Entrepreneur Rx_Darren Sommer: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Entrepreneur Rx_Darren Sommer: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

John Shufeldt:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another edition of Entrepreneur Rx, where we help healthcare professionals own their future.

John Shufeldt:
Hey everybody, welcome back to Entrepreneur Rx. Today, I'm real excited to have Darren Sommer with me. Darren is a multifaceted, multi-disciplined physician entrepreneur and I'm excited to chat with you about it. Darren, welcome.

Darren Sommers:
Thank you, John. Glad to be here.

John Shufeldt:
Thank you. All right, so let's start at the beginning. How did you end up where you are?

Darren Sommers:
All right. So I attended college with the intention of becoming a law enforcement officer.

John Shufeldt:
My God. Me too. That was my start, wow.

Darren Sommers:
First year of college was fun, but not very educational. Came home that summer, I was 19 years old, told my parents, look, I got to figure out something else and decided to join the Coast Guard. And so I spent my first three years post-college in the Coast Guard enlisted because I knew I would have a chance to do law enforcement, search and rescue, and other things that I felt would benefit my future. So the Coast Guard decides to send me to EMT school. And I said, oh, this medical stuff's pretty cool, let me think about maybe going back to medical school. So talked to my wife, her brother-in-law was a physician at the time and he said, hey, look, consider it, it's a great career, and I went back to college. This time I studied, got a bachelor's degree in chemistry, graduated with honors, and then went off to medical school. So interestingly, the very first day I had a chance to put my white coat on and go into the office, I had a family doctor tell me a joke about three different physicians, one that made a lot of money, one that made a moderate amount of money, and one that made very little money. And the one that made the most was a veterinarian, the one that made the modern amount was a dentist, the one that made the least was a MDO, and the punchline was, hey dummy, why did you go to medical school? And I was so pumped up to wear my white coat and to go to medical school and to be in a clinic, I was really let down. And I noticed over the next few years of my education, I would be around colleagues that would complain a lot about the healthcare system, but they would never do anything to fix it. So I made a commitment at that time that if I saw something wrong or I could improve something, that I would make an effort to do that. So my career is riddled with opportunities to fix the healthcare system and a focus on doing more than just the rogue front-line patient care.

John Shufeldt:
That's exciting. Okay, so back it up. So I was a criminology major in college. So when you said that, I, of course, like, oh my God, you poor bastard. Okay, so you did a year of college and went home and had the epiphany of like, okay, this is, I need a new direction, and so you joined the Coast Guard as an enlisted. That's amazing.

Darren Sommers:
Yeah.

John Shufeldt:
It was three years.

Darren Sommers:
Yeah, it was originally a four-year enlistment, but then when Clinton came in, he wanted to downsize the service, so they looked for people to get out early. And I had progressed pretty well, nd at that point, I knew I wanted to go back to college and get a bachelor's degree and go to medical school. So for me, getting out at that time was perfect. I wound up obviously later on going back into the military after 9/11 and medical school, but at that point in my career, I had left. I stayed in the Reserves, so while I was in undergrad and before medical school, so I had a total of six years in the Coast Guard before leaving and then eventually joined the Army.

John Shufeldt:
Wow, and then you went back as an officer, obviously. Oh, so you, okay, so three years of Coast Guard, you went back, you do three years of college undergrad, chemistry major, and then medical school. Okay, so you're in medical school, what specialties interested you now that you heard you should have been a vet?

Darren Sommers:
So actually, OB-GYN was something that I liked the most. And so I was really interested up until the time that we were supposed to be picking our residency programs, and I went and did an extra month of OB-GYN and I just, I didn't get a sense of the quality of life. Obviously, as an OB-GYN physician, you're on call, there's a lot of stress. But I enjoyed the balance between the clinic and the OR but ultimately decided that hospital medicine was going to be a better fit for me. And it really was a good choice because I think for my lack of ability to focus on things for extended periods of time, being able to bounce around the hospital, see multiple different patients be taking care of a different set of pathologies, really worked well for me. And I think the best thing about medical school, in my mind, was I learned who I was, how I learn, how I fit best into a role from a career perspective. And maybe some people get that in life sooner, but for me, it really hit home in medical school where I was going to excel in a career.

