Lyle Berkowitz audio.mp3: 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, where we help health care professionals own their future. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to entrepreneurs. Today I'm really excited to chat with Dr. Laura Berkowitz, whose path we have crossed, it seems like for years. Lyle is the founder and CEO of Keycare, the nation's only virtual care company built on the epic platform. He has more than 20 years of experience as a primary care physician, a health system executive, an informatician before these things were even existed, a health care innovator and a serial entrepreneur. Previous roles include founder and chairman of Health Bench, chief Medical Officer at Mdlive, our old competitor and director of innovation for Northwestern Medicine in Chicago.
Lyle Berkowitz:
Thanks, John. Glad to be here.
John Shufeldt:
Thanks. All right. As I mentioned earlier, so Lyle and I've already spent a few minutes either getting to know each other, getting to know each other. But I'll give folks a little bit. Start early because you've got a really unusual background because there weren't a lot of engineers going to medical school when you were an engineer going to medical school. So catch everybody up for your the pretense to all this.
Lyle Berkowitz:
Yeah. So listen, I grew up in the 80s when the computers were coming out and yeah, mostly video games, but started doing programming on the Atari and other little computers that we could use and took a couple of computer classes and went into biomedical engineering at Penn, very much thinking I was going to be a doctor and thinking, Hey, maybe I'll invent the $6 Million Man. But turns out I wasn't that great a mechanical or electrical engineering. But I was really good at computer engineering and in biomedical engineering. It sort of jack of all trades, master of none. You either have to go and get an MD or a PhD to really focus on what you want to do. And so I had a path ahead of me. My dad was a doctor and so I really wanted to be a doctor my whole life. And so that was easy, except I get to med school and I'm like, I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing. Where am I going to specialize? How am I going to still do my computer stuff? I was fortunate, as often happens, to have some mentors in my life, and I did a lot of computer programming and mathematical modeling at Penn and my senior year I worked for a doctor helping build out educational type of things for his students, and he recommended that when I go to med school, the University of Illinois, that I connect with his old friend Arthur Elstein, who's a PhD actually, but the guy was a founder of the Society for Medical Decision Making.
Lyle Berkowitz:
He was in this early field of medical informatics, applying computers to health care, and he was studying it from a research perspective. Arthur became my mentor and boss for four years. I was his research assistant, and he brought me into this world of computer based decision support tools. And then he introduced me to his buddy, Bob Greenhous, who was the head of one of Harvard's NIH funded informatics facilities. And Bob Greenness. Let me come and spend a few months in his fellowship lab as a sub fellow at Harvard for a couple of months my senior year in Med school. And all of a sudden I realized that this is what I wanted to do was to be a doctor who understood technology and how to apply it to make life easier and better for both doctors and patients.
John Shufeldt:
So you got your informatics degree as well, post residency?
Lyle Berkowitz:
No, I did not. I did the School of Hard Knocks and Informatics. I did what we call the Sub fellowship my fourth year, a couple months, like I said in this program, but did not get a formal degree. What I found was I didn't want a PhD in informatics. I didn't want an academic degree in informatics. What I was interested in was what we called applied informatics. You know, the real doing the work, not being a research expert in informatics. And so what happened is after in med school, I did a lot of informatics research and work and then in residency I was the resident who was on all the computer committees and helping them decide how to choose which EMR to use. Et cetera. And the local computer geek. When I applied and got the job at Northwestern to be a primary care doctor, I said, Hey, I'd like to be the director of technology as well. And they said, What does that mean? I said, I think computers are going to be important. It's about 1995 now, and they're like, the Internet had just started. They're like, But you're a doctor, but whatever. Fine. You can play around with that for 20% time by the time 20 something years later went from 80% clinical, 20% executive time to the opposite, almost 80% is physician executive, 20% clinical and had a great run at Northwestern about a decade of the classic IT Informatics rolling out EMR. Et cetera. But then another decade setting up an innovation program. So I switched in between and said, I really have no desire to be a geeky informatics doc. I'm all about applying this stuff. And I started one of the earlier innovation programs where I got to apply all this cool technology as well as learn innovative thought processes, thinking and apply it to how do we solve big problems in health care.
