Paul Dain: 0:01

Outside of maybe finance. This space is the most intimate relationship you can have with a brand right? They have your health data. They have the most you know, data about you that no one else has, about what's happening inside and around your body.

MIke Giambattista: 0:17

So you know this should be the best experience that you have if you look at it that way, it should at least be the most secure feeling Right Today. On Customer Land, paul Dane, who is CEO of Abundant Health Acquisition For today we're going to call that AHA. Just let that sink in for a minute, because it's a great brand name to talk about the work that they're doing in the world of healthcare experience. So first of all, paul, thanks for joining me. I really appreciate it.

Paul Dain: 0:53

Thanks, mike, I'm delighted to be here.

MIke Giambattista: 0:55

I almost got soapboxy before we just turned the record button on here about you know why we're pursuing so much uh coverage in the worlds of experiences, but I tried to stop myself. I don't know if I was successful in that, because really this is about more about you, your perspective, what you're doing at aha, but let's start with um, a little about your role there. What brought you to this place? Yeah, there's probably a lot that went into that.

Paul Dain: 1:27

I think that'll help set things up a little bit too, especially, I think we'll get back to your soapbox. But, as you mentioned, I'm Paul Dane, ceo of Abundant Health Acquisition. We're going to call ourselves AHA, moving forward today. I've been with the company since its inception in 2018, and it was really my first deep dive into healthcare.

Paul Dain: 1:49

I have been an ad agency and digital marketing person pretty much my entire career, since the early 90s, and I've worked across, I think, every vertical that you could possibly imagine vertical that you could possibly imagine and I've been fortunate, very fortunate, in my career to have a wide range of roles. I started off and maybe this will give you a little bit of some flavor for my background but I started off as an advertising copywriter in Detroit, working in automotive, but it was right as the web was starting to take hold. But it was right as the web was starting to take hold. Netscape wasn't even a thing yet. It was still a beta version of Mozilla and it was for an agency that I won't name them, and I won't name the client, but one of the most revered brands in automotive.

MIke Giambattista: 2:38

And I? Just a quick interjection there. Sure, that's my background and my rough same timeline. How come you look at least 10 years younger than I do. I don't know. It doesn't seem right unless you started when you were an early a pre-teen or something I, I was.

Paul Dain: 2:54

It was my my early 20s, um so uh, I was a copywriter working on things like everything from ad slicks to some radio, and our copywriter or, I'm sorry, our creative director, came around one day and said does anybody know how to build a website? Brand X needs a website, and we don't know what that means. So there was like this cabal of web hobbyists and I, some art directors, some writers, who were all tinkering with this stuff. We raised our hands and it was just a crazy ride. Ever since then, I've had creative roles. I've had roles in UX. I've probably spent most of my time as a technology lead, but then also as an account director, strategy lead, which then led me to AHA most recently. So it's been a roller coaster and kind of wild ride, but I have no regrets. My entire career. I've been very fortunate throughout my entire career to have just such a wealth of experience and given such great opportunities.

MIke Giambattista: 4:06

So we're going to have to have an offline conversation and compare our resumes, because there are some significant parallels there. It's okay, but just a side note, I started my career as a copywriter as well, in advertising, doing the same kind of work into digital marketing, much for the same reasons and ways you did. But anyway, I think one of the things that intrigues me about what you just said about your journey there is that, having experienced so much of and produced so much of the kinds of messaging and methods that are designed to engage people, if you followed my same trajectory and it seems like you kind of did you kind of ended up in this place, where it really does coalesce into this idea of experience Somehow and for me, that light bulb didn't really go off until really just a few years ago that that term started becoming the way I think about things. I'm thinking back to 2017. Healthcare experience as a term was was a fairly new, not very widely adopted idea at that point.

Paul Dain: 5:33

Yeah, yeah, and I think it's still emerging as as an idea, specifically the term health or healthcare experience. I think if you asked most people on the street what they, what, how would they define or give an example of a health experience? They'd probably cite, you know, Apple Fitness and Apple Health as an example. They might cite some you know services from Walgreens or Amazon as some best in class around that, but I don't think they would associate it with the traditional healthcare system and providers and payers. They're such an outlier in that I think the technology companies, even some upstarts, some younger startups, view themselves that way, but it's really just emerging for the larger, more traditional providers.

MIke Giambattista: 6:27

Can you just from your perspective maybe you know what is the Paul Dane definition of healthcare experience? How do you see that and how do?

