Episode 40: Exploring the Rise in Home-Based Care with Sprinter VP Seema Otoya
How to approach care at home like Disney or Apple.
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In this episode you’ll discover:
How to apply experiences from other industries to healthcare
Why you need to focus on customer experience in healthcare
How to navigate the challenges of working in the home health space
What the advantages are of being missions oriented
Keep scrolling for a transcript of this episode.
Key Takeaways
Being in varied and different roles or industries gives you the unique opportunity to provide your learnings from those roles and apply them to your current ones. Learn the industry as fast and as deeply as you can and inject your experiences.
Other companies treat their customers as guests, but it’s different in healthcare. It’s time for companies to step up and make healthcare a more personalized, pleasant, and convenient experience.
There are certain challenges that come with a home-based healthcare service like Sprinter Health. Some of them are hiring qualified people, managing their time, and dealing with the challenges each city presents.
Being mission-oriented will help the company navigate through rapidly changing times and prevent people from being distracted by “shiny objects” that appear along the way.
Learn more from Carrie and Rebecca:
Healthcare insights (monthly email) | Telehealth/Virtual Care Mgmt Update (biweekly LinkedIn update)
Website | Carrie on LinkedIn | Rebecca on LinkedIn | NGL on LinkedIn
“Being mission-oriented, and always keeping your eye on what you’re trying to achieve is super important. In this market where things are changing and innovation is happening, if you have that kind of North Star guiding your decisions, it is incredibly helpful to navigate.”
Learn More
Connect with Seema on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seemaotoya/
Company website: https://www.sprinterhealth.com/
Careers at Sprinter Health: https://jobs.lever.co/SprinterHealth
Learn more about Care at Home on the Nixon Gwilt Law blog: https://nixongwiltlaw.com/care-at-home
Read the transcript
Rebecca Gwilt (00:17):
All right. Hello. Hello, everyone from rainy East Coast hurricane land. Welcome back to Decoding Healthcare Innovation. I am super excited today to be joined by Seema Otoya. Seema, good to see you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us.
Seema Otoya (00:34):
Nice to see you Rebecca.
Rebecca Gwilt (00:36):
Yes, so Seema is another powerhouse lady in digital health. She's the VP of Marketing, Finance and People at Sprinter Health, which is a mobile in-home testing company. And they do a bunch of things we're gonna dig into today. She is operating and Sprinter is operating in a new space that I've been paying a lot of attention to this year and that I think has tremendous opportunity for growth and that is really truly bringing healthcare, not just through video, but actual physical healthcare into the home. So I'm excited to talk with you about that today.
(01:13):
Seema, I'm gonna start with you in particular before we get to the company that you have been helping to grow. You are wearing a lot of hats. I don't think I've spoken to a VP of Marketing and Finance and People and I know you wear a lot of other hats as well. I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey, what it's like to be you part of the founding team of a successful venture backed healthcare innovation company. How do we get here?
Seema Otoya (01:43):
Yeah well first of all, thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here and happy to share anything I can. So yeah, my background, it's a little varied. I'm not a traditional healthcare person. I come from a long career in a variety of industries where I did actually always wear a lot of hats cause I was always on the strategy side. For the most part, my training was in finance. So I definitely have this foundational experience doing true finance from M&A to accounting to all of that fun stuff. But my career really progressed into a strategic role where I did operations or I did marketing or I did typical finance. So what that did is that led me to a point now in my career where I can dive into an industry, try to learn the industry as fast as I can, but then bring my experience from all of the different companies I've worked for and bring process and execution to life essentially.
(02:43):
And so that is where I landed. So my previous career was working in the consumer spaces in wellness and in goods and retail. And so now when we come to healthcare, what's exciting is the founders who started this company, Sprinter Health, they're not traditional healthcare folks either. So we all kind of came to the table saying, look, we're all passionate about healthcare. We think our experiences lend themselves to doing some things a little bit different. And I know there's obviously so much for all of us to learn and we will do our best to educate ourselves and get up to speed. But we do think a fresh perspective is sometimes what's needed. So we're all excited to dive in and we've been working on this, basically this amazing little startup for the past year and a half.
Rebecca Gwilt (03:31):
Well, it's amazing in the healthcare sector because we've heard for a very, very long time we need to focus on the patient and traditional healthcare folks have been saying that a long time and still we end up with a patient experience that's vastly different than what we experience with other services and products companies, sometimes paying lip service to patients being at the center of things. And then the experience doesn't really pan out that way. What's cool about your background is that you have a history in the consumer focused space and there's a lot of folks in digital health, especially in the last two years who came in and said, actually we really wanna focus on the consumer and the way that Apple focuses on the consumer and the way that Amazon focuses on the consumer and really create an experience. And I think especially if you're gonna be in people's homes, that's incredibly important. Have you been noticing that evolution in the digital health space as well?