John Shufeldt:
Now, you were funny. You were so far ahead of your time, at least from my construct. We had a kind of a time of large, urgent care company and we went finally to an electronic health record and the early 2000 and it felt like it was unheard of. And we were just flying by the seat of our pants. Yeah, I was way early in.
Lyle Berkowitz:
Good and bad, right? Being early like that is not necessarily successful. The best companies usually have really good timing and I was absolutely early, so I can call myself a futurist because I see the future, but it's not always great. And today, in 1995, 96, in that era, my organization had no interest in EMR for our group. I actually wound up going to a dinner for this company, and by the end of the dinner I asked so many questions. They said, Would you like to be our chief medical officer? And all of a sudden I'm an executive in the EMR company learning about project management, product management, physician adoption. It was great. He had a wonderful boss and learned a lot. As the doctor it person. So I'm doing that two days a week, seeing patients three days a week, and again getting my street, so to speak, as this was a publicly traded company and was very early in the EMR space. So learning that helped me a lot later on when I'm evaluating the cerner's and epics of the world and figuring out how to use them and customize them for my own group.
John Shufeldt:
Which company was that?
Lyle Berkowitz:
That was a company called Advanced Health Technologies. John They talk about a futurist. The guy who founded it was a doctor who had the patent on e-prescribing that he got in the early 90s. So we actually had the patent prescribing. We were using Fujitsu handheld computers mainly to do the ordering process prescriptions, labs. Et cetera. I was integrating in more of a note taking process and really building out the whole EMR. It was actually going relatively well. The company also happened to have funded itself in part by being a physician practice management group that PBM blew up in the mid late 90s. That actually pulled us down. We would have actually probably, I think, had one of the best I've ever used in terms of ease of use, in terms of how it was developed and thought I was very much as in throughout my career thinking about how do I make this easy to use for the doctor rather than focusing on how do I make it a good documentation tool?
John Shufeldt:
Exactly. And that's clearly that's what's lacking. So when we did it at the urgent care became so easy to use and so streamlined, it was just too easy to use. And I worked with Cernik. I haven't worked with Epic too much, but those things don't exist anymore. They were clearly ahead of their game. That's pretty cool. When did you get this entrepreneurial bent to you? Because you've clearly had it.
Lyle Berkowitz:
Well, like I said, I was not the kid who was selling t shirts and mowing lawns in high school. I just wasn't. I had a regular job. It really my entrepreneurial bent was a little more of a means to an end. I did take a course at Penn and Wharton called Entrepreneurship, and I have to say I loved it was I was an engineer. I'm like, This is the easiest course I've ever taken. This makes so much sense, this idea as an engineer, right? We're all about problem solving and fixing things and wanting to improve the world. So entrepreneurship felt like a natural extension to being able to say, okay, I can fix something bigger, I can make a bigger impact. And with that said, like a lot of things, like a Forrest Gump was at the right place at the right time and the right people liked me and hired me. And all of a sudden I'm learning along the way.
John Shufeldt:
That's very cool. What was your first large company that you really were integral, where you went along the path? The Informaticist Was it Mdlive or was that way later?
Lyle Berkowitz:
That was definitely later. So that first company that was there for a couple of years that it would have gone well if the the stock didn't fall. And then I wound up going into another company called Proxicom, which was a e-business consulting company. They work with Fortune 500 companies and basically help them develop their Internet and intranet sites. So again, this is 98, 99. This is the boom era. This was so much fun, right? I was a millionaire on paper. Within a couple of weeks of starting, I set up their health care practice and working with hospitals and pharma. Et cetera. And so I was important part of setting up that health care. And I thought, hey, this is not just health care. It has multiple industries. This will never fail. And then, of course, the 2000, 2001 came and it failed. But by that time, my hospital was ready to do an EMR and they brought me back. At that point, I started advising a bunch of digital health companies, so fractional chief medical officer, advisor, but I always wanted to start something from scratch. I did work with a friend of mine, helped start as a sort of minor player, a couple of companies. But then the big one that I started in 2011 was Health Things, and that was a workflow automation software company. I was doing a lecture at a conference in Mayo Innovation Conference, and a young grad student saw me, also biomedical engineer, and he said, Hey, let's start a company on your ideas.
