Entreprenerur RX_Harvey Castro: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Entreprenerur RX_Harvey Castro: 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 another episode of Entrepreneur Rx, where we unlock the secrets of very high-functioning and producing colleagues in healthcare and outside of healthcare. Today, I'm really excited to have Dr. Harvey Castro on the show. Dr. Castro is like me, an emergency medicine physician that has residency at Saint Luke's in Pennsylvania, and after that, he is, the list is too long to go over, but he is a multidisciplinary serial entrepreneur. Harvey, welcome. We're going to get into it, all of it.

Harvey Castro:
Honor being here. I really appreciate you being, inviting me, and being an ER doc as well.

John Shufeldt:
Excellent, all right. Well, let's get started. So you got a kind of a crazy ass background. So let's start at the beginning.

Harvey Castro:
Yeah, so I feel really blessed. I feel like I'm like no other entrepreneur. I feel like I have done everything from A to Z, and let me quickly go back, go into my background. I come from a really humble beginning in New York City, grew up in poverty, and I think that was the key to my success. I think it just pushed me so hard to have a strong why and to always better myself. So as a first-generation American and first-generation college student, I wanted to make sure I did it my best, and I did everything I could.

John Shufeldt:
So first generation from where.

Harvey Castro:
My parents are from Bogota, Colombia.

John Shufeldt:
Okay, very good. Okay, keep going.

Harvey Castro:
And looking back, it's crazy. I'll go into details later, but at one point, I was actually kidnapped as a child. I was, I had really hard background. But the reason I share it is, I really think it makes sense later why I did what I did. And just as a kind of label, some things I've done, I started my own vitamin company when I was in residency, and it was a heart vitamin that went national. Other things, I didn't have money for medical school, so I contacted all the medical bookstores and publishers and asked them for free books in exchange to edit their books. And believe it or not, I probably had the best library any medical student could have because I had literally all the books, and they were all free. And then later, when the first iPhone came out, I was so fascinated. I was in the ER working, and unfortunately, I had a code, and I had told the nurse, hey, let's start this trip. And I was amazed when she got this big textbook out and was flipping through the pages to find the exact dose, to find the right titration rate, and I was just shocked that she didn't have it memorized or that this information wasn't available. So I literally created the first ID Meds app, and it was in the top ten in the world, and then.

John Shufeldt:
I think I actually had that app.

Harvey Castro:
Oh, really?

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, yeah, I saw it, I'm like, that looks really familiar.

Harvey Castro:
Yeah, it was fun. I was really honored to be able to contribute to medicine, and at one point, I had over 30 apps in the App Store and Google and Web apps and became a consultant for HCA and different hospitals for IT, which was really fun. And then fast forward, the latest couple of things I did, I had my own staffing company, my own billing company, my own ERs, and then the latest is this book called ChatGPT and Healthcare. So I feel like I've done a lot, a lot of mistakes, and I've had a lot of great mentors, my first being my mother, just opening my eyes to things, and I feel just blessed to be able to share all that with everybody.

John Shufeldt:
That's exciting. Okay, so you may be unwittingly or maybe wittingly, knowing you a little bit, to quote Friedrich Lacroix, I'm going to refer to, is, he who has a why to live can bear almost any how. He pulled the Simon Sinek out initially and said you had a great why. So what is your why?

Harvey Castro:
My why I think is just growing up with nothing. My biggest fear is losing everything and having nothing. And so I've always been just worried that maybe I wouldn't have food on the table because that's how it was growing up. And so that strong why created this push for me to just make the best version of who I am, and so I've continuously done stuff. I know at one point when I was a president of this eight center ERs, I went back to school to get my MBA, and I remember so many people giving me slack about going back to school, but I think it's just this strong Why need to just constantly improve and do better.

John Shufeldt:
Do you, is your father in the picture?

Harvey Castro:
No, unfortunately, my dad was abusive, and he, my mom left him when I was like six months, and it just, he was never that person. So for better or worse, that's my mom, that's been my mother and my father.

John Shufeldt:
That's very cool. Have you ever heard of the Hamilton syndrome?

Harvey Castro:
No.

John Shufeldt:
I'll send it to you later, but basically, the short version is for men with absent or absent fathers, and they're either absent in reality like yours or absent because they're just not physically, not emotionally there, they always feel like they have something to prove and they have a chip on your shoulder and not in a negative way, but you're like, okay, I've got something to prove. And so they talk about Springsteen and Bono, and there's a whole list of people, but started with Alexander Hamilton. So I don't know if you know his story, but his father was basically non-existent. And so he always had this, yeah, he always had this kind of chip on his shoulder, I'll prove myself to you. It's the blessing and a curse that you grew up with. Okay. So what was your undergrad degree in?

