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Changing The Last Mile of Healthcare | Zingage CEO Victor Hunt
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In this episode, we’re joined by Victor Hunt, co-founder and CEO of Zingage, a platform focused on fixing the logistics behind home care delivery.
We start by diving into his background and how growing up around a home care business shaped the way he thinks about healthcare. From there, we explore why home care is evolving into a core distribution layer for the entire healthcare system. We break down the real bottleneck in the space—not a lack of caregivers, but the complexity of coordinating them at scale. Finally, we discuss how AI can unlock that constraint and what the future looks like as more care shifts into the home.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Healthcare Theory Podcast. I'm your host, Nikhil Reddy, and every week we interview the entrepreneurs and thought leaders behind the future of healthcare care to see what's gone wrong with our system and how we can fix it.
00:00:14
Speaker
Today's guest is Victor Hunt, the co-founder and CEO of Zengage, which is one of the largest AI platforms for home care. It's a huge structural problem, and Victor himself has a family deeply involved in home care. His grandmother was a nurse who built her own home care business, and seeing that, he built Zengage and accelerated this startup to Basically, answer and solve the logistics problem in home care.
Understanding Home Care Challenges
00:00:38
Speaker
As you may know, healthcare care' is a huge supply demand issue, but Victor today argues that it's more than just a lack of supply of home care clinicians, but it's a behind the scenes logistics problem and better orchestration can alleviate the burden on home care. We talk about why home care is becoming a central part of the healthcare system, why it's really a distribution model shifting it from both a cost and consumer perspective, and why it's generally so hard to scale healthcare and home care in the future.
00:01:05
Speaker
So hi, Victor, thank you so much for coming on the Healthcare Theory. Welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Of course, I'm super excited to get into z Zengage, but I want to start off with your background a little bit. I know you have deep roots in both healthcare and technology, and I read that you actually grew up in a home care family and you had to start it before this.
00:01:22
Speaker
So with those early experiences, how did that shape the way you think about startups? And what is it in your background that really brought you to this space today working in home care? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, home care has touched so many parts of my life and perhaps most ah most clearly is my grandmother, who was a career nurse for 30 years and she started her own home care business.
00:01:43
Speaker
um And I saw firsthand a lot of the challenges she had with ah trying to scale up what she loved the most, which was taking care of people who needed it in their homes and doing that at scale.
00:01:53
Speaker
um She quickly learned that a lot of the work is not so much how good you are clinically, but so much more to do with your operational skills and the logistics of running a business, mobilizing people, um finding ah great caregivers and staff.
00:02:09
Speaker
um And so that really stuck with me in terms of how much she poured into her work.
Zengage's Founding and Vision
00:02:14
Speaker
um I actually started out in a different lane. I actually built a prop tech startup.
00:02:21
Speaker
that was focused on automating the procurement process between building managers and um contractors. And I started that while i was in college at Yale and did that for about four years before exited and um learned a ton in that space, especially working with frontline workers.
00:02:37
Speaker
um You learn a lot about how i people who are not behind desks ah need innovation to show up for them without getting in the way of the work that they're doing with their hands.
00:02:47
Speaker
very similar to home care in that respect and and healthcare generally. um And so when I wrapped things up with that company, I took some time to explore and my co-founder and I both having a lot of deep roots in home care um and a deep passion for ah equipping the frontline with better ah services, better innovation that helps them achieve their goal of doing their craft without having any of the constraints, any of the logistical burdens.
00:03:15
Speaker
um That's what led us to build this company. And yeah, it's been a roller coaster since and started about ah two and a half years ago, but it's been um quite fun. Awesome. I mean, and that makes a lot of sense. I can imagine having your grandmother work in home care.
00:03:29
Speaker
was an interesting lens that, I mean, I'd love to hear about that a little bit more. I mean, home care can mean a lot of different things. There's a lot of different channels to provide home care. I mean, how do you define home care? And why is this such a large part of the health care system today?
Market Trends and Economic Incentives
00:03:43
Speaker
What gaps is it filling?
00:03:44
Speaker
I think the market's almost $500 billion dollars or something like that, which is insane to me. But what do you think is driving this but to become so large and and fill this structural need within health care? Yeah, I mean, I think most people look at home care as this other category of health care, um similar to how you would view any other specialty care.