Lyle Berkowitz:
And we did. All of a sudden we start this company. We're fairly naive. We're building software to automate the refill process. So instead of making a doctor go in and review every refill, we said the rules to this and let's just integrate these rules. And I called it my sad philosophy to make doctors happy and patients healthy. It's how do you simplify, automate and delegate routine repeatable workflows like that that are often rules based and all of a sudden we're saving doctors thousands of hours a week across thousands of doctors. That was a great run and that was a pure tech company that we built on purpose to be an app on top of VMs 2011, again ahead of the game. But fortunately, timing was on my side. This time, John Allscripts rolled out their app system, Epic rolled out their app, or Cerner opened up app. Athena all of these EMR started saying, Hey, we're looking for apps. We wound up winning all scripts, best app, Athena best app becoming one of the first apps on Epic's app Orchard, right place, right time. We prove that you could build something on top of VMs and it worked. We eventually sold that in 2020 and that had a nice exit to Health Catalyst. Wow. And I was chairman and chief medical officer on the board, but I wasn't working full time there. It was something that I was able to nights and weekends be involved in, help move along. And then Mdlive came along in 2017.
John Shufeldt:
And were you one of the founders? You weren't one of the founders of Eli by that point, right? They hired you to be a.
Lyle Berkowitz:
Mdlive itself was started, I think, in the late 2000. So by the time I came along, it was ten plus years old. They just hired a new CEO who I knew and he asked me to come along and be his number two. And I came in as a chief medical officer and EVP of Product and Strategy. So ran a lot of both the operations and the product and strategy side and learned a ton and was the first time I was a full time in the heat of it. Operator and a multi-million dollar company. And so it was a great learning experience, helped them raise money, helped them stabilize, get operations under control, help them scale up 4 or 5 X from around 200,000 visits to over a million visits a year and got the company to ready for what eventually wound up being a exit to Cigna.
John Shufeldt:
Yeah, that was a great exodus for you guys. With all these things you've done, you've already been down a telemedicine road once. Plus I'm sure. Why start key care? Do you think? Maybe the horizons already We've already seen the rise and fall of telemedicine. Obviously not.
Lyle Berkowitz:
When I left live, I was like, I'm done with telehealth. I want to do something new. This was the AI era was happening. I was really wanted to be focused on software, but Covid was flaring and all of a sudden health systems and I'm a health system guy, right? Health systems are doing tons of virtual care and it peaked high but then was coming down and people are like, oh, no one wants to do virtual care anymore. I'm like, That's not true. People love virtual care. I saw that live. I saw that in my own practice in the 1990s. I was emailing with patients this is before HIPAA, so I knew people loved the ability to do routine stuff online. Why wouldn't they? They do it with every other part of their life in health systems, weren't really able to service that well because they're doctors or I call them office allergists. They're focused on the office. They'll do a little virtual care, but it's not their focus. And it's a cognitive dissonance to go back and forth, and they're not going to be optimally great virtual, right? You and I both know virtual doctors are a different breed, and that's okay. Just like hospitalists were a different breed in the 90s. Just like E.R. Docs separated themselves out at some point.
