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“Absolutely, there are times when you need to be face-to-face with your patient. Yet looking at the broader picture, COVID-19 has shown us that in many instances, we can perform at an optimal level while remote. In my experience, I’m often able to see more patients, and the quality of the connections I form with them is higher when I don’t have to shuffle them around in an office. Aside from the bonds I’m able to create with my patients, I’m also more productive without the distractions of sitting in an office. Expanding the options that we as patients and providers have readily available to us is, in turn, making health care more efficient for all of us.”
Kirk Heath is a health care executive and can be reached on Twitter @ModioHealth.
He shares his story and discusses his KevinMD article, “Can medicine transcend beyond the clinic walls? I’d like to see us try.”
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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.
Transcript
Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show, we have Kirk Heath. He is a health care executive, and he wrote the KevinMD article “Can medicine transcend beyond the clinic walls? I’d like to see us try.” Welcome to the show.
Kirk Heath: Thanks. Great to be here, Kevin.
Kevin Pho: Thanks so much. But first off, can you just share your story and journey to where you are today?
Kirk Heath: Yeah, happy to. It’s been a great journey. I’m originally from the Philadelphia area, but now I live in Virginia Beach with my wife and three kids. I went to the University of North Carolina as a business major, but then somehow followed my passion and found my way into the medical field. I was an EMT at the time. I went to medical school and then surgical residency here in Virginia, and just fell in love with operating and health care and whatnot.
Interestingly, early in my career, maybe about five to seven years in, I was introduced to the ROI and the health care tech industry through the implementation of an EMR in our system. Our system is Sentara Healthcare, and thanks to the HITECH Act, we were sort of encouraged to put EHRs into our organization. Sentara did it pretty well. After doing that, I started a company that really did that across the country and helped other entities and really large organizations do it, and I fell right into it while practicing. I just fell in love with the efficiency and driving the ROI.
I did that while I was a full-time practitioner, which, like in the article, I’m not sure I recommend. But it did give me a really good experience in health care IT ROI and the business of medicine, which finally led to the creation of Modio in 2014, where I am the president now. We were acquired in 2019, and I actually dropped full-time practice probably a couple of years ago. I still cover in sort of what’s termed the gig economy. I hate putting that on physicians, but it’s sort of locums and what we call flex medicine. But yeah, that’s my story. It’s been a unique journey from college until now.
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Kevin Pho: So I’ve had several physician CEOs on this show, and I always like to ask them the same question. Tell me some of the challenges that you face moving from the clinical side into the CEO side. And has being a physician helped or hurt you in your role as a CEO?
Kirk Heath: Yeah, that is a wonderful question, and I love answering it. There are a lot of valuable lessons learned. One of the biggest ones: I sometimes tell folks that when I’m in a business meeting, I don’t put MD after my name and I don’t introduce myself as Dr. Heath, because sometimes it hurts. We are known as only knowing medicine. “You can’t possibly be good business people. Why don’t you stick to what you’re doing?” So I’ve learned over the years how to navigate that.
So there are times where I don’t lean on that, but there are other times where it’s extremely valuable as a subject matter expert, not only as a user of some software or as a clinician, but really understanding both sides of the coin, whether it’s product and engineering and the limitations we have when creating workflows, or just getting that buy-in. I love nothing better than sort of eavesdropping on a sales demo where they don’t know I’m a physician. You hear the conversation, and then our sales team would say, “Oh, this is Dr. Heath,” and everyone’s like, “Oh my gosh.” You get instant validity in some of these workflows. So it’s great. It provides a lot of transparency in the sales process. I say transparency and relevancy, like, “I understand your pain. I feel your pain. That’s why we started Modio.”
So from a lessons-learned standpoint, and has being a physician helped? I would say yeah, definitely. Overall, it’s been a wonderful education, obviously clinically, but also in this sense, in the business sense. That’s a completely different animal. I’ll leave it on this: When you have physicians who have an idea and want to start a business, it’s hard to do both. It’s hard to do both well, and I’d be the first to admit that if I’m trying to do so many hours being an executive and then so many hours, particularly as a surgeon, you got it. Most of the time, you have to pick one or the other if you want to be really good at it.