00:04:02
Speaker
um But instead, we think of it much more as a medium of distribution for health care. um So think of it more like e-commerce rather than, um you know, you've got You can sell fashion, you can sell home goods, you can sell all sorts of things and you can do that in a brick and mortar storefront, but you can also do that online. And so sort of sounds ridiculous to people today if you say I run an internet business.
00:04:22
Speaker
um And I think that's how we view what home care sounds like today and won't be in the future. Instead, it will be that home care is a distribution method. And in fact, you see now Everything from basic companionship to home health, um infusion therapy, going as far as to hospital at home, um which is quite exciting to see so much care ah making its way into the places that people want to be the most, which is the comfort of their homes.
00:04:50
Speaker
And so we view home care really as this ah ecosystem. It's a means of distribution. um And the job that's Engage Solves is making the logistics so easy that any provider can enter the home and provide care without having to sort of go through all of the process to figure out staffing, figure out scheduling
Pandemic Impact on Home Care
00:05:11
Speaker
compliance. um This is what you know will ultimately unlock capacity for folks to ah do a whole lot more in the home.
00:05:19
Speaker
Yeah, and it's almost like, as you said, like a distribution system in some ways. In the same way that the internet and e-commerce displaced brick-and-mortar stores like Blockbuster, you want it to get more convenient and get your products online. It could be the same thing for healthcare, care where going to an inpatient or outpatient clinic is expensive and time-consuming, but...
00:05:38
Speaker
getting the care in the home is much more efficient and convenient. So, mean, why is healthcare, though, moving from more to the home and away from the hospital? Is it because of pricing, convenience, or just something else within the system?
00:05:49
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you can sort of follow the incentives on both ah both ends of the spectrum. On the consumer side, um it's as simple as looking at ah the trends that are pretty clear across other industries. So where are we getting more of our food through delivery apps? Where are we getting more of our goods through ah e-commerce? And so much more of this ah kind of bring the service to me as opposed to go out and find it. um That psychology is ah very consistent and it only makes sense that we would want to receive health care delivered to us and in the comfort of our homes as well.
00:06:23
Speaker
um The other side of this as well is the fact that um you're seeing a lot of demographic change, the number one being ah just the increase in seniors um and just so many more of these seniors, not just um needing more care, but also ah having a much more distributed ah family ah composition than what has historically been. So in the past, people lived very close to their families.
00:06:49
Speaker
sort of take care of each other in that respect. But now you're seeing 25% of dementia patients live alone. You're seeing 26% plus seniors living alone. And in certain cases, very far from access to ah great healthcare. So we're talking about people who live in rural or suburban areas, people who maybe you just simply can't get up and out of the house as easily as they used to. And so it's very hard for them to get this kind of care.
00:07:14
Speaker
um And so that leads to sort of the most important inflection, which is the cost to deliver care at home versus in a facility, especially hospitalizations.
00:07:25
Speaker
Namely, the fact is you'd much rather pay $40 an hour to reimburse um a nurse or reimburse a caregiver to prevent a fall rather than have to address the fall through a very expensive surgery on the other side. um And so all of this sort of compounds into a really attractive um industry and sector for everyone, which is home care, we want more care in the home as consumers.
00:07:50
Speaker
And it's much more cost effective, much better outcome ah for the patient. And also, frankly, the only way to access health care for many people. Yeah, and COVID, I assume, has so accelerated a bit of this. I can imagine it would have been different because, of course, in an era where going to the hospital is is achievable, yes, but really risky for a lot of elderly patients. So you had to bring health care to the home to some extent.
00:08:16
Speaker
Did that change the dynamics? or I know since then the CMS has paused for hospitals at home and wants more acute care at the home, but and not just general nursing, but skilled nursing facilities as I get into the home too. So the CMS is pushing for this. Do you think COVID affected this, or was it just recent legislation? What is the overall landscape of how is changing today? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when you think about what COVID did, it really compressed the timeline for people to...
00:08:41
Speaker
ah take serious some of the innovation that maybe was just getting started. We're talking about things like telemedicine. We're talking about ah the ability to ah communicate and receive care over new methods. And so being forced to stay in the home for ah you know a year and a half for a lot of people um will inevitably put us in a position where we're receiving more care and more goods in the home.
00:09:05
Speaker
um And I think, as with all things regulation, it is a very strong forcing function
Logistical Solutions in Home Care
00:09:10
Speaker
to adoption. um And so many of the i large incumbents in the space, be it Epic, Cerner, ah Well Skies of the World, these companies ah benefited from a a series of regulation that essentially required health care to be managed in the cloud through the EHR.