Lyle Berkowitz:
I was visiting some of my friends at Epic and we got to talking about, Hey, wouldn't it be cool to have a virtual care company that was based on Epic? Because then you get rid of all that interoperability issues and you can just really focus on building up great teams of virtual lists and having them work in support to amplify and be a really good partner to health systems, because our mission really is to build these tech and powered virtual care workforce teams that support the health systems and all the great work they do. We decided, Yeah, let's do it. And so that's how we started. The company got some funding, started getting some people and then building out. We got our own instance of Epic. We optimized it for virtual care, but we also optimize it to be of service to other epic sites because there's new epic functionality that allows to epic sites, to epic instances to really connect beautifully. And most people don't take advantage of that because most epic sites are in competition with each other. We became a neutral third party that would take care of patients online but send them back for whatever care they needed off in the offices in a true hybrid approach to care.
John Shufeldt:
I love that. So you're basically doing after hours and support care to large tertiary care centers and health systems that have epic where you can be the white labeled white knights, so to speak, where you're there when they need you. You're all virtual list, you're agnostic to the health system you're working for.
Lyle Berkowitz:
Correct. So we get this economy of scale because we can have this a group that can manage 50 state 24 by seven. And our group just has one single EMR. They work in Epic, but we can take incoming patients from any other epic sites, right? Over time, actually. And that's for urgent care. And urgent care is a little more treat them and move on as we move into primary care, behavioral health and other things that have a more consistency, we'll actually build teams that will work more consistently with the health system in support of their doctors so it won't feel as anonymous and we'll actually be able to do not only sharing data like notes and meds, we'll be able to send in orders and exchange messages and really feel like a true virtual care extender team to amplify the doctors in the offices, not simply to be a one time use.
John Shufeldt:
Now, I know physicians get this and don't won't feel like, oh, they're competing with us down the street. But I haven't met a lot of health plan or hospital executives who would be comfortable with quote outsourcing their care even if it's virtual. Because what they'll think is, oh, these guys are just Trojan horses. This is just a Trojan horse play. They want to come in and really take our behavioral health patients, take our internal medicine. You know where I'm going with this? How do you get around that?
Lyle Berkowitz:
That's easy because those third parties, they are absolutely doing that. They are trying to own the front door. Some of their mottos are We want to be your virtual front door. I'm like, no health system. We work with you. First of all, the patients come in through the health system front door. They don't send them to us. They literally come into the health system. Front door health system gets first choice for on demand urgent care. Health systems have to send patients to us, schedule with us. They can schedule within their epic instance with us. So we are not creating a brand. We don't spend money on marketing. We are not trying to brand ourselves. We're supporting them. We don't have brick and mortar facilities, so there's no way we can compete with them on the big stuff. The reality is what we're doing is expanding their capacity to take care of more patients, and we're taking care of the, let's face it, the sort of lower value patients where they're going to lose money. But what they care about is when they are sick that they're going to come into the system. And since we're so well connected, it's just literally automatic. If we take care of the patient, their note goes into the system.
John Shufeldt:
Very good. So you're expanding their geographical footprint really exponentially and your providers are effectively putting on the proverbial lab coat of the health system whose patients are engaging with at that time. Is that a good way to say it? Like when they see a care provider, the patients you work for Penn or you work for whoever. Because I went through Penn's front door.
Lyle Berkowitz:
So we Wellspan is a great client in Pennsylvania. Patients go through the Wellspan front door. They're told legally they have to say, you're seeing our partner care to them? It feels so. This is a partnership that these this key care doctor they know my history. They've got all my allergies, meds. Everything I do is get sent back to my doctor. It's in my chart portal. So to them is not only feels, but functionally it is a truly collaborative, coordinated experience that is essentially in the same system that they're used to.
John Shufeldt:
Particularly for urgent care, which are episodic visits. Anyway, that's interesting.
