PowerLiving with Kimberlee Langford
PowerLiving with Kimberlee Langford
Building The Brain To Amplify The Heart In Care Coordination
What if the most important part of healthcare lives between the five‑minute doctor visit and the rest of a patient’s life? We sit down with Mendel, CEO of CareCo, to show how an AI co‑pilot can remember every touchpoint, guide better conversations, and finally give care teams the tools they deserve—without replacing the human heart of care.
Across eight years running a coordination service, Mendel learned that success hinges on workflow, not shiny features. Care teams everywhere follow the same core loop—pre‑call prep, post‑call documentation, follow‑up tasks, and ongoing communications—yet juggle it across tabs, systems, and memory. CareCo stitches phone, video, text, and ambient capture into one surface so the AI can build a living “brain” for each patient, then generate a call guide that’s both clinically smart and personally warm. Think motivational interviewing prompts alongside reminders about the orange pill bottle they couldn’t find last time.
We dig into quality and compliance in a way that actually helps: organizational call‑guide profiles encode standards, consent language, and end‑of‑call summaries, while every conversation is scored with citations to the exact moments that mattered. In a value‑based world, that level of attribution—who did what, when, and with what effect—may be the difference between getting paid for outcomes or getting lost in the noise. Early results show around 40 percent efficiency gains, richer conversations, and less burnout, but the real question is how to use that time: push more volume, or cap caseloads and move toward six‑hour days or four‑day weeks so clinicians can practice at the top of their license and feel the joy again.
If you lead care teams, this is a practical blueprint for turning AI from “another tool to learn” into an always‑on partner that protects attention, lifts quality, and proves value. We keep it transparent, hands‑on, and focused on what actually changes patient lives: trust, follow‑through, and clear next steps. Subscribe for more conversations at the frontier of care coordination, and if this resonated, share it with a colleague and leave a quick review—your feedback helps others find the show.
Empower Living with Kimberly Langford, where inspiration meets empowerment. Kimberly is a nurse executive, leadership coach, Reiki master, and your guide on this journey to whole person wellness.
SPEAKER_00:Hey, hey, hey, here we are. I am so super stoked uh to get some time to visit with you, Mendel, and uh here on the podcast. Mendel is the CEO and founder of CARCO. Uh CareCo, which is an AI co-pilot and really built to amplify uh care coordinators, not to replace those those folks. And I think the prowess of your tool is to provide that automated uh uh documentation platform, tightening quality and compliance and really embedding AI into that full uh the the workflow for the clinician. But welcome. And gosh, if you wouldn't mind, tell us a little bit about you and your journey. What made you dip your toe into AI?
SPEAKER_04:Well, thank you so much. And firstly, it's it's it's an honor to to uh to be here, excited to be a part of the show. So thank you for the invite. Um I've been in the care coordination space for about eight years, actually. So I built a service-based company that I still have called Previva Health Group. And that is a company that does care coordination uh on behalf of typically primary care uh physicians. We currently talked about 6,000 patients a month, and doing programs like chronic care management, remote patient monitoring, annual wellness visit support, uh transitional care management, kind of ongoing preventive care. And so building that company for you know seven, eight years and building it step by step really gave me a deep understanding of not just the behaviors that make care coordination work as a as a process and as a program, but I think more importantly, the behaviors of the folks that actually do it. And that's been really critical to not just the genesis of the idea of Careco, um, which I'll talk about, but the way, I think more importantly, the way we're going about it and the way that we're building. And so about two years ago, so it was February of 23, so I guess, well, that's when the initial idea came into my head. Um, this idea popped in my head of like I can build something that is hyper-specific, hyper uh, you know, tail uh tailored for care managers, care coordinators, care teams. And it's this interesting kind of part of healthcare, right? Because you've got most folks are going after the doctors. They want the line share of healthcare. That's where the doctors are, and you've got all the tools and ambient recorders and note takers and all this kind of stuff. They're going after all the doctors. Um, then you have other folks that are focusing on the patient. And there's this kind of not very recognized, not very overly paid attention to slice of healthcare called kind of care teams, or the folks that sit between the doctor and the patient. And those are the folks that are doing, like I said, transitional care management, ongoing care management, utilization management, um, various different forms of care coordination. And those folks really are the foundation of their patient's entire experience with healthcare. You know, as someone that's done this service for the last seven years, you you learn this very quickly. Patients have a doctor. They see that doctor for, you know, I don't know, five minutes? Yeah, if they're lucky, five minutes, it's a whirlwind. Even at their annual, they'll go home, pick up the phone, and call their care coordinator and say, hey, can you do me a favor? Can you look at that visit node and tell me what the hell just happened? Because I have no idea. Absolutely. And so when done correctly, care coordination really becomes more than just a program, but it becomes um it becomes really critical for the entire experience. And and when you talk about trying to reduce utilization, it all comes down to a a relationship. I mean, think about it. If you you have a friend who's what do you do when you when you when God forbid you've got a I don't know, health question, what do you do?