00:09:28
Speaker
And so with these ah sort of inflection points in law, um we also see the timelines speed up. um And i think we'll continue to see that because of how much i how much people are suffering right now from not being able to access care, even if you just look at something like the ah Medicaid waitlist, we're seeing hundreds of thousands of people who are not able to get care, who have the reimbursement approved for um this care, um but are simply and an impasse when it comes to ah the supply of folks who can provide that care.
00:10:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think at this point, it seems like home care is almost perfect. like It's better than a hospital. It's more personal. It's in the home. It can address people's needs a little bit better and more personalized. But um but that at that point, why not give home care for everybody? And I guess there's a few structural barriers. I'm seeing, of course, the supply side. is It's hard to get labor here. It's a difficult market. It's also very expensive in some some capacities.
00:10:24
Speaker
Could you speak more to that? If home care sounds so good on the demand side, what is on the supply side constraining this or preventing this from actually happening? on a large scale, what are the barriers that you see in the future that's um slowing the supplementation? Yeah, I think when people hear supply constraint, they immediately jump to, we don't have enough workers.
00:10:41
Speaker
um And I think that leads to a lot of the ah source of the issue, which is trying to throw bodies at a problem that frankly starts with ah the logistics and the organization of what it means to have supply and have capacity. So I'll give you an example.
00:10:56
Speaker
um When you look at the average ah provider who we serve, um when we're getting started with them, they're reporting things like 30% missed calls. Now those calls could be someone inquiring about new service.
00:11:07
Speaker
It could be someone who's having an emergency. It could be someone who's looking for a new job. And so all of these are bottlenecks in the funnel that leads to receiving that care. So if we're not even able to process the full demand, let alone understand if we have capacity to match that demand with the care. um This is where we're seeing a lot of the kind of breakthroughs um and a lot of the sort of fractures in this care continuum.
00:11:31
Speaker
um The other side of that as well is the logistics of staffing these cases. And so being able to properly ah match folks with the right shifts, match them with i patients and clients who are going to be the best fit for them um and doing this at a fast enough clip to not lose that connection.
00:11:51
Speaker
Oftentimes you'll hear 70, 80% turnover in the home care industry. And you actually double click into that. um The reality is that most of these folks are staying within home care, but just going into i different companies to work the same job, but essentially get new schedules, get new, ah get a new relationship started because they don they didn't have a new assignment after their patient passed away.
00:12:17
Speaker
um They didn't have enough hours because their first employer was only able to give them 10 or 20 hours a week. And so this is the sort of volatile, a high frequency health care that home care serves today.
AI and Automation in Home Care
00:12:30
Speaker
And why is that so hard to fix? I mean, of course, the sounds on the outside looking in. It sounds like you could bring a tool like yours in. And before we get into Zengage, I mean, there's been this problem for decades, at least for a decade.
00:12:43
Speaker
um So why wasn't this gap like not filled? Why do you think people couldn't just create an algorithm or have more staff on hand? Was this a monetary constraint, something with incentives again? Or do you think there's we can't afford to have too many people scheduling? This would not have worked fundamentally because of the...
00:12:59
Speaker
cash flow coming in what is structurally preventing us from changing Yeah, because there are just so many moving pieces in what that algorithm requires. And those moving pieces are constantly dynamic. It's almost like, a you know, the the Uber analogy that people love to draw is we'll just match the patient with the caregiver and or the nurse.
00:13:17
Speaker
And that ah it breaks down very quickly when you realize that there are certain skills requirements. It's not that it's availability, it's preferences. um And then on top of that, um you also have sort of this kind of question about where are we getting the data? Where are we getting this information? Because although folks are using tools like an EHR to staff and to keep track of basic ideas like availability, ah most of that is stale data and incomplete data that doesn't give you the full picture of what you needed. So that's why these people are on the phone most of the time asking, hey, can you take up a shift?
00:13:53
Speaker
Hey, um you know what's your preference for next week? What's your preference for travel? Your preference for ah clients. What if your license is expired, and I need to go and have you follow up with that. So all of these moving pieces are part of what the care coordinator does, um and what makes this problem so complex.
00:14:12
Speaker
um And it wasn't until recently that many of the ah sort of LLM and applications on top allowed us to start to solve these in very meaningful ways.