Seema Otoya (04:34):
Absolutely. I think the time is ripe for this type of emphasis to come into the healthcare industry because, to your point, healthcare has just been this pretty bad experience. People have to go wait in lines when they have to get a medical procedure done, for example, like a blood draw. And they're in these dark and dingy waiting rooms and it's not a great experience. So as you mentioned, I have this consumer experience. One that we think about often is, I was at Disney and in Disney, I was on the retail side for some period of time and we think of our customers as guests and how do you treat them in a way that they really feel invited and they feel included and they feel heard. And there's a variety of companies in different industries who do think of things in that way.
(05:17):
And so we said, let's try and bring that to life. And so the very case in point situation is when you need a blood draw, which you know go to your physician or you talk to your physician about telehealth and they're like, we need to do your labs. It's a pretty basic thing. I think it's some insane stat of number of diagnoses come from an initial lab draw. So you have to get these things done often, more often than I even ever would've thought. You don't do it right with your doctor, you actually have to go to a facility to go do that. And sometimes that transition is hard, sometimes the wait is long and the experience isn't very personalized. So what we said is, why can't we do that in the home? If we have this fleet of trained phlebotomists, can we not bring a better experience for these patients and help make it more convenient, make it more personal, and make it more pleasant by doing it in the home with the appropriate training and tools and systems in place? And so that's what we've done. So we have the Sprinter experience where we come in and we make our patients feel very comfortable and we introduce ourselves, we bring in our tools and our bag and we do the service in a very quick and seamless way. But that at least still feels like a personal connection between the phlebotomist and the patient.
Rebecca Gwilt (06:36):
Yeah, I'm sort struggling with whether to get into this specifically this mobile phlebotomy space or whether to go high level. And I think since we're already here, I'm gonna drill into it and then we can zoom out a little bit. So I am aware of companies that have tried to do what Sprinter is doing now, maybe starting five or six years ago and they all went belly up, it just didn't work. There wasn't the infrastructure, there wasn't the demand. I think Covid had a lot to do with that and there wasn't really supportive reimbursement structure frankly. And as we all know, it doesn't get paid, it doesn't get done. In your mind, what has changed to enable us to get to this point where this is actually something that a lot of people are interested in that payers and big employers and large health systems that they're all trying to do this now. What has changed since five years ago?
Seema Otoya (07:38):
I think there's a few different tailwinds that are helping kind of enable this type of business model to occur. The first being technology, the advances in technology and the ability to do the logistics and routing type of work that an Uber or a DoorDash does. We're not contractor based, but we still have a similar logistics platform. So that is enabling us to be able to go out to the market. So that's one piece of it. I do think though on the healthcare side, there's definitely this shift from a traditional fee for service to an emphasis on value based care. And so in traditional fee for service, you do a service, you get paid for it by the government or individual kind of insurance plan. In a value-based care model, there are plans, groups, organizations that are being paid lump sums to keep their patient population healthy.
(08:31):
And how do you keep your patient population healthy? You administer preventative care and preventative care is something that is your annual wellness exams, your diabetes checks, all these tests that need to happen. And in order to do that, you typically need to see a provider or be in a facility. And for a lot of different reasons, there's a big amount of people who don't do that. They don't go see their provider, they don't go get their checks done. And so if you think about it from the organization standpoint, then you say, okay, how do I get these people in? I can try to email them, I can try to ask them to come, but if they don't come, what if we go to them? And so that's where we come into play and we say, Hey, you know what? We will go on your behalf to the patient's home and give them the diagnostic tools to then provide them better care so we can catch somebody or we can give somebody the tools of the information so that their provider can provide them a diagnosis that will help keep them healthy and keep them out of the hospital.
(09:37):
So I do think that that major shift from fee for service to value based care is the biggest tailwind that's enabling companies like ours to be able to say, actually there's room here. There's room for us to be able to pay for a service like Sprinter Health. But then on the in long horizon, the ROI is vast because these patients are gonna be healthier and they're not gonna enter the system and cost a bunch of money to then care for them.