Harvey Castro:
Think of overachiever, I was a biomedical science BS, and I was also a political science BA, and my goal was to go to get an MD MBA and then finish with a law degree.

John Shufeldt:
Very good, okay, so that's how the medical apps started. So you had your biomedical engineering, biomedical science degree, so you just started the medical apps. And you were probably early in the medical app game, weren't you?

Harvey Castro:
Oh, I was one of the first, which was a blessing in disguise, which is a great transition because being the first had its pains. I submitted all these apps to the App Store, and it kept getting rejected, saying, no, we won't approve. But I look at those apps that I was trying to admit to the store today and they would laugh, like they were so basic, but they would be approved today, but they weren't approved when it first started. Correlates with ChatGPT.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, the old saying you could be, you should always be embarrassed by, if you're not embarrassed by your minimum viable product, you held on to it too long. Okay, so let's talk, so now, are you still practicing?

Harvey Castro:
Very few patients I see once in a while. I'm mainly focused now on digital.

John Shufeldt:
What does that mean?

Harvey Castro:
I spend more time helping start-up companies, telemedicine companies, AI companies in healthcare, and as a consultant, just helping them using my MD and business degree to help them best plan their next projects or be a consultant on what they're doing.

John Shufeldt:
Now, as I recall, because I did my research, you did some coaching as well, right?

Harvey Castro:
Yeah, I do several things. As a physician, I'm sure you can relate, I enjoy just helping people. So I've done a lot of coaching on the side, just friends, family, and then just anyone I see struggling that I'm like, okay, let me just give them my hand and help. I end up doing a lot of stuff just because I want to help, outside of everything that I am getting paid for and doing, and yeah, I enjoy doing that.

John Shufeldt:
Very cool. All right, so let's talk about your books. So what was the first book you published?

Harvey Castro:
My first book ever is called Success Reinvention, and it's this whole idea of having to improve and reinvent yourself and make yourself better. And I basically took my life story and put it in a book to inspire others. I figured there's a lot of single kids out there like I was and a lot of single parents raising kids. And I thought, if I make a book to help motivate and explain how I became successful, then why not share it with the world and help it help others? And so that was the first book that I ever did.

John Shufeldt:
What was the secret? It was a secret, you have this Hamilton complex? It was a secret you had a why early, or did you just grew up with grit?

Harvey Castro:
I think all of the above. I honestly did feel like that strong Why, and then growing up in New York City, and was also in the US Army, and think all those things gave me a lot of grit. And so when I went to med school, to be honest, it felt like an easy road because when I was in undergrad I was a double degree. I was also, I started the largest pre-med society at Texas A&M, and then simultaneously I was working. And so when I went to med school, I just had one focus and that was medicine, and at that time I was like, wow, this is simple.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, when you shave everything else off, it becomes much easier. Okay, so in success, the Success Reinvention, you talk about your life and what are your take-home points for that? What do you leave people with?

Harvey Castro:
Yeah, I leave things a couple of strong things. One, I love talking about what I call the infinity productive ladder, productivity ladder. Basically, in life, it doesn't matter how fast you go up that ladder, it's important to find those goals that you want to do long, short, and middle just to make sure that you're getting up that ladder. And I call it infinity because once you hit that top, you're technically not at the top. You got to keep pushing yourself, and so that's one big take-home point that I strongly believe, to be successful, you just got to keep going up that ladder. Obviously, I talk about the strong why, and then I like giving stories, so I talk about a lot of personal stories that just help drive the point. And like we've discussed like the why and the productivity part.

John Shufeldt:
Very good, that's exciting. Where can people find the book? Is it on Amazon?

Harvey Castro:
Yes, sir. It's Harvey Castro, and then it'll say Success Reinvention, and it has all the other books I've done.

John Shufeldt:
Great, talk about the other books. So what's the next one?

Harvey Castro:
I've done some workbooks which are minor, but the next one that, the biggest is the one called ChatGPT and Healthcare. The reason I wrote it is honestly twofold. One, when I first came across ChatGPT, I thought, man, this is just like the iPhone moment that I had when I thought, man, this thing can be such a good tool in the future. And then the second part, I thought, huh, there's going to be a lot of resistance out there and uneducation to some degree, meaning my goal was, let's bring this technology to healthcare, and let's start talking about it as a community, because my thinking was, if I can get physician leaders, patients altogether in one room and we all talk about the problem, then eventually we're going to create a new product, and from that new product will be, in my opinion, better healthcare, and then eventually everybody wins. And so I don't have any ownership obviously into ChatGPT or healthcare, but my goal is, let me just start this conversation. Let's get it going. Let's see what happens. And then I'm sure something will grow with it, and then we all win.