SPEAKER_00:Right? Well, what do you do? Yeah, so if if I don't know it, I ask a trusted colleague. But you're absolutely right. That's what people are gonna go to. Well, the if they don't have a nurse in their pocket or a doctor friend, they're gonna ask their neighbor across the fence.
SPEAKER_04:Right. Or they'll just go to the ER because you don't Right. Or they'll just Google, which means everyone has cancer all the time, and then they'll go to the ER, right? Um, so that's not good. Uh, but if you're not one of the probably very few that are lucky enough to have a close friend who's a doctor, um, that's what you're gonna do more often than not. So having that relationship um with a care manager is really, really critical. And I don't think it's being done well. And I think the proof of that is how little it's funded uh comparative to kind of some other programs. And so all that kind of came together to hey, we can build something that is an AI co-pilot for care managers, care coordinators, and really the entire care team. Something that understands that technology is better inherently at the brain of care, but humans are better at the heart of care. And that's never gonna change because there's something superhuman, and this is something that so many people in technology get wrong. You've got all these tech companies that are building these AI bots and agents and all this stuff. When it comes to care coordination, you are calling patients that don't know how they're putting food on the table next week. They're not thinking about the gym. They're not thinking about their exercise routine or their diet or how exactly to get healthier food. That's who you not only have to get in touch with, but you have to change their life. You have to change their behaviors. So the level of humanity and the level of relationship that needs to be built to create that effect is so deep that, yes, there's a place for you know, AI if you're trying to schedule appointments, or if you're just you know lonely and want to chat at somebody, which is a whole different thing. Sure, there's a lot of different areas for agentic AI. But when it comes to changing that, you know, diabetics life or that, you know, patient with stage four, you know, chronic kidney disease or whatever, um, that's really, really human. And so we wanted to build something that understood that dynamic between the brain and the heart. And our kind of mission has been boiled down to this line that we want to build the brain to amplify the heart. So we want to build the perfect brain of the perfect care manager that remembers everything, always has access to the right thing to say, always, you know, can can do all the annoying parts like generating documentation, like you had mentioned, task creation management, communications, but then leave the heart, leave that impact uh to the human.
SPEAKER_00:Nice. Uh well, and too, uh when I think about you know the real power of AI, being able to um harness to your point some of those other tasks that, you know, maybe they don't, maybe we don't need the nurse to do or the navigator to do. And that frees up bandwidth and time for the the human, if you will, to do that work that the human excels at. And especially in an environment where, you know, when you talk about doing more, you have to be efficient and productive in order to serve uh you know your clients in the right way. Um interesting though, I think a lot of my colleagues and clinicians, when they think about you know, harnessing an AI tool or something like that, I think sometimes we tend to um maybe merge. Uh either we think it is going to um drive the whole thing and make a lot of errors, or we think that you know it's just a transcription kind of tool. And I think sometimes there's we've we lose the value of the real work that you know an AI platform like that does. How would you describe the difference between I know you said before that AI scribe isn't the product, it's a feature. So um tell us a little bit about what the product is. While AI is the feature in the product. Um tell me a little bit about that product and what makes it different in the marketplace where other scribe tools really miss the mark.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, so there's a couple questions there. Um I'll say a couple points. Firstly, this is where it really is impactful to build something that is purpose-built for a particular use case and not try to go after 10,000 different buyer personas, right? Uh the magic is in the understanding of the workflow. That's where the magic is. Because if you don't get a workflow tool right, it will not be used. Right. And so you're seeing this in the kind of race to the death of all the big um, you know, all the big um uh note-taker companies, that they found out very quickly that this technology is extremely easy now and not there is no moat in that tech. And so they're all raising a ton of money to expand, uh, to expand out to take on you know RCM or whatever the different areas that they're going in because they're understanding they have to be workflow tools that extend to other parts of the workflow. They can't just be a note taker. And so that was very apparent to me from day one. And again, because I've been building the service human side for eight years, it was extremely easy on how to um on how to build this very, very particularly for the uh the uh care managers. So that's point number one. I think that the the the secret is really in um it's really in the workflow. It's understanding that end-to-end and building something that is purpose-built for the people that are there to use it. Um and so yeah, I think a lot of a lot of folks get that get that get that part wrong because when you're it's also the type of company that you're trying to build. If you're gonna build a company and you're going out to raise and you're trying to do all this, like you have to show that you're going after this multi-billion dollar market. And it's difficult, it's difficult to convince people that I'm building something speci for a specific subset of people because you feel like you have to take over the whole market, otherwise, you're not gonna be this multi-billion dollar company. And I think the incentives are off there, you know.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you're everything to everybody, then you're nothing to nobody. Exactly.