Rebecca Gwilt (10:05):
Yeah, I mean we talk about this a lot about how the triple aim was something that Don Berwick came up with a long time ago and that is better care, better outcomes, lower costs. And you've hit on all three of those here. Really hard to do that in a fee for service environment, especially the cost reduction piece of it. But to your point, it's care certainly made the financial argument. The other thing is, as you mentioned, these diagnostic tests are pretty important to accurate diagnoses, to identifying problems early on. And there's still a vast group of physicians, healthcare professionals in this country that have said, we're still not down with telemedicine cuz how do you really know? And I just wonder if this is one of the things where it's gonna turn that tide if we can say, yes, telemedicine has its place and also yes, you do need to do some testing, you know can get on board cuz here's what the new model is.
Seema Otoya (11:17):
Well, and that's exactly right. So touching on telehealth, obviously Covid kind of catapulted telehealth into the forefront. It's been around forever. But finally people were like, oh, I could actually do this. There's still that, it's called the last mile of healthcare. Telehealth will not solve the need for a blood draw, it won't solve the need for a diabetic eye exam. Those are physical things that need to happen. So again, now you take telehealth and you say, how can I make this a holistic solution for a patient? There's actually now a way you take a company like Sprinter Health, who goes into the home, does all the tests. So whether it's collecting blood or doing a diabetic exam or taking the vitals, some of the basic things that you just physically need to be present to do, and then that data is transmitted to that provider who can then provide care for that patient via telemedicine. And so I think that that is this new age and new model that has kind of come up and is something that's really exciting for the industry at large actually.
Rebecca Gwilt (12:24):
And what are you seeing as you're doing is working and it's making an impact? What does that look like? What are you seeing as outcomes so far?
Seema Otoya (12:37):
Well, I mean we are very proud to get the patient feedback. We do ask all of the patients that we see for direct kind of survey results, how it was your experience. And we have such glowing positive reviews from patients who say things like, I would've never gotten this test done if it wasn't for Sprinter Health because I had no way to get to the hospital. Or this was the most painless and seamless way for my child who has anxiety when they're going into a facility. And so you hear those testimonials from folks who actually I either wouldn't have gotten care or would've had a bad experience. And you really feel the positive effects. There's this one example we have actually recently we launched in a few different states and this was in one of our newer states and a patient who we went to go see had a blood pressure that was off the charts and if we hadn't gone into the home, this person wouldn't have been seen and this catastrophe could have happened. But actually we were there with the blood pressure, and we were triaging with the provider and our medical director and the patient ended up getting admitted into the hospital and they're alive today, which is phenomenal. And so if we hadn't gone into that, yeah.
Rebecca Gwilt (13:50):
There's nothing better than that.
Seema Otoya (13:53):
Exactly. There isn't anything better than that. So that impact on patients lives is what we really get excited about. And on the bigger picture, there's obviously cost savings and this and that, but the true impact on individual lives is what is really, really cool.
Rebecca Gwilt (14:09):
Yeah, I mean the thing about healthcare is we all interact with it. Would I much rather have someone come to my home and do this for me or my children? Absolutely. And somehow we're finally moving into a space where companies can do that and do well. My good care, my access, my good experience, and the savings that nets for the folks that provide healthcare and healthcare insurance to me match up <laugh>.
Seema Otoya (14:46):
Yep. That's exactly it. So great. It's so great to finally have everyone working towards the same goal and working out.
Rebecca Gwilt (14:55):
Yeah. Okay, so now that we've talked about how amazing it is I'd love to hear about, I imagine there are some fairly unique challenges for building a national network of people who physically get deployed to go do things in the home. And oh by the way, it can't just be anyone. They've gotta be properly trained and they have to understand patient care and they have to be able to get to people in a certain amount of time. I mean certainly it's a technology challenge as you mentioned, but I'd love to hear a little bit about what you all are learning about how to make something like this work.
Seema Otoya (15:36):
That's a great question. So I think one thing that's unique about us in this space is that we actually employ all of our clinicians as full-time employees. And so there's a lot of models out there where you work with contractor networks and in some ways that's challenging of course. But there's also benefits there. You can move do a lot of things. We have taken the approach of doing a employed model and that in and of itself comes with a lot of benefits and also challenges. So the benefits obviously being we are vetting our folks, we know they're well trained, we know they'll be available, our partners and our patients will be almost guaranteed a great experience because we've trained these folks and they're our employees. On the flip side, hiring is a challenge in all these markets, right? Because you are faced with the need to hire qualified people and you also need to manage their time in the sense that as we're ramping up regions, we need to be able to have folks who are available.
