At one point in his career, I Don’t Care Host Kevin Stevenson spent some time on the pharma side of things, in between working at hospitals.

Today he dives back into that world with Donovan Quill, President, and CEO at Optime Care, a nationally recognized pharmacy, distribution, and patient management organization that creates the trusted path to a fulfilled life for patients with rare and orphan disorders.

“What we try to do is create a holistic program for those patients where we combine all the services you would see in a pharmacy in a patient care model,” Quill said. “We try to create a one-stop-shop for patients to really get the care they need from a support standpoint, from affordability, and also to distribute their products to them in their home or site of care.”

“Our patient populations we treat here at Optime care range from 16 patients nationwide all the way up to a couple of thousand.” - Donovan Quill

Orphan disorders and drugs are a bit different from regular pharmaceuticals. Typically, an orphan drug is a treatment for a condition with less than 200,000 patients in the U.S., according to the FDA definition. But, what they do at Optime Care is treat disorders that are even more rare, or “Ultra orphan,” according to Quill.

“Our patient populations we treat here at Optime care range from 16 patients nationwide all the way up to a couple of thousand,” Quill said. “We really try to focus on the patients who need a little extra care.”

Most of the time, the patients they treat have a disorder they’ve never heard of and are treated with a product they can’t pronounce, Quill said jokingly.

Healthcare is a complex industry, and its processes often lag behind other sectors for a myriad of reasons, but its embrace of technology is rising. EHRs have been around for decades, but workflow management remained an untapped challenge. Not only did a solution need to create structure, adherence to HIPAA guidelines is also critical. I Don’t Care Host Kevin Stevenson spoke with Dr. Michael Docktor, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and Co-Founder and CEO of Dock Health on this topic.

Docktor described himself as “techy” and was inspired by the world of apps and how an idea could become something deployable to the masses. He built his first app with engineers on potty training. “I learned about the process of design and user interfaces.”

With this experience in his background, Docktor soon began to ask big questions about tech in healthcare workflows or lack thereof. “I was thinking why aren’t we using these tools and became a mobile evangelist, bringing in new clinician facing tools, later becoming the clinical director of innovation.”

The focus on streamlining workflows securely became his vision. “EHRs are very clinically oriented, but the administrative and operational aspects of healthcare are ignored. If I order a therapy, there may be multiple downstream tasks to do this with different stakeholders with no structure or accountability,” Docktor said.

Dock Health is taking on this gap, tracking all the tasks from pacing an order until completion. It also helps organizations understand bottlenecks through data collection, which enables them to refine the process. “Workflow management didn’t exist in healthcare. Educating this world about how technology can transform drives efficiency and offers visibility,” Docktor added.

How is artificial intelligence changing the healthcare industry? Does using AI improve health outcomes and reduce costs? To discuss the use of this technology in healthcare, Carol McCall, Chief Health Analytics Officer for ClosedLoop.ai joined host Kevin Stevenson.

“Healthcare is finally becoming a big-data industry,” McCall said, pointing out that there is now so much data in healthcare it’s almost too big to know and becomes a burden. That’s where machine learning comes in. ClosedLoop.ai provides an intuitive end-to-end machine learning platform for healthcare organizations to predict health outcomes and target resources.

For example, McCall explains that health providers who are trying to prevent unplanned hospital admissions can use an AI platform to look at factors in their patient population to predict health outcomes. This allows providers to reach out to patients and help reduce the likelihood of hospitalization.

AI can be an essential part of the push toward value-based care. “If people want to succeed in value-based care they really have to have the ability to produce better outcomes with a much higher degree of precision. They have to be able to anticipate when something bad might happen because you can’t prevent what you can’t predict.” McCall said.

Stevenson and Carrol delve into various use case scenarios for AI platforms from the coordinated care of ACOs to assessing specific risks of patient populations and integrating data for more predictive power. “Data and analytics are really becoming the center of healthcare,” Mcaall said.

Technology and healthcare are a marriage made in heaven. As technological advancements evolve, so does the ability to treat patients in a new and innovative way. These tech and healthcare innovations are conquering the toughest of tasks when it comes to patient care.

On this episode of I Don’t Care, Host Kevin Stevenson talked with David Preiner, CEO of Medivolve, which seeks out disruptive technologies, ground-breaking innovations, and exclusive partnerships to help combat COVID-19 and generate remarkable risk-adjusted returns for investors. The duo talked about tech and healthcare, Preiner’s career in startups and entrepreneurship, which has spanned over a decade.

“Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could take that same concept that’s been used to treat some of the most complex problems in healthcare … and bring that approach to every American and make it very accessible" - David Preiner

Preiner has bootstrapped three companies and has spent a significant amount of time in entrepreneurship. Wanting to find a little bit of life balance, he started to get curious about biology. This led him on a path to the Harvard Extension School, where he dove headfirst into the subject. He eventually landed at Medivolve when the CEO position opened up.