Paul Dain: 6:38

you articulate it. It's a great question. We have, or I have, an idea. Well, let me back up because there's a term you might be familiar with in this space called digital front door. It's really heavily used over the past several years in healthcare in conjunction with consumerism healthcare consumerism and if I start talking about healthcare experience or health experience with a customer, they'll usually try to then draw an analog to okay, well, he's talking about our digital front door and I personally am not a fan of the term digital front door because it implies that there's one entryway into a brand's digital ecosystem.

Paul Dain: 7:34

Look like is a unified ecosystem of services, capabilities, content that is seamless to me as a consumer Very much. You know it's cliche to keep citing Apple as an example, but very similar to how Apple keeps strengthening their ecosystem in a seamless way, and I think that's you know their ecosystem in a seamless way and I think that's you know for better or worse. That should be an aspiration for us. But providing that health experience that is seamless is easy and isn't often associated with healthcare, but delightful how do we make something that's that's a delight to use? So that's maybe a long walk for a short drink of water, but that's how I do it.

MIke Giambattista: 8:32

No, I think that that's really good and it's helpful because of you know, I think it informs why you do what you do and how you do it. I'm curious because, as you said a minute ago, the idea behind healthcare experience is a fairly new one, just in terms of the age of the industry overall, and I know in other verticals. Trying to explain and inject new thought into those systems can be difficult and challenging, and so much of the conversation that the people I interview on this show end up having to do with change management and you know you're coming in with new ideas into.

MIke Giambattista: 9:17

You know well-established cultures and methods and KPIs and you know and trying to say, look, here's the better way. I'd love to hear how you at AHA approach that, because you know you're knocking on doors that may not want to be opened.

Paul Dain: 9:38

Yeah, I think so. I think there's a pretty clear path that has been paved over the past several years. There's been a movement within providers especially to bring in talent from outside of healthcare, especially digital talent and related marketing talent. So I think there's a strong desire for it. But I think there are maybe a handful of categories of barriers, largely internal, that these health systems face in the realization of that vision, that that, that vision, that experience that they they may want to, to, um, to realize for their community. Um, those can be operational, they can be technical, they can be political and so on. So I guess my point is that there's there's strong desire, there's a strong intent. I think from leadership, in most senior leaders that I've talked to, it falls apart often or gets slowed, and maybe that's a better description of it. The pace is so slow to realize it that we, you know, as we consumers, are being left behind, and that's one of the reasons why you know, health experience, healthcare experiences from providers are still largely reviled.

MIke Giambattista: 12:24

Yeah, there's an awful lot of chatter out there and I think if you did a sentiment analysis on all of it, you'd probably find it was largely negative.

Paul Dain: 12:33

Yeah, and I'm not going to point the finger at any one vendor. People can draw their own conclusions, right, but I think there and we're to maybe take it to the next step. We started off as a company, as a digital marketing agency and web development agency focused on healthcare providers. Our first customer was Memorial Herman in Houston Large health system, and we were assigned to redevelop their website Kind of straightforward agency stuff. Been doing it my entire career One of our clients. The first thing she said to me was well, welcome to healthcare where it's 2008. And it's kind of you know the running joke. They had a content management system. Funny, but it's not funny. No, I know this is outside of maybe finance. Finance this space is the most intimate relationship you can have with a brand. Right, they have your health data. They have the most you know data about you that no one else has, about what's happening inside and around your body. So you know this should be the best experience that you have.

Paul Dain: 13:54

If you look at it that way.

MIke Giambattista: 13:56

Yeah, it should. It should at least be the most secure feeling you know.

Paul Dain: 14:01

Yeah, and that's a whole separate conversation. You know about the breaches that have happened and you know the security issues that health. You know large health systems have had to deal with over the years. But you know, when she said that, to me it really resonated because it was a recognition from them internally that they're behind, they're really behind, interesting, they're really behind.

MIke Giambattista: 14:24

Interesting my uh, so my agency experience we had for for by about two, two and a half years or so. We were dealing with um a local healthcare system, regional healthcare system doing the same kinds of things you did. You know, building out their, their website and their apps, and you know even some more of their, of their direct mail and other marketing channels. One of the things that struck me, though, was was that they had just they had just completed a brand new hospital in a kind of growing suburban area, and this this was some of the most beautiful architecture I've ever seen. I mean, it was just gorgeous, with all the most modern thinking about how to create an environment that's conducive to healing, aside from the wild technology that we got to see in this thing. And then, when it got to time to talk about how to engage patients prospective patients how to you know?