John Shufeldt:
So you were fortunate to figure out what you wanted to do right towards the end of medical school, and then you did internal medicine, I'm assuming?

Darren Sommers:
I did.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, okay, where did you do that at?

Darren Sommers:
University Community Health System at the time, down in Saint Petersburg, Florida. So it was multi hospitals here, so as an osteopathic physician, we train in community hospitals. So it was at Bay Pines VA Medical Center is at Tampa General Hospital, I was a Hospitals Largo Medical Center in Saint Pete, and a number of different other locations.

John Shufeldt:
All, right, and then did you go back into the Coast Guard during residency?

Darren Sommers:
No, so what happened was, is, I did the reserves during undergrad, and then I knew I was going into medical school, and so this was pre-9/11, and had decided that probably being the military wasn't a good idea during medical school because the obligations and didn't want to impact my education. But the very first month I was there a Florida National Guard recruiter came in and was talking about the military, and it just, it's something that I missed a lot when I left, and so I decided that I would join the Reserves. So I received my commission about a month after 9/11. I'd already been starting to go through the process, and so now, here I am a commissioned officer in the National Guard. I'm at a point where I can't go and serve in a combat role, so I had to sit on the sidelines and watch. And so having stuck in this kind of limbo role where all of this is happening, friends are leaving, they're going overseas, they're fighting the war, and I'm stuck back home, it really drove me to want to go back on active duty. So after residency, graduated on a Friday, moved the family to Fort Bragg on a Saturday, and six months later, I'm off to Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division, and so that's kind of how my whole military career took off.

John Shufeldt:
Wow, okay. So right out of residency, you're an internist working in a field hospital or?

Darren Sommers:
Yeah, when I got to Fort Bragg, we were just getting ready to leave for Afghanistan, and so it was a lot of operational training. We had a month-long field exercise and there was a whole bunch of career development, there was a lot of clinic work, it was a lot of evaluation of soldiers. Are you well enough to go on deployment? Because by 2006, we'd already been in the war four-plus years, and so there are a lot of guys that were on their second or third mobilization and they were hurt and had issues, and so we had to assess them and identify whether or not they were going to be well enough to go down range and do their jobs. And so most of my time was spent doing health evaluations for soldiers, getting ready to mobilize.

John Shufeldt:
How much PTSD, I know is a little off-subject, but how much PTSD did you see in those early years?

Darren Sommers:
Say, for myself and the people around me, it's not like a light switch, right? Where you're like, all of a sudden it's dark, you turn the light on and it's bright. Post-traumatic stress isn't where I have a normal one day and I'm not normal the next, think of it more like a dimmer switch, slowly gets brighter and you don't remember how dark or bright it was an hour ago or a day ago or a week ago. And so for me, I noticed the impact of those experiences, like months after I got back. And I think talking to colleagues, that's how it is quite a bit, and everybody processes those experiences differently. And I think I did better than a lot because I had already been exposed to the human body, to death, and to some of the things that a lot of people are just thrust into. And so we each kind of carry our own wounds, but it's much more insidious, and I think it's much more common than even people will acknowledge today, despite how good we've done in addressing it.

John Shufeldt:
Wow, so even in 2006, you were seeing a lot of soldiers at least coming back with some indicia of PTSD.

Darren Sommers:
Absolutely, yeah.

John Shufeldt:
Wow, I can't imagine.