Kevin Pho: Now, you’ve successfully made that transition from clinical medicine into the CEO role, and I know a lot of physicians want to make a similar transition. What’s your single biggest piece of advice that you can give to those physicians?
Kirk Heath: Yeah, so in order to make that transition, understand what you’re getting into. I’ve got to tell you, I miss surgery. I miss operating. I miss that clinical touch. But it’s a trade. I also love, absolutely love, what I do now. So make sure it’s the change you want, and make sure you understand the work it takes to get there.
And also, if you make that transition, stay grounded. Just because we’re physicians and we’ve spent 20 years, some of us more in longer residencies, doesn’t mean that we can go into a business setting and be the king or queen in the room. It may not happen. Listen, pause, respond. Take that mentality. I’ve learned that lesson. I don’t want to say the hard way, but I’ve learned that lesson over the last 10 or 15 years of doing this.
Kevin Pho: All right, let’s transition into the KevinMD article that you wrote. It’s titled “Can medicine transcend beyond the clinic walls? I’d like to see us try.” Now, for those who didn’t get a chance to read your article, can you just walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it?
Kirk Heath: Yeah, fun article. It outlines, you know, COVID brought this up, and this has been big: gig economies, for those who don’t know what that is. That’s sort of temporary work, kind of all the time. I hate to say I was part of the gig economy, but as surgeons, all of us have something going on. We all have something we’re doing, whether it’s clinical research or expert witness work or another company that’s going on.
So COVID really brought to the forefront: Can we be efficient remote? Because we were forced to be remote. The company that acquired us has 3,000 employees. You know, in the middle of building another building, all of a sudden, “You guys are all going home.” And it’s a monumental effort to get there. So it’s really fascinating in the tech and sort of nonclinical realm. But in the clinical realm, can there be some way that we are efficient and we can do our jobs?
A lot of our daily activities are, yes, we want to be next to patients, and a lot of times we have to be. We have to touch them, particularly in surgery. But do we always have to? Well, we do, because that’s how we get reimbursed, right? And that’s such an antiquated statement. Look at telemedicine. We look at telemedicine as sort of just coming to the forefront. It’s been around for a little while. I can remember, I always tell the story of the rounding robot. For some clinicians, this was pioneered with urology, and I think it was InTouch Health out in California. When I was a resident, we had rounding robots that the urologists used to visit patients. Now, you had to have another clinician there.
And so I wrote the article really to provide another perspective on remote medicine in the clinical realm. And what a taboo topic: “How can you possibly sit at home and treat patients?” Your radiologists have been doing it for decades with PACS systems. So surgery, could we possibly do it? Can I tell if you have a wound infection at home? Maybe not. I probably need to see it. But can I see you after a post-op appendectomy? And then really driving to the limitations and benefits. I won’t get into, I will get into specifics, but that’s what the article outlines: What are the good, bad, and ugly of remote work in the clinical setting?
Kevin Pho: Yeah, so from your perspective, tell us some of the challenges that physicians face practicing remotely.
Kirk Heath: Yeah, so I break that into a few categories. What I mentioned before is, clinically, can we do a good clinical job remotely, right? And there are certain times you need to be in front of a patient, and there are certain times you don’t need to be. Mental health is a great one. It provides more access, if you’ve got access to the technology. Or I saw one, an urgent care, I can’t remember the organization, where you actually got into a booth, a public booth, and you had a visit. How awesome is that, to really be able to access care? So there’s great potential there in terms of access and actually physically being able to do it.
The struggles and some of the barriers we have are around, and it’s really what I do, credentialing, licensure, and privileging. It is such an archaic process that we go through now. Attorneys go through it; they have different laws, obviously, in different states. Medicine doesn’t vary from state to state, I’ll be the first to say that. It’s the same basic principles. Not to call out North Carolina, but in trying to get a North Carolina license, prior to COVID, we’re half a year, or six months, before I can get a license.