SPEAKER_04:So amen. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And you had me with workflow because I think workflow is so important, especially in healthcare, you know, where I I've never seen a period like this in my entire career where you know, a lot of the old guys they've left. They're not here anymore and they're not coming back. And a lot of our experienced folks, they're just they're they're not there. And so to be able to have a tool where you can help new team members become successful and competent quickly and not have gaps, or to your point, um, where you're really able to do more with that embedded tool. I mean, a lot of teams they'll get 20 to 30 30 calls in an afternoon, or you know, and you you've you think you're finishing your note because you're so busy typing all the things and checking all the boxes and the phone rings and you gotta pin this one, heaven forbid if you don't go back and finish your note, right? It's a real that workflow is a real problem and it does lead to gaps, it leads to missed opportunities. Um, and so I I you know I think that's I think that's a real differentiator.
SPEAKER_04:Um and you know, you yeah, it's it's it's really important.
SPEAKER_00:Now I have a kind of a side question. Uh so are you saying then if you have a uh a company that specializes a certain niche, maybe maybe you specialize in MSK, for instance, or maybe your specialty is cardiac or uh oncology, can you integrate that tool then and customize it with those particular like um care flows and and pathways?
SPEAKER_04:So I think the approach is you know, I I I talk about this sometimes when I go out and speak at these different things. No one uses AI. Nobody. You don't use AI to use AI. You are trying to get something done. That's what you're trying to do. And everything from a technology perspective that you are actually going to use and enjoy using, not because you were mandated to use something, is going to come about because those things are in service of you trying to get that thing done. Right. And so it's not even specialty, it's it's understanding the human, what is the outcome? What is the outcome that you are trying to accomplish at the patient level? What is what are you trying to enable your user to accomplish? But at the user level, who is that person and what are you trying to allow them to accomplish? And that's why it's it's it's not just specialty specific, but understanding the actual person, even within a specialty. Who is the person? What is their workflow? What is the program that they run? You need to have a nitty-gritty, real, you know, understanding of the minutiae around what are they doing? What you know, we sit and and and I feel so incredibly blessed to have this experience and to have that first company because we're able to sit with them and see how they're navigating around six different tabs and how they choose to pop around the EHR and when they choose to pull up the chart before they call the patient. And, you know, like all these little tiny little things um really make an impact in the way that you build technology. And so, yeah, I would I mean, once you nail the the the uh the the workflow for the person, I think it matters less the way that we've built careco. Careco is actually extremely adaptable to various different work for various different like the specialty doesn't matter, the care that you're providing does not matter. We've got therapists on Careco, we've got home health, we've got chronic care management, remote patient monitoring, you know, we've got um we've got pharmacists on there, like you name it, there's all that's why we call it care teams, because it's basically all these folks that just sit between. But you know what they do have in common? All of them are doing the following thing: pre-call or pre-conversation prep, post-call documentation, post-call follow-up action items, and postcall communications to either uh pharmacies, providers, referrals, or patient. Those steps are being taken by every single across the board. Yeah. Then the the individual pieces of those change, right? So this one wants this particular type of documentation, this one wants this particular type of task, this one wants this, you know, and that's where you build in that that kind of flexibility into the platform. Um, but it really just comes down to understanding your user.
SPEAKER_00:So, you know, I love what I'm hearing, Mendel, because I have found in the systems that I've used, they've been the most helpful to me when I did have somebody looking over my shoulder and seeing what I was doing. And and uh so I'm just curious because I, you know, I've heard you speak in different forums, and the passion is so front and center. Where does that come from?
SPEAKER_04:Where does the passion come from? Um, extreme ADD mixed with uh, I don't know. Um look, I mean, we've got 25 employees at my first company, and now I'm blessed to have, you know, we're close to 500 users on Careco now. And when I get on these onboardings, and so what we do is, you know, when someone comes on, what I like to do is instead of me doing a demo, you know, most people, they the person from the company shares their screen and they say that I don't do that. What I do is I have the user who's seeing my platform for the first time ever, I send them a welcome email, I have them log in and I have them do the demo in front of everyone because that's how easy we've made the platform. And when you watch the face of these users who have been spending the last decade to get or two decades doing care management and care coordination, and they know the pain, they know the work that they've been doing up until this moment. And we and and and you watch them just like just understand, like, oh my gosh, like that that aha moment when they complete their call and they see everything kind of populate for them, and then they see that the call guide for that next conversation, and it tells them exactly what to follow up on, talking about my niece and talking to, you know, like when they see that I've literally had people in tears on these calls.