Darren Sommers:
I mean, because these guys are having multiple combat deployments and the operational tempo was high. And I think the biggest part of it is the hypervigilance, right? So you go down range and you're on a convoy or you're asleep at night and you don't know when the next indirect fire or IED or direct fire is going to happen, and so you're kind of always on guard. And when I got to Afghanistan, it was supposed to be an 11-month tour. When we left, we were there for 15 months, so they extended us another like four months beyond ... So when I left, my daughter was 11 months old, I came back and she's two and it's like just this crazy long time. And so when you're in that environment and this hypervigilance state for 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 months, you can't help but come back. Like, remember, we got back and within a couple of days of me being back, my wife's, hey, we want to get together with my sister and go have dinner. And what, we were in Raleigh and we had dinner and then we went to the mall. And I just remember being around all these people, and I just, I couldn't stay in there. I just had to get away from that environment, and it took me a little while to get comfortable with my surroundings again and then recognize how I had changed.

John Shufeldt:
Wow, that's a, man, I mean, imagine you were a little bit older. Imagine being 18, 19 with less worldly experiences, and I mean, that's got to be very difficult.

Darren Sommers:
100%.

John Shufeldt:
Wow, that's interesting. Okay, so what was it, so what did you learn in Afghanistan that made you a better entrepreneur? Kind of an off question, but it seemed like there would be some learnings there.

Darren Sommers:
Yeah, no, I mean, this is how it all started. In 2007, we got there January 2007, we didn't have smartphones, we didn't have tablets, we didn't have the online version of Up to Date. So whatever medical resource you had, whether that was ingrained in your brain from your training or experience or available in a book, those are the only resources you had to try to figure out what to do. And as I shared before, I trained in at community-based health systems, so we didn't get a lot of battlefield trauma. We didn't get a lot in tropical diseases. We learned about bread-and-butter stuff, COPD, strokes, heart failure. And so here I am now in this third-world country, taking care of not only our service members, but contractors that have health issues and host nation. I'm taking care of pediatrics, yet I'm an adult internist. And so I was able to communicate with colleagues around the battlefield and around the world to say, hey, I have this patient with this pathology in front of me. Here's what I think I could do, here's the resources I have. Am I on track, and do you think this is a good idea, or should I just cut loose now and call in medevac? And call us calling in medevac in an operational environment, it's not like us calling in medical transport back home. I mean, there's a lot of implications to get a helicopter because it's not just one. It's at least two helicopters and there's distance, kinetic operations, weather, a whole host of factors that come into that decision. And so here I am using this experience, which I was, I just thought was amazing. This is such a great thing to be able to interact with these colleagues and really provide a higher level of care. And then you contrast that when I get back home, I work in a more rural area of a state because there is, there's rules around practicing in certain areas as a military physician. And if a hospital has a certain level of Tricare patients, you can't consider double dipping. So I had to go way from the more urban area to the rural area, and it was the same thing, right? But this time I couldn't call, if I called somebody at Duke or at Wake or at Chapel Hill, it was like, hey, dude, just send me the patient. I'm not going to give you the advice on how to manage, I'm not going to look at your x-rays or have this discussion with you. I just thought, what a waste. When we would send a patient and a day or two later they'd come back, and they really didn't have much done. And you're trying to meet the standard of care and you're trying to do these things, but at the same time, you recognize that we're really burdening our healthcare system by having patients possibly be transferred, and so I saw that opportunity to try to figure out how to solve that. I didn't know at the time how to do it, but that was probably the most influential factor for me starting the company that I did.

John Shufeldt:
So when you were in Afghanistan, you literally had the ability to call people all over the, call colleagues who were specialists all over the world?

Darren Sommers:
Yes.

John Shufeldt:
So, and then you come back here and it's.

Darren Sommers:
Yeah, we typically called Walter Reed, because Walter Reed had every specialty and everybody was on call. We could send emails with pictures, we all had digital cameras at the time, so we'd take a picture, come back, and upload it into a computer and then send it off. And so we could do some of those things that we couldn't do typically, like smartphones and things that we can do today.

John Shufeldt:
Wow, so get back here in a rural environment and you can't do that. And I get it, I mean, like, look, just send the patient, but I've been on both sides of that coin, as I'm sure you have as well, and yeah, it's a huge waste of resources oftentimes.

