Episode 95 | How Tech-empowered Virtual Healthcare Teams May Save Your Life with Dr. Lyle Berkowitz

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  00:00

But today, I would say healthcare, large health systems, right? If you’re going to do something, start small, think innovation, use user centered design, figure out what corporate metric and KPI you’re going to really fix. And I always say, because I’ve done this a long time, is you’re better off being inside the balloon and expanding it slowly than throwing darts at the balloon trying to radically change. Healthcare does not like to radically change

Voiceover  00:05

Welcome to the “Lead at the Top of Your Game” podcast, where we equip you to more effectively lead your seat at any employer, business, or industry in which you choose to play. Each week, we help you sharpen your leadership acumen by cracking open the playbooks of dynamic leaders who are doing big things in their professional endeavors. And now, your host, leadership tactics, and organizational development expert, Karan Ferrell-Rhodes.

Karan Rhodes  00:37

Welcome back to the podcast, and thanks for joining another episode designed to help you better lead at the top of your game. As you know, for season three each month, we’re featuring leaders who have fascinating roles in a particular profession or industry. And today’s episode is part of our special series featuring leaders in the healthcare industry. And now enjoy the show. Hey there, superstars. This is Karen, and welcome back to another episode of the lead at the top of your game podcast. As you know, we are doing a special series on leaders in healthcare, and boy, do we have a fantastic guest for you today. I am so honored and pleased to introduce on today’s show, Dr Lyle Berkowitz, who is the founder and CEO of Keycare, and Keycare is a virtual care company with a mission to create tech empowered virtual care teams that support, strengthen and amplify our nation’s healthcare systems. Now Lyle is a primary care physician himself. He’s a health systems executive, a serial entrepreneur. He’s an angel investor. And if there’s anyone on this guy on this green earth that could speak to some of that the dynamics going on in healthcare, he is definitely the premier expert, and we’re honored to have him on today’s show. So welcome to the episode, Lyle. We’re so happy to have you. Thanks,

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  02:04

Karen. I appreciate the intro. I’ll do my best to live up to it.

Karan Rhodes  02:08

I’m sure you will. And more please. Well, healthcare is, you know, on top of everyone’s minds, it’s on. There’s, I don’t think there’s a new segment that ever goes that doesn’t have it is a piece of their offerings of something new that’s going on in the in the world of healthcare. But so there’s tons to talk about. But before we start there, we’d love to learn just a tad about you personally. So for just as much as you feel comfortable, would you give us a sneak peek into your life outside of work?

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  02:39

Yeah. So I am a family man living in Chicago, got two kids who are out of the house now, both in healthcare, which I love.

Karan Rhodes  02:47

Oh, wow.

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  02:48

And I, like a lot of doctors, I love working, and I love what I’m doing. I don’t even feel like it’s working. So I don’t take a lot of breaks. But when I do, I do love to travel. I like to get in a little golf, if I can. I love to read some good historical fiction, nonfiction, et cetera. But right now I’m really obsessed with what I’ve most of my life has been around, how do we fix and improve our healthcare system? And to me, it’s just a big, giant game that I’m trying to put together. So it’s a never ending journey for me. And so it energizes me every day.

Karan Rhodes  03:20

Oh, wow. Well, I can’t wait to hear more what you’re going to talk about in a second, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say that I’m similar to you. I love to travel, and love to travel the world. So I think I’ve been to over 39 countries now, but I’m working on more. So I love the travel, and I think you’ll be my husband’s best friend, because he’s a golf fanatic as well. So okay, well, let’s start off, Lyle, if you don’t mind, by sharing a little bit about the company, Keycare, what you all are doing, and kind of peel back the layers of the onion a little bit, and give us a sneak peek in how you all are trying to make a difference in the world of healthcare.