John Shufeldt:
The, so I've been using ChatGPT for the last couple of months, and it blows you away, it's amazing. But it's funny, I haven't really thought through it for healthcare. Give us the, start at the 30000-foot view and then start drilling down into it.

Harvey Castro:
Yeah, so I like dividing this subject as pre-clinical, clinical, and post-clinical. And so the pre-clinical, I think of your medical students, your education portion. And so imagine having ChatGPT on your computer, and you're going over physiology or cardiology or something very specific and then being able to put that subject, and let's just say I don't know, the heart flow of your heart, and then you put that into ChatGPT, and it goes through it. But then you can ask ChatGPT, give me the common questions that I need to know about this, and then it'll ask you those questions. And so my point is, from there you can say, okay, make me some note cards in very near future that are about to convert this to voice, so then technically you could have it running in the background while you're driving and then it'll give you your notes and explain to you. And so from a pre-clinical point of view, amazing technology, because now as a medical student I can learn more. And then let's fast forward it to you and I as physicians, every 72 to 74 days, medical knowledge doubles, and so could you imagine how much knowledge we're responsible for? And so with that said, how nice for ChatGPT to be able to keep you up to date. And so these are the applications that you can do now to some degree, and it'll only be more with this ChatGPT API that's about to come out. When that comes out, all these developers are going to be making these types of applications. From a pre-clinical point, from a patient's point of view, imagine how many patients we've seen that they come and they ask you questions, and you're like, okay, let's get to the meat, especially as an ER doctor, you can relate, we don't have time. Could you imagine a patient that's just waiting in the waiting room or waiting in the, in their room before they see you, if they were able to get a pre-clinical questions for you? Meaning like they're having right lower abdominal pain, and they can say, okay this is what, just be prompted in all the questions that you may be asking, but be ready to answer them, and so make the patient an effective, efficient patient. How nice would that technology be? So when you walk in the room, the patient knows exactly what you need, and they're, not that they're steering you down the road, but they're being more efficient instead of them going into all these other things that really have no relation go into the meat of it. I think that plays a big role in the future. Obviously, there are some errors in the thinking of that and some bias, but I think at the end of the day I think there's more good than bad. On the clinical side, I see ChatGPT, especially on physicians like you and I, let's say, I'll keep it at ER, we're expected to know a lot, but we don't know the depth of a lot of things, but we know a lot of a lot. We even know some rare diseases. So what if you went, you got stumped on a patient, and you go into ChatGPT, and you just put all their symptoms, radiology findings, obviously protect HIPAA and all those things, and then it spit out a differential diagnosis, and on there was a couple of diagnoses that you could not even think of yourself. That is powerful, that is, and then you can argue you could do that in Google. My argument back is you can't, because this will interact with you. And so as you're asking these questions, it'll remember, and you can follow up with other questions to your main question, and it'll give you a better yield. That blows me away. The last one is just post, those how I divide it. Let's talk about you and I keeping an ER, we see patients from all over the world. I used to work in front ... of a hospital, and sometimes I would get people from Africa, and I didn't understand what they were saying, and the translation service sometimes didn't have those languages. How nice would it be to have something, some tool that they could type in, obviously, protect HIPAA and all those things privacy, but type in there your diagnosis and then put it in their language and create discharge instructions and say, here you go? As opposed to if you give it to them in English and say, here you go, versus maybe the translation is not perfect, but it's better than the English. And so from a discharge point of view in post, I see that as being a huge advantage. I've talked to companies using ChatGPT to help create medical literature, and I know that sounds weird, but for example, like let's say a weight loss website, they're going to ChatGPT creating all this content. And I know some doctors out there are like freaking out, no, this could be all wrong. What they're doing is they're having a physician like you and I that will look at it and say, yep, that looks correct, I give my blessing. One big warning I want to warn people is just because you have an MD doesn't mean you can bless everything that's on ChatGPT. So you and I again, being in the ER this is great, we can jump in and call BS on anything that's ER literature, but if they gave us something very specific to surgery or cardiac surgery or transplant surgery, we would look at it from ChatGPT and say, yeah, that looks good to me, but in reality it's wrong, and it's this whole hallucination effect, meaning ChatGPT will always give you an answer and if it doesn't know it, it'll come as close as it thinks it can, but a lot of times if you don't know that this is your space, then they could give you some false answer, and you think it's correct, and that worries me for patients.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I've had that a couple of times when I've used it. I've asked them very specific questions. When I read the answer, I'm like, not quite. Part of it was right, and part of it was great, but part of it was like, yeah, you missed the boat on that one. It's also early in its history, so it'll only get better, very cool. So what advice do you have? So there's a lot of physicians out there who are going to hear this and say, like, that's cool, I want to be him. What advice do you have to them? Because a lot of us, and I have a few years on you, when I started, it was, no, you're a physician. That's all you're going to do, you're a physician. And clearly, we've both gone down other paths as well while still being physicians. When asked, I sometimes have a hard time articulating what drove me to that point or if I drove myself there. What's your answer to that?