00:14:24
Speaker
i think that makes a lot of sense. And I want to get into, think it'd be a good time to get into ZenGage now. i mean, we have this issue where, of course, you have a lot of demand, as you've addressed, but it's hard to coordinate and provide the supply.
00:14:35
Speaker
So how is ZenGage approaching that? When did you come up with this idea? And what were some of the constraints and incentives that you wanted to build around on orchestrating the solution and building a product? I guess, what were the first principles behind ZenGage?
00:14:47
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, when we first started, Engage was focused on solving caregiver turnover and overall employee retention and productivity. um And the big constraint there was bandwidth. You have a lot of really great back office admins who are doing some wonderful work, but they don't have time to ah reach out and remind people to clock in or make sure that they are um taking taking care of their best people, recognizing them for great work.
00:15:13
Speaker
And so we built automations around those sort of workflows that augment the service of the back office. um And what was ah very new at that time um was the ability to ah interact ah with the data that lives in the EMR so that people are not having to go and ah manually ah trigger these sort of automations.
00:15:36
Speaker
um So you could have someone, for example, show up to a shift um on time, stay super compliant, have an amazing streak, and that person, now all of this performance data is feeding into Cengage to allow us to reward them, recognize them, communicate with them in the same way that your best ah care coordinator might do.
00:15:55
Speaker
So that was where we started. um As we grew, we always knew that our focus was on ah helping solve the logistics problem that is ah home care. um There are many pieces to this, the most hair on fire problem being care coordination.
00:16:08
Speaker
So you talk with any home care business and their boogeymen are turnover, call outs, compliance issues. And all of these are moving pieces of a part that is care coordination.
00:16:19
Speaker
um And so Zengage today is that platform that solves the system of actions, the orchestration layer to ensure that care is being delivered compliantly um and making sure that when there are issues like a caregiver calls out, emergency happens, a new lead from a prospective patient comes in.
00:16:40
Speaker
All of these sort of ah trigger points lead to some outcome that the agency, the provider wants, whether that is restaffing the case with the proper caregivers, whether it's notifying the family of a patient that they're ah relative is going to the hospital and that our caregivers on the way with them.
00:17:00
Speaker
um Or it might be processing a new lead to make sure that this person can get the intake and assessment on time. So all of these different moving pieces typically sit on the plate of a home care admin staff, be it a care coordinator.
00:17:13
Speaker
And this is what Zengage solves for them. But importantly, it solves it to the extent that they want. So some businesses are a bit more hands-on and they're wanting more oversight and supervision and so there's this symbiotic relationship where you can have zengage that runs your entire ah function of care coordination or you can have it be more of a co-pilot that takes certain steps along the way um and is responsive to your back office so that they can step in where they want to be ah but have ai do a lot of the heavy lifting and one of the most classic examples is in a
00:17:47
Speaker
caregiver or nurse call out when this happens, you're having to reach out to many people ah at once um over a period of time to socialize an open visit and open shift, getting them excited, familiar and finding that right person who's going to take the case and then doing the actual work of assigning this person, updating the records in the HR.
00:18:09
Speaker
This quite tedious. um And at a certain point, there is diminishing returns for the human scheduler, the care coordinator to do that work versus having the AI do it. So that's where Zengage sits in ah the overall care platform that we, the system of action that we provide today.
00:18:26
Speaker
Yeah, I guess the idea is that you don't want or don't necessarily need more caregivers. You need to allow caregivers to handle more people and get them to be more efficient and take that burden off almost, which is interesting because for you guys, I would be curious when you have a system of action, usually that's built on something like a system of record to obtain that data.
00:18:45
Speaker
So is all the data collection happening through you guys? And within that, what does that layer actually look like for the clinician? What do they see when they go on ZenGage and use the platform? what does it feel like to actually be involved in this? because Yeah, well, it depends on who is using Zengage, but ah you can sort of think of Zengage as this colleague that you work with where um you have access to ask it questions, you have access to see what it's up to and the progress it's making on open issues.
00:19:11
Speaker
um And the important thing for us is making sure that Zengage people have visibility so that they can jump in and steer the ship if it's going in the wrong way. um And where we're most special that I think um you know has really given our customers a lot of ah a lot of leverage is the memory aspects of our product, where we're able to actually take in the feedback that they're giving us, whether it's caregiver calling and saying, Hey, I don't like cats. um You guys staff me with a patient as cats, please don't do that again.