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  04:05

So as mentioned, you know, we’re a virtual healthcare company, so basically, yeah, you imagine, yeah, you’ve seen your doctors because of covid. You’ve probably seen your doctors via video, online, etc. You may have even gone to one of these sites where you can see any doctor to help take care of you. It’s a really convenient experience. It’s something that for routine issues, is extremely convenient for a lot of patients, and people who don’t have time to go in the doctor, don’t want to go to doctor and get exposed to other sick people, right? But the time element is critical in today’s day and age, and so we wanted to build up a national primary care group that can help manage, take care of people fully online. However, the problem that we’ve seen over the years, and I’ve as I’ve been a practicing doctor in an office, I’ve helped run a national telehealth. Company that sort of does transactional care. The problem has always been that when you see your doctor, that’s good, but your doctor doesn’t have that much time to see you online, because they’re busy in the office, right? So if you see some other random doctor and they don’t have all of your history, it’s a very isolated experience, and it might be okay, but you lose out on quality, and you lose out on the overall coordination of care. So I said, Well, how can I do this in a way where I can have a panel of doctors take care of patients all over the nation and yet still be coordinated with their doctors in the health systems? So what we did was what no one else has done to date, is we actually partnered with epic, which is a the big national electronic medical record system. Many people might know my chart, which is their patient portal. 70% of all health systems are using epic. It’s sort of like Microsoft operating that runs many medical groups in healthcare, and we put our virtual care group our instance of epic, and that allows us to share data with any other organization using epic. So we became part of the ecosystem, and so we actually partner with health systems across the nation. So they will send patients to us when they can’t take care of them where they’re overflow 24 by seven urgent care, we can take care of them in the context and coordination of who they are, knowing all their data, send that back to the health system, and we’ve expanded from urgent care to primary care, so chronic care, preventive care, wellness checks, etc. And I, at the very least, on one hand, we can be a team member to your doctor who’s in the office, but you might not be able to get any particularly for routine issues. On the other hand, I’m

Karan Rhodes  06:47

Now is it transparent to the patient that you’re different than like I’m a Wellstar gal. Would I know? Because I have used the online Doctor service before, because, to your point, you sometimes you can’t get to your doctor when you need to for an urgent type of situation. Would I have known that it would be through your services, or is it WellStar would work with you, and then they would just find a doctor that could access my history.

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  07:19

So it’s a bit of a continuum. In general, you would go to WellStar and you would say, I have an urgent care problem, and if your doctor wasn’t available, our button keycare would show up in the WellStar MyChart. You could click on it and connect to our doctors. Ah, gotcha. WellStar would explain this as a partner of ours. In your mind, you’re probably just clicking through and going, well, you know, this is all

Karan Rhodes  07:44

I don’t care if your partner or not. I just need some help.

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  07:46

You need help for a very routine issue, right? You don’t want to bother your doctor, and the doctor that you saw would have all your information, so it would, it would sort of be like seeing a partner, and it would feel very connected. So legally and technically, you would be told and see that this is another medical group. WellStar would decide how they want to explain the partnership. But in your case, all you know is you went to your main clinic online. You went to WellStar and boom, you got to see someone who took care of you in coordination. So next time you saw your primary care doctor, he would have that information and that you wouldn’t have to say, Oh, I, I went to some clinic up the street, or I went to some online thing, and I they gave me some antibiotic, and I don’t know what else they did. Now you can say it’s in your system. You can take a look.

Karan Rhodes  08:36

Oh, nice. And then, on behalf of all of America, we love you. This is wonderful.