(16:38):
They may be sitting idle for a couple days or a couple days until the volume comes. And you have to be okay with that. And then when the volume does pick up, you need to be able to then say, okay, we actually need more and be able to anticipate when you need to hire more. And then that recruitment cycle can sometimes long or short depending on the market. And we've seen those challenges come to light as we've been expanding. So we started here in California and we've expanded into Florida, Georgia, and Massachusetts. And each state in each city has its own set of challenges in terms of the quality of people available, the market rates that are paid, the geo geographical spread, how do you count for a city like LA where it's a giant metro and you have a need for people to travel through different traffic patterns, then a city like Miami, whereas it's a little bit different. And so those are some of the unique challenges of a services business.
Rebecca Gwilt (17:39):
And you guys all are doing that all in house, is that right? The recruitment, the hiring, all of that, you have to do that in house?
Seema Otoya (17:47):
Correct. So we have a operations team that helps us enable this clinician network that we have. So they are, they're small and mighty. And then on my team, we have a clinical recruiter who's out there trying to get the best folks in.
Rebecca Gwilt (18:05):
It's actually, it's actually pretty incredible and why what companies like yours are doing is so much harder than Uber or Lyft or any of those , I know y'all get compared to those because you've turned into essentially a telemedicine staffing. Companies that are taking the employee model are staffing companies, and they're not just staffing companies, they're training companies in addition to being a technology company in addition to being a healthcare provider in addition to somebody who is billing for healthcare. I mean, this is complicated stuff.
Seema Otoya (18:42):
It really is. And I think once you get into the weeds of it, there's a lot to get done. And at this stage we're a startup, we're little, we're not that big. So that's why we all wear a lot of different hats and we have to do a lot of different things. But the payoff is so fantastic as we talked about earlier, with the impact that we're able to have and we have found between in the year and a bit that we've been operational on the clinical side. The folks we do recruit in, they're fantastic and they are aligned with our mission, they're aligned with our standards and they're evangelists for the service themselves. And we found that to be really successful. So as we grow, we have a need to hire more and more and more. And our hope is that this new style of behavior and employment will actually catch on.
(19:40):
It's similar to if you think about, you mentioned Apple at the very beginning here when the Apple store concept came to light, like that wasn't even a thing, but they ended up deploying a model that brought this great customer service and this friendliness and all of this into the retail environment. And sure enough, Apple has so many stores everywhere and that same model is employed. So we believe that the Sprinter experience, we call our clinician Sprinters, the Sprinter standard will become much more normalized and we will be able to train up a lot of folks to be able to do it in this manner and change the way in-home services are provided.
Rebecca Gwilt (20:21):
Well, I'm ready for them to make their way to the Richmond market. I'm ready. I may have to wait. I may have to wait. Maybe a tertiary market for you all. <laugh>. Okay. So I'm gonna zoom now. I wanna zoom out a little bit and really get your thoughts on the larger landscape of home based care. So what I have been paying attention to for this year, it's been my pet study, is the movement from telehealth only to telehealth-hybrid to telehealth basically in the home, or digital health is probably the better term. We've got the hospital at home model, mobile in-home services, virtual telehealth services and home health, which is a whole thing unto itself. And I'm just interested in your thoughts on the direction that of healthcare delivery is going in the context of the home-based care landscape and your observation of the players interacting. I know we were just talking about a couple of deals just recently in the space, we know that the big players know that home based care is coming, but what is that gonna look like, you think?
Seema Otoya (21:44):
Yeah, I mean it's definitely the hot topic I think in the healthcare industry. I know you and I attend a lot of these conferences and it's always topical to talk about in-home care home-based care. And I do think that all of the four kind of categories that you've mentioned are going to slightly pivot to realize that you actually can do very specified care in the home. Traditionally, I do think it was often a nurse was sent to the home. If you think way back, doctors would go to the home. And that was the beginnings of this whole thing. Then it became, doctors are in a facility, everyone comes to the facility. But then we had nurses who were going to the homes to do a variety of different services for different population groups. The movement now is people have started to pick off services that you realize you actually could do the right type of provider for the type of care that's being needed.
(22:43):
So it's almost specialized. And that works in favor for a few different reasons. Number one, the patient is getting the right type of service that they need. It doesn't have to be the whole gamut of everything. It's a specifically whatever it is, whether it's a blood draw or a foot exam or whatever it is. You do that and you also, from a cost perspective, it's actually cost efficient to do it this way where it's like you actually don't need to send an RN who's actually quite expensive to be on an hourly basis to be going around. You can actually send a phlebotomist or you can send a x-ray tech or you can send a paramedic. You can do all these different things. And technology has enabled that ability to pick and choose what is being deployed when and where. So I think as we look at home health, we really will see a lot more of this going into the home with the right type of clinician or provider so that you can get the appropriate data collected for that patient in particular. So yeah, to your point about the deals, right, we've seen some great movements. There was, back in the day, there was Heal out here in California, which was then invested in by Humana, and Humana's doing a bunch of stuff with Heal. We saw CVS recently acquire Signify, which was a big market mover recently of in-home care. So there's definitely a lot of really great stuff happening with the biggest players, the payers getting deeply entrenched into this in-home model.