00:19:42
Speaker
And that information now adds to the memory of this caregiver and of their preferences so that in future cases where we know there's a open shift it with a cat, that person is not contacted. And it can be something even more trivial, like Hey, I want caregivers who know how to play bingo.
00:20:00
Speaker
um It could be something much more significant. um We need to make sure that for, you know, this patient's wife, if she ever calls, um although she's not a patient of ours, um take the call, but she has dementia and don't, you know, cancel shifts if she asks to.
00:20:15
Speaker
These are all serious situations that require this sort of context layer and engages the one to absorb and encode that information. um And in this way that is very anthropomorphic. So it feels like you're engaging with another colleague. It doesn't feel like you're going into ah the bowels of some software to teach it. Instead, it's just how would I tell my friend? I might tell them on the phone. I might text them. I might type in a comment and all these things contribute to that knowledge graph.
00:20:44
Speaker
Yeah, I think the fact that, as you mentioned earlier, LLMs are getting more and more popular is probably helping a lot because if you think about, told people about AI five or six years ago, they'd probably a little bit confused on how they'd that it interact with home care, but not everyone can probably visibly see where might align or overlap.
00:21:00
Speaker
People using Chat2PT and other platforms, and that pushes adoption forward a little bit, especially for clinicians that are a little bit tech-averse. So it's different than selling Epic, for example. Selling to hospitals is much harder, but you have only so these contracts are much larger.
00:21:14
Speaker
With you guys, you're targeting a much more fragmented market. So what does that go-to-market look like? How did it feel like selling to fragmented market? What were the and initial conversations in that area? Yeah, well, i always aim to build a product that serves every stakeholder up and down the continuum.
00:21:34
Speaker
um When I think about the people who purchase and Engage, those are people who are doing an incredible complex coordination of bringing in ah amazing patients and families who need care, along with amazing care providers who want to do this work, who find it as their life's calling.
00:21:54
Speaker
And putting together this ecosystem that allows both sides to get what they want and need. And our role in this is to ah be that voice, be that face, that orchestrator of making sure that the caregiver has what they need when they show up to shifts.
00:22:12
Speaker
making sure that there's always someone who can ah provide them the extra guidance, the support they need, be it on a call, ah be it on just pointing them in the right direction of how to use the tools they are provided at work.
Personalized Care and Industry Flexibility
00:22:26
Speaker
Same thing on the patient and the family side. Someone who's calling in worried about their mother hundreds of miles away. Can you help coordinate a wellness check? Yes, so absolutely. We can. And this is where our AI is again serving as this extension of the motivation behind that provider who started this practice in the beginning.
00:22:44
Speaker
They want this amazing ecosystem that provides amazing care, um does the work to ah bridge that gap for those folks who are looking for information, who are looking for help um with none of the taxing burden of burning out your best people to take all these actions to see that that outcome happen.
00:23:04
Speaker
Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense. do you think the industry consolidating will change a a bit about how the product is used? I imagine you're serving all the stakeholders, it could be pretty similar and modular and flexible enough, but the industry does seem to be fundamentally changing from sponsor investment and other other forms of roll-ups getting involved.
00:23:21
Speaker
How do you think a consolidating industry would change the nature of the problem and the product that's being used? Yeah, I guess the question is really, is the rate of consolidation ah greater than or ah less than the rate of growth of this market.
00:23:36
Speaker
Because the reality is we're way under capacity in terms of servicing the amount of demand for this level of care. And so while there is consolidation, there's also ah an extreme need for more independent providers, mom and pops to come along and do this great work.
00:23:55
Speaker
But what's stopping them is what stopped my grandmother along her journey, which is that the logistics are so painful and so overwhelming that it pulls back these very high agency people from the motivation they have to do this great work.
00:24:09
Speaker
And so what we're seeing right now is, yes, plenty of consolidation, but we're also seeing ah plenty of inspiration and excitement from the people who ah are day to day in the business going in and shaking hands with their referral partners, with the families, the caregivers.
00:24:27
Speaker
And so it's all great. um There's amazing positives and upsides to all of those scenarios. um And our ability to service ah large companies, roll ups, multi-state platforms is incredible and just as effective and quite interesting as it is for even the SMB who you know is working with a couple dozen ah patients in their individual location, their individual geography.
00:24:57
Speaker
And I mean, with these SMBs, I can have the the personalization factor i imagine is huge and pretty hard for most people to provide. And it's more and more understanding like a little bit what these caregivers like or dislike.