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  08:44

Yeah, I’ve seen it for years as a primary care doc, like when our patients have so many times they just want to get in for a quick issue, and a lot of times they don’t even want to bother their primary care doctor for a routine issue. They want to know when they’re really sick that they can see their doc correct. But part of that is also relieving the primary care doctor, load balancing away the routine, easy stuff, to a team that is really optimized for that. And then there’s a whole bunch of other folks who don’t even have a primary care doctor. Only probably maybe 25 to 50% of America has a true primary care doctor. You’re lucky that you have one. Many people don’t. They don’t have the time, energy, ability to get in, they call up. It’s a three, six month wait to get in to see anyone. They just don’t bother with it. Or they feel fine, but they don’t know. They should get some type of checkup, get some screening, and what happens if they feel sick? Who and where do they go? Going to the ER is not the best option. So part of what we do is also are able to see these folks when they can’t get in to see anybody, even for routine screening, stuff doesn’t have to actually be a new problem. So that’s the type of stuff we’re building up. We’re also partnering with specialty care, like behavioral health, rheumatology, etc, to make those types of doctors available as well, because we say that there’s a shortage of. Physicians in this country, and indeed, the way we use them, we have a shortage because we use them to do everything. I actually suggest we don’t really have a shortage of physicians. We have a shortage of using efficiently. To give you some context, analogy would be like saying that anytime you need to withdraw $100 from the bank, you have to go down to the bank and meet with the vice president of the bank and do a 15 minute visit with them to withdraw $100 we don’t do that, right, but we used to, 100 years ago, yeah, we did. And then they got tellers to do that, and then they got an ATM machine. And now you can do everything online, but in healthcare, we make you go in and see the vice president of the bank to withdraw $100 so we haven’t caught up in health care like we have in other industries. And even in health care, we’ve done a good job and surgery and certain imaging, etc, using technology and team based care. But in primary care, we are old fashioned, and we have plenty of doctors. If we start using technology, automation and a team based approach in doing more stuff online, we can make our doctors so much more efficient.

Karan Rhodes  11:14

Wow, I’m curious. Keycare is not the only player in this field. Correct? Are there others that are doing similar work to you, and if so, is there any collaboration amongst because I’m sure they’re having to have technologies talk to each other and workflows be similar. I’m just curious how you thrive. How does Keycare thrive in a space if there are others that do this has similar technologies as you

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  11:44

So we’ll say there’s a wave, one you know, over the past 10 to 20 years. There are a couple of companies you’ve heard of, TelaDoc and ammo, etc, have done this. We’ll put them in the category of what we’ll call isolated, siloed, transactional telehealth. So they’ve been doing it for years, and they were way ahead of the curve, but sometimes ahead of the curve means you build up a lot of things and you lose out on what the standard is so they’re able to do that, but because they’re doing it in a isolated way, the quality is not going to be as good as if they’re coordinated. And what’s happening is health systems, payers, employers, are recognizing that isolated, transactional, telehealth care is not the ideal version, and so we’re very different from them, because we use the EMR epic, that is the traditional, customary EMR used across most of America. It means that we’re connected to all that data, but it also means we have a full functional EMR versus just a transactional tech system. So that’s a big difference. And then strategically, we’re really trying to take care of patients longitudinally, not just transactionally, and we’re partnering with health systems. We’re not competing with them. We’re really saying, Hey, we’re here to help your doctors in the trenches to manage a larger population. With that said, there are a lot of specialty groups out there doing interesting niche things, but they’re finding that if they’re working on their proprietary technology, they can’t easily connect to the health systems. And so when they partner with us, we’re able to bring them in to the health systems in a much more seamless way. Again, another analogy would be, you probably use Microsoft Word and office and breathe. It’s because everyone else uses it right. If someone came to you and said, Hey, I’ve got this brand new spell checker, and you have to use a whole different system, a whole different word processing system, to use it. You’d probably say, No, thanks. You know, it doesn’t make sense for me to pay for that, and I’m not going to pay to integrate it into Microsoft Word, and Microsoft isn’t going to pay for it. You know, they have a spell checker. So the issue is, once you have a stable operating system a platform, there are ways to build on top of that, and in our case, we build on top of it by bringing new doctors and providers onto our platform. But our platform is epic, and we also can optimize epic. I optimize and you optimize your Microsoft Word, right? You give it certain things, you tweak it certain ways. We can optimize our epic instance to be more efficient and effective for virtual care. We can add in a little extra tech. We can add in content, etc. And so the analogy really holds true when you think about we don’t need a new platform. We just need to make the current platform we’re using as good as possible, knowing that it is the ubiquitous platform everyone else is using.