When COVID hit, there were some government regulations that said, “Hey, we’re going to expedite getting licensure.” And that brought to everyone’s life, “Hey, maybe there’s a better way to do this,” from a regulatory standpoint and from a technology standpoint. That’s where we come in, and really just common sense about licensure. Skip the business reasons why it’s separate. Skip the antiquated legal reasons from the ’60s why every state has a different licensure process. But it’s great to see new ground with the compact states that are allowing cross-state licensure and whatnot. There’s really no excuse for not doing that. So I think the article really tries to bring to the forefront that different perspective, that we need to push forward, because no one else is going to do it except us as clinicians.
Kevin Pho: So as the pandemic hopefully winds down, and I keep my fingers crossed on that, you’re seeing more and more physicians go away from remote and back to in person. So I guess my question is, what do you see as some of the lasting effects on remote care that the pandemic has brought on?
Kirk Heath: Yeah, I think the big one is the exclamation point on telemedicine, no question about it. I think it was already on the way. No, you would have convinced anyone. But not only, like I said before, the access to care, but think about even the protection of the provider. Imagine if you had remote capability into areas where there’s Ebola or another SARS virus or whatnot, and you don’t, look at everyone, all these guys putting themselves at risk going into some of these ICUs.
So I think that remote capability works well. Even, if you think about it, in intensive care units, what used to be the VISICU doctors, I think, was the name, where you’ve got the ICU docs monitoring 20 beds at night and doing a great job of doing it. So I think that’s some of the lasting things that will stay with us: We really can, clinically, there are some things we can do remote. And I think, really, from a satisfaction and living and quality-of-life standpoint, that may help with some of the pressures that our colleagues have been under in this grueling environment.
Kevin Pho: So now, from your perspective as the head of a technology company, what’s coming on the horizon in terms of remote care? What’s coming in the next couple of years?
Kirk Heath: Yeah, it’s funny. From being in technology, on my side, we’re pretty straightforward: credentialing, privileging, licensing. But I’ll talk about some of the other. Look at the remote robotic work that’s being done with the da Vinci and folks operating across the ocean or from an office. I think that’s really, really fascinating. And the telemedicine and the really progressive vision of some of the, I’ll call them, primary care and urgent care, you probably know the names of some around the country, of just their new technology approach to primary care. I mentioned one, which I can’t remember the name of, the sort of box. But there are some in California and across the country where it’s even electronic scheduling, even making sure that when I get there, I’m going to be there on time and the provider is going to be on time, instead of, “Yeah, just show up at this time and we’ll.” Those groups that adopt that, and those health systems that adopt that, are going to be the ones that succeed financially and also with patient care and patient experience, because that’s such an important aspect. So I see that coming down the horizon.
What I want to see, obviously, since it’s in my area, whether it’s our company or one of our awesome colleague competitors, is really streamlining the credentialing process. Why does it take 90 to 100 days to get me privileged into a hospital? I can tell you, but it will take me another 20 minutes. But let’s figure out better ways to do it, by better data management, things like that. So I think technology, obviously, and I’m a big believer, is assisting in our process.
Kevin Pho: Now, in terms of licensing, is there any movement towards, say, a national license?
Kirk Heath: Yeah, so that’s the compact initiative. And so there’s a fair number of states, and I’m sorry, I don’t know the number, but it’s growing, where you get one license in one state, and instead of the, I mean, it is 90 to 120 days before COVID, and some of the licensure is like six months. But with these compact states, it’s a much shorter application. The due diligence has been done on the provider. And I’ve got to tell you, the plug for these is that the reason it was done is the right thing. We want to make sure we’re providing providers who are safe and have demonstrated to be safe, right? I don’t want to skip the line in doing that. But there’s definitely progress in doing that.
I think, again, COVID and the legislation that came out of the previous administration, where they expedited that to, look, “Let’s skip all this. Let’s get our needed providers in, even in our own hospital. Let’s get them in there.” There’s definitely a way to do it, and it’s definitely coming down the pipe.
Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Kirk Heath. He’s a health care executive, and he wrote the KevinMD article “Can medicine transcend beyond the clinic walls? I’d like to see us try.” Kirk, what are some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?
Kirk Heath: Yeah, and you know, I love my colleagues tremendously. Like I said, I do miss practicing, but health care is such a fascinating industry, on the clinical side, the tech