Ed Connors.mp4: this mp4 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, where we help health care professionals own their future. Hey, everybody, and welcome to another edition of Entrepreneurs. I'm your host, Sean Shufelt. Today I'm excited to have Ed Connors as my guest. Ed has a really cool, diverse background as an engineer in aviation and electronics. He's been a serial entrepreneur for the last 25 years and public health and product development and quality management experience. Ed, welcome to the podcast.
Ed Connors:
Well, thank you very much, John. I enjoy being here today.
John Shufeldt:
Thank you. All right. So you have a little bit of Steve Jobs said connecting the dots backwards probably makes more sense than forwards. So give us a bit about your background.
Ed Connors:
Yeah, this is a very interesting point of entry here for the conversation. And maybe it's because I'm dyslexic. I tend to have a different slant on most of the things I work on, but my coming into the health care space is based upon my interest in electronics and earth. Science started as Stem education company and had an obese child in one of my programs and thought How cool would it be to address the problem of childhood obesity through the lens of K-8 education and quickly realized that there was a lot of community level, home based factors, individual behaviors that needed to be addressed to be impactful. It took me down a different pathway and did what my occupational training taught me to do. I looked at the federal government for funding and picked up a phase one. Phase two small business innovation research grant with the Department of Agriculture.
John Shufeldt:
But you've been in health care and public health for 25 years. Is it always been on this focus?
Ed Connors:
Yeah, I think my time really focused on public health is really surfaced within the last 12 years or so. But yeah, it really has been around emerged out of that educational experience I had with doing some initial programming or product development in that space as well.
John Shufeldt:
Very good. Okay, so the origin story is you had a project for Stem education and you noticed some childhood obesity. Is that the origin story?
Ed Connors:
That is the origin story, yeah. About the 2009, I had this encounter with an obese child and one of my programs, I had already realized that working with fruits and vegetables changed my eating habits and behaviors and thought that was a good place to start. And I realized within the first couple of weeks that it was just more complicated than that. And so my initial focus was two parts. One was on lesson materials and educational component curriculum, and then the other one was a piece of technology that got all of the community based organizations on board the same platform focused around the problem of childhood obesity so that they could better address that complex public health problem. And the phase one prototype got picked up by health care project in Charlotte, North Carolina, not to address the problem of childhood obesity, but to improve primary care access for the immigrant Hispanic population that lived there.
John Shufeldt:
Very interesting. Okay, so the platform is called Uriah. Is that correct?
Ed Connors:
The company is right and the platform is called Access Care. Think about it as a virtual social worker, Community health navigator.
John Shufeldt:
Got it. Okay. Can you walk us through this? It started with obesity addressing one problem, and then it morphed into multiple problems that associated with health care disparities.
Ed Connors:
The origin story for was that the fundamental problem I was trying to solve, where I had recognized was that in any community there's countless organizations that bring different value to the table and that they're largely isolated out, right? These are all islands of isolated people, siloed out. And we needed to create a technology platform that got them on board and working better together so that they understood, right. What I didn't really understand when I first started was how deep knowledge barriers are in communities and within organizations themselves. So by implementing access care into a given community around any particular health problem, we start to eliminate the barriers to care, improve inter-organizational collaboration. It's a team building opportunity and getting people to contribute information to this platform. And in so doing, people become sensitized to the needs of others. They understand how they fit into the puzzle of a community and help build that fabric that low income individuals need to live a healthier, more sustainable life. So we launched the platform initially in Charlotte, North Carolina, not to address the problem of obesity, but to improve primary care access. That allowed me to line by technology up with a methodology that was proven to increase access to community health clinics by 180% over a three year period of time. Wow. Okay. And that correlated to a reduction in avoidable emergency room visits and write offs. And I was fortunate to pick up a community health interoperability exchange program with the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT. We directed that solution into rural South Carolina and improved access to a prenatal care program by 90% and 90 days for vulnerable African-American population of women who were largely removed from really good points of access for prenatal care.
John Shufeldt:
Wow. All because you had an obese child in a Stem program. You were doing what, a pebble in a pond story. That's amazing.
Ed Connors:
Yeah. When you really think about it, the fundamental barriers to care language, literacy, knowledge, transportation, cultural health beliefs, they are deeply embedded in society and they're really the root cause of why people wind up in unfortunate circumstances and make poor health choices. Right? Fundamentally, lack of access to care and income inequality are the primary drivers of poor health in America.
