Hello, everyone. This is Jacob Emerson with the
Becker's Healthcare ASC podcast. Thanks so much for
tuning in today where we're thrilled to be
joined by John Brownlee, who's the CEO and
cofounder of VidScripps.
John, thanks so much for taking the time
to be with me on the podcast today.
My pleasure, Jacob. Appreciate you inviting me. Absolutely.
And before we dive into everything we wanna
talk with you about, can you tell us
a little bit more about yourself and your
background in health care?
Yeah. Certainly.
So I've spent pretty much my entire career
in health care. I I started off in
the biotech and medical device
businesses,
worked in,
with in largely
in interventional cardiology and oncology
and,
and then the vaccine space.
And I transitioned into the health care services
side of the of the business. I met
governor Tommy Thompson who had just finished his
his time as secretary of health and human
services, in the George Bush administration,
w Bush administration. And,
he was chairman of a company,
did health care services, and I joined that
company. And we did a lot of work
in the both the public sector and military
and CDC and also in the private sector.
And then after leaving that company, which was
sold to UnitedHealthcare,
went into,
kind of my entrepreneurial
time, started a virtual care company called Quinian
Health, a little bit ahead of the time
in terms of, in terms of virtual care
and online care, but,
ended up selling that company.
And then about thirteen years ago, I started
Bitscript along with my, cofounder Brian Koyad, who's
our who who remains our chief technology officer.
And, I think, mostly what we'll be talking
about today is is the script and and
the things that we do in the ASC
space.
Fantastic. So a long time in the health
care industry, John, and and because of that,
you know that patient education has traditionally relied
on brochures and post op handouts. As we've
seen,
spectrum, how have you seen this experience evolve,
during your years in the industry?
Yeah. There's there's been a lot of evolution,
I think, with various varying levels of success.
You know, when we think about how we,
engage with patients
prior to procedures,
after procedures, you know, with new diagnoses
and so forth. You know, the the the
big challenge here is, you know, health care
providers
tend to repeat themselves a lot. They tend
to say the same things over and over
again.
And, and yet we know patients forget up
to 80% of what they learn at the
point of care depending on depending on what
study you're reading. So we have we have
these really perishable encounters between
providers and their patients.
That leads to a lot of frustration for
providers, a lot of a lot of drives
homes, speaking to patients in the car, and
a lot of callbacks to
to staff members. And a lot of people
are trying to figure figure this thing out.
And I'm not sure we've made a ton
of progress, to be honest with you. You
know, there's there's text messaging platforms. There's,
there's lots of mobile apps. We're looking at
the future of AI agents, you know, delivering,
dynamically delivering con content in kind of conversational
formats, you know, drawing from particular knowledge bases.
But, you know, there's there's a lot going
on, and,
and there's been some successful things and a
lot of things that haven't really worked. But
I think I think from my point of
view, the the endpoint that we we wanna
be thinking about isn't so much the modality.
We tend to get kind of caught up
in innovation
and digital and
digital health and and and those kinds of
things. But it's not really about the the
modality. It's really about the outcome. You know?
Well, what are the tools that are that
are proven to bend the curve
on outcomes that we all care about?
And, you know, from from our point of
view, you know, we we've been doing VidScrip
for thirteen years now, and
there's kind of three buckets that we that
we look at here that that drive success.
You know, the the information that patients receive
needs to be accurate.
That's table stakes.
One of the challenges, of course, though, is
that we tend to create information vacuums for
patients, and patients
go online and they seek out doctor Google,
and that's a problem. And then the accuracy
decreases.
You know, that's the first a. And the
the second is, you know, accessibility.
This is also table stakes. But, you know,
there's varying levels of of accessibility of
of educational content. Certainly, health care providers are
difficult to access because they're so busy.
Apps are hard to access for a lot
of patients,
and so forth. So accessibility is an issue.