00:25:10
Speaker
Do you think there's still a little bit of a disconnect? Because I can imagine something as nuanced as like, I don't like cats, maybe. um You might know that someone generally likes a cat or not, but um I imagine it's hard for to know everything when you guys are initially personalizing this platform. So what does that actually look like? i mean, how do you have you been personalizing this and making sure that clinicians get what they actually want?
00:25:32
Speaker
um Is that through an algorithm or is it something else like a complex process behind the scenes that allows you to orchestrate to the right people? um What does that matching process actually look like?
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, a lot of this stuff is, um you know, thinking from an anthropological standpoint, how was it done even before the technology? How did the best people understand their workforce?
00:25:56
Speaker
How did they make the best connections possible? And all of that is ah both a work in progress and actually listening for and seeking out those answers.
00:26:06
Speaker
And so with what's engaged is doing we have uh massively expanded the capacity of those best people in the back office to spend more time with their patients with their staff understand them better and that typically feeds back into our understanding because now that they're no longer fielding uh dozens of calls um an hour uh they're able to think for a moment and say hey, wait a minute, I should go and do drop in visit to our new patient and this new caregiver to see how things are going.
00:26:39
Speaker
And I can relay back to the team. Here's what I learned. You know, Mrs. Jones um is actually a hoarder. And it would be a great fit for Betty because she's a better caregiver ah to deal with this situation. And so these sort of insights come about.
00:26:55
Speaker
um And then on top of that, deploying is engaged to proactively ah collect these insights is what we're starting to see more of where people are now saying, well, it's engaged. Please do you know the check in on that caregiver who ah is having their initial visit with this new patient.
00:27:11
Speaker
um rather than waiting for them to reactively reach out with a complaint or possibly reach out with um a praise for this staffing.
00:27:22
Speaker
Zengage is now able to do that on their behalf. And so it's a matter of by increasing this capacity, um we're seeing many new, ah many new opportunities for people to connect and understand each other.
00:27:34
Speaker
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think for me, it's also interesting when you have a large just large debate in healthcare care about how much AI should replace a clinician. It almost seems like that's not necessarily the debate going on within health home care today.
00:27:48
Speaker
um This is one that's going to be delivering, I guess, people are still delivering the healthcare or home care, but in your case, it's more about how much... How should data and AI enable the clinician to interact with people and and and individuals within that space? And to some extent, I think especially in medicine, there's a hesitancy around AI.
00:28:06
Speaker
If someone reached out to you, you're more likely to like spill the beans if it's a friend versus an AI where you don't really feel that emotional connection. So I am a little bit curious. I mean, if AI seems a little bit transactional at first for a lot of people,
00:28:18
Speaker
How do you humanize and encourage people to understand that it's maybe part of a larger process? Is that is that kind of the method or what does that really look like in terms of going through the app, you have a humanistic AI and something that people want to actually talk to and explore with?
00:28:34
Speaker
Yeah, so it's actually impressive how much we've um seen the connections form between Cengage AI and the ah audience who we serve, whether it be patients, the caregivers, even the the admins themselves. And so ah in the beginning, it was sort of you know this is just a transactional call can you take this shift can you um tell us why you're not at the shift or why you haven't clocked out um those sort of transactions are very taxing over time and can become quite uh annoying whether or not it's ai if it's just someone who you know who's in the office but all they ever do is reach out to you when they want something that can really uh strain a relationship and make people quite frustrated
00:29:18
Speaker
um And so instead with Cengage, where we focus is not treating this so much as a transaction, but instead an ongoing conversation. um When you think about a company like Epic, ah the reason why it's named Epic is because you ah the founder is a huge fan for mythology. and The term epic is about the journey. It's about the history of that story. And her philosophy is that your health journey is what they're serving. They're here to encode and serve you along that journey of health care.
00:29:49
Speaker
um And in the same way, our interactions are treated as this journey. And so when you pick up the phone and call, you know, it's not you know, Hey, how may I help you? It's Hey, Nikhil, how's it going? Um, you know, what can I help you with? Is this about, uh, the call earlier for picking up the shift?
00:30:03
Speaker
Um, so there's context, there's memory, there's personalization. And over time, this actually feels much more, um energizing and enriching to ah engage with versus someone who um as a human being, we can only keep up with so much information. There some super smart and amazing people who have ah amazing recall.