John Shufeldt:
Totally. What were your barriers to start this? What sort of obstacles did you face?
Ed Connors:
Yeah. Think the largest barrier. I continue to face it to this day. I'm an outsider in the health care space. I came into this with an idea. I followed the idea, taking the greatest path to opportunity at every fork in the road, and in so doing, wound up with a very scalable platform. But the fundamental barriers for me have been access to capital, and that's been challenging. We were first to market. It's taken a while for people to get sensitized to the importance of social determinants of health and how those health related social needs are important. I think that that people have focused a lot of attention, probably too much attention on the value of giving people referrals to health related social needs. That's an important tool to have in the tool kit, but that's not where the impact driver is. The impact driver is to be able to engage people where they are, marshal those that are around them and help them find the most appropriate centers of care in a very culturally competent and sensitive way.
John Shufeldt:
Is the app patient facing?
Ed Connors:
Yeah. You brought up another very interesting point. When we built this out, prevailing wisdom was you couldn't intervene with an individual themselves because of a lot of different reasons. Yeah. Our initial philosophy was that and business model still is focusing on those who are on the one one degree removed from the individual themselves. Right. We met through a interested party that we both know that was a very favorable introduction that brought us together. And that's pretty much how people navigate health and social service networks. It's word of mouth. So by getting these people who are stakeholders in the community seen as champions and credible messengers, getting them on board the platform, they were the ones who reach out and create the initial impact of momentum into that target community. But what we have found in February, we've got our platform up and running in eastern Iowa. We've had about 10.5% of the people that use our platform used it to find mental behavioral health care services. And those include homeless people who are on the street moving from one town to the other, trying to find services. We've had a father whose daughter ran away on a Friday night reach in and use the platform to help find counseling services for himself and his daughter to try to resolve that problem. And a person who woke up at 2 a.m. on a Monday morning and used access to care, to self-refer, to mental behavioral health. So if you think about this in terms of the last mile of fiber problem and really reaching individuals, we're doing a great job and doing things that we didn't expect to be able to do.
John Shufeldt:
So how many different social determinants of health now have been addressed using the platform?
Ed Connors:
Well, we actually address about 42 different main categories of things that people need. We pride ourselves on not just addressing the social factors and the social resources, but more importantly, we are focused on increasing access to preventative health care, primary care, prenatal care, because we see that as the most valuable skill we bring to a community. There's a fundamental methodology that we use which was found to be able to reduce avoidable emergency room visits, improve access to primary care, has such a great economic impact on the communities that we're working with, and I see that as a precursor to really addressing social needs, right? We have a significant lack of capital that we can devote to affordable housing and transportation. So much money is being consumed in reactive health care that being able to focus more attention proactively to reduce write offs to low income individuals as well as reduced cost of care for payers and providers. That's significant in a world where more people are being focused on value based care. And it was only a month or two ago that The Washington Post published an article where 100 million Americans are carrying $200 billion worth of collective medical debt, and a good percentage of that is because they're delaying care. They don't know where to go. They're not making the right choices. And it's significantly impactful at the individual level as well as the institutional level with hospitals and payers.
John Shufeldt:
And I think the last I'd read, I think that's one of the largest causes of homelessness is medical debt. Because people can't afford their medical bills, lose their job, lose their source of income, lose their home, and all of a sudden they're out on the streets. It's totally tragic. And so they end up in the emergency department for primary care needs, which is, you know, is not the best place for them. So, yeah, you're on clearly on the right track. How hard was it for you with your background to design the platform?
Ed Connors:
Well, I was really fortunate very early on at a key inflection point, I was introduced to Marty Fisher, the president of AOL's technology division, and got to meet Marty. And he became very interested in what we were doing. The first conversation we had together. Well, technology is easy. How are you going to build community around it? That's what he wanted to know, and that's where this public health approach that we use for getting the platform built bottom up, creating that network and driving impact was so important because he had all of the requisite knowledge on building out technology and the technology platform. And I had a vision on how that could be applied to create a pretty good community impact, and we've been very successful at it.
John Shufeldt:
Well, it's amazing how many patients or individuals you have on the platform now.
Ed Connors:
Yeah, we had at last look, we had 42,000 people use it. 40,000 over a 12 month period. Peak usage has been around 1700 people per day. And those are in largely rural areas focused on mental behavioral health use cases and substance use disorder.
John Shufeldt:
Who pays for the patients for how to use the platform?