SPEAKER_00:And I can imagine because in in most programs, it takes a while because you have to fit your process inside their tool.
SPEAKER_02:Yep.
SPEAKER_00:And it sounds like what you've built is a tool that really fits inside a provider's process.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. And so I remember one person like literally in tears saying, like, where has this been for the last 10 years of my life? Like almost like looking back in our life and being like, I've wasted, I've wasted so much time. And I think this, you know what? I think this is something that this this age that we live in right now with technology is gonna do for us, where we're gonna look back at the time that we've spent, you know, doing things that were a literal waste of our life. You know, you you talk about you talk about earlier. I mean, can you imagine going and plowing a field now, spending 40 years plowing a field when now you can just go to the supermarket and buy flour, right? Like, if I took you back to that, you'd be like, well, thank God I don't live in that era because this is way easier. And you talked earlier about, you know, the the um people being burnt out and how you don't like that word. You know, people aren't lazy. We just don't like doing things that we don't like doing, like it's that simple.
SPEAKER_00:Or that have low value.
SPEAKER_04:Yes. Well, that's usually why we don't we don't like doing things because of because of one of two reasons. Either we're not good at them or they have low value. Yeah. Right? Like that's why. And so um 90% of the time that is being spent in healthcare is typically forcing someone that went to school to care for patients to do one of those two things. A low value to them or to the patient, it's probably valuable to billing and to the business side, but not to the care, not for the thing that they went to school for. So it's low value to the care, and it's usually something they're not good at, like navigating a bunch of tech, right? Yeah. So um, so yeah, when you when you when you when you watch these people see like, oh my gosh, we're here. We're at this place in technology where something actually understands my workflow, and I don't have to do all the things I've been doing for the last 10 years um that have just you know wasted my life. It's it they get emotional, and that's it's just very touching.
SPEAKER_00:I just had a picture flash in my mind of the old days. The old days we used to have to hand write in a paper chart a head-to-toe physical assessment. I mean, it would take up a page. Can you imagine sitting at a nurse's station 30, 40 minutes writing a uh oh my gosh, it's crazy.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Well let's talk. So kind of switching gears a little bit. Um, I was really interested, you know, where you and I have talked before, um, where I can also see this tool being really helpful in terms of helping an organization uh improve in terms of quality and compliance. Can you talk a little bit about how does the tool support those kinds of measures? Um like scoring, audits, that kind of thing. How can how can the tool help an organization sharpen the saw, so to speak?
SPEAKER_04:So we'll do a little breaking news on your show here. Um I literally got finally got my hands on this uh feature set that we've been building for last year this morning. Uh started started messing around with it.
SPEAKER_00:Um, it's hot off the press.
SPEAKER_04:This is hot off the press. Uh, just for you just for your listeners here, let me take a step back and just describe briefly what Carico does if it's not clear. Carico is an end to end co pilot platform at uh for care teams. It's a communication platform, firstly. So we built a phone system, a video system, texting, and an in person ambience. Recorder directly into the platform, which means that all of your patient communications, no matter how you're communicating with the patient, goes through CARCO. Now that's really important because CARCO is this brain that's kind of building a mini AI brain on every individual patient, remembering everything that was ever said to that patient, whether that was a phone call, a voicemail, a text message, a video call, or in person. And then it does two things. The most important thing is it gives you a guide for every single conversation that without doing any prep, will give you this like hyper-specific, hyper personalized talking points and discussion items, both from report building and clinical, to guide the patient to the preferred to the clinical outcome of the call. And then when you get out of your conversation, uh you're going to get your documentation, your tasks, and your communic communications or anything you need basically that would take up your time to do manually is done for you. That's that's in short. And so the flagship features that call guide, and that I think is the future of care. And so up until this point, it's been really cool. It's kind of been a hyper-personalized script, but really hyper-personalized, um, that remembers but and it and it kind of learns from all the previous interactions to understand where to go. What we've built, uh, and this was has always been the vision, but what we finally have is the ability for you to come in as an organization and set up various different kinds of profiles of call guides. Or maybe you can call them like a care program. So you come in and you say, okay, at my company, at my healthcare organization, we do X, we do transitional care management, we do a diabetes education program, we do nutrition program, whatever it is. You can then create these mini profiles where you describe what the perfect ideal conversation should look like at a high level. And so, but at an intelligent level. So it can be the various different compliance things, like has to be epic compliant, you know, we need to tell them that they're on a recorded line, like some of those things. And then we always need to be addressing the chronic conditions that are on the uh care plan. And, you know, and also we should be doing motivational interviewing. And also any I want to know that every single time a patient brings up any kind of concern, it is at least addressed. Meaning, like they say, I will do XYZ with a clear action item, even if you're not the person to fix it, but you're addressing it, right? All these intelligent things. Um summary at the end of the call, repeat back to the patient, what you're gonna do for them, um anything that you can that you can think of. So you build this thing, Kerco then takes that profile and then you assign it at different levels, stacks that kind of um stencil, let's call it, on top of all the computer data for the patient. So net so and to create this hyper-personalized version. So now when it says to discuss you know, rapport building with with uh with Kimberly, it's hey, how was your how was your niece's ex? You know, and like um uh when it's um when it's you know clinical, oh, last time we last time we left off, you were saying how you couldn't find that orange medication bottle, you weren't sure where what it was, have you been able to find it? Can you read the label for me? Like, all of that is where it becomes hyper-personalized. But here's the kicker every single call can now be scored and reported on at the conversation level in Careco. And so every conversation that follows those guidelines will now have an intelligent analysis with a score that will break down every single section that you've determined is critical to the the success of this uh of this. By the way, care gaps identified, care gaps closed, reduction utilization, you name it, is now reported to you with an intelligent reason why it was reported as such, citationed to the point of conversation where that thing happened.