MIke Giambattista: 15:30

At that point I remember having early conversations about removing friction, and it was. It was kind of like what are you talking about? Our facility here is a state-of-the-art facility. That's what's going to bring people in here. We don't need to be thinking about all this experience junk. So suffice to say that that business relationship only lasted about two and a half years and then it was kind of like this isn't going to work, but that's where the journey begins, you know.

Paul Dain: 15:55

And if they don't recognize, I understand why they have to make choices. And I don't want to get into the. I don't think you want to get into the economics around all of this, because I think there's that's probably a whole separate discussion, but they have. Let me say it this way a health system simultaneously can have the most advanced technology in the country and the least advanced technology in the country. You know, when they're serving their patients, when somebody is getting something, you know, having a serious procedure performed, they have access to the world's best technology quite often. But when it comes to the consumer experience or the digital patient experience outside of the hospital, it's usually subpar. Yeah, but that's the. You know, no other industry thinks that way. They want an end-to-end positive, best-in-class consumer experience generally speaking.

MIke Giambattista: 16:55

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, but in my view it wasn't necessarily inside the hospital. Outside the hospital it was. You could walk into the hospital and the modern, really cool stuff, if you will processes, environments, experiences happened once you're admitted Exactly.

Paul Dain: 17:15

Machines, and that's what I mean.

MIke Giambattista: 17:16

Yeah, but you're walking it like even up to admitting it was like. Let me just say this it sucks.

Paul Dain: 17:25

It does.

MIke Giambattista: 17:26

It's horrible.

Paul Dain: 17:26

I think I said reviled, like okay, better than my word it does, it's horrible. I think I said reviled.

MIke Giambattista: 17:28

Yeah, okay, better than my word.

Paul Dain: 17:32

Yeah, no, I fully agree, and that's where I think there's that gap. But it doesn't have to be that way and we're not looking to fix the healthcare system by any stretch with what we're doing, the healthcare system by any stretch with what we're doing. What we're trying to do and this builds on what I said about how we started what we found ourselves doing with health system websites was building the same stuff over and over and over and again. That's not something any other industry would do, and if you look at like retail experience, you'd be a fool to every time you built an e-commerce site for a retailer, building the shopping cart from scratch, right, whether it's the UX or the design or the technology. But that's kind of what happens in this space is that we build the same stuff over and over and over, from scratch, over and over again, because it's such a regional industry.

Paul Dain: 18:39

And the CMS vendors, the digital experience platform vendors like Sitecore and others. They provide a general market solution to including their healthcare customers, right, so they have to service everybody. And then it falls on the digital agency, largely generally local for a health system, so a local agency to build that website for them. And again, though, that's a most likely a general market agency, and this is one of many customers that they have. So they're going to build their website just like they build everybody else's website.

Paul Dain: 19:17

They've got a business to run, they've got margin targets to hit, but the need of a healthcare system, from a capability perspective, really exceeds their ability to provide the budgeting necessary to deliver on all of that.

Paul Dain: 19:39

They have more back-end systems, more complex ecosystem of back-end systems than I think I've ever seen throughout my career. And that's expensive to do, especially if you're doing custom development, custom design over and over, and you have designers and developers at these local agencies that don't have experience working in Epic, don't have experience working in a lot of these solutions, that don't have experience working in Epic, don't have experience working in a lot of these solutions, so they have to make trade-offs. So what we saw an opportunity to do was create a scalable platform, much like an e-commerce platform, that gives that vertical specific capability that we were developing over and over again. So everything from the find-a-doc experience to the scheduling process directly in the website that more often than not a consumer has to go to a separate patient portal or something else to complete off-site stuff and the brand has limited customization capability and control and security too, 100%.

Paul Dain: 20:53

So our focus over the past two, three years now has been on what we call the health experience platform, or HXP developing software that allows not just the health system but also the DXP vendor, like Sitecore, kentico and others, and the digital marketing agency because it's a developer platform as well to stand up much richer, feature-rich, user-focused capabilities directly within the website that connects into those back-end systems. Really, easily.

MIke Giambattista: 21:26

Is it a fair comparison? I'm making this up here, so so I'm likely wrong, but it would be a fair comparison, at least for on the the front end. To say this is comparable to something like a Shopify for for e-commerce, where you have a basic platform and then modules that you can bolt on as needed.

Paul Dain: 21:44

Absolutely, but even Shopify does have they require to kind of go off-site. It's a completely hosted solution. I think the difference with us that makes us more like a traditional e-commerce package that a site core offers is that we're fully integrated into the on-premise or cloud-based DXP that they're already using. Okay, all right, gotcha Interesting. So we're an independent software vendor partner of SiteCourse. It means we have historically worked with them to build websites for customers, but now what we're doing is building software that extends SiteCourse capabilities.

