Innovative Business Models in Healthcare: Lessons from Amazon and Costco

Transcript

Nicole 

Welcome to the Digital Health Transformers podcast series. This podcast explores the dynamic world of healthcare innovation, one conversation at a time. I’m your host, Nicole Guevara, and today, we have an inspiring guest at the forefront of transforming the healthcare landscape.

Today, I’d like to welcome our remarkable digital health expert and leader, Aasim Saeed, founder and CEO of Amenities Health. A seasoned entrepreneur with dynamic experience in digital health, Aasim has helped several providers with revenue generation technology, product road mapping, care coordination, and more. He has also worked as a vice president of digital health at Baylor Scott and White Health.

His achievements at Baylor Scott and White Health speak volumes about his passion for digital health. In 2021, Aasim started Amenities Health, a digital membership platform to help health systems acquire new patients, engage new users, and build brand loyalty. Amenities Health aims to address pain points such as new patient acquisitions and care scheduling through digital health technology.

That’s about his company. Aasim’s experience varies from clinical to CMD, consultant for McKinsey, and entrepreneurship. In today’s episode, we’ll have an insightful yet fun interaction with Aasim on different innovative models in healthcare.

I’m excited to hear more about your journey, Aasim. Let’s begin. Thank you for joining us, Aasim.

Aasim 

It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Nicole 

Wonderful. Aasim, you have worked a lot in digital health technology. What pain points do you have as an entrepreneur in this niche?

Aasim 

Yeah, so my view of digital health and the opportunities associated with it can sometimes be a bit boring in the sense that I am really all about the fundamentals in healthcare before we do the fancy stuff. And especially, you know, the last several months of supreme excitement around AI and generative AI models and other things are easy to get caught up in. I think it’s an exciting time to be alive.

And what those technologies can do is eye-opening, really catchy, and newsworthy. But the reality is the problems in healthcare that are most tangible to patients and to everybody involved, including providers and operators, are way simpler than that. It’s 2024, and there is almost nowhere in any market where you can quickly lookup a doctor, search through several profiles, find one that speaks to you, see the availability of that doctor, and book that appointment online.

It is 2024, and you can’t do that still. So, before we AI a bunch of stuff, why don’t we fix that? I mean, that’s really my view of digital health to start with.

And a place that I’ve been emphatic around or an evangelist to say, let’s solve the basics because those are the major patient pain points before we try to get real fancy with other stuff.

Nicole 

I completely agree with you. As a consultant, I have clients whose healthcare systems are numerous and big. And it doesn’t seem like there is one set example where they could just look up a patient and then look up a doctor, I mean, and then pick from that doctor’s schedule.

It always seems very complicated, requiring many website techniques and manipulations to get to that particular schedule. So, I think this is a great platform that you have provided for your consumers. As Aasim, you have worked with several providers. From your experience as a partner, what should be the focus or top priority of providers right now?

Aasim 

So, the number one thing we recommend for everyone is that your business as a healthcare system is predicated on new and current patient services. And yet, again, you’re going to hear this repetition from me: it was like, how hard is it for those patients to give you their business? It’s incredibly difficult for patients who want to patronize your business to find the providers you offer and an appointment time that conveniently works for them to pay you money.

And that’s the number one priority for any business. How do we make it easy for our customers to transact with us, especially established legacy brands like large healthcare systems and all these different major cities and areas? Customer acquisition is a very close second.

If you’re not growing, you’re dying as a business. And yet, again, health systems seem to, in general, take for granted that people will get sick, they’ll pick us, we’ll always be here. And I don’t think that’s the case.

We often rely on past performance as an indicator of future performance. The reality is that dynamics are changing, and I hear this from health systems all the time.

We don’t consider Amazon or CVS a competitor. How are they going to perform the surgeries?

That is such incredibly short-sighted thinking because the reality is, no, no one is coming to take your surgery business besides ambulatory surgery centers. But the problem is they’re coming to take your customers. They’re coming to show them a bit better way and say, do I really need that health system?

And then, trust me, they will come back once they’ve stolen all your customers and say, how much will you pay us to have some of them back now with partnerships? And so that’s the reality you’re facing. And the sad part about that is it will take an incredible leap for those CVSs and Amazons to build all of that quality brand trust that all these health systems have.