SPEAKER_00:That's huge. Yeah, huge. And I love you. So you mentioned rapport building several times. And you know, I that's so key because you can't change behavior unless you know people feel like you care about them. It's impossible. And without without a uh without a trusted therapeutic and professional helping relationship, you're not going to really impact somebody's life for good.
SPEAKER_01:Yep.
SPEAKER_00:That's awesome. And then I think all the heat is all the different kinds of things that we have to capture and report on. I mean, there's been some initiatives where for for quality and and uh and improvement measures where you know folks have abandoned them just because nobody could keep up with all of them, or things were too expensive and too cumbersome to put into place. Never, you know, never mind that they may or may not have have had value. You just couldn't even try it because you know it wouldn't fit.
SPEAKER_04:So and it's an additional point that's becoming really, really interesting. And you know, this the current CMMI, I don't know if you know if you see Abe Sutton around, um, he's just every week he's dropping another model. It's crazy. Today he dropped another one that's gonna replace the ACL Reach program called LEED. Um and he's constantly dropping these models. And and and one of the most exciting ones he's dropped is a model called Access. And the common thread between all these models, and even before this administration, even with the previous administration and the leadership at CMMI, we're moving more and more towards aligning the uh incentives with value-based care and doing a lot of show me, don't tell me, right? Like outcome, outcome, outcome. Now that's really good because it'll start aligning the behaviors and the programs in that direction. But as we start to succeed, we've never had these problems because we've never succeeded at value-based care. But as we start to succeed with value-based care, the biggest issue is going to become proof. If you are doing a program with the patient and I am doing a program with the patient, and then both of us succeed and then we succeed. How do we know that? Because the patients, you know, they have a reduction utilization. They're not, you know, they're not going to the ER, they're whatever it is. Who should get paid? You or me? Right?
SPEAKER_00:All we know is that's true. Because a lot of these patients, they're seeing a cardiologist and they're seeing an endocrinologist, and they're utilizing a nurse coach. Or yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_04:Right? Very interesting. No one's no one's thinking about this yet, but this is where the puck is going, right? Right now it's not an issue. Because you do your fee for service, I do my fee for service, you just you're in your zone, I'm in my zone.
SPEAKER_00:Scrap it out.