MIke Giambattista: 22:24

Okay, All right. So yeah, I'm thinking of parallels and other verticals that I've seen and other verticals that I've seen, One in particular and I don't think I should name them. But that was their business strategy from day one, and so they spent a lot of money and time in the early phases building this, what ended up being kind of a connector platform, yeah, and knowing that once it took, it would take well, and in fact it did. The company's done just extraordinarily well with that model, because, even though it took them a while to develop it, work the kinks out, make the connections, but once you've inserted yourself into a rich partner landscape ecosystem, it's all there. It's just a matter of plugging in and running, and that's what these folks that sounds like you know. There's a strong parallel. I think it's all there. It's just a matter of plugging in and running, and that's what these folks that sounds like you know there's a strong parallel.

Paul Dain: 23:15

I think it's a great parallel. That's really what we're looking to do. You know, connectors that's kind of how we started this platform was on the data connector side because our clients were digging themselves into technical debt by developing their own tech, their own connectors. But anytime a change was made or they wanted to migrate to a new DXP platform, they had to rebuild, they had to rewrite um and that's a pretty significant time investment. Um and they also, you know they they have attrition, they have a host of issues that they're dealing with. So giving them something that's a bit more of a standard and they can rely on, that is supported, they can be trained on and gives them speed to market we've seen so far has been, it's been well received into the weeds here and we don't really have to go here.

MIke Giambattista: 24:15

But you've built this platform as a connector platform Again, there's a better word for it than that, I'm sure and certain healthcare systems are going to be ready for it and certain ones aren't. But regardless, it seems to me that there's probably a big chunk of AHA's effort that would need to be advisory in nature, consultative, figuring out what they have, what they don't have, navigating the internal cultures and politics, before just saying look, here's our connector box. Well, we can make this work.

Paul Dain: 24:56

I think our implementation phase for customers is maybe 75% shorter than the sales cycle. Okay, if that helps kind of put it in perspective, it does. Yeah, not surprising. But yeah, you can have up to a two-year sales cycle in healthcare, it Right, and a lot of that sales cycle is getting that alignment that you're talking about educating this especially for something new, and I think it takes some time to kind of get your head around exactly what it is we're doing and to understand the value of it.

Paul Dain: 25:39

You know we have to do a lot of show and tell and part of our process too we found really useful is to do some pre-visualization with our clients to say, okay, this is what your scheduling process looks like right now If you adopt HXP, this is how it can look and that can be a really great unifier with the team but also, I think, helps them socialize internally and get broader stakeholder alignment to say, oh, yeah, that is what I want. I didn't know that was possible. So you know we pull so many different levers to try to accelerate that process but we're learning incrementally. It's still pretty early days.

MIke Giambattista: 26:22

Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure I'd like to shift the conversation a little. Well, really, the kinds of operations and functions and features that you're seeing healthcare systems plug into and grow with now and I think having a kind of snapshot of the now situation would be helpful, but I think maybe even more so you know what's that going to look like in two years or or whatever it is, because you're probably in a unique position where you're seeing trends from an elevated level before people you know on the street level are really aware of them. So you know the state of of, you know HCX now and what do you think it's going to look like in a couple of years?

Paul Dain: 27:15

Yeah, so this is the part of the conversation I really like. We've had to like temper ourselves because as we start to unlock different capabilities and realize the potential of what could be, we get really excited. Unlock different capabilities and realize the potential of what could be, we get really excited. But your question about what the now looks like there's so much opportunity to just to crack the basics and to have the fundamentals be solidified from an experience perspective and I'm talking really specifically around finding a provider and scheduling that's the low hanging fruit in this space. If you can provide a really simple provider search and scheduling capability versus what exists in the market right now, that's a huge win and we view that as like the first tier, our foundation, to then build upon with incremental capabilities. I'm going to get I'll probably get a little bit in the weeds here, but there's a reason for the weediness.

Paul Dain: 28:27

Are you familiar with the term open scheduling in the context of? Yeah, so open scheduling is the publicly available, you know first time patient sort of scheduling. It's what I can see on the website without having to log in. So that's where our focus has been is on open scheduling to date. What we're doing this year is going to be unlocking the ability to have a one-to-one personalized experience, an authenticated experience, in the primary website, to then unlock direct scheduling. But direct scheduling where it's with your existing provider is also sort of low-hanging fruit.