Rebecca Gwilt (24:14):
And I mentioned earlier it may be that the listeners don't understand the distinction between care at home or home based care and home health. Home health being a method of delivery of care that is very specific and very specifically paid for. Generally we're talking about either fee for service or capitated value based program. Home health is a whole different animal in terms of how it gets paid and the home health industry is paying attention to this and they've got territory to protect. And so it'd be interesting to watch how all of this plays out whether and home health is specifically licensed at the state level, right? And so it'd be interesting to see how all of this plays out, the interaction between all the players that are ready to bring care into the home and the home health agencies who are saying, Hey, wait a minute, this is our turf. Have you started to navigate any of that?
Seema Otoya (25:22):
Well, it's interesting you bring that up because Home Health is one of our key partners actually. They actually really like us in particular because of the way Home Health operates. There's this nursing shortage in the industry forever. And they have an amazing crew of nurses on staff. But many of the patients in home health environments actually do require basic services like a blood draw or a specimen collection pretty regularly to keep their care or their medication going. And nurses who are already strapped for time, were having to then go to these patient homes or patient apartments, whatever it is to do these blood draws, which are time consuming. And those nurses could actually be deployed to be doing something more in line with their licensure.
Rebecca Gwilt (26:16):
They're overqualified to do it, you're saying.
Seema Otoya (26:19):
Right. So home health agencies are actually overqualified to do those services. So they've taken a liking to us because they then say, Hey, Sprinter help. We need this patient of ours to be getting their blood drawn. Can you just go do it and then drop off the blood blood and let our nurses do all the other stuff that they need to do. So they've actually not really been threatened by us. It's really been a partnership that's proven to be really, really great for many, many patients and those partners.
Rebecca Gwilt (26:45):
That's great. That's great. It sounds like that because you can increase the efficiency of their sort workforce planning that financially it makes sense for them even using their setting aside what they would otherwise need to pay their own staff, that they have the resources to partner with companies like Sprinter and still maintain margins.
Seema Otoya (27:11):
Yep, exactly. Exactly.
Rebecca Gwilt (27:13):
It's amazing.
Seema Otoya (27:16):
Yeah, it works really great for them. And then speaking on the other pieces of that home health puzzle you were talking about. So even with virtual providers, one thing that's really great and unique perhaps about us is we are not going in to say that we are the provider. We're not going to replace that provider's role in the care of that patient. We are simply a conduit for data. That provider will enable that provider to provide better care. So when we think about virtual health and its movement into the home, it's again another really great partnership opportunity because we're saying we're an extension of your services. We're not replacing you by any means. We're not actually doing any of that. We're actually just helping you provide better care.
Rebecca Gwilt (28:02):
I love that. I love that. Well, this has been really insightful. I always learn something new when we speak Seema, and I'm really excited about where Sprinter is going. I'm gonna drop a link to your hiring page, <laugh> in the show notes. Anybody wants to join. Anybody wants to be a Sprinter. Check notes. Yeah, <laugh> always hiring. So the last thing I wanna close this with is one A, thank you very much for joining me, and two, I always ask for a little bit of advice from everyone that I speak with. So what is one thing that you would tell our digital health innovators who are listening that they can do right now to supercharge their business or of improve their own journeys?
Seema Otoya (28:58):
That's a really good question. I think we ourselves are learning, but I would say from our experience being mission oriented and always keeping your eye on what you are trying to achieve is super important, right? In this market where things are changing and innovation is happening, if you have that kind of north star guiding your decisions, it is incredibly helpful to navigate all the different, we experience this every day. It's like every day there's a new shiny object that is like, you know, could do this or you could do this, or you could do this. But if you can always come back to is it aligned with our mission? Is it going to help us get, achieve what we are setting out to achieve? It can help you, the company, the people, navigate those decision points and really then supercharge you to your point towards that. And so I think that's really something really important to do right from the very beginning.
Rebecca Gwilt (30:03):
Absolutely. Absolutely. Super inspiring. I totally agree. Drop the mic. Thank you so much for joining me, Seema. I hope to see you very soon and we'll have to have you back in a while to see how check in on how y'all are doing.
Seema Otoya (30:19):
Would love to. And thank you so much for having me today.