However, these health systems are squandering it because they are not meeting the consumer where they are. Again, if you look at the ambitions of the health systems, we see all of these, like emphasis and focus on AI. How are we going to do this? And you look at their website, and it looks like it was built in the 1980s on a WordPress backbone.

And you need help finding a doctor. The entire physician list is sorted alphabetically from A through Z. Poor Dr. Zaid will never get a patient, let alone what you want as a patient, which is not just to see every doctor but to understand what’s most important is the earliest available appointment. Those are the types of things that we push our clients and partners to consider if you have to transact. You have to do the basics well to meet consumer preferences. And then this is the part that gets fun: now let’s get above and beyond and do something bold and different.

And that’s where health systems—again, we encourage them to think differently. Every health system in the country will tell you we have the best doctors. We have the best brand. And even the ones that know statistically that’s not true, they’ll still write like our doctors, who are differentiated, our quality, our team that cares.

It’s not that those things aren’t true. There’s an incredible bias of generous people who care about giving care to others who work in health care. But everyone has that.

Patients cannot meaningfully distinguish between quality of care because you’ve never allowed them to. And so I think that ship has sailed. Quality means something very different to patients.

Quality could be that I found an appointment within two minutes on your website with them, whereas health systems are like, oh, quality is our cabbage, you know, reinfection rate on this war. It just doesn’t mean the same thing to patients. And so the reality is, I think we have to be convenient.

We have to be accessible. The really fun starts when we go above and beyond and think creatively about how to differentiate ourselves with a different offering than is everywhere in the market today.

Nicole 

I couldn’t agree with you more. I absolutely agree that some of their websites are run in 1990s WordPress. And it’s hard to find a specific position to see in the next few days because their panels are closed or they don’t have bill abilities in the next few months.

Some even go to the length of just calling the specific health care system, and they’re calling bots or call centers that have thousands of people in line just to get into a health care space. So, it’s less convenient than we hope for the patient. And it’s absolutely important to think about that quality.

I love how you differentiate that quality from the quality metrics healthcare systems look at. Healthcare systems look at the quality metrics provided by the CMS, while patients look at the quality metrics from their own digital front door. So it’s important to see both.

Healthcare systems should be more tuned to the qualities patients seek. Thank you for that. Yeah.

Aasim 

And I would take it just another double click on that last point, which is to say, I think it is assumed that you aren’t going to hurt me or kill me. When I’m going to receive care at an inpatient or outpatient facility, my baseline is you’re not going to try to harm me. Right now, if you ask the patient to distinguish what a good doctor is,

I mean, just go out into the world and ask patients what makes a good doctor. And you will hear every different thing. But the reality is that the biggest thing that we found in patterns is that they are nonjudgmental and willing to listen to me about the types of things my input in the treatment path.

It has nothing to do with where they went to school. How many years of fellowship training do you know, and how expert are they in certain surgical procedures? I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t.

I’m just saying patients don’t have that information, and doctors are holding it, and doctors and health care systems are holding it as a matter of pride to say we are the best world-renowned at X, and or maybe they put it on a billboard. And you’re like, that’s not going to work in today’s age because the information asymmetry is too high. So the only everything in between, like you’re not going to kill me, and I have the rare type of cancer that’s only treated at Mass General Brigham or something like that.

Everything in between is about communicating empathy, convenience, and care. And that’s not what the quality metrics that we measure ourselves are based on, and so that’s OK.

I’m not saying we must rebuild quality or CMS must change all the metrics. That’s not what you’re competing on. We would acknowledge that and start competing based on experience.

Nicole 

I completely agree with you. In med school, they always told us that not always the smartest would get the most patients, but the most people-person, the most amicable, and the most empathetic of the group. So, yes, I completely agree with that statement.

My next question is, how can healthcare systems adopt a membership model similar to Amazon Prime for patient engagement?

Aasim 

This is our whole world. I left Baylor, Scott, and White at Amenities because we had built, I think, some of the best tools in the country still today. And at Amenities, we’ve done that at scale with multiple other health systems.

So, if folks are looking for a digital front-door website provider that can search registration in under 30 seconds with no data entry, we’re excellent at that. So I’d welcome anybody to check us out for that. But we’re really excited about —and again, the thing that I was missing at Baylor that I really wanted to manifest in the world was this idea that memberships have a very interesting opportunity in this time that we live in.