Karan Rhodes  14:48

I love that. I do know I have a very close friend who is an Epic trainer and administrator for numerous hospital he called those hospital. Entities like a WellStar, if you will. And so she was in at the very beginning when all the hospitals and healthcare groups were adopting epic, you know, having to train up physicians and nurses and all that. So she was in that first wave. And now, like you said, it’s the standard. Now everybody is using that. I’m curious, though, historically, healthcare wasn’t an early adopter of new things and technology, and so how have you found the Healthcare System’s attitudes now on innovating and taking advantage of a lot of the technology and work processes and things that are available now to create new efficiencies for the sake of the patient.

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  15:48

So health systems and health care folks are not necessarily the best innovators, right? There’s a standard way. The example that’s often used is the classic 17 years for something to be published and researched and established before it’s even spread. People get used to they get muscle memory for what they’re using. Yeah. And so in the late 90s, 2000s as computers and internet were starting, you had a couple of early adopters, but it was really not until you know that mid 2005 ish area where Meaningful Use and government rules, sort of financially supported use of electronic medical records. You saw the explosion, but there were hundreds and hundreds of EMR vendors, people trying lots of different things, and the governments are funding it. So they were willing to financially try certain things, and they were probably much more willing to try one off different types of software. I did a lecture in 2010 saying, now that the EMRs are becoming more stable, we need to think about them sort of like the iPhone. We need to build apps on top of them. I developed a company called Health fiction that was built as an app that helped automate certain workflow, like refill processing for doc. But instead of doing it outside the EMR, we actually built it into the EMR, and that started to get accepted and health systems were willing to work with lots of outside companies, as long as they could integrate in some way with the EMR sit alongside of it that actually we’ve seen is going down. What they’ve seen is that a lot of these companies weren’t able to keep up with the integrations with the technology. And of course, the EMR companies started building stuff, and it’s just like Microsoft, again. The idea is that if you wait long enough, they’ll start building in. So Microsoft didn’t have a spell checker to start with, but eventually they did. You didn’t have to go and buy a new one. You know, the same analogies happen. So today, probably harder to get into a health system with a new idea innovation, because they’re one, you know, they have a platform with epic, or there are a couple of other EMRs. You’ve got some little Cerner all scripts, etc. But once they have that in place, and that company continues to build on, I mean, Epic is, I think, releasing 10, 2050, AI tools so you don’t need to go outside to buy something new. You might as well buy something that’s built in, or, in Epic’s case, they have their own sort of, what they call the showcase, but the sort of like Epic’s App Store or App Store, App Store, and some of the other companies do as well. And so health systems are really looking at, how do I leverage the platform I have, and either use what’s coming from vendor and or something that has been closely integrated? It’s very hard to bring stuff outside. And in fact, the real innovations probably are going to be in people and process and business model. Innovation is probably more important in healthcare than technology. Innovation, although we have seen, I think probably the coolest thing in the past year has been ambient AI, which is an AI based tool that listens to a doctor and patient talk and then creates a note. So can be highly efficient, or at least effective, for the doctor to have a well documented note without having to type everything themselves. And there are some companies who have done that is, EMR.

Karan Rhodes  19:12

Do you have to get? Does the doctor have to get permission from the patient to use the AI?