Harvey Castro:
It's all about finding things that you're not comfortable with, and I know that sounds weird. So, for example, if you want to go into entrepreneurship, but you're so focused on medicine that you think you cannot, then twofold. One, find a business partner that complements you in the things that you're weak. Second, the reason I go, I say go into things that make you uncomfortable, it's a two-edged sword. If you go into things that make you uncomfortable, you're going to be better at it, you're not going to avoid it, and you're eventually you're going to work hard like you did for med school and you're eventually going to be an expert in it. The other part to it is if there is a problem in society, i.e. healthcare, your niche in healthcare, you know what the pain points are. And then I would, my favorite phrase in life, let's work backwards. So find that pain point, see what it is, and then think of it through how can you make a product and how can you make that better? And then boom, there's your business idea.

John Shufeldt:
And, but a lot of folks have this, there, I was, I have a venture capital company, I work with physicians who have venture ideas, and the ones I work with are the vast minority inasmuch as they actually go, okay, I have an idea, I see a problem, I have a way to fix the problem, and I'm going to go for it. They probably don't have an MBA, but they have the school of hard knocks, they're gritty as hell. That's the people listening to this podcast. But what do you say to the other folks who see a problem, have a solution, they're like, you know, I'm a physician, I'm, this is what I was born to do, and I don't have time to do anything else because I've got family and kids and all sorts of things other to balance? What do you tell them?

Harvey Castro:
I would tell them protect their idea. I know the first go is to just tell family and friends and everybody, hey, what do you think? I would do your research without sharing that, I would protect it. And then if you don't have the, feel that you can take it to the next level, I would contact those leaders out there that might be interested in taking that to the next level. I know personally I have some ideas that I'd love to do, but right now I'm focusing on creating those ideas, but then literally finding a business partner that's going to take it to a reality and make it their full-time job.

John Shufeldt:
Right.

Harvey Castro:
So that would be a way to handle it I would at least consider.

John Shufeldt:
So you mentioned this earlier, finding somebody with skill, a skill set, complementary to yours. And I think a lot of us in the past have hey, I'm an EM physician, she's an EM physician, we both think alike, this will be a perfect business marriage. In reality, however, you really do want to find people who have a different skill set, a different way of thinking than you do. Would you agree with that?

Harvey Castro:
Oh, 110%, and I would even take it to the next level and say keep it to two, the people at the top is just two. Once you have more than two, it gets difficult to have three, four, five, because then you're trying to drive a ship and then you have too many chiefs and not enough Indians. And then on having that, I call it like finding your spouse in business. So that person that really sees things differently and doesn't have to totally see differently, but just is better than you in a sense that they're a complement to the things that you can't, because like you just said, if you have two EM doctors doing the same thing, more than likely they're going to have that same grit in a sense like that risk-taking, and they're going to look at things the same way and everything is going to be, yes. And you actually need that person to say no and why? And to help you steer that ship and pivot at times.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I totally agree. But I think most of us, myself included, have fallen into the, they think like me trap, so therefore we're both right. And oftentimes we've both been wrong, but since we think we don't know it for a bit. What was your, what has been your biggest surprise through your all your entrepreneurial efforts? What is, what surprised you?

Harvey Castro:
That's a good one. There's been times I've come up with products and thought, Oh my God, like groupthink theory where I think it's great, my friends think it's great, I put it out there, and then nothing happens, and I'd be surprised. I'll give you a real-life example. When COVID hit right in March, I sat at the board level and told everybody, hey, we need to come up with some other way of making, doing business, because if we continue the same way, we're not going to do well. And the example that I did is I created a mobile unit, I used telemedicine, I was able to get one of the first rapid testing in Dallas before everybody else. And I said, we're going out to the different businesses and we're going to create this mobile program that we can do telemedicine and check people out, do their screening, put them back to work or not. And I thought, man, this is going to be great. And at first, it did well, but I think it was so new and we probably didn't do a good job marketing that really didn't take off as I thought it would. Fast forward like six months to a year later, it took off, but I think it was just that I was surprised that it didn't sooner.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I've had a few of those where I'm way early to a marketplace and no one really thinks exists, maybe other than me. And then I don't do a great job communicating it or marketing it, and then I run it for a while and say, okay, this is going to work and close it, then 3 or 4 years later, someone else does it with better skill set. And I'm like, yeah, that was my idea. And they seem to do it relatively, they seem to do it much better than I did, and that's part of it. Part of it is I think is just market timing, and it's tough to pull that off because I've learned if you have to spend money to educate the market, man, you are, you need a lot of money.