Darren Sommers:
And today it's completely different, right? I mean, if I were doing that same thing today post-COVID, they'd be like, they would definitely help and try to keep that patient from getting transferred because everybody's now overwhelmed with patients, but at the time it wasn't that way. And this is a pre-telemedicine time in our lives where it was like, either send, let me see them, or don't send them at all.

John Shufeldt:
Right, all right. When did you get pushed into, and I think probably push is a good word, when did you get pushed into your business model?

Darren Sommers:
Yeah, or maybe even pulled, right? So I finished on active duty with the Army in 2010. I had a chance to go to a rheumatology fellowship at Walter Reed, decided to go back into private practice, and I had an opportunity to go to Duke and get an MBA. And so I'm working in the hospital that I was moonlighting in as a medical director, and I'm doing every other weekend for 18 months, this MBA program, and it's phenomenal. And we have the healthcare reform debate taking place at that same time, and I'm thinking about my life as a physician going back to that way, we started this conversation about that joke and how we make things better, and I realized that just being a physician is not enough to weigh in on the healthcare debate. So you go up to Washington, D.C., and you're talking to congressmen, you're talking to senators, and you realize that people that are making all the policy decisions are people that never take care of patients, right? These are relatively young people with master's degrees in public health or other things that have a different understanding of healthcare, and they're making all the decisions, and so I decided, hey, going and getting my MBA would be valuable. So I did that with the health sector management degree. And I just, I guess I've always had this interest in entrepreneurship and inventions and other things, but this really was the catalyst for me to figure out how to do this in a viable way. And I got my MBA and then it launched me into a position as a senior vice president for a company in Ohio that had both ERs and hospitals doing hospitals programs, and so they had me run their hospitalist division. And the group was roughly about 20 years old and they were going through this transition where.

John Shufeldt:
Which group was this?

Darren Sommers:
Premier Physicians.

John Shufeldt:
Oh, sure.

Darren Sommers:
And so their senior leadership was getting to the point where they're thinking about retirement. And so they're trying to figure out, do we want to continue to invest more and trying to grow this practice, or do we want to sell? Because obviously, ER groups are buying ER groups all over the country. And I saw the writing on the wall that they were ready to sell. And I didn't want to invest 2 or 3 more years in a group that wasn't going to be there because who knows who's taking over. And at the same time, the State of Ohio had asked me to take a look at a telemedicine technology platform that was developed in Dublin, Ohio. There was a company called Health Spot, and they had this idea for a telemedicine kiosk. Think of a photo booth, it has medical devices in it.

John Shufeldt:
Oh, I know Health Spot. Yeah, that's exactly what it was.

Darren Sommers:
And so I don't know if you ever met the CEO, but he was a super charismatic guy, but really no healthcare experience, and they raised $48 million to run the company, and one of the big sticking points was Ohio's prescribing law. So if they had put these Health Spot kiosks out in the marketplace, then could they prescribe? And so the Osteopathic Association, which had a seat on the board, asked me to represent it. So I went and saw the technology, talked with CEO, and I fell in love with it. I thought it was fantastic. And I was super into technology, I thought, Here's telemedicine that could be deployed in a really great way. I mean, they had amazing members on their board. They had investments from Cardinal Health, from the Cleveland Clinic, Rite Aid, I mean, all kinds of stuff. So they raised $48 million in 48 months, and then January, and I don't remember the year it was like 2014, 2015, sign on the door that says, hey, we're out of business, and that was it, the dream was over. And so I had been working with a company that was an offshoot of that. So the way Health Spot was set up was you could only be a hardware company, you could not be a services company. And so one of the investors was going to be the services company and asked me to join them. And they said, hey, look, we're gonna give you a sweet package, we're going to keep you at the same compensation and bring you over to come and work with us as the medical director. And we were actually the first company in the state of Ohio to get a contract with United Healthcare to do telemedicine. So up until that time, United Healthcare had never given a contract to physician services provider to allow them to do telemedicine. So now we had a mechanism for reimbursement. But, you know, the company that I was working with really needed capital. The owner expressed an idea that he had unlimited capital, but when push came to shove, he didn't. And so it was very difficult for them to raise capital knowing that I had this salary that was not commensurate with a startup company. And I came in one day, the last day of June, and he had an envelope in his hand and he said, here's your last paycheck. And I said, wow. I said, it was unexpected. I said, well, I said, what about my ownership? And he said, what ownership? And contractually I had ownership in the company. So I walked out that day, no job, not sure if I had any ownership. And my son's friend at the time, her dad, was a healthcare attorney, and up until that point in my life, the only legal work I'd ever done was with my brother, who's an attorney. Hey, Brian, look at this contract. Does this look good? But I've never hired an attorney. I'm 40-something years old, never had an attorney in my life, but I had to actually hire for anything of purpose. And so I called Greg up and I said, hey, here's the situation. He's like, here, all right, come in tomorrow, talk with me and Nick. So I talked to them and I said, hey, look, here's what's going on. What should I do? And I said, I have a not a settlement, but.