Ed Connors:
Yeah. So we use a single payer model. So we go in and we work with our client who could be a certified community behavioral health care clinic. Maybe they're a quasi government organization or a hospital. And so they pay and they get a community license. We launch the platform in that community, and we then onboard all of the community based organizations that line up with their use case. They have free access to that platform. We allow organizations to join the referral module. Every organization gets three free seats so that they can mobilize the effort.
John Shufeldt:
Yeah. So who ultimately pays for it? The primary organization that contracts with you.
Ed Connors:
Yes. Our client is a clinic, a hospital or a health plan.
John Shufeldt:
And what would a clinic or hospital use this for? Would they use it for patient aggregation to pull patients into their system, or would they be patients that are at risk for.
Ed Connors:
Yeah, the best use case is double sided. So a clinic uses it for patient aggregation to attract, retain and support more of their patients and in partnership with a hospital or health plan that can reduce either the write offs to the hospital. If you localize it around a high paying population where their needs or use of the emergency room is contributing to misuse and write offs. Right. We can redirect and help people self navigate to a more affordable centers of care. So everybody wins in that equation. And then as part of a value based model, that same talent has value to a medicaid managed care organization or a state Medicaid plan. Because again, that fundamental behavior of uninsured individuals is shared by Medicaid beneficiaries who are twice as likely to use the emergency room for primary care.
John Shufeldt:
Interesting. I can think of a lot of places where this would really be very impactful. So you were fortunate to meet a technical co-founder, very high powered technical co-founder, right out of the gate. How did you get the health plans and community organizations to use it? Was it basically just demoing it for them and showing them the best use case?
Ed Connors:
Yeah, I won't understate the challenge that is that we were very fortunate. We had a very good start right out of the gate. Getting the product lined up around the primary care use case in Charlotte. We then immediately went to do a complementary program in a very rural community with great economic disparity so that we could understand that experience. That was our second install and that it was the Community Health Interoperability Exchange program in South Carolina, and there was about a 3 or 4 year period of time where we were just iterating. We did a project, a really interesting project up in Northeast with Pocono Health System, where they really brought it all home for me. We were asked to support them at a community health wellness fair, at a Head Start program. And so we had a layperson navigator just introducing the platform access Care that we brought up in the community. And one of the first 75 families that came by was an older woman. I'll call her Joan, who was a young grandma with a six year old boy. And when asked if she needed help finding any health or social services, she said the boy had been kept out of first grade and they lacked a source for low income classes or low cost classes.
Ed Connors:
Wow. And about 30s into that, she says, Oh, by the way, I have a cancer on my nose. I don't know where to go or what to do. And this woman had four different barriers. She had an income barrier because she was laid off. She had an insurance barrier because she didn't sign up for Medicaid, didn't know what to do next. She had a knowledge barrier because when we asked if she knew about the new cancer center that was two miles away from where we were standing, she didn't know that. And then she had a fear barrier. She had to have enough of a rapport with us about the boy and build that up over a 32nd conversation before she started to reveal this more significant, serious issue that she was confronted with herself. And and again, she did what most women do, put the needs of the child before the needs of themselves, even when their health needs are more significant. And so to me, that brought it all home.
John Shufeldt:
Yeah, that's a great story. And for everybody listening who is in health care now, we all know how difficult it is to navigate the health care system literally today. Was working with a close friend of mine to help navigate the health care system. And I'm in the system, and it was still mind numbing, all the different hurdles. And they said, God, thank God you're helping me because I would not have known where to go. And it goes back to exactly what what you just referenced. Boy, if you don't know how to get into this, it is daunting and people fall through the cracks like none other.
Ed Connors:
Oh, yeah. It is amazing. And we've seen that occur several times, right? That's the best example. That's when I knew that this worked, right? It was just a combination because that person passed by the station that included the Medicaid managed care organization. They didn't engage with the local health and social service alliance. It was only by asking, Hey, can we help you? That conversation was quite an emotional experience for that woman.
John Shufeldt:
Yeah, it goes back to what I mentioned before. That pebble in a pond. Think how much you've impacted her life and then her grandson's life and seashells. She was a primary caregiver for her grandsons as well. So something happened to her. He'd be in trouble. And he sounds like he was already in trouble. Where can people learn more about this? Because I think people are going to be very moved by this story and the origin story and will want to learn more and already have some ideas for you.
Ed Connors:
Yeah. The first thing to do is to go to the platform website, Access Care.com. I'm always available and interested to talk to folks. My email address is EdConners@heudia.com. H-E-U-D-I-A.com and take text messages and phone calls: (908) 265-6282.