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  19:16

They’ll often say, Hey, we’re going to do this, but it is built and so because that it is private, right? It is very secure, right? It is not going elsewhere. It’s not being saved elsewhere. It is, it is sort of like having a transcriptionist sitting next to you and typing things up. But it actually it’s pretty cool, because it doesn’t translate it verbatim. It actually creates the what a good note, should look like, so it would take out if I asked about, you know, Hey, did you see the Cubs, you know, win last week? Right? It wouldn’t include that. It would only include things that are medically relevant. And the doctor, of course, has to sign off on it at the end. But today, I would say healthcare, large health systems, right? If you’re going to do something, start small, think innovation, use user centered design, figure out what corporate metric and KPI you’re going to really fix. And I always say, because I’ve done this a long time, is you’re better off being inside the balloon and expanding it slowly than throwing darts at the balloon trying to radically change. Healthcare does not like to radically change, but you can boil that frog in water, slowly moving where we are in some ways, I think about ourselves. We’re working with health systems. We’re using epic we’re billing fee for service. What’s innovative about that? Well, what’s innovative in our case, is we’re doing it virtually, and we’re building we’re going to continue to tech enable our virtual care doctors, because everything’s done online, we can tech enable that a lot more than an office visit. Yeah, and over time, I’m hoping that we’ll also see a true team based approach to managing a population. I’m also hoping that we’ll see things like physician compensation, redesign health systems, start paying doctors based on the panel size they manage and the quality that they manage, not on how many patients they can see in the office. I love that, because if you don’t change compensation for how we pay doctors, we’re only going to get what we pay for, which is lots of volume.

Karan Rhodes  21:16

They’re not going to be in incentivized and do anything different, you know?

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  21:19

 Yeah, so I would say the short answer to your question is, make sure you’re really online with metrics, figure out and including what the hospital wants and how they’re paying doctors, and as much as possible, use the technology that they already have in place and figure out how to, you know, people process, and maybe little tweaks technically to to get to your innovation.

Karan Rhodes  21:43

Wow, I have a million questions, and I wish I had you five hours. Let me ask you this. So for key care, what is your business model? How do you all get paid? Is it a percentage of everyone who books? Or is there another financial model?

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  22:01

Well, in many ways, you know, we are like a big medical group. We get paid to see patients. The majority of our revenue is coming from taking care of patients and getting paid either by the insurance company or by sponsorship, if, for example, a health system or employer may pay for their employees, but that is the majority. We do have some maintenance agreements with hospitals, but it’s a small part of the total revenue. So we are, in that way, similar to any other health system out there. We are, again, in many ways, like a big medical group that uses epic and every medical group out there gets paid by seeing patients or taking on risk to manage patients.

Karan Rhodes  22:40

Are you taken away from the primary care because they’re not seeing as many patients as you all are?

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  22:47

Well, that’s, that’s one of their concerns, right? So we have to be really careful about going in and saying, Hey, we’re just going to take all your patients, or all your easy patients, and you’re going to see less, particularly if you’re paying your doctors based on their volumes, right? So a couple of things there in. Number one is the first thing we do is simply say, Look, we’re just seeing the patients. You can’t. We won’t start seeing patients until you’re full. And the truth is, most primary care doctors are booked out one two months. Oh, so or more. We’re not stealing their patients. Number two, we’re actually keeping their patients in the system, because when they can’t see their patients, their patients are going to go to the urgent care down the block or somewhere else online. If they have a good experience there, they’re going to steal them. We will never steal them. We’re sending them right back because we are coordinated and connected to the health system. And third, as we have hopefully move into true population health and paying doctors based on panel size management. Manager, if I go to a doctor and say, Hey, I’ve got a virtual care team and will together, we can start taking care of more patients, but instead of you seeing 25 patients a day in the office, we’re going to cut you down to 12 patients, but you’re going to increase your salary by 30% How does that sound? And most doctors are going to be like, Well, that sounds too good to be true. We’d say because we’re making, you know, to think about your whole podcast, what you talk about. We’re making you the leaders. We’re putting it at the top of the pyramid, doctor, instead of you having to do everything, instead of you having to take care of every part of the patient. You are not the VP of the VP of the bank. Should not be taking care of everything, right? You’re going to see 12 patients, they who really need to see you, and you’re going to have plenty of time with those patients. They are more complex, and they need you those other but bunch of patients, though, who have routine issues, they don’t need you today, yeah, but they’ll need your team, and your team’s going to work in coordination with you. So imagine if we can double your panel size a typical primary care doctors can manage 2000 ish patients. What if we could say you can manage four or 5000 patients? Because. Your team is going to take care of all the routine stuff, and you’re going to focus on the complex stuff that you as a doctor in the office should be focusing on, right? And because your team manages more, and we pay you by panel size and quality, we can pay you more. We have burnout because we keep asking doctor to see more and more patients, and we keep reducing their salary. No doctor is trying to squeeze in another extra patient because they want to make a little more money. It is a very, very tough intellectual challenge. Think about if your day was 2025 meetings every day, each meeting was 15 minutes, no matter how complex the issue and each one, someone came to you with at least one but up to five problems, and you had to document everything about every problem, solve every problem, explain it to this person, write everything out, type it all out for them, give it to them, and you have 15 minutes and one after the other, that’s what we’ve done to doctors. That is not how you use your highest and best and most of the care that’s done is what I call the Triple R threat routine, repeatable rules based care. We don’t need a doctor to refill standard medicines, to order standard labs, to do general wellness checks. We certainly don’t need a doctor in the office, a physician and MP quite honestly, using computer technology, automation can do much of that.