Lyle Berkowitz:
And then and you think about it as we move to primary care, it'll be an even closer connection where we might have a primary care team that's supporting Doctor Smith in the office and they'll actually communicate. And Doctor Smith may tell his patient, Hey, you're going to see Doctor Jones. He's part of my team. Yeah, he and Mary and Kelly are the key care team. They're going to manage you. You don't need to see me every two months. They'll take care of you online, Come and see me once a year, and that way I'll have more room and opportunity to see new patients. While you're being managed quite effectively and quite easily by the online group. And if you ever have a major problem, you'll come back in. One reason I gave up being a primary care doctor is because I realized I was just babysitting patients, so to speak, and seeing a lot of patients who I just filled their scripts and moved them on. But I wasn't adding value. I wasn't working at the top of my license team based care, population health. These aren't new ideas, but they haven't been executed well, in part because the offices have limited space. We're hoping to execute it well by being virtual and then tech empowering our virtual office to be even more efficient.
John Shufeldt:
That's really very cool model. And then how were you compensated for this? Is it a per member per month with the health plans member? So it's up to them to direct what they want to? Or is it an episodic per engagement?
Lyle Berkowitz:
Yeah. So there are a couple of different ways we can be compensated. So depending on who the sponsor is, we can charge the patient directly self-pay, we can charge the hospital or payer sponsorship. We can do it either as a or as a per visit, and we can actually work with the hospital and assign billing to the hospital so that they the hospital can actually bill under their contracts and pay us our fee while they keep the difference.
John Shufeldt:
Right. And then they get they expand it as we talked about their geographic footprint. That's very cool. So they expand.
Lyle Berkowitz:
Their reach and they do it in a way that is profitable for them. At the same time, both direct as well as the indirect just by having more capacity.
John Shufeldt:
Yeah, totally. And probably a much better patient experience if the patients are sitting at home not venturing out into the cold, dark world and for the urgent care. So now I mentioned this before we started. There's going to be a lot of physicians and I think you and I both have talked to a lot of them over the years who say, I just don't even know how to start like I'm entrepreneurial. I think I've got some good ideas. I want to contribute. I see the bigger picture. I want to do more population based things. And these one off patient encounters. What advice would you give them? Because you're clearly an outlier in this world.
Lyle Berkowitz:
I'll tell you what worked for me was not doing all at once, basically doing what the kids call a side hustle. It's very hard for a doctor and a regular practice to all of a sudden go into business. It rarely ever works. What I did early in my career and people can do later and say, Hey, I'll do part time. I'll do one day a week, a couple hours. The truth is, it's much easier for an doc and or a hospitalist. Where they have designated time is a primary care doc. It was not easy. There was lots of balancing and lots of nights and weekends, but I loved it. My best advice is start slow. Find a scenario where you can do some things and you may find, by the way, that's the most fun you can have if you're working 1,020% with a company doing thought leadership providing strategy support. Et cetera. That's actually a lot fun. Once you go in full time, you're an operator. And this, John, all of a sudden you're dealing with someone complaining over here, an HR issue over here and payroll over here preparing for the board. You become more of a business person and a lot of doctors aren't ready for that and they're certainly not ready to be yelled at by someone else. They haven't had that happen since they were an intern. So a lot of doctors are used to being the smartest guy in the room. You go unless you're the CEO. Even if you are the CEO, it doesn't matter anymore. You're never going to be the only smart guy in the room in many cases. You may find a very unnerving experience. So my advice start slow, have some fun with it. Do some part time work to start with. Be a fractional chief medical officer or something similar. That may be all you need to refresh, reboot yourself and may find that's not something you want to do full time. But part time may make a lot of sense.
John Shufeldt:
For me and I think possibly for you it was for me too. Way to stem burnout. As an physician, there was a lot of burnout. I think there's a lot of burnout across medicine, period, but it seems like it's rife with it. I can't say I've really ever felt burned out about doing it. Now I do it a lot less now than I used to. But even while going to school and starting these businesses, I don't remember the days where I'm like, Oh God, another shift. It was always, Oh, thank God. I get to do something really cool and go into the emergency department. Did you have that perspective?
