems. And so I think what a lot of folks are really eager to do is understand what type of low, low acuity, commoditized care can be pulled out of the health system and treated either asynchronously or synchronously using virtual care and telehealth, etc, so that you can focus in the hospital system itself on the higher acuity care that is best served within a hospital facility, and so being able to triage how to best match the supply and demand of care is incredibly important and a great opportunity for technology to play a role. So I would highlight that at the top number two, and it's a very close second, is burnout. I just think there is a massive amount of provider burnout across the entire system. Every healthcare system is grappling with it right now. And I think what's most exciting there is we've seen a lot of opportunities for AI to make the experience of healthcare easier for frontline healthcare workers. And so I'm sure you've seen almost every system right now is looking to implement an ambient note taking solution, because providers spend up to 50% of their time on manual administrative tasks. And so I think what I'm hearing very broadly is anything you can deploy that improves efficiency and makes life easier for providers is a clear win and something. Health Systems really want to prioritize, because ultimately, they are often the largest employers in their region. Every single, every single person they have who leaves due to burnout, there's an extraordinary cost associated with that, particularly given all the temporary labor that's required to often fill those slots, given that there's a gap to being able to hire and so retention, reducing burnout, increasing productivity, increasing efficiency. Huge focus right now it's very hard to staff a hospital. And in that same vein, I think the administrative side of AI is going to be where you see a lot of traction. Early on. We've seen this with our portfolio companies. AI agents are quite exceptional, and that they can not only flag issues, which is what the previous issue, which was what the previous iteration of AI solutions could do, but you would still need a human being to intervene, for example, because most of them were very clinical in nature. AI agents can take really complex workflows and automate them almost fully. I mean, we've seen processes in our companies that would take a nurse case manager two and a half hours, and we've gotten them down to a number of minutes, low single digit number of minutes. And I think you're going to see that really, really broadly across everything that's going on. Last one I'll highlight, and I could go on and on, is, I think the speed of technological change is affecting everyone, right? And so, as you know, there's a long sales cycle associated with selling into a healthcare system. There's then a long contracting process and a long implementation process. And so there's just so much seismic change underway that going to one of the large global service integrators and asking, Hey, I need a solution for X based a lot of health systems realize they're getting information that is, you know, already six months old at that point, and by the time you're implementing it, it could be 18 months old and obsolete. And so you're going to spend extraordinary time, energy and resources implementing solutions which could be extremely legacy technologies by the time you actually put them in place. And so systems are really struggling to know what is best in class. Where is the puck headed? How do I make sure that what I put in and devote resources to is something that is still going to be seen as cutting edge once it's actually implemented? And just given how close we are to the market, we always have our ear to the ground in terms of what the competitive landscape looks like, the ability to provide that strategic guidance across their business without charging for it in the way that a consulting firm would, I think has been really valuable to the systems we're working with.
Megan Antonelli 17:28: Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, it's almost like, you know, I mean, I had a bunch of stuff that I wanted to ask you about, kind of advice that you give to startups, but in some ways, you guys are, in fact, functioning as startups, going in and evaluating the needs of the partner to then, you know, sort of adapt and obviously help help the your organization, you know, portfolio companies, and develop them. So it puts you in a really unique position to kind of ascertain both the problems and the and the solutions and then navigate, you know, the decision making process in terms of what, what's going on within the health system. But you know, in that, I imagine some of your companies are also selling outside to them, you know, outside the consortium and that type of thing. What types of advice are you giving them to help them kind of navigate all of that?