Karan Rhodes  26:25

So does anyone ever say no to you? I’m sold. I mean, you’re the best salesperson. You have the right justifications. That pitch was awesome. I need to put you on Shark Tank. Does anyone say no? Why would they say no? What’s the downside? What is it I’m not seeing?

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  26:42

So you know, people are different. So from the patient perspective, we and others have done numerous surveys, and what we find about third of the patients actually prefer doing everything online for routine care. About a third say, I’ll do I’m fine with either, whichever one’s more convenient, probably online. But about a third of people say, I really like going to the doctor’s office. They have a good relationship. They want to go in. So not every patient always wants to stuff online, and some are are reticent about seeing someone that’s not their doctor. Now, with that said, yeah, it’s unless you have a concierge doctor, there’s no guarantee you’re getting Yeah, but majority of patients, particularly post covid, have learned that this is a very good way to take care of things. And many patients, again, recognize the difference between a small, routine issue, yeah, where anyone can take care of them, yeah, but they want it connected to the doctor, versus a really complex issue, where I want to see my time. But overall, patients really love virtual care, and we’re not giving them enough options. On the other hand, doctors who are paid solely to see patients in the office, that’s their salary, they are not going to willingly. You know, send too many patients to us that our biggest problem right now is incentive misalignment, and so we do encourage health systems think about how you’re paying your doctors and whether this makes sense. Some health systems will say only our doctors in our offices should see all patients. I think that’s short sighted. I think more and more of them are recognizing that the more that we can offer options to our patients by but keep them in the system, the better we’ve done. Pretty well. We’ve signed up, you know, 17 health systems and a little over a year and a half, that is a hard thing. It often takes a year or two to do it in that time frame, and we have nine more in contracting. So we actually have established product market fit health systems like us. However, how much they’ll share the care with us and our providers is going to be a combination of, are we taking the insurance that they offer patients who’s paying for it needs to be affordability, awareness. We still have some humps to cross, but we are seeing this starting to happen. Pre covid health systems really did not want to do much of this post covid, they’ve gone from a small amount of visits to over an epic system. Over 4 million visits a month are done on video, and that continues to rise. And so we think this is now part and parcel, just part of healthcare. And the issue is, do you want to need a partner to help you with it? Our job is to be an amazing partner and to be able to do it quicker, cheaper and faster, better than a health system can do it themselves. Because I want my health system focusing on curing cancer, broken bones, heart attacks and complex patients. I don’t need my health system spending a lot of their time and money on assigning their doctors to take care of sinus infections and UTIs or refills. I want their doctors to focus on the hardest stuff, but that means they need a partner to focus on doing the routine stuff, really efficient,

Karan Rhodes  29:54

Amazing. I am just speechless of the opportunity, and I do think it’s very well needed. Needed because, you know, especially depending upon what part of the country you’re in, if you’re speaking to the US, but just specifically, it’s hard to get into. You know, a doctor, I’m lucky to have a great primary care, but I’m a power user of technology, and so I, to your point, I’m in that bucket that for certain things I want to see my primary, but others the sniffles or something, you know, something I can’t handle as much I’m okay with seeing someone else if I don’t think it’s like urgent, or something that I know that they can help me and help me faster than it would take for the three month way to get it.