John Shufeldt:
An employee severance agreement, an employment agreement.

Darren Sommers:
Thank you, thank you. And I said, I'd like what they committed to my severance package and I would like a non-compete. I want to be able to go out and do my own thing. And they worked out a settlement, I got that, and I got out of the non-compete and got the capital, took that, and invested in Innovator Health. So almost, I think it'll be ten years next year, we started the company and so that's how it all started.

John Shufeldt:
That's cool. Okay, so when we talked a little bit ago, and full disclosure, we're looking at possibly investing at some point or at least helping you along the way with Xcellerant. Give us an overview of what Innovator Health is. It's a very cool model and it's not a model that's, that I've seen really done at scale before.

Darren Sommers:
Yeah, so thank you for the question, John. So we started out as a hardware company and so the vision was we would create a platform that would allow a physician like myself to have a rich interaction with a patient. Up until that time, most telemedicine was focused around laptops or landscape-oriented small screens where, you and I are talking by video now. But is this the modality that I want to have to share life-changing news? And I submit, no, it's probably not. And so how do we create something that allows us to have a richer interaction? And so what we did is we wound up taking our screens and turning them into a portrait orientation, and instead of using that 12, 14, 27-inch screen, we use the 55-inch screen. And so we were able to broadcast to be in front of patients life-size, 3D eye contact, and that was a really immersive experience. And what it did is it allowed us to have an almost lifelike interaction. And quite often in the beginning patients would say, wow, it's just like you're in the room with me, and that's what we wanted to hear. Like we wanted the technology to disappear and it, just how that patient-physician relationship developed. And so what was interesting about experience is we thought initially we needed to build this custom system in order to achieve these different things, and then we sold a number of systems, put them out in the market, and we learned a lot from that. We didn't need all the bells and whistles we put on there and in fact, we were better off finding off-the-shelf components and working with companies that could sell products that were already pre-manufactured than we were trying to do anything custom cost way down. And so I brought on a business partner, Dennis Kopp, and he had a lot of experience in GE product sourcing. And so he essentially reworked the product line to be able to get it substantially less expensive and to have vendors be able to compete for the products we needed, and it was really helpful. So now we have this really good product line and we were taking it to customers. And what we consistently see in the telemedicine marketplace is that hospitals acquire technology and they attempt to use it with the staff they have within their health system or within their hospital. And I submit that you will be hard-pressed to find any physician working employed in a health system that doesn't have something to do, right? Like everybody's busy. Family practice doctors are booked 4 or 5 months out, the surgeons are booked a few weeks out. Everybody has full panels unless they're brand new. But what hospitals try to do is they try to start a telemedicine program. Let's say they want to do outreach cardiology.

John Shufeldt:
....