Lyle Berkowitz:
Quite honestly, it felt like you guys had a lot of different opportunities to see some cool stuff, but the burnout I can imagine is high. And I was very fortunate because from day one, I always had these other jobs and other things to do in balance that made me really happy. I also, as a doctor, I wound up taking care of movies and TV shows like Just Anything to Break Up The Day sometimes was fun for me. Some doctors and God bless them, they can just go to the same office for 50 years and be happy. Not all of us can. I knew I had to balance things and I was fortunate. I had amazing bosses, doctors, executives at Northwestern who about every five years let me essentially change what I was doing and focusing on, and that was why I was able to be there so long. I will say one thing I wish I had done and one thing I would strongly advise to doctors who are feeling burned out is take 1 to 2 months off. I know that seems crazy, incredible, but your health system will probably support that now. Maybe not pay you, but when I have done something where I was able to leave my practice and I did this. About ten years in, I left my practice.
Lyle Berkowitz:
The my hospital and my group had asked me to set up our executive health program. So I left my regular practice. I wrote a goodbye letter to patients. I went in and did that. And again, it wasn't sabbatical, but it was a very different thing. I realized after a few months I'm like, Boy, I miss my practice. Executive health is fine, but it's a bunch of now it's even more boring. It's I see two patients a day for three hours each and they're 50 something year old white males. That wasn't what I was born to do. So I actually left and went back to my practice and wrote like Michael Jordan. I wrote I'm Back. I was so refreshed for another ten years. My left empty life just for a month, just did nothing, Went with friends, skied. Et cetera. Your mind clears. So many businesses do this epic is well known. Every five years you get a one plus month sabbatical. Why don't we do that in health care? Why don't we give our doctors a break? Why do we let them burn out like that when even a couple of weeks of getting away from it will help them re-energize in various ways and not have to feel like, Oh, I want to go into business all of a sudden.
John Shufeldt:
Yeah, that's phenomenal advice and a great construct that Epic has, because you're absolutely right. Even a couple of weeks, I think people return refreshed. I can only imagine what a month or two would feel like. So what's the trajectory of care? How's it going to look? If you had a just wave your magic wand, what would it wave?
Lyle Berkowitz:
I'm waving my wand right now. First, we're in growth mode. We're signing up health systems. There are about 625 health systems in the US. Around 400 use epic. My hope is, hey, how do I get 1520 a year signed up? And so at the end of five years I'm at 8100 health systems. And each of those health systems giving us a fraction of their care, not even giving up anything, just letting us help expand because we have access issues. So we're not stealing from anybody. We're just expanding how many patients they can manage. The biggest problem we have, so to speak, or the biggest barrier we have is health systems who say, Oh, we can do this ourselves, or doctors who feel like, Hey, you're stealing my easy patients. I have what I call the three C approach to that C, Number one is that they're only going to give up patients if it's a clinically connected team. They don't want patients just to go to some random non connected group. We can give them that. We can give them a clinically connected team to make them feel confident in the quality and the coordination. The second and third C's are really up to the health system. The second C is comp redesign, physician compensation redesign. We have to get off this treadmill of reuse, and paying our doctors simply based on volume has to figure out how do we pay them based on the panel size that they manage the quality of care that they manage because you get what you pay for.
Lyle Berkowitz:
If a doctor knew that sending a patient to a key care team would, you know, they lose money doing it, Why would they do that? If they're incentivized, though, that it helps them understand that's how they increase their panel size? Because that's what we need to do in this world to be able to take care of everybody Then now they're well aligned and they know that team can also do a lot of the routine care that most doctors don't have time to do. Most doctors, I think the estimate is it would take a doctor 26.5 hours to take care of their panel size of 2000 patients. It makes no sense. They need a tech empowered virtual team. And the third C is culture, and that's patients, staff, doctors, culture, education and change management. That a team virtual team is actually good care that actually allows you as a system to take better care of a patient on a more consistent basis. So all those things have to come into play. I often say we don't have a shortage of physicians. We have a shortage of using them efficiently. If we can align the technology, the incentives and the cultural acceptance, we actually can save health care from this access issues because we're not making more doctors. It's not happening. And so we've got to rethink how we address the problem.