John Beadle 18:20: So I think it's incredibly important for your first small number of customers to create an aligned incentive model where they are incentivized to spend a lot of time with you and give you a lot of feedback. Because going to a health system with an unproven product and just asking them to buy it is a very, very hard sell. And so I typically tell companies, particularly B to B, enterprise software and healthcare, if you're talking about larger contracts in extremely important areas, your first five or six customers really are co development partners. It takes you that long to build a generalizable, extensible product that you can go deploy at scale. And so treating those first five to six customers as partners who are helping you, co design, co develop, co deploy the products. I think is incredibly important, and I think health systems really welcome that if it's serving a big enough need, they believe in your team and what you're doing, and you found a way to give them a beneficial agreement that recognizes all of the work that goes in, whether that's a discounted customer engagement, a small number of warrants for the time they've put in, and sweat equity the ability to invest and be able to realize the longer term upside associated with the enterprise value they're helping you to create. So I think not getting greedy in those early stages, you can make up for it later. But those first systems really are your champions, and every other health system you go to as a customer is going to want to speak to those folks and hear about what it was like to work with your team. So I think building that engagement model and creating those testimonials is really essential. And as I hear from a lot of different health systems about what they have most disliked about the most recent wave of health tech innovation, it. They feel they've been given these solutions to implement that were created in Silicon Valley. They had no part in developing them. They don't really work. They don't integrate in their workflows, and they create problems for them on the front lines. And so we've tried to really flip that model on its head by developing these solutions, folder and folder, hand in hand with the end users, and making sure it's something that they love and will champion. And it's made a huge impact in terms of ease of adoption and ease of scaling.
Megan Antonelli 20:29: Amazing. Well, that's great, I think. And then beyond that, right? I mean, in terms of the partnership and the real value that they, you know, can get through that. What about the actual, you know, I think that that's where a lot of this starts to the wheels come off the bus a little bit in terms of measuring and quantifying value, right? You make this up time, this upfront investment in time and money. And even if people you know, your providers, like it, your patients like it. You know, where does the sort of value paradigm come into play, and are you working on that? And is that something that kind of, you know, tell us a little bit about, you know, the strategy there, because it seems like that's something that, you know, people aren't 100% satisfied with at this point.
John Beadle 21:13: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And when you look at the most recent wave of AI innovation, if you ask health system leaders, have you seen strong ROI from the most recent generation of companies, the answer is very often No, or I'm not sure, and so I think the burden of proof that a startup needs to overcome in order to get a solution implemented is extremely high. But at the same time, I think the best way to figure out whatever your success metrics are, is to work backwards from your customer and be able to partner with them from day one in designing a set of KPIs and success metrics that solve the key challenge that they're facing, whether that's reducing leakage, increasing downstream revenue and referrals, automating a process to be able to reduce the amount of labor that goes into it and drive down your costs, getting prior authorizations executed more quickly so you can reduce length of stay, for example, reducing HEDIS penalties like those. Are all some of the issues that we've tackled through our portfolio companies. The biggest challenge, I'll say, very candidly, is always attribution. And how do you measure what percentage of an outcome is attributable to your portfolio company versus any of the 30 other things that health system might be doing? And you have to design studies that can enable you to demonstrate attribution as verifiably as possible. And so designing those outcome studies, we find to be really essential as part of that process of contracting, particularly with your first set of CO development and CO design partners, because that's really going to be what everybody looks at. And so there's always going to be noise, and you can never prove a perfect correlation, of course, of implementing a solution in 100% of whatever that outcome is being attributable to you, but I do think you can demonstrate with a high degree of confidence in certainty that it drove a large amount of impact. And it wasn't coincidental that you put this in on January 1, and then on 1231 you executed, you know, 100% of a certain goal. There's always going to be multiple things going on, but I think designing those studies in a way that you can bring them to the next set of customer and have them be taken seriously is really essential.
Megan Antonelli 23:25: Yeah, I think that's really important. And you really articulated that super well, because we've talked about that a lot, but I think that problem of attribution, you know, it comes up a lot because of, you know, healthcare being complex, and there are not only so many softwares, with so many players and so many systems in there that are, you know, working towards the same goal. So how do you do that? But, you know, I think, as you said, the study design is a huge part of that. And then, you know, working with, working backwards, you know, and from the from the solution. So, great stuff. I mean, tell me a little bit about, you know, there's obviously many partnerships you're working on, and many companies tell us, you know, and I know, you don't want to play favorites, but tell us, you know, is there an example of, you know, a specific partnership or organization that you've worked with that really has, you know, kind of from from the beginning to the end, you know, being able to to, you know, sort of exemplify the strategy and how well it works.