SPEAKER_04:Once, yeah, but once we're like, no, no, there's gonna be dollars going to a a we a you know a better outcome on this patient. Now you have 10 people that are claiming it was me, it was me, it was me, it was me. Who is it? And so it's going to take a care code to say, oh, here is the exact intervention that I took, that now I can report at scale to prove the value that I'm uh providing the patient.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, and I think payers are hungry for that. You know, a lot of these great programs that you know folks have in place, us uh here at Boon Chapman as well, um, it really comes down to that, right? Because the payer, uh the employer-sponsored health plan pays that service and they get the invoice for it. And you know, you can see where you maybe you had an impact in steerage or you know, there's a hard savings, but some of those other very robust and longer-term game-changing savings in terms of truly altering the trajectory of a health plan and the health of its members, those are harder to track and harder to prove. And, you know, I think a lot of them they want those kind of programs, but it's really hard to flesh them out to your point, because you know, a lot of times people don't prove they can't they can't prove them. I once saw a company, they um they just blanketed every intervention they had was worth X dollar amount. It didn't matter what the intervention was. Well, that's that's it doesn't work like that. So I think that's really really amazing. So I mean it sounds like you've got some some pretty impressive validated not to overuse the word outcomes, but for your platform where you're really able to streamline and make the clinician's workflow more efficient and productive um and scale the um the capacity for improved outcomes and better utilization, more robust and well-rounded, holistic, if you will, utilization of their healthcare experience. Um But what kind of numbers uh do you have out there for the marketplace? What can people expect when they take a peek under the hood at possibly you know entertaining, uh integrating um CareCo in their um in their workflows?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, so uh just some some context on where we are, because you know it's easy to have outcomes at a small scale, but as you kind of uh move up, um so we launched formally in January. We have uh, I believe we're closing in on about 100,000 patients now. We're doing last month we did about 60,000 patient conversations analyzed and supported um in the month. And um when I say patients, I mean actual actives being spoken with patients on the platform. I don't mean any of these fluff numbers of like patients loaded into the system or anything like that. I'm talking about communicated with in a given month. Real, real work. Real work. Um and so that's exciting. And yeah, look, I mean, immediately you're gonna see a 40% um increase in in productivity and efficiency. I think that's but that's not interesting to me, really, because that's just getting started, really. Uh there's so much to cut away. If you just think logically, I'm saving you all this time pre, you know, pre-conversation, and then I'm saving you all this time post and task creation management, communication, uh creation, and and and documentation. So I think that's just getting started. I think um I think the industry, I think we we know what uh the continued work that we have to do in order to continue to strip away a lot of these um barriers to communicating with the patients and having more impact with the patients. Um and um and uh I think the most interesting part is gonna start on the value side. I mean, the there's there's some small value things that we're seeing already. I mean, the conversations are obviously longer with the patient because they have more things to talk about. Um, from a staffing perspective, uh, you know, obviously burnout, quote unquote, is down to really, really minimal. Um, and so yeah, that's that's what we're seeing so far. But it's I think we're just getting started on the numbers.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's interesting because I think too, there's some real ROI there. Maybe it doesn't jump out at you, but I think about you know, we when you talk about increasing the productivity of a clinician by 40 or 50 percent. What if you could see 40 or 50 percent more patients? What does that do? What does that do to the pressure?
SPEAKER_04:So I have an idea that I've been toying with, okay, that I'd love to hear your thoughts on. Um it's a little calmie vibe, so I'm a little socialist vibe, so I'm not 100% sure about it, okay? But but the idea is all these efficiency gains are great. And if we're trying to reduce burnout, that's great. But how much work is happening right now outside of the eight hours, the supportive work, the the pajama, whatever these people want to and so what happens when AI is just used to just shove another 400 patients down your throat, and now you're doing, yes, you're doing work that you prefer doing, but you're just still completely overburdened, right? And I think there's an interesting opportunity here to flip the script and say, you know what? I know what ROI I need from an employee in order to have a feasible, successful business, and that's the cap that I'm gonna put on. I'm gonna give you all these AI tools to allow you to kind of unleash yourself and just get things done in a much more efficient manner, and I'm not going to increase your caseload. Wouldn't that be?
SPEAKER_00:Well, you know, it's interesting though, when you think about that. I mean, I've I've worked in organizations where sometimes you're spending 30 minutes reviewing a chart just to figure out what you got to pick up the phone and talk to the member about. It's ridiculous. I could I could serve somebody in that time. Or to your point, um, there's a lot of companies out there, a lot of companies out there that are doing the work, but they don't have time to do so. We have revenue generating activities, which is like seeing the people, talking to the people, and then you have activities that support that revenue. So when you think about that, how many organizations would love to do an audit but can't because they're caught on that hamster wheel. So to your point, you know, increasing that you could certainly see more patients, but you talk there's a certain value or an ROI in being able to do the supportive, the the revenue supporting activities, if you will, to make sure that your organization is producing. I mean, because uh, you know, it's a pretty competitive marketplace. What is it that's going to differentiate company A from company B?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And when you have an organization that's not only providing compassionate and, you know, personalized care, which often, you know, when you look at other, you know, scribing tools or platforms and it's just really generic, there's a real value to picking up and you know, to your point, how is your daughter doing, or how was your son's first day at college? That's huge.