Paul Dain: 29:05

What it opens, having personalized, authenticated experience within the primary website, though, unlocks incredible capability Something that the patient portal space can't do which is co-mingle the wealth of content that the health system has on their current website with EHR data.

Paul Dain: 29:51

So if they know that I have a history of cholesterol and I sign into the homepage of the website not the patient portal I can be greeted with my EHR data. What I need to know any appointments that are coming up, but what I can also see are not just links to articles that are probably going to be relevant to me around cholesterol, but ideally and this is something we're testing out right now is AI-driven summaries of okay, given where I am right now, and maybe appointments that I have coming up, what I can do to prepare for an appointment, what I should be doing daily. Maybe I even sync it in with real-time data, like from Apple Health or from Google, to even make that a richer, more real-time experience in one place. No one has access right now to everything orchestrated capabilities. That's where it gets really exciting to me and allows us to create that kind of what I mentioned earlier, that ecosystem feel for an individual healthcare provider.

MIke Giambattista: 30:39

Really interesting. I spent the past, the bulk of the past week, at a giant retail technology show here in New York and the thinking is very, very similar. You can bring in data from a multitude of sources, parse it, understand it, deploy it so that the customers are getting these unique, highly tailored experiences. And I can tell you, as a healthcare consumer, I've never seen anything even remotely close to that in that world whatsoever. Close to that in that world whatsoever. So that seems like you know in some iteration in some level of sophistication?

Paul Dain: 31:38

that's kind of what you're talking about. I think so, and you know I'll share, you know some inspiration for me personally. I'm you know I'm a pretty voracious technology consumer as well, but I'm also a longtime runner. So I use Strava every day, multiple times a day, and to me, strava is almost a gold standard when it comes to health experience. First, because it's a source of incredible positivity, just the way that the system runs, and you know it's all about affirmations and sharing, sharing things about your health in a positive environment.

Paul Dain: 32:19

But they've recently started to roll out really interesting features, like they have a new athlete intelligence feature. That is kind of you know, I call it kind of stupid AI tricks, but they're delightful. They really add a nice little personalized flair, like you'd want from a real coach that assesses your last workout, gives you, you know, a summary readout on how that performance was relative to workouts over the past 60, 90 days, and then it even does it for each submetric like heart rate, pace, miles, run and so on. So you have this kind of co-mingled with your stats. You have context being provided around it for each one, so you don't have to then go look and, oh, how does this look like in a chart? What does this look like in a chart to three months ago? So that's the kind of like really personalized experience that resonates with me, that serves as inspiration.

MIke Giambattista: 33:24

Yeah, I mean, that's probably another one of those conversations that we should just dedicate to. Probably another one of those conversations that we should just dedicate to what is the robust experience look like, because there's so many different ways you could paint that is, let's just say, not really ready for it, but needs it badly.

Paul Dain: 34:01

They will get there, they will get there.

MIke Giambattista: 34:03

I'm sure they will so. And yeah, I've been a fan of Strava's for a long time.

Paul Dain: 34:22

And yeah, I've been a fan of Strava's for a long time. We did a short series on them a couple of years ago because they were ahead of the curve, doing some really great things around user privacy and notification and transparency. Oh right, yeah, especially when they had some issues around the users on military bases, the users on military bases Right.

MIke Giambattista: 34:31

And they came right out and said in the most transparent like you know hey, this is what happened.

Paul Dain: 34:36

Yeah, nobody does that, yeah, no that was a lesson for the rest of the world. It absolutely was. They handled it with great, great aplomb yeah.

MIke Giambattista: 34:43

Really did a nice job. Well, you know again, I think there's so much we could be talking about here, but I want to be kind to your schedule.

Paul Dain: 34:52

I appreciate it. I appreciate the time. It's been a fun conversation.

MIke Giambattista: 34:56

I'm really serious. This is the stuff. Again, I could get very soapboxy here and I don't want to Suffice to say thank you. This is really rich, it's a lot of fun, it's really informative, it's interesting. Um, I think the people who listen to this podcast are going to get a lot out of it, because there's a there's a cross pollination effort that we, frankly, we like. We like the fact that we're talking to people who are all about this kind of engagement, experience, idea from different disciplines, and you know we're all getting ideas from one another.

Paul Dain: 35:34

So that's an exciting time for it.

MIke Giambattista: 35:36

Thank you for this, for being transparent, thanks for sharing your ideas, and we'll pay lots of attention to what you and AHA are doing Well.

Paul Dain: 35:45

thank you so much, mike. It's been a pleasure. Really enjoyed the conversation.