One is that they’re ubiquitous. Everybody expects a subscription for X, Y, or Z, even things you get tired of. There’s a bit of burnout on how many subscriptions I have to have Hulu.

I have to have Netflix. We’re always trying to reduce the number of streaming services, but overall, I think the examples you just cited are the biggest ones.

So Amazon Prime and Costco have not just been dominant; they’ve been industry-transforming. The reason I look at Amazon as an example is Amazon Prime. Before Amazon Prime, I was an Amazon shopper. But still, nine times out of 10, when I needed something, I would drive my butt down to Walmart because I wanted it right away, right?

I wanted to touch it. I wanted to feel it. I want to try it on.

But they did two things in Amazon Prime that, at least for me, were massive difference makers that unlocked so much value. One, unlimited returns, free returns, right? So, I’m not worried about how fast I get it because it won’t be two weeks later.

It’s going to be two days. It could be better. And obviously, they’ve made it even smaller every time.

Right now, it’s same-day delivery, next-day delivery. But two days was enough for me. I can wait two days, OK?

That was one. But then it was also free returns. It was the idea that I could try it on, and I’m not being penalized by sending it back.

The reason those two I cite as the biggest examples is flip it now in 2024, well after Amazon Prime came out, but very close after Amazon Prime came out, it became nine to one the other way. I became an unlimited e-commerce shopper, but specifically at Amazon. I’m still hesitant to shop at other places because I will have to pay for the shipping back, or I will have to find a local store to take it in.

Amazon Prime coupled the idea of a membership with attacking the worst parts of an industry. The problem with e-commerce was instant gratification and the risk of what if I wanted something else. And they addressed that head-on and wrapped it in a membership.

And now again, think about how much value they’re driving from nine out of ten times that I would have gone to Walmart now, I’m shopping there online. And so that’s the transformative lesson from memberships: how can healthcare? We’ll talk about this in a second. It’s way harder, but how can healthcare create something that addresses core patient pain points but wrap it in membership so they are excited about the super high-end returns they could potentially have? Rather than these incremental, we added virtual visits.

Great. That’s commoditized instantly. Oh, we have a device that does some remote monitoring.

Again, everyone can buy that. Let’s discuss something that addresses core patient pain points and has a transformative opportunity.

Nicole 

That was well said, and I agree with you regarding Amazon Prime and its transformative experience. They do everything so fast and quickly, and they have a great amount of customer service to back it up as well. So, most healthcare can learn from Amazon Prime because they’re taking over the e-commerce world.

What are the operational strategies used by Costco and Amazon that would be applied to improve efficiency in healthcare?

Aasim 

Well, a little less efficient ink could pay for itself in spades. One thing that Amazon and Costco do brilliantly, and which a thousand percent of healthcare professionals should learn from, aside from what I already said, is that they get on their members’ side. And when I say that, I mean there is an Amazon 30-day window; you buy something and return it.

But I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this, but I haven’t. Ah, it’s day 31. Ah, it’s day 35.

I forgot. It’s a busy time. You ask them.

You’re just like, I know this is past returns day. Could you still take it back? And more often than not, they’ll be like, yeah, you know what?

That’s no problem. We’re on your side. And you’re like, oh my God, they broke the rules for me.

They’re on my side. The same is true for Costco. Regarding warehouse setup, Costco and Sam’s Club are 90% the same.

It’s a warehouse, discount, all of that sort of stuff. And they got pizza right when you come in. They got iced teas, all that.

It’s all the same. But I am a Costco shopper instead because, my goodness, are they on your side? They’re there to please.

They’re like, hey, unlimited returns forever, 90 days for electronics. But they also ask how we can improve that. What can we do for you?

It’s the attitudes of the people. There are a ton of case studies, so I don’t have to explain it to people.

They can Google it. But the thing about both of those is they are on your side. And let’s be blunt and ugly.

When was the last time health care was on your side? You call any hospital or clinic and ask them a billing question, and they talk to you like they hate you. They talk to you like you’re ruining their day, and it’s not their problem.

And why can’t you just let me return to my lunch? Every part of that is policies and other things, so it’s not an operational efficiency opportunity.

My goodness, if everybody in your organization was actually responsible for the delight of that consumer, we would feel a lot differently, and our behaviors would change quite a bit.