John Beadle 24:26: Yes, I mean, I could highlight a bunch of different ones. I think the one that is probably most helpful to all your listeners is going to be what we've done with Northwell, because it's been over such an extended period of time, and able to really see it end to end. To give one example, a company called ascertain that I mentioned is a proprietary AI agent framework which can be applied to a lot of business units in the back office of the health system to be able to execute manual, repeatable workflows with a dramatically higher rate of efficiency. So there the way we figured out our first product. To focus on was the COO of Northwell, Mark salazo, who's been a huge champion of all of our initiatives, came to us and said, I really want to reduce length of stay to huge source of potential savings to the system, and I'm having trouble scaling this team of nurse case managers who are responsible for for transitions of care to LTAC or SNF, or another secondary side of care. Right now, it can take three hours for a nurse case manager to execute one prior auth to get someone to that next side of care, which can often result in the person needing to stay an extra day in the hospital, which means there's a bed that could be open to someone who needs it more, and who the health system can generate more revenue on and people want to get out of the hospital as soon as they can, right? And so it's a win win for everybody. And there we had a growing team of, you know, they were going to need to execute against a really robust hiring pipeline. And nurse case managers, as you know, are one of the scarcest resources in any health system. And so for us to go in and really think about, how do we turbocharge their productivity, make their life easier? What they were doing before was handwriting forms that they were faxing in to payers, and they would need to go find the information to fill out those forms in six or seven different source systems, very manually. What we were able to do is build this AI agent framework that could pull in all of the information using the AI agents, populate the form using that information, send it to a human being to look at, then automatically submit it also check before it does any of the documents that may be missing based on an understanding of what the payer rules are, and then go execute on that Chase list and get the person their dietician note or a note from their physical therapist or anything else that might be missing to get the approval. And then we've even developed caller models which can call the payers and have these conversations in a totally automated way, and the nurse case managers would spend a lot of their day on hold before. And so now you have an AI agent sitting on hold, and they're able to do the calls just as well. And so you can get a multi hour process down to a number of minutes, and really drive a lot of great outcomes. Those types of case studies, I think, are really essential in terms of us being able to develop a view that this technology works. We've seen it on the front lines. It can actually be successful, unlike a lot of the previous iterations of healthcare AI that we've seen in the past, because it's not clinical, it's not regulated, the risk of making a mistake if you did make one, it's not something that's going to kill someone or cause a major issue. It could cause a pay or delay, which you can sort through. So I think these are the great low hanging fruit type use cases that are really important to building trust with the healthcare system. And the way we did that was we went in and we we shadowed all of the different members of that team for, you know, weeks, and really understand their workflows, their pain points, how we could build something that made their lives better. And they've been the most incredible champions for what we're doing because it's worked so well,
Megan Antonelli 28:02: yeah, that's pretty, I mean, that's pretty in the weeds, right? I mean, that's not, you know, oh, here's how grabbing, you know, up here. I mean, that you really would have to go in and get to the step by step. So tell me a little bit about that. I mean, who are the, who are the folks that you were kind of interacting with on the front lines to get to those, to those answers.
John Beadle 28:20: So I think what's always incredibly important is you need to go both top down and bottoms up. I think we need, we typically try to combine the two. And there have been situations where we'll go to the CEO, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, they'll tell us, this is a huge problem for us, and then we'll get access to either the business unit or the service line that is experiencing that challenge, and you find out they either don't want something or they already have a preferred vendor they want to work with. And we've had situations in the past that we've learned from where we would go into those situations and think we could win them over, but in most situations, you cannot they already know what they want to do, and it's much easier to pick us, to pick a problem to solve, where you are seen coming in as a white knight, and you are helpful in coming in to add value to them, and there's not a lot of convincing required because they are deeply experiencing a problem they don't know how to solve. And I think generally, folks in healthcare have a really good understanding of what their problems are. I think there's a less clear, I think there's a less clear understanding in many cases of what can actually solve the problem, but they are really good at knowing these are my top pain points. And so what we typically try to do is triangulate, where is there a major system wide priority in the five year strategic plan that has broad support at the C level and a desire to fund it and resource it. And where can we find a team that really wants to work with us and is a good cultural fit, a good fit related to actually putting in the time and resources required for CO development. And when you can marry those two, I think you typically have a successful product, a project. And so for us, it's really. All about finding where is the marriage of those two kind of sets of criteria being met, and what in situations when that's happened. I think we've had great projects.