The The one that we really focus on
at VidScrip, but I probably should talk about
kind of what it is that we do
here at some point, but, is authenticity. And
that's and that's that's kind of the most
important
element of really creating
content that drives
that drives outcomes. And and not a lot
of people wanna play in that space. And
we can talk about kind of what I
mean by authenticity. But,
the you know, in our view, and the
our data seems to indicate that the more
authentic the content is that patients are receiving,
the better engaged patients
are. The better engaged they are, the better
the outcomes are. And, so accuracy, accessibility, and
authenticity
are really those keys, and that's kinda how
we think about whether it's digital or nondigital,
how we need to be engaging patients to
get better outcomes.
Absolutely. So content drives outcomes. And I and
I totally hear your perspective that it's not
necessarily about the modality. It is about the
outcomes. But is video particularly impactful in an
ASC setting compared to some of the other
forms of patient education that you mentioned?
Yeah. I mean, our day our data would
would would seem to indicate it it is.
And, you know, I always kinda caution this.
You know, there's a lot of people, like,
talk about video.
And and, you know, VidScrip, you know, VidScrip
is is a is a platform that allows,
health care providers to create short little videos,
a whole bunch of them that answer
all of the patient's questions about, you know,
let's say, a procedure like total knee replacement.
And then we take these little videos and
bundle them into journeys, and we guide patients
through these journeys using the videos from their
own doctor.
And so but this script doesn't work because
it's video
per se. It works because it's authentic.
And so, you know, we have we have,
a study published in the Journal of American
Urology Association in 2019,
'12 centers
around the country, some academic, some private, led
by doctor Mike Shea at the University of
California San Diego.
And that study showed a 70% reduction
in cans in surgery cancellations
for patients who were receiving
these series of videos when they get them
by text message or email.
But they're receiving these videos leading up to
surgery and then after surgery.
And ninety four percent of the patients in
that study said that they watched all or
almost all of their doctor's videos.
And so I I really try to emphasize
that I mean, there's there's tons of video
out there. You know? There's you can go
to YouTube and find video about anything.
But what makes VidScrip work or things like
VidScrip
is that the videos are so authentic authentic
because they come from your own provider.
And what what we've figured out how to
do over the last decade plus is to
is to create authenticity at scale.
And that's the trick with video. And, when
you can do that,
you combine that accuracy of the information because
it's coming from your own doctor,
the accessibility because it's being delivered directly to
you at just the right time in a
care episode,
and most importantly, by far, the authenticity because
it's content that's coming from your own doctor.
So when you
consume that or when you share that with
a a loved one or a caregiver,
this is the most important information there is
because it's authentically coming from the provider who's
taking care of me or my mother and
so forth.
And so, yes, we we do video, and
there's there's a number of different video based
platforms out there. But,
but the authenticity of your own doctor is
really is really what it comes down to.
Understood. So so the data is really pointing
to patients increasingly preferring to consume medical information
via the video format.
What are some of the challenges then that
practices might encounter in getting providers on board
with doing this? How how is Vidscripts
making it so that it's easy for clinicians
to make these videos?
Yeah. That's and that's, you know, that's been
the work of the last, you know, thirteen
years for us. And, you know, there's there's
I always say there's there's kind of four
potential failure points for something like this. Number
one is, you know, is this is this
a problem we're solving?
And when I talk to busy surgeons and
I say, hey. You know, you're it's Groundhog
Day. Right? You repeat yourself all the time,
but patients forget what you say. They almost
all agree with that. And so, you know,
getting sort of buy in that this is
a problem we're solving is is not too
difficult.
And when I ask them, will they will
they sit in front of our app, that
script in our case, that script studio and
answer a whole bunch of questions? We don't
really get too much trouble getting them to
do that because they realize they're solving an
acute problem that they face directly in their
own practice. It's not the same as when
sort of maybe a marketing person calls and
say, hey. Will you come down to the
conference room and sit here for an hour
and make a video that we're gonna put
on our website? That's that's video content you're
kinda creating for somebody else. This is content
you're creating for yourself, for your own patients
that will drive efficiency and drive better patient
behavior. So that's really not a big barrier.