Harvey Castro:
I agree, and the best part of entrepreneurship I think is not giving up. Kind of like that Rocky movies, you get knocked down, you get up again, you get knocked down, you get up again. I think it's all about getting up. Totally brush off failures, and the best thing is just learn from the failures. Don't just fail and then not learn from it. Learn from it so that the next time you do it, you don't pay money for that mistake or you actually profit from that mistake.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, totally. It's a fall down seven, get up eight things. All right, so you mentioned law school. What's the impetus for law school?

Harvey Castro:
Maybe it's this Hamilton syndrome. I just always loved school too much. I just love reading and constantly just putting information. And I thought, my last stage in life, I was wanting to go to law school and then run for Congress, and I wanted my last part of my career to end in public office. So that's where that comes from. I love law, I love the, just all of parts of it. But the older I get, I realize it's not as easy for me as it used to be. When I went back to get my MBA a couple of years ago, I remember, Man, this is a little harder than I remember this being. I don't know if it's age or maybe my grit is starting to wear off, I don't know.

John Shufeldt:
No, it's, I'm sure that's not, neither the case. I did go back to law school and found that much easier than medical school on just volume-wise, so I think you should do it. I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the people, really enjoyed the learning, and thought the knowledge was very relatable. Now, how much of that I remember now after 17 years, I'm not sure, but at the time I thought it was pretty relatable. Well, Harvey, what final thoughts do you have for folks out there? You've been uber-successful, you're writing books, you seem like you're way ahead of the curve on most things. What's coming down the pike for the rest of us and for you?

Harvey Castro:
I'm working on some fun projects using AI in medicine that I should be able to announce in a couple of weeks. But my tip to everybody is honestly, I know it seems overwhelming. Just remember, you don't have to get there tomorrow. You can slowly get there. Obviously, listen to this podcast, watch some YouTubes. I firmly believe if you're a physician and you've made it, then it's just a matter of retooling yourself and saying, okay, now I need to learn this vertical and now I need to focus, and then just make it your ever, like your everything. I know when we all got into med school, we studied our butt off and we did everything we could. It's the same approach, now you are going to change it to a different silo, and that's going to eventually be your business.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I think I can see where a lot of people are like, what if I don't learn more stuff? I've got to retool. I went into this to practice medicine, not to retool every ten years and do something else. So I'm sure there's a lot of folks out there, it's mildly annoying that they're being forced to retool their career thoughts or direction.

Harvey Castro:
I'm going to add one other thing real quick. I did a talk on why doctors fail, and one of those points is that exactly. We make it so far in our brain, we're like, I'm a doctor. I'm at the top 1%, I'm here. Obviously, my job skill set should relate to other fields, and in reality, it doesn't. It's another beast that you got to learn and conquer.

John Shufeldt:
The one thing, though, that I have found to be true is, what you have said is dead on. You can be an expert on medicine and just a total newbie in all other disciplines, which you should be, and that's the way life is, you've got to learn it. But the one thing that I think sets physicians apart is just this resounding grit, because without it, there's no way you'd get in the medical school. There's no way to get through medical school. There's no way you'd get through residency. Literally, grit is a common denominator that holds us all together.

Harvey Castro:
Agreed.

John Shufeldt:
You don't see many fragile, perfect-storm physicians.

Harvey Castro:
No, no, you see the spectrum within physicians, which is interesting.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, very interesting. Harvey, this has been great. Thank you so much. Where can people learn and find out more about you?

Harvey Castro:
Yeah, I'm on social media. All my handles are the same, it's HarveyCastroMD, as in medical doctor, and I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn posting different ideas and concepts and stuff like that, so feel free to follow me on LinkedIn.

John Shufeldt:
Very good, thank you so much. It's been really enjoyable. Thanks, everybody. Another phenomenal episode, at least from my perspective of Entrepreneur Rx. Thanks, Harvey, and we'll be back to you all soon. You can find a lot of information in the show notes at the end. Thanks all.

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.

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