Nicole 

Yes, I think you pointed out a few things there. One is that the consumer should always be first in any transaction. Consumer health is taking over, especially what they’ve learned from Amazon or Costco, and they know that they could be first in a specific industry.

They’re bringing that attitude to health care and to other industries, so it’s important to go ahead.

Aasim 

I want to give you an example that I often point out when we talk about patients because we say in health care, patient first, patient at the center all the time. Having been inside a health system responsible for innovation, I can’t tell you how frustrating it is. One of the main barriers to innovation is using words that sound good but mean the opposite.

If I ever needed a point, the example I always give is: Imagine if every single Southwest Airlines pilot had to individually decide whether their passengers could book those tickets online or not. And you know what? They just don’t like it when passengers book their tickets online. They want them to call in.

So, the pilot made that choice. That’s US health care. Every doctor is empowered with the choice of saying, I don’t think it’s safe or correct to have online scheduling because we need to make sure that they’re calling in.

And that is not a patient-centric, full stop. The fact that every physician’s appointment can’t be booked online at your own convenience with your own kind of self-administration is not patient-centric. Anybody who has any misconceptions about that needs to evaluate that and understand that we say things to be, oh, we want patient-centric.

But we mean we want them to see me on my terms, not theirs. I always point this out as if we’re far from it. There are numbers in the industry.

However, less than 20% of one in five health systems have open scheduling, especially for things as challenging as a specialty. And there are some nuances there, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

Nicole 

Yes, I completely agree with you. I’ve worked with some clients who have documents and documents of provider profiles to work with because the providers have their own terms of how they want it to be scheduled. For example, they can’t see ear infections, or they can only see this or that, but not this.

So, it’s not as patient-friendly, as you said, and patient-centric as patients want it to be because it’s so hard to see that doctor at the specific time that they want to be seen.

Aasim 

It’s different expectations. By the way, let’s be very nitpicky about this here, which is to say, that’s not how it works at one medical, right? Those, by the way, because it’s one thing, again, when you’re talking about, like, I’m a super specialized hematology oncologist specializing in this type of cancer.

OK, there’s a matching problem that can be helped in different ways. However, when we’re talking about primary care, primary care has yet to have open scheduling in most healthcare systems in the United States today. Primary care, by definition, is a catch-all service line to take any of those things.

Now, that doesn’t mean that physicians don’t have preferences, but that is not the operating model of one medical. They are there to serve you, and they will make time to see you if you want to be seen. And that’s a different mental model than, well, we need to match the physician templates to match the way that the doctor wants to practice because they like to do physical, you know, sports physicals on Monday mornings only.

Too bad. Like, that’s my answer to that. Too bad.

That is different from how we can operate in a consumer-centric world. Let’s stop pretending or give that model to a partner. For example, amenities can help with that model because we know who the C is.

We often have that conversation inside health systems. Who’s the customer? Is it the physician?

Again, health systems have to cater to physicians often. And so, again, that question would frustrate me more than anything else. Who’s the C?

I’m like, the patient’s the customer. And then we get into insurance debates and all this other stuff. So that’s how I think: we should be crystal clear about the patient and empower them, even if they’re not making their own decisions about moving to different healthcare systems.

Again, I think the early adopters here will win the market. We are here to help them do that and figure out exactly what those patients want.

Nicole 

Absolutely. How do partnerships with companies like T-Mobile or Tinovi improve healthcare delivery?

Aasim 

So I think the things that are infrastructure are why I’m putting this category. T-Mobile is very interesting for a number of reasons. Although they don’t, I mean, technically, you pay them every month, so they technically have a membership.

But T-Mobile, by the way, what I mentioned earlier, was the movers in telecom that went after every worst part of their industry. And they had exceptional growth associated with it. So things like no contracts, unlimited data, and free streaming came because T-Mobile was like, what’s the worst thing people hate about cell phones?

Let’s change that. And then everyone had to follow suit. Now, don’t get me wrong.

Everybody’s making their money. They increase the price, and it’s very frustrating. However, Verizon would only have unlimited data with T-Mobile.

Without T-Mobile, I don’t know who else is out there. AT&T wouldn’t have; they would still pay $0.05 per text, which would be incredibly frustrating.