John Shufeldt:
We'll put all that in the show notes. Hey, Ed, what advice do you have for because there'll be people that listen to this and say, wow, that guy's a badass. He's outside of health care, and yet he's making a huge impact on health care. I'm in health care, and I too, want to make a huge impact. What advice do you have for them?
Ed Connors:
Well, I think the largest part is don't make technology your strategy. Technology is an empowerment tool. It should work for you. Just as if you were trying to get a glass of water out of your faucet. You turn it on and you need to have what you get. It shouldn't take a lot of time to set it up and it's got to reach the people. It really is in social determinants of health. It is a really complex environment to work in, but you've got to look at the community engagement aspects of it. You've got to think about and understand the ecosystem and where the strengths of that community is and get people onto the initiative and get some team building going. I think we focus a lot on the intangible barriers that exist with the individuals themselves, but a lot of time those same barriers are present with some of the community stakeholders we work in and you've got to nurture relationships and the technology is important, but the team building that goes on around the implementation of the technology is critical.
John Shufeldt:
And it sounds like also the barriers really are opportunities because this was a barrier for you, you turned it into an opportunity. And but for that barrier, you wouldn't have a business.
Ed Connors:
That is true. That is true. And unfortunately, it took a pandemic before we started to get pretty serious lift in the market because people started to recognize people who had never been vulnerable before, all of a sudden became incredibly vulnerable.
John Shufeldt:
Yeah, so true. Yeah, the pandemic changed a lot. Much less resources and health care. We've lost a lot of health care folks since the pandemic and during the pandemic. So it's made it more complicated, certainly.
Ed Connors:
Yeah, Just today we were doing a stakeholder meeting with one of our clients in Fredericksburg, Virginia. And one of the key milestones we got to there was working with the platform and our community partners to launch an initiative, a health outreach program to engage homeless individuals that turned into a biweekly event at a food program. And summer of 2021, they were seeing maybe 70 to 100 people at this food program. And just yesterday, the numbers have gotten up to about 170 people. One of the things that is really excited me about that is the combination of technology and the network collaboration that we've gotten through. The implementation of access to care has led the community to provide mental health and physical health outreach at a food program and reached over think 2000 people in 2022 with free health and social wellness checks.
John Shufeldt:
It's interesting because the populations you're impacting, I would think it'd be much more difficult to reach and keep engaged than other populations. Just the technology alone. A lot of folks don't have cell phones. They don't have web capable anything.
Ed Connors:
Yes. And the interesting part there is that there are always somebody in their ecosystem that does have some level of connectivity. Again, the project we did in Dubuque, Iowa, we started with focus groups and had some key meetings. And one of the barriers that people talked about was lack of Internet access because people couldn't afford it, didn't have the equipment. And we actually hope that client win a $400,000 connected care pilot program with the FCC so that they could underwrite the cost of Internet and cell service through this federal program. So part of the work that we've done and the additional value we bring to our clients is we've actually helped them pull in additional federal funding to support their program development.
John Shufeldt:
Wow. That's close.
Ed Connors:
Those gaps in care.
John Shufeldt:
Yeah, that's amazing.
Ed Connors:
And the other thing is sometimes you just again, coming back to what we talked about early on, it's that dyslexia. You got to flip the switch a little bit and not think about how do you get people to come to you, but how can you get to the people? And instead of looking at doing something one up and expecting people to walk into a particular location, our community partners decided that they would look out to see where the opportunities they found this food program going on. They made a strategic decision not to go just once. They didn't have the bandwidth to go every week, so they decided that they would go every other week, and that allowed them to build a rapport with that population that they otherwise would not have been able to do. And it's a trust building process.
John Shufeldt:
Yeah, it is. That's wonderful. Well, I applaud the work you're doing and the fact that, as you said, you're an outsider coming into this crazy health care system we have is really impressive. And you're clearly doing God's work out there. So thank you for that.
Ed Connors:
Quite welcome. Thank you for that compliment.
John Shufeldt:
Thank you so much for being on the podcast that I really enjoyed it.
Ed Connors:
So did I. So complete pleasure. Thank you very much for having me, John.
John Shufeldt:
Thanks, everybody. That wraps up another wonderful podcast. I'm glad you're joined. Stay tuned. We have more to come. Thanks for listening to another great edition of Entrepreneur to find out how to start a business and help secure your future. Go to JohnShufeltMD.com. Thanks for listening.
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