Darren Sommers:
Yeah, so they bring on they ask their cardiologist, hey, in addition to all the work you guys are already doing, now I want you to do visits at a hospital an hour from here by telemedicine. And the problem is, 1 or 2 guys in the group are fine with it, but the rest don't want to do it. And so the program's never going anywhere, and these telemedicine systems become just coat racks. And so what we decided early on was that we're going to be really engaged in the process and figure out how to help them use the technology, because we felt the more they use it, the more they would acquire it. And I think from that perspective, we were, right, but what we didn't realize at the time is what we should be providing is the services. And so about a year before COVID in 2019, our largest customer came to us and said, hey, more than the hardware, we need physician services, can you help? And as a physician, I said, yeah, rock on, let's try this. And so we started providing hospital medicine services and it just worked out really well. And what we realized, rather than trying to go to a hospital and sell a piece of hardware, which winds up becoming a capital expense that has to be budgeted and in certain dollars has to be approved by the board, we turned it into an operational expense. And what we did is we just included the cost of the hardware, amortize it over time, and said, hey, look, we're going to provide you this service. So now we have the capability to go into a hospital and they need that cardiology program, we bring them the cardiologist and we can provide that service less than what they could provide if they actually hired the physician, because not only can we provide the service and the hardware platform to deliver the care, but we can then spread the use of that physician more in a more cost-effective way so that they could provide care at multiple sites if needed, and so that model works out really well. So now COVID comes along and does two things. One, it changes the opinion about telemedicine, right? So now everybody's used it in some form or fashion. And two, we go from being 65,000 physicians short to 165,000 physicians short. So now we come out of COVID with a comfort level of using telemedicine and at a much higher demand for physicians. So now we really need the efficiencies that telemedicine brings in addition to now being comfortable with it. So it was just a complete game changer for us.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, do you think COVID really accelerated that for you?

Darren Sommers:
100%. If I were to ask you the very first time the word telemedicine showed up in the medical literature, what would you guess what year?

John Shufeldt:
First time in the medical literature, right? So I started a telemedicine company in 2010. So of course I want to say 2010. But when did it show up?

Darren Sommers:
1972.

John Shufeldt:
Oh, God. It's funny, I knew that answer, and I remember hearing the story. In 2010. people looked at me like I was crazy. And I remember thinking, '72, really?

Darren Sommers:
Yeah.

John Shufeldt:
That's, I remember that. Tell that story, if you know it.

Darren Sommers:
Oh, yeah. So let's contrast this to the blood pressure cuff. So when the original blood pressure cuff came out, the England Journal of Medicine did an article about it that said, this device was designed only to be used by physicians. And so it took a long time for people to get comfortable having other people provide services. A big issue with telemedicine is, should I, should a medical assistant, should an LPN be putting the stethoscope on the chest or doing these other things? And I submit if I'm the one that's taking the data, then sure, why not? And so in 1972, a physician from UMass decided to look at how they could reduce admissions to the ER, and they did two things in that study. They used one, a nurse practitioner, which was very new at the time, and the term telemedicine, they coined that term, and they were using facsimile to share EKGs and notes and closed circuit TV and other things. And what amazes me about that is, now you fast forward, like what are the impediments to adoption, right? Broadband internet, which is everywhere now, devices that are capable of providing telemedicine and sharing content, which is ubiquitous now. All the impediments were there except the adoption for actual telemedicine capability, and so that was the last piece, getting people comfortable with it, and COVID really changed that model.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, it's amazing. I remember reading about Semmelweiss and you know how he's talking about handwashing because all his women are dying postpartum, right? And the poor guy ends up in insane asylum, shunned by his colleagues because he said, hey, we should be washing hands after our autopsy. Funny thing about healthcare is it hasn't changed all that much. I mean, if telemedicine was 1972 and in 2010, I'm still getting weird looks from people. And it really took it really, you're, right? It took to COVID before it became more ubiquitous.

Darren Sommers:
I would go to conferences and I would have people almost yelling at me with the idea that we're going to not be in the room with our patients. And I would say, look, I am never advocating that we should not be in the room with our patients, but let's be realistic about access to care, because not everybody has a physician in the room with them. So it's either no healthcare at all or it's telemedicine, and that's what we're really advocating for. So yeah, it's crazy that it took us this long to even get to this point.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, give us a little bit of overview on the business now. How has it been going for you?