But your question is more about the infrastructure players. And there is a reality that not everyone has access to digital services and Wi-Fi at the needed levels to be able to leverage it like the way we’re all hoping and dreaming or picturing the future, where you can just whip open a video visit and talk to your doc conveniently or use a Bluetooth stethoscope or a blood pressure cuff. So, for players that do infrastructure like T-Mobile, some cellular players are more of a global cellular.

And then Tenovia, I think, especially in the remote monitoring world, simplifies access to devices. But I will also be clear that I think this is all secondary to fixing the website, being able to find a doctor, and knowing where the appointment is. Again, we jump to this, and this was my job, by the way, at Baylor Scott & White.

I spent 15 months of my life scoping out every remote patient monitoring capability. The reality is that there’s not yet a business model that justifies remote patient monitoring. However, there are individual codes that you get reimbursed for, and you can do it.

However, we have amazing technology and are looking for a business case. If we start with the basics, we can get there. For example, remote monitoring and other things will ultimately be wrapped into a membership.

But at the current cost, it’s most justified in high-risk Medicare Advantage. There’s not a great business case for using it in other places just yet.

Nicole 

Yes, I agree more with you. T-Mobile’s infrastructure, such as remote patient monitoring, would be useful later. The secondary portion of the phase, where the primary portion would be the schedule, registration, and the importance of getting that patient into the door.

How do consumer-orientated interfaces like those used by Amazon and Costco enhance patient experiences?

Aasim 

So this is one where it’s both not surprising but also incredibly frustrating to see that, to some degree, we all are frustrated by this. But at the same time, some people advocate for this, so we’ve deferred our consumer tools to large EMR vendors. And then we’re shocked that we are, you know, everyone complains about how behind health care is when, again, that’s like saying you’re going to let, if you were a tax preparer, you’re going to let Microsoft Office build your consumer app and just be like, yeah, they’ll do a great job.

What could go wrong, right? There’s no way that EMR vendors were going to be the best at a consumer experience. They’re building literally for large healthcare systems and providers.

Patients are an afterthought. If anybody disagrees, ask them how much they love their patient portal. Again, there are occasional oddballs, but nine out of 10 are like, no, I look at this as a thing I have to use.

I have no desire or appetite to be like that; this is good. Or, again, it’s back to that 1980s WordPress-type website, the equivalent of apps. I know they came along later than the 1980s, but that’s just to say that apps like Amazon and Costco aren’t necessarily the best.

They’re not my examples of the best apps, but there are constant iterations of mobile experiences and web responsive on mobile experiences that are really upping the game in terms of our expectations. If nothing else, by the way, booking something is established now by Uber or Uber Eats. Yelp establishes your ability to find where you’re going to eat.

Amazon established your ability to find a garden hose. And so when we talk about provider search again, these things have been solved. If we match those things, which, by the way, is entirely self-serving, but that’s what amenities do.

We just provide a modern consumer experience for provider search and scheduling that is sorted by things that patients actually care about. This means taking all your providers and sorting them by the next available appointment. As much as physicians may not like to hear this, the number one thing a patient is looking for is the earliest available appointment. And instead, what often happens is they’ll be like, oh, what about ratings?

Well, unfortunately, ratings in healthcare have become meaningless. One, this is an insider industry secret, is physicians have the opportunity to protest a lot of those bad ratings, right, wrong, or indifferent. In this case, at Baylor, Scott & White, we don’t have a sort by ratings of the provider because everyone is 4.5 and above. It’s not a meaningful discrepancy between them. Instead, when we surveyed people, number one was the earliest available appointment. Number two was that I wanted to avoid driving 50 miles for this.

So proximity. Three and four were always things that we never found in a single provider profile. You mentioned it earlier.

They’re like, hey, I want to ensure that I do this or only this. What patients want to know about their profile is, are you judgmental? And what’s your philosophy on medications?

I’ve literally never found those two things on a single profile, yet they pop to the top every time we test. What do you want to know about a provider if you’re going to match a provider that you’re going to see repeatedly? Now, it’s different for specialists.

They care a lot less because then it’s about how frequently they do this. And again, that data is not available. It’s not like we’re saying we’re going to take the volume of collarbone repair surgery and put it into the search.

That would be amazing. But again, we’re so far from consumer-centric views on these things. Just baby steps about doing the schedule sort by the next available will already be better because I think about what patients have to do today.