Patients love this content.
Our we we ask we ask patients,
patient satisfaction score for every single journey, and
the average patient satisfaction
score across our entire platform was 9.6 out
of 10. So the patients are thrilled with
this content. They're not used to getting it.
Where are the operational challenges? And when we're
working with an ambulatory surgery center or practice,
the really, the key is
is getting in there and making sure that
we're managing the workflow.
And what that really means is making sure
the right patient is getting the right VIN
script from the right doctor. And so we
can export, you know, very simple standard reports
from the EMR systems all the way up
to, you know, a fire based integration and
kinda everything in between to make sure that
we're sort of automating that process of,
of making sure that we're getting the data
so we can enroll these patients.
And and that's really the operational key. And
so the providers tend to be really on
board because they they they they can imagine
if I if I could repeat myself less
or if I could have to field fewer
calls or my staff could field field fewer
calls and so forth, there's value there. But
it's really that operational piece in the middle
that really that really drives success.
Absolutely. And and, John, you mentioned the high
consumer scores.
Can you expand on that and give us
a a concrete example in terms of from
the patient side on how Vidscripts is supporting
the care journey?
Yeah. Absolutely. So
there's a lot of I mean, as you
can imagine over this period of time, there's
a lot of examples. I'll give you a
couple of my favorites.
We do a ton of work in the
audiology space. So Vidscript Vidscript is across really
all all specialties.
We we do we do we happen to
do a lot in the audiology space. So
one of my favorite outcomes metrics is something
in audiology they call companion grade. And so
if we all think about people who are
at a point where they're, they're exploring,
hearing aids and that kind of thing, the
the percentage of patients who come to their
visit with a companion
has a fundamental,
impact on what they do next. In other
words, if if my dad goes in for
hearing aids and he goes by himself, the
chances are he's gonna walk out there and
and and nothing's gonna happen. But if he
goes in with my mom or if he
goes in with my sister, it's very different
different things. So we design journeys in the
audiology space specifically geared towards driving higher companion
rates, and we've seen
measurable improvement in that, which improves outcomes, improves
practice operational and financial performance. And that's just
a really good example of of what we
really try to do, which is designing these
journeys to have it to bend the curve
on an outcome that we know is important
to both patients and providers.
Another another one is we we we work
in the prosthetic space,
and we we help prosthetic
practices
guide their patients from sort of that surgery
experience that they have
to months later when they're actually getting fit
for
for a prosthetic device. And so if you
imagine a patient who is a lower limb
amputee and they come for that fitting,
one of the things that can be that
can be determinative of whether they're gonna have
a successful fitting is whether they bring the
the other shoe, the shoe for the for
the limb that they've lost, which they're obviously
not using currently. And so when they come
to the fitting, they need to have both
shoes with them
so that they have a proper fitting. It
seems like a little thing, but it's actually
something that derails these fittings.
So, again, part of that journey
is we've designed in reminders to make sure
that they that that they that they accomplish
that that relatively minor task so that they
have a successful fitting. And so those are
just kind of two examples of of that
I particularly like.
And we have examples like that from orthopedics
and from urology and and and other spaces
as well. But, you know, we design these
journeys, and we organize the questions that the
providers answer,
with these little videos, and we deliver them
to patients at at just the right time
so that we bend the curve on these
outcomes that that impact what happens with patients.
And because we get such high engagement in
the in the content and the reason we
get such high engagement is because it's, again,
it's authentic. It's my own doctor, my own
prosthetist, my own audiologist.
They're paying attention, and so they
their their actions tend to change as a
result. And so it's exciting to see once
those once we fine tune and tweak those
journeys, it's exciting to see those metrics those
metrics improve.
Absolutely. So clearly a lot of a lot
of great work happening across many specialties, John.
And and if you were to look ahead,
how do you see video continuing to transform
patient care at ASCs
and other benefits that you think practices can
expect by prioritizing
video based education?