“Medivolve has a couple of really key assets that made me curious about a problem,” Preiner said. These two things were an issue with COVID-19 collection sites, as well as pharmacy acquisitions.

One of the things he learned in his studies is how to treat patients. As a tech at Harvard Extension School, he noticed how important it was for healthcare providers to have a baseline of care for patients. When taking diagnostic tests, then adjusting medication, and then reperforming diagnostics so that doctors could see if a patient improved.

“Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could take that same concept that’s been used to treat some of the most complex problems in healthcare … and bring that approach to every American and make it very accessible,” Preiner said.

Listen to learn more about how Preiner wants to improve healthcare through tech and data.

On this episode of I Don’t Care, host Kevin Stevenson talked with Steve Loveless, President, and CEO, Regional Market Executive of St. Vincent Healthcare, about his career in healthcare, which began as a fellow working with Stevenson in Oklahoma. They also talked about leadership and taking risks.

“Those early activities, as they pulled me out of the fellowship and into the role of value enhancement, and the efforts to understand what brought value to healthcare" - Steve Loveless

In his first role as a fellow at Good Samaritan Hospital in Oklahoma, Loveless learned the importance of vision. He noted that the leadership at the time had a vision, and they were willing to take risks. This is a value that’s important to healthcare, according to Loveless.

These leadership examples early on in his career would have an impact on how he would lead.

“Those early activities, as they pulled me out of the fellowship and into the role of value enhancement, and the efforts to understand what brought value to healthcare,” Loveless said. “Then to break it down and to pursue action plans in each of those areas and drive value further was the groundwork for the activities that I’ve been driving in my organization.”

As he heads into the next phase of his career, one in which he’ll focus on the development of others, specifically leaders and future leaders, as an executive coach.

Technologent is a Global Provider of Edge-to-EdgeTM Information Technology Solutions and Services for Fortune 1000 companies. They help companies outpace the new digital economy by creating IT environments that are fast, flexible, efficient, transparent, and secure.

The duo talked about how the pandemic brought upon the need to cut costs and move to a digital environment more dire. The healthcare industry loses about $150 billion annually due to missed appointments because 88 percent of appointments are still made manually. With an RPA, errors could be reduced and will increase savings.

“It isn’t about replacing workers. It’s about making work more efficient,” Buckley said.

Listen to learn more about how RPA and AI Can improve healthcare systems.

On this episode of I Don’t Care, host Kevin Stevenson talks with Ted Quinn, the CEO and Co-founder of Activate Care, a digital health company helping everybody engaged in the healthcare system - clinicians, patients, families, and communities - act together to make health happen, wherever they are.

The duo dug into CIEs or a Community Information Exchange platform. During the pandemic around the country, many healthcare organizations struggled to communicate between parties. Many of these issues could be solved if important information about patients and care could be shared between stakeholders.

“A community information exchange is a platform that enables all those stakeholders in a community, like a town or a county, to come together and share its space,” Quinn said.

If these stakeholders can share this information, they can come together to drive the outcomes they want to see.

The pandemic highlighted some of the issues that these community organizations lacked. Some of these things include having different terminologies, priorities, incentive programs, and how they communicate. The goal moving forward is to have these organizations communicate with each other so care is improved for patients.

Rural hospitals took a major hit during the pandemic, with many closing or on the verge of it. These organizations are a lifeline for the community, and some are persevering and thriving. Sharing her hospital's story, Fairfield Memorial Hospital CEO Dr. Kathy Bunting joined I Don’t Care with Kevin Stevenson.

Dr. Bunting started by telling Stevenson about Fairfield. “We have a staff of around 300 with 90 credentialed physicians and providers. We have a strong team, and our employees are the heart of who we are.”

In January 2020, the hospital broke ground on a new $24 million expansion just months before the pandemic. The expansion, Dr. Bunting, explained, aligned with community needs. “We listened to what they felt was the most important, including orthopedic services, which will include a suite for operating and radiology.”

Dr. Bunting noted that the “silver lining of COVID” was their ability to adjust to new demands. “We were able to rearrange the design to add negative pressure rooms, more laundry services, and PPE storage.”

The hospital’s response to the pandemic was one of a united front. The hospital didn’t eliminate any jobs. Instead, they cross-trained certain individuals to take over areas that needed more attention. One example was to use coders to help with housekeeping services.

Dr. Bunting put together a COVID team that organized mobile testing and managed the surge of hospitalizations they experienced in the fall. Now, they are one of nine hospitals in Illinois that has no restrictions on vaccine supply and have vaccinated thousands of Illinois residents.