They literally go to the website, which is completely organized. They pick the first provider who doesn’t look like they’re going to be a jerk to them, and they call them.

And if that provider says either I’m not accepting new patients or my earliest available appointment is five months from now, think about how many people stop and say, OK, I’m going to get back to my day. I’ll handle this later and never come back to it. Because again, you’d have to go five deep, six deep, and then number seven had availability tomorrow.

And yet that’s how we’re like, oh yeah, but that’s the consumer. They’ll call. They’ll get through it.

In what world do we do that? When you need anything done, if you need somebody to come to clean your carpets, you’re going to call seven of them in a row just to be like, hey, do you have availability eight months from now? OK.

I’ll call the next guy and get back to you. Yet, this is what we expect patients to do.

And it’s just never going to work.

Nicole 

You made a few good points, but I couldn’t agree more. Well said. So, you mentioned that EMRs are not patient-friendly.

That’s correct. Aside from a few, most EMRs are in tune with the healthcare system to ensure seamless workflow. But when it comes to the patient, especially at the patient portal, it’s not that user-friendly or is not that great regarding accessibility and user-friendly features. But also, you said that patients would start looking for five or would ask for five different doctors and not get it at first availability. And that’s correct; they would still have to call.

Sometimes, the call center already has a line of patients waiting to answer their phone calls, and they get to them later than they do. You have to wait a few minutes in order to get that specific schedule. So it is not patient-friendly and it is not consumer-friendly to just get a schedule in hand with those providers and practitioners. So yes, you made some great points there.

My last question is, can you discuss the potential financial benefits for healthcare providers of adopting such business models?

Aasim 

Yes, so I think we think of memberships. Again, I bet my entire professional career on this and left and started a company because I think, obviously, I want to build a good company and a venture. However, the number one goal is to fix some elements of healthcare, and I don’t know how to fix costs.

I don’t know how to fix quality because I don’t even know what it means anymore. I think we can fix experience, and the key to doing that is competing on experience.

If a health system, let’s say it follows the exact example you gave, spends a ton of time and effort on its contact center. Right now, if you call, right, by the way, when you pick Dr. So-and-so on the website, that number isn’t for that doctor; sometimes, it’s to the contact center. They’re like, oh, Dr. So-and-so has not been available for eight months. They’re like, OK, great, who is?

And they’re like, I don’t know, who do you want to see? And it isn’t very pleasant. Let’s say they spend a ton of time to fix that.

They’re still wondering, did we really get any benefit from that? That’s where memberships are my professional thesis. We can fix experience by making it super concrete that when you win a member, they start coming to you more often. They will start staying in your network and utilizing your services, especially for high-dollar surgeries, procedures, and inpatient volume.

And I’ll give you a concrete example of what I mean when I say membership because I think everybody, when they think of membership, unfortunately, in this industry, we’re not very creative. It is rich people, medicine, and concierge care. We’re like, oh, yeah, let’s do memberships.

Let’s charge people $2,000 yearly to get our doctor’s phone number. Then we’ll be, ta-da, we’ve fixed the world. That’s 1% of the population or less that will apply to.

As I mentioned, there are opportunities with T-Mobile and Amazon to go directly to the worst parts of your industry and do something about them. For patients, our surveys make it 100% clear that cost is the number one problem in healthcare. It is not accessible.

We just complain. I’ve been complaining to you for about 20 minutes now about not being able to find a doctor’s appointment. But when you ask patients, OK, what are you really worried about? The number one thing is that you’re going to bankrupt me if I don’t know something that you expect me to know ahead of time, whether it’s my deductible or whether it’s out-of-network, whatever it is.

And health systems have largely said, well, that’s not our fault. That’s insurance’s game. And so I made almost no progress in four years of leading innovation at Baylor, Scott & White on this issue because health systems are conflicted.

Do we want to do something about something when we’re the problem? It’s our bill that they’re. Yes, this is back to that membership.

Get on the consumer side. And so when we do things about memberships, we promote things like no surprise billing guarantee, satisfaction guarantee, and transparent cash pay pricing. Those things in membership are way better than concierge care because one medical proved that you could get concierge care for primary care and go wherever you want for specialty. After all, there’s never been a health system that’s made a nickel in partnership with one medical.