Yeah. I think that the ASC space I
mean, that's clearly, you know, to I'm in
Minnesota and to use a hockey analogy, that's
where the that's where the worst that's where
the puck is going, and that's where we're
that's where we're all skating.
You know, there there's some really some specific
needs in the ASC space that we could
obviously,
talk a lot about and and a lot
of your other podcasts have. But, clearly, operational
efficiency
is really what we're what we're going for.
We we need to reduce,
procedure cancellations and no
that's something that we're able to do.
We we wanna reduce callbacks. We want to
reduce the amount of time staff is spending
answering the same questions over and over again
and so forth. And and we've got data
that shows that that this type of content
can do that. Postoperative
outcomes, you know, a new study that was
just, completed at Penn State,
in the again, in the urology space, which
shows a five x reduction
in
post procedural unplanned visits for patients who are
receiving Vidscript before and at Vidscript videos from
their doctor before and after their procedure.
Those kinds of things,
have a significant impact on kind of operational
outcomes.
I think very specific to the ASC is
some work that we're doing with our partners
at at,
at J and J MedTech,
is really thinking about how can VIT scripts
impact things like the new requirements around OCAP
scores,
patient satisfaction metrics,
things like that. So we can build these
journeys and design these questions that these providers
are answering, and then we deliver those videos
to patients around.
For instance, in the OCAP surveys, there's a
number of questions about, did you receive adequate
information around anesthesia and things like that? And
so we make sure
that as we build these journeys,
we're addressing the things that appear in these
surveys
so that when the patient gets that survey,
they they very likely will have forgotten what
they learned at the point of care.
But when they're at home and they're with
a caregiver or a loved one and they're
calm and they're exploring this information in video
form from their own doctor, they're less likely
to forget that, and they're more likely to
be engaged.
And so we're really targeting some of those
patient satisfaction type
type metrics in the, in the ASC space
to make sure that
those practices are maximizing those scores and then
they obviously, what results from those scores. And
so so we're building these journeys
in in slightly different ways in the ASC
setting than we might in in in in
other settings. And we're we're very focused on
kind of what are the what are the
operational,
clinical, and financial outcomes that those practices are
looking for. And then we build patient engagement,
highly authentic
patient
patient engagement to make sure that we drive
to those outcomes.
Absolutely. Well, in the vein of of building
this product with ASCs in mind, John,
we have a lot of ASC leaders listening
in. Before we wrap up, anything else you
wanna share with them or any concluding thoughts
you you have for our listeners?
Yeah. So so, well, for one thing, I
mean, you know, if if if any of
them are interested, obviously, in what we do,
they're more than welcome to go to vidscrip.com
and and,
and learn about that. They're more than welcome
to email me at jbrownley@vidscrip.com.
There's no s on the end of that.
V I d s e r I p
dot com.
J Brownlee with two e's. I this is
what I do is interact with, with leaders
in these spaces and and make sure we
understand what their needs are.
The other thing they can do is they
can contact their J and J medtech
representative
in the orthopedic space, for instance, and,
and we actively work with them in the
ASC space,
to bring these programs, make sure that they're
delivering value for those practices. So so so
we're certainly interested in having conversations
and understanding how how the AC practices are
looking for to implementing,
you know, AI driven patient education,
what are all those things that are on
the table, and and how to make sure
that
with all those technologies,
you're leveraging
the authenticity of the of the expertise of
your clinicians
to really drive outcomes. So so we're very,
very interested in having those kinds of conversations,
of course.
Fantastic. Well, John, thank you so much for
taking the time to chat with me on
the podcast today and for sharing your insights
with our listeners. We really appreciate it. My
pleasure, Jacob. Thank you very much. I'd also
like to thank our podcast sponsor, Johnson and
Johnson MedTech. You can tune in to more
podcasts from Becker's Health Care by visiting our
podcast page at beckershospitalreview.com.