Megan Antonelli 30:10: Yeah, I can imagine, I mean, and it does, it's like coming, you know, to the incentives and where the incentives completely align. And I mean, the example that you gave very much is around, you know, not only something that does benefit the patient, because everybody wants to make that transition faster and get out of that, you know, get out of the hospital. Ironically, sometimes when we think about health systems, we don't think that, you know, they want to reduce the length of stay, but you make a good point that they have other patients coming in, and the more that they can, you know, see, and the more that they need have that, that you know, brings value to the organization. So finding that, you know, sort of, you know, areas where the you know, all, all parties benefit, and it is a win win. So that's that's great, but it does seem, I mean more so than I would say that I hear from other folks, you know, that you're really in there listening to the teams on the ground in terms of what, what their problems are, and making sure that what you're bringing in will solve them. Yeah, so that's great in terms of, you know what you're seeing and and kind of, you know where, what's next. I mean, what? What are the areas where, you know you talked about access and burnout as the problems, but what about kind of the internal bottlenecks in the areas for kind of disruption you know that are ripe for disruption within the hospital in the next five to 10 years?
John Beadle 31:32: So the biggest low hanging fruit opportunity I see is just back office automation. It's about a trillion dollars of spend in the US. And I think there's some really credible estimates that say about half of that could be automated. And people talk about, you know, will that kill jobs, etc, they'll certainly be some movement in labor pools. But there are so many scarcities because, you know, in the overall healthcare labor pool, shortages of millions of people in different places that, and I think health systems are generally quite good at reskilling and retraining and moving people to places where they can add more value. And so I think the best way to start is focus on places where there's already a shortage and there's a welcoming team or a welcoming set of teams that want new solutions to turbocharge their productivity and make their lives easier. And I think you can use that to build a lot of momentum, but I think over the next five years, you're going to see a lot of the back office business units of health systems automated. The other one that I am incredibly excited about is the ability to automate the entire interface between the patient and the health system. And we're focused on this with one of our other portfolio companies called care, where I think the biggest challenge that we are trying to face there is, how do you create, you know, I use the example of Delta Airlines all the time. I haven't had to call Delta Airlines, and I'm a million miler. I'm on the road constantly. I haven't had to make a phone call to delta in so many years because their chat bot is so incredibly good. I can change things. I can check on upgrade certificates. I can do all sorts of different things without ever needing to pick up the phone. And a lot of health systems, even the leading ones that we work with. The way you often get an appointment, as you know, is you submit a form online. Someone calls you three days later at a random time. They can't figure out whether or not that physician has an appointment because the schedule will sit with that person's scheduler in their office. It's a disaster. And so I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit opportunities to be able to make it far easier for the patient to be able to engage with the health system. And then once they're in, we're doing things like automated care journeys for hundreds of different conditions in the health system so the patient understands what's next on their journey. Can we send them content FAQs make it easier for them to pay their bills, for example, to get a referral to another physician to refill their prescriptions. All the things that people love about groups like one medical where you have amazing technology that pairs with all the clinical care you're receiving, how do we enable health systems to have a similar level of ease of access, ease of convenience, to the large scale digital health companies which are disintermediating them and taking a lot of their patients? So we're very focused on that. And I think what's exciting about AI agents as a technology is to do that in the last generation of technology, you need to throw a ton of people at it. And the reason health systems didn't want to execute against a lot of these challenges is, if you you know you're going to increase the in basket messages, you're going to end up resulting in a lot of new volume that you don't have capacity to staff, but now you can reduce a lot of it using AI and still give someone that concierge like experience. So we're very excited about that opportunity. Last one I'll highlight, and this, again, is in the realm of generative AI. We're focused on spin out opportunities with health systems, where you can take a large scale business unit, typically healthcare services, and it can either be a cost center or a profit center already. Right? And a lot of these are so inefficiently run because they've existed within the mothership, and they've never had any incentive to operate with extraordinary efficiency in the same way an independent business would. We are excited to use our existing portfolio companies, particularly ascertain and care to execute against the AI digital