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  30:42

Does it matter if the random doctor you see it has access to your information and connection

Karan Rhodes  30:47

It doesn’t matter to me at all?

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  30:48

It made it but a lot of people, it matters to because things like, do they know your allergies? Do you have to refill everything you know, put everything back in? Do they know who you are? Have they connected to your doctor? Yeah, into a lot of patients, they don’t they’re like, I don’t care

Karan Rhodes  31:02

Oh no. If you have that expertise, that’s what I care about. Oh, that’s amazing. Well, you’re doing some great work at key care. I know you’re going to be continually to expand based on what you’re offering, and if you give that same pitch. So what? How you explain it to me? I don’t know how anyone could say, No, we don’t want to partner with with you all, because you’re providing such an invaluable service. Now I literally that’s why I said, I wish we had five hours. I literally blinked and we’re coming up on time. But you know, one of the things that we do, you can never let our guests go until you weigh in on our signature question. As you know, I wrote a book and did research on leadership execution, some of the tactics and things that highly successful leaders use in any leadership effort, all seven are equally as important. You just use different levers at different times based on the effort that you’re doing, and so you were so kind enough to share that leading with intellectual horsepower resonated with you and for you listeners out there who haven’t gotten the book yet and read it or looked at our white paper, leading with intellectual horsepower is all about using your areas of expertise to watch trends, to peek around corners and see you know and identify things that others miss and bring it to the attention so you can take action upon it. And so now, hearing the story of key care, I kind of understand a little bit about why you might have selected that one. Well, curious ones wants to know. Dr Lyle, why did leading with intellectual horsepower really resonate with you?

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  32:47

Well, first of all, yeah, just a shout out to your book and your theories, right? It was very hard because you have a multiple things that are all really important, yeah? And I’m like, I’m choosing intellectual horsepower. That sounds like I’m such an egotist that I got. I think I’m just smarter than everyone else. The reason it resonated with me because, as you describe it, is because I’m a bit of a weird hybrid, right? I am an engineer by background, who became a doctor, became a health system executive, became a, you know, an innovator, and, you know, informally trained in innovation, who became a digital health entrepreneur who was at an academic medical center for 20 years taking care of patients and work in the system, who went and worked in a big national telehealth company and learned operations there. And none of that would have mattered, except for covid coming, and all of a sudden, the perfect storm came, because on top of that, right? All of a sudden people wanted virtual care, and my expertise just literally coincided with what the world needed. And my background as a doctor who knows technology and innovative things, all of a sudden came, and on top of that, I happen to know a lot about epic, because I helped implement that at Northwestern for primary care. I built a company that integrated with Epic. So all of these things had to come together for us to be able to come and say, let’s create keycare. Yeah, I am not. I think in general, doctors aren’t regarded as the best CEOs of companies. Company I should be allowed to run right, right, but it, you know, to have the ability to see from my perch, yeah, understand the technology and understand how epic works, understand how the health system works in general, because I teach courses on that. Understand, as a doctor, how primary care works, understand how the national telehealth vendors work. Bring all that together to create this new version, this wave to, you know, telehealth, 2.0 that’s the, that’s how, that’s why that intellectual horsepower appealed to me. Because it’s not about, you know, necessarily being smart and everyone else, but I have insight into all the different things that literally all came together to make this company that. It creates uniqueness that I think is different, because if you look at most telehealth companies, it’s started by some kid, you know, maybe a doctor who doesn’t know tech or etc, but yeah, you know, I bring it all together. And you know, I’m not, I’m not 25 year old kid, but they’re two peaks to entrepreneurs. One is before children. The second is after children. Now my child, and this is where I get to spend a lot of my time.