Future Goals and Structural Changes
00:30:25
Speaker
But even with that, um how quickly can they give you an answer about your upcoming schedule? How quickly can they ah find out what is the best available shift for you.
00:30:35
Speaker
um This is what AI is able to do at a rate that is so much greater. to It completely eclipses what's possible as a human staffer, as a human being. Yeah. and I think in some ways that's why they should have an AI and a human. I mean, I'm glad you guys have both because I can imagine if you just had the human, it would be really hard to orchestrate all of this. But then if you just had the AI, you're you're really putting a large um burden, necessarily, kind of, in some ways. So i think they still need some of that human connection, but you have a little bit of both.
00:31:07
Speaker
So I love that story with Epic. I mean, that healthcare is sort of a journey, and um especially being an entrepreneur. So I'm curious, what is it like? what What do you see as the future of Zengage? Are you still looking forward to the next, what are you looking forward to in the next five or ten years as the platform from scales? Is there any features or things you're looking to add from a larger, like, moonshot vision, are you guys building step-by-step over time? Super excited to hear what's going on with you guys.
00:31:32
Speaker
Yeah, everything that we're doing today is about building the ecosystem and making it possible for the logistics of ah home care delivery to ah happen seamlessly. And so what we do now is focused on ah areas of care coordination, um workforce management, um all of the different touch points around communications.
00:31:52
Speaker
um And continuing to build on that, um we're launching many new exciting platforms, things around um staffing and helping people to augment the service in a way that allows it to grow.
00:32:03
Speaker
um And so I'm super excited about um that realm of the platform, but most importantly, um just continuing to help our providers, our customers,
00:32:14
Speaker
reach more patients and deliver better access ah to care um because we're seeing it already with this added capacity they are growing ah much faster than they otherwise would and so doubling down on this and in the future my ultimate goal is that we can bring all care into the home that we have the ability to ah put new lines of service as complex as hospital at home into ah places where previously people would have to ah wait very long and go very far to get this level of ah care in their lives.
00:32:51
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm very excited for that. And i guess one last question. I think that before i think that once we can enable clinicians, you also kind of draw more people into the workforce, which will be a larger driver in the problem and fixing the problem, I hope.
00:33:03
Speaker
and And once the care is coordinated better, almost every stakeholder in health care ideally should have some benefit. but do you think the larger market will change as a whole in terms of the way health care is delivered? um Are you more like navigating this current market and building within it? Or do you think larger legislative things will also evolve to shift this market forward?
00:33:21
Speaker
i mean, what do you think about the future of how home care will look like structurally? And what do you expect or anticipate in terms of any large or big picture changes in the next few years? If anything at all, really. Yeah, it absolutely will. So this is another you know area that will um have a huge lift in the coming years, which is that the care providers will be getting paid more because so much more money will be flowing into this side of the preventative care.
00:33:46
Speaker
um We look at some of our customers, like one example is a provider in Florida who um has been able to use the data that their team is producing in terms of um a two hour visit with their CNA that cost $160, is able to reduce hospitalizations ah by around 80%.
00:34:04
Speaker
And these hospitalizations cost roughly around $11,000 minimum um and in terms of the types of ah patients who they're dealing with. And so these sort of narratives and these stories are now ah surfacing.
00:34:16
Speaker
And with this added bandwidth of what we're ah doing together with the providers, they're able to now pitch that to the payers to say, hey, let's do more in the preventative. Let's do more in post-acute in the home.
00:34:29
Speaker
And that's what's going to help ah pull more ah investment, which will obviously lift the interest in terms of who wants to work in this space, who can afford to work in this space. Yeah, no, definitely. i um But at the first level, it sounds almost kind of expensive, one-on-one health care. And you might think that, why not use the skilled nursing facilities or something like that? But at the end of the day, i think the preventative health care and proactive reactive care will save money in the long run. So I'm excited to see how that changes with things such as Engage.
Conclusion and Additional Resources
00:35:00
Speaker
So thank you again for the time again, Victor, and walking through your story and how home care is evolving. um We're really excited to hear more about your future story in the future. So thanks again for coming on.
00:35:12
Speaker
Yeah, anytime.
00:35:16
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Healthcare Theory. Every Tuesday, expect a new episode on the platform of your choice. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, any streaming platform you can imagine.
00:35:28
Speaker
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00:35:41
Speaker
Repeat, thehealthcaretheory.org. Again, i appreciate you tuning in and I hope to see you again soon.