transformation of those assets. Be able to make the cost structure and unit economics far better, and then sell them as managed services around the country, and be able to either significantly increase revenue for a health system or drive down costs, or an ideal world both. And so it's always exciting. You can find an opportunity where both of those are true, and there's a lot of those available. And so I think generally, there's just a tremendous amount of opportunity and excitement in healthcare right now, in this notion of services as software, where you can sell a piece of software, but instead of just selling a license, you are saying, I am going to execute this workflow for you, so I'm going to charge you for the work, not just for the software is being really well received, and we're going to see more and more of it, and It's an overlay. It's almost everything we're doing right now
Megan Antonelli 36:04: that's amazing, I think, you know, and they're just again, the way you've articulated it all, you know, a lot of the times when we're talking about AI, and so if there's this sort of element of fear and like, oh, you know that, what if and how, you know how to, but it seems like the way that you guys are approaching it really comes to, you know, has the guardrails because you're looking at the problems you're dealing with the, you know, the things that people want and the things that people don't want to do anymore. And I think that's the fear comes from the idea that you could take away jobs that we do want, right? But there's so much opportunity for the technology to really get rid of the, you know, get rid of the stupid stuff, move us to the, you know the next level of, you know care and you know convenience, you know, within a hospital, and give hospitals that role of caregiver, you know, back, as opposed to sort of, you know, a place that no one ever wants to go, not that we want to have to go there, but you know, at the end of the day, we want it to be, you know, not the a negative experience every Time.
John Beadle 37:01: I couldn't agree more. I think one of the ironic things, when you look at the overall trajectory of AI in healthcare is when you go back to 2014 when cov nets first came to be, everyone was saying radiologists are going to be obsolete. You're going to have aI doctors. You know, there's going to be all of this labor force dislocation, and none of that has happened. I don't think it's likely to happen, but what AI really has done, it's eliminated a lot of the manual, tedious work that no one likes to do, so doctors can focus on doing what they went into the business for, which is to help people to provide empathetic care that everyone wants when they get sick. And so ultimately, I really think bots can be for those manual, repeatable processes, and we can enable doctors to be freed up in such a way that they can focus on providing patient care. That's best in class, which is why I'm sure you know a lot of doctors in the same way I do. People don't become a doctor because they want to rule the world or get wealthy. They do it because they want to help people in almost every situation. And I really am very much an AI optimist as it relates to the potential of the technology to let doctors get back to the practice of medicine, to let nurses get back to it, versus spending all day charting. EMR,
Megan Antonelli 38:12: yeah, that's amazing. Well, tell our audience a little bit about how they can get in touch with you, you know. Tell us a little bit in terms of, you know, are you, you know, can hospitals reach out to you to become part of the consortium? What is the, what's the best way for folks to get in touch and and kind of the the best reason for them to get in touch?
John Beadle 38:32: Great question. So we're always open to new inquiries on the consortium. The way we'll typically try to pursue entering is, we love to find a project to work on immediately with the health system, and I think that's the best way to build a relationship and determine whether or not the consortium is a good fit, since it ends up being a very high touch effort that touches a lot of the different core components of your business. And so I think the best way to begin working together is always find one opportunity within the existing portfolio that we think could be a good fit aligned with their strategic needs, and we can get deployed fairly quickly. And from there, I think the kind of world is our oyster, and there's always a million follow on opportunities that can come from that one. So always delighted to connect with health systems that have a need that fits one of our existing companies, or if you have an asset you're looking to spin out that you think you know we could potentially be helpful in helping you pursue so there's a lot of different reasons to reach out, and we have a contact form on our website. I'm always happy to connect with people directly. John at Aegis ventures.com and can direct you to the right person across the ecosystem depending on what you're looking for.
Megan Antonelli 39:38: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here, John, and I look forward to having you back in health impact and back on the show. You know, I think obviously you're the experience that you've had and the work that you guys are doing is really, you know, it just sort of lays out a really incredible roadmap for healthcare innovators and hospital leaders. So thank you for joining us, and thank you for our audience. To our audience for being here. Thank you for listening and stay tuned for what's next on health impact digital health talks.
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