They’re just losing money, paying Amazon to steal their patients from them. Instead of concierge primary care, if you had no surprise billing guarantee, you had transparent cash-pay pricing and a satisfaction guarantee when you needed surgery. Where do you think you’re going to go?

Because those only apply to the health system. Now you’re talking about things that don’t cost new doctor salaries, things that scale with technology, and things that you can do to truly get on their side. But you might not be surprised to hear that when we talk about this with the health system, the first question, the first reaction, is shock.

Are we going to offer patients no surprise billing guarantee against ourselves? Yes. Yes.

Yes. A thousandfold. That’s what you need to be doing.

If you want to shift the trajectory of health care, the first movers who do this will be massively rewarded. And by the way, when we say massively rewarded, if you move 10 percent of volume and increase that in a market like Dallas Fort Worth, that is worth a billion dollars. That’s the reward because healthcare dollars are big in these major markets.

Why not take a bet? What’s the worst that could happen if we tried to get on the patient’s side and do something like this? But I think we’re too absorbed with keeping the status quo.

And so this is the opportunity that we’re pushing folks. It’s why we’re called amenities. We’re trying to create the amenities of health care that stop making the experience suck so bad.

We want to help fill these gaps because we know it’s not native things that health systems will know how to do. However, they should be associated with health systems because that will provide the majority of care in this country for the next 50 to 100 years. And that’s OK.

We need to embrace that and say they need partners. Hopefully, we can partner with them to help them figure out this world of memberships.

Nicole 

I love that about amenities and the fact that you’re taking the cost question out of the equation for the patients. Right now, it seems like the insurance company dictates health care versus the patient dictates its own health care.

It’s great that it’s very consumer-friendly, patient-focused, and patient-first. I also want to give you the floor so you can tell us more about the amenities.

What do you want our audience to know? Tell us more about the projects that you’re currently working on. Share this your time to share about amenities as much as you can.

Aasim 

Sure. I’ll keep this relatively short because I covered some of it. But I appreciate the platform.

So one part of what we do is we build, I think, candidly, the best digital front door tools in the country for health systems. I prove that at Baylor Scott and White, where my BSW Health and BSW Health dot com are two of the highest-performing websites in the country. And when I say highest-performing, I mean half a million new patients were acquired between those two platforms.

That is a massive revenue of millions of dollars attributed to those two platforms. Now, part of why I left was that not every health system has the money we spend doing that. And so we do it at a fraction of the cost.

We’ve already gone live with a couple of different health systems. But for folks looking at new patient registration, one of the biggest problems we mentioned with the EMR platforms is that they are literally current patient platforms.

They’re not new patient acquisition tools—at least not in the way they think they are. They’re not here to let anyone in off the street.

We help let anyone in off the street because you want them. That’s a patient. However, patient portals need to be built that way.

So, there is new patient registration, provider search and scheduling, and a comprehensive mobile experience. That’s where we excel, and we’d love to talk to anybody looking to do that.

On the other side of the house, a part we call just like Amazon makes it frictionless transactions. Just make it easy for people to do business with you. On the other side now is the Amazon Prime.

We’re working with partners to build the Amazon Prime of health care by getting deep and providing a nuanced view of loyalty. So, specifically, most health systems don’t understand or like to admit this, but they have patients in all of our research, even patients who say they are loyal to a health system split 50 percent or more of the time. And so their share of the wallet is a fraction of what it could be.

Then, they have dozens, hundreds, thousands of patients who come through their door who have not said that they’re their preferred system, but they have an opportunity because they walk through their doors. Finally, there’s the mass market. And so we are very pointed in our memberships designed to attract and win these types of patient classes.

So we design, build, deploy, and manage direct-to-consumer memberships for these health systems, all 100 percent white-labeled for that health system. So they’re earning the loyalty, not one medical or some other partner.

Nicole 

That’s quite impressive. Thank you, Aasim, for sharing your insights today. It has been a pleasure discussing healthcare business models with you.

Before we wrap up, we encourage our listeners to connect with Aasim on LinkedIn to stay current on his work and insights. Our engagement with the podcast is valuable, and we look forward to bringing more informative discussions to the future. Thank you for being part of our community.

Again, thank you, Aasim, for sharing your insights and knowledge with us. We appreciate your time.

Aasim 

It’s a pleasure.