Karan Rhodes  35:24

I love, well, I will say, I know just a tad about a tad. I worked for four years for Blue Cross, Blue Shield of Florida. Back in the day, it was way before tele health and, you know, technology as an HMOs were a huge, huge at the time, and they had call centers back then of nurses, believe it or not, I’ve been out of it for a minute, but I appreciate you know all that the advancements that are being made. I look forward to seeing how healthcare will continuously innovate. I’m hoping they have the bug now so that we can provide better care and more extensive care to patients of all financial abilities. I will say I don’t know what the right answers are, but there are a lot of underserved around as well. So I think is as much as can leaders like you can focus on bringing great opportunities and efficiencies to healthcare. I think it will impact other areas, and innovation will continue to happen, but that’s just Karan’s thinking and wishlist and my dreams.

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  36:38

Well, it’s certainly part of you know, what is now called the quintuple aim, right? Yeah. How do we improve quality and improve service? Decrease costs, expand access and access to the underserved population, right? The everyone says, you know, you can hit you can either you can improve quality, you know, cost or access, but you can’t do all three. I’m gonna suggest we can, yeah, with, again, a tech empowered virtual care workforce working in, you know, as a teammate to the health systems, I believe that there is a way to say, by improving access, we immediately improve quality. And if we can do in a way that is makes financial sense for everybody, because we can take care of people earlier, before they’re too sick, but identify the ones who need more help, we are able to start taking care of a bigger and bigger population, yeah, with smaller group of people.

Karan Rhodes  37:34

I love that. Well. Dr. Lyle Berkowitz, it has been an absolute honor having you on the show, we’re going to have a lot information about your bio and background and links for you and your company in our show notes, but I love to give our guests opportunity to give voice to that on the podcast. So where can our listeners find out more about you and keycare?

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  37:57

Well, our website’s keycare.org, again, we’re not really direct to consumer, but we, if you’re at a health system and want to find out how to get a virtual care partner, come find us. We’ve got, you know, LinkedIn, I’ve got, I have a website. Dr Lyle, D, R, L Y L E.com, and I’m on Twitter. Dr Lyle, MD, so yeah, I’m out there a lot LinkedIn, etc, to put out my views on how I think healthcare needs to continue to transform. Who’s doing great stuff, who’s doing stuff that might not, you know, be as important or great for the health system. So I’m pretty much an open book on that, and I love being able to talk to you about this. It’s been a fun conversation.

Karan Rhodes  38:36

It has been, I know I’ve learned a lot, and I’m, I’m glad to have you as part of our lead at the top of your game network. We’ll definitely be following you and your thoughts and and seeing how things transpire. But we do appreciate the gift of your time and coming on the show. Thank you so much,

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz  38:54

Of course,

Karan Rhodes  38:55

And thank you to listeners for the gift of your time as well. We know there are literally millions of other podcasts you can be listening to, so we don’t take your patronage lightly. Please be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast and just share with just one friend, because by doing so, we can all learn how to better lead at the top of our game. Thank you so much, and see you next week, And that’s our show for today. Thank you for listening to the lead at the top of your game podcast, where we help you lead your seat at any employer, business, or industry in which you choose to play. You can check out the show notes, additional episodes, and bonus resources, and also submit guest recommendations on our website at leadyourgamepodcast.com. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn by searching for the name Karan Rhodes with Karan being spelled K a r a n. And if you like the show, the greatest gift you can give would be to subscribe and leave a rating on your podcast platform of choice. This podcast has been a production of Shockingly Different Leadership, a global consultancy which helps organizations execute their people, talent development, and organizational effectiveness initiatives on an on-demand, project, or contract basis. Huge thanks to our production and editing team for a job well done. Goodbye for now.