John Shufeldt:
So final question for you. A lot of physicians are very scared of AI, and they're scared of it because, hey, it's going to take my job. What are you telling medical students these days as far as specialties to go into where AI will be less penetrated? So I always say things like interventional radiology probably won't have a robot do that. But for a lot of the specialties, we were talking beforehand about how to use AI to make the provider more efficient. What are you telling medical students as far as residencies go or specialties?
Lyle Berkowitz:
I'll tell you, I've always been careful about not getting caught in the trap of saying, Oh yeah, I always say, and I'm sure you say it, same thing. Go in where your heart is going, where you love it, because there's always going to be room for a great doctor. I remember when we were coming out, they said no one should go into archaeology. It's overcrowded. The few guys who went in and killed it. And by the way, why did they kill it? Because they figured out to use a tech and powered delegated team and all of a sudden one there's a shortage. One anesthesiologist can run five teams. So the idea of team based care is not new. Surgeons do it. Anesthesiologist dermatologists, ophthalmologists do it. But in the end, you got to tell someone, go where you hurt. Go what you love to do. Don't go because you think something's going to make more money. With that said, keep your eyes open and understand that the very least the doctor who uses AI is going to beat out the doctor who doesn't use AI. If and when I completely replaces doctors or a lot, it's probably replacing almost all society at that point. The truth is what I think is with AI, we can really take care of more of the routine stuff in a hyper efficient way. While we can let our doctors focus top of license, the future I envision is not helping a doctor go from 22 to 24 patients a day.
Lyle Berkowitz:
That's not what they want. They don't love the idea of saying, Oh, tech can help me see a few more patients today. I want them to see less patients today because I want them to see the patients that really need them where they make a difference. In a typical doctor's life of a primary care doctor, 20 patients a day, 100 patients a week, there's probably 20% of those where they can really make a difference day to day, but they can really make a difference. And unfortunately, if they only have 15. Minute visits, they may not be able to make a difference. So what if their team could manage those other 80, 50, 80% of patients and they could focus on the 20 to 50% who really need them in the office? And instead of doing 15 minute visits, they can do 30 or 45 minute visits and truly make a difference because the real art of the physician is not the diagnosis. That's usually the easy part. And particularly in primary care, it is weaving together the right plan for that patient and a variety of ways. The truth is empathy and compassion and and understanding are important, is getting good at that, too. But again, the best doctors are going to be able to bring all those things together. Maybe we'll be at a time when there certainly won't be a doctor shortage, but we're not close to that yet.
John Shufeldt:
No, I agree with you. I mean, using the technology we have today and where it's going, it should make us more efficient, but hopefully less busy so we can spend more time doing what we all signed up to do, which was really interacting with patients and helping them on their journey.
Lyle Berkowitz:
It could be the robots in interventional stuff that might wind up being an injection. That boom takes care of those and those we'll retrain those guys as primary care docs.
John Shufeldt:
Love it. Sticking with the nanobots, Hey, where can people learn more about you? Because you've got an incredibly distinguished career.
Lyle Berkowitz:
My personal site is W-w-w dot Dr. Lyle Drell Telecom and then keycare w-w-w dot org. It's funny, years ago when I was young and a new doctor and my friends called me Dr. Lyle. That's my first name. They might call you Dr. John at some point. And one of my friends happened to own an ISP. And for the kids out in the audience, the Internet service providers used to have one like every few blocks that you needed to have one of these guys to call into to get the Internet. And as a birthday gift, as a gag, he got me the website Dr. lyle.com. So that just became my brand and over the years I've updated the website and got some good smart people to do something on it and it just became an easy brand for me.
John Shufeldt:
That's very cool. Well, you were very ahead of the curve. Very impressive. Well, this has been a blast talking to you. Thank you. I know our paths will continue to intersect. Thanks for listening to another great edition of Entrepreneur to find out how to start a business and help secure your future. Go to John Shufelt Webmd.com. Thanks for listening.
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