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. And and let me let me put some numbers on this just to give you some perspective. So pre-CareCo folks are doing between 150 to 250, depending on the the type of program, um, patients on a caseload per month. Okay, that's that's how many uh a typical care member's uh able to see. Post-Careco 350 is basically a piece of cake. Um and where I'm going with this is what I'd like to accomplish is I've done the math, and you can technically speaking care for 350 patients working six hours a day instead of eight. Okay. And so I've I've picked, I've picked up, I've picked up your caseload by 100 patients, but I can show you how you can actually get that done now in six hours instead of eight, or maybe working four days a week instead of five. And I'm toying with this idea of saying, you know what, I'm not gonna then say, oh, well, then let me just backfill those other two hours with whatever the math on the patients is, let me bring that up to 400 patients. I'd like to say, you know what? No. Like let's let's all win by using AI. I'm winning because as the company, I'm now bringing in more revenue with less uh with less overhead, right? But let me put a cap on it. Like, I'm doing good here. You should also get, as the employee, you should get the benefit of of using AI that it should make your life easier. And if you want to work four days a week instead of five, but you're creating the same output for your for your job, then great, go do that. You do you.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting concept. I don't know if it was my company, Agni, for more revenue. That being said, there's you know, clinicians. So a concept that's really important to me is creating organizations and teams where clinicians can practice to the top of their licensure and find joy in the work. There is no joy when you're duplicating, triplicating, quadruplicating, if that's a word, the work. I mean, I've seen people copy and paste segments into four different platforms and shut up.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Or, you know, you're doing the same work three or four times or twice. I don't like double charting. It's mundane and it robs the joy of the work, not to mention the productivity. And I think too, one of the reasons why you may be seeing that jump is because the workload is probably more enjoyable.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, and what are people gonna do? I mean, yeah, maybe extra vacation days. It's an interesting concept. I I'd be interested interested to see, you know, I I don't know. I think when you take when you take the girdle off, so to speak, and you let you let people bring their magnificence to the workforce workforce. And I I just think you for the right, for the right people um at the right times in their lives, it's really amazing what a team can produce. That being said, I mean, working a six-hour day for for clinicians, a lot of times it's not an eight-hour day. Tell me a nurse that has a uh, you know, an eight-hour day anymore. I can't think of any.
SPEAKER_04:Right. But that's my point. What if what that's why I think everyone wins? Because if I can take you from a 12-hour day to a six-hour day, and I can take you from a company perspective from 250 patients to 350 patients, if I can square that circle, now we don't have to pull everyone to their extreme. You know, we don't have to like, I don't know. Again, I'm still toying with it because you're right. It is not the capitalistic thing to do. It's like the, you know, if you're the company and you have to whatever, if especially if you have shareholders and things like that, you can make the argument that just go for the maximum amount of money. But I think there's something nice in this, you know, that the their kind of Elon Musk um vision of how AI is gonna like impact all of us, and he's been on this rant about how you know money is gonna be thing of the past and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, just like this like messianic era type thing. But um, I I think that if I think that with the right people, some of those gains can be realized in the in the in the short term. I mean, to me, that sounds like a dream. If I can, if I can tell you I'm gonna increase your revenue by um some insane amount, by the way, because it's without any increase in overhead. So any increase is pure net, right? So it's not, it's not, it's it's it's an insane increase. If I could take you from the numbers are 250 to 350, but with the same amount of people, the the net revenue increase is insane. So if I can do that for you, and at the same time tell your employees they can now work for six hours a day or or four days a week, and the patients get better care, more personalized care, quicker care. Everybody is winning because of Gen AI.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely, absolutely. Very very interesting. Um gosh, I had a thought it'll come to me. Um it was pregnant with possibility. It'll it'll come. It'll come.
SPEAKER_03:Honestly, how can this impact how is this going to impact my bottom line?
SPEAKER_04:It sounds like you would expect people to ask that, but they don't. And they're busy trying to find budgets for like AI tools. And I feel like we're we're in this really easy kind of conversation because it's like, here are all these things that are costing you money, and we can just kind of manage. But it's difficult to get into that conversation with folks sometimes. But um, yeah, I mean most most folks that are most of our clients, by the time they're coming to us, they've seen a lot of the content and um they kind of understand the product. So they're coming with an understanding already of it of of what it does and where it fits in the organization.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, because you share a lot on your website. I try.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I try.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04:It's uh it's a it's a decision. Even you'll see. You know, the way I'm talking in this conversation, it's a decision to be very transparent and to just just just communicate what you do. I think there's a lot there's a a lot of a lot of people out there that think that you know don't share, um, either because of fear of of of uh competition, you don't want people to know what you're doing, or um it's actually quite a difficult task to communicate effectively what you do. It's actually quite difficult.
SPEAKER_00:If you do it well, it's difficult.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. So either they don't know how or they're scared to. And so or they think, or I think the the stupidest version of this is like, oh, the mystique will make people book demos because we'll show them just enough to not understand what we do. Oh, and then they're gonna book. And that doesn't happen. If if I'm giving you four four milliseconds to decide if if this is interesting to me or not, I need to understand exactly what you do. And if I don't, I am not booking a demo because I don't know what you do. So, you know.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, oh my gosh, we can share some stories around that. Oh, you got to tell me your workflow first. Why do I want to tell you my workflow? If I don't know you're gonna be a good fit, just show it to me. Let me look, let me drive the car before I decide if I want to go on.