Darren Sommers:
Oh, it's been great. So in multiple sites, we're in four different states, US plus we're as far away as Guam, routing thousands of visits every year. We now have a very scalable model, so obviously this round that we're looking to raise is to go ahead and take that model and go ahead and grow. And I think what's nice about Innovator Health and Innovator Health Physician is that we're really an end-to-end solution. So if you're a hospital CEO and you said, hey, Darren, I need that cardiologist, okay, we're going to source that doc for you. We're going to bring them on board, license them, credential them, privilege them, provide all the equipment they need, all the training they need, all the equipment you need, all the training your team needs, all the malpractice, everything from end to end, so you don't have to do anything. And we don't do any long-term contracts, either we're providing a service that's valuable and that is helping you, and if we're not, then, hey, we'll move on to the next ... health system. But every single customer we've ever had from the very first start, we, are still our customers today, and all of them have grown. And that's a testament to the way we approach making sure that if you're going to use us as a partner, we're really adding value to your medical staff.

John Shufeldt:
Now, and you don't bill, you don't bill third-party payers, you let them do it.

Darren Sommers:
Absolutely, yeah, because look, honestly, large health systems have much better pay rates than I'm ever going to get, right? So it's better for them and better for us. Plus, we can do a lot more by not having to deal with insurance companies and the headaches of that. We can grow and expand and provide other services. So in all honesty, it does save us a big headache, but it's also win-win for everybody.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, totally. Well, so this has been really cool. And like I said, just really hats off to you one. Thanks for the service, but also taking that, what you learned in Afghanistan, the challenges you had in rural North Carolina, and then maybe turning this into a business really impressive. Where can people learn more about Innovator Health?

Darren Sommers:
Yeah, InnovatorHealth.com or IHPhysician.com. ... and my contact information is on there and we're happy to help. And I think it's going to be a lot more to come in this marketplace, so yeah.

John Shufeldt:
That's really exciting.

Darren Sommers:
..., John, thank you for this opportunity.

John Shufeldt:
Pleasure. And hopefully, it'll get some potential physician, physicians out of this as well because I'm sure people hearing this will be like, oh hell yeah, I want to do that.

Darren Sommers:
So look, you and I have a lot more gray hair for the hair that we have left, and so we have missed how many birthdays, holidays, vacations, and other things because we've been dedicated to our careers. I'm going to put food on the table in addition to the work we do. And a lot of people, with COVID, were able to work remotely, and that really wasn't a big option for a lot of physicians. But today, there's a pathway for physicians to work from their home. As an example, our client in Guam asked us to provide an outpatient OB-GYN program because a lot of women on the island don't have access to OB-GYN. And so we're able to bring on board a board-certified OB-GYN physician with this amazing background who just has a two-year-old son at home. And so he's going to work kind of like four in the afternoon till about ten at night, taking care of patients in Guam. And his wife is also, she's a high-risk OB, and so he can now take care of his son, be at home, but yet still medicine. And the medicine he's practicing is something that's going to add a lot of value to a lot of women.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, and they'd never get there.

Darren Sommers:
It's a win-win all around. And I get excited just thinking about that opportunity because it's not something I had, was week on, week off for me, plus all the moonlighting I did, and it was a real grind. So being able to have that quality of practice, but also that quality of life, yeah, it's been amazing.

John Shufeldt:
That's awesome. Well, congratulations, Darren. Thank you so much for doing this.

Darren Sommers:
Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah, look forward to seeing it.

John Shufeldt:
And we'll have it all in the show notes. Folks, thanks again for another, listening to another episode of Entrepreneur Rx, and Happy Doctor's Day. I know they'll hear this a few weeks after Doctor's Day, but Happy Doctor's Day, and Happy Doctor's Day to you, Darren.

Darren Sommers:
You too, John, thanks again. Take care.

John Shufeldt:
Thanks for listening to another great edition of Entrepreneur Rx. To find out how to start a business and help secure your future, go to JohnShufeldtMD.com. Thanks for listening.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your mp3 files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you'd love including world-class support, share transcripts, enterprise-grade admin tools, collaboration tools, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.