SPEAKER_04:Oh, but if you give me your email and your social, then I'll send you a 10-page thing on how to get into my webinar that'll teach you how I've, you know, it's like just show me what you're doing, you know.
SPEAKER_00:You know, the other thing that that comes to mind is, you know, we are in an in a in an era where we're gonna see such a huge uptick in healthcare and the utilizers of healthcare. We're seeing that already. And that's also cool. It's at the same time that we're seeing a decrease in providers. And I mean, we've always had a shortage, but this is like, oh man, I could tell you some stories. You know, there's some offices in the country where it's a physician holding down the fort, and he's the medical records, and the receptionist, and the nurse, and the doctor, and everything because there's nobody, there's nobody there. I it's crazy to me. And so, you know, I really think that what you've built, uh, Mendel, is absolutely something that um is worth looking at. So thank you. Um let me ask you this, because I know we've we've chatted for a while, but um, let me hit you with some hard and fast quick questions. What what do you think, in your opinion, from your experience in working with these various companies, what's one meth metric that every healthcare team should be tracking? What kind of numbers would they should they be tracking like on a weekly basis?
SPEAKER_04:A new metric that we came up with called value to patient. And it's an intelligent metric that we're watching every single conversation saying, hey Kerco, if you are the patient in this conversation, did you receive value? And the reason why I love that is because that is the bottom line. Everything else that every other metric is trying to determine value. It's like trying to quantify a way to get to that real metric. What you actually want is I have patients. Are they receiving value from these interactions or from this program at every single point?
SPEAKER_00:I think interesting. I like that. What about if there was one workflow that you could kill tomorrow? What do you think it would be?
SPEAKER_03:One workflow if I can kill tomorrow. What would it be?
SPEAKER_04:The barriers that HIPAA introduces to patient communication.
SPEAKER_00:Does HIPAA introduce those barriers, or do people who don't understand HIPAA introduce those barriers?
SPEAKER_04:Good argument. Possible.
SPEAKER_00:Oh wait, can we say six or seven?
SPEAKER_04:Let me find a two-year-old one second.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Oh, it was big in my house uh this last week with all the grandkids over. Oh my gosh. Yeah, interesting because a lot of people don't understand that. Patients do have a right to their information and healthcare, yeah. Anyway, that's a topic for pizza and root beer for sure. Yes. What about if you if you were talking with a a healthcare provider who's just maybe a care navigator is just fried. What would your best advice to them be?
SPEAKER_04:Use care co. No, I'm joking.
SPEAKER_00:Um hey, uh hashtag use care code.
SPEAKER_04:Right, exactly. Um I think I would remind them that they're blessed. This is what I talk to my team about a lot. There's a million and a half different ways to make a living in this world. And to make a living by helping people in one of the most beautiful parts of healthcare, because care coordination is all about that. There are some really dark parts of healthcare that are really traumatic and difficult to be in. Care coordination is not one of those. Care coordination is nice, it's great. You're fielding call, you're affecting patients, you're calling them proactively, so you're not, you know, you're not, God forbid, coding patients in the ER. Um, that's a blessing. And so I think I think the the gratitude to that usually, you know, should take away a lot of the angst. And then and then and then it's just a reminder that, hey, we live in this era now that talk, you know, we can work through the workflow constraints that are causing the burnout. But I think just that kind of zoom out is usually helpful.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the impact or what did you call it? Patient value metric. I think that's lovely. Well, um, if people want to know more about you, maybe they want to see it up close, maybe they've been on you, and if you haven't checked out uh Mendel's website, it is he's got a pretty good video there for you at careco.ai. Um, but yeah, how do people, if people want to talk to you or they want to know maybe more in the weeds, or maybe there's some integration that they're looking at, how would they how would they reach out to you?
SPEAKER_04:So content-wise, I uh you know, I'm I'm one of those, I can't have any notifications left unread. So I'm I'm pretty good um at LinkedIn messages, but if you want to book a demo uh just off the website, you'll see I think what you're referring to. There's about a 10-minute video on the homepage that'll kind of walk through the gist of the platform. And then um, if that makes sense to you, go ahead and book a demo and um happy to show you around. We don't hold anything back, and uh I I won't I won't uh force you to jump through a hundred hoops in order to see what we're doing.
SPEAKER_00:I tell you, you're you're all about the mission, and your mission is all heart. And Mendel, I I just really appreciate the great work that you do uh and how you're helping to bring care back into an industry that has become not caring. And uh yeah, thank you for all the good you do for so many people.
SPEAKER_04:Well, thank you so much. Thank you for this uh this wonderful chat. And um yeah, this was fun.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we'll have to do it again.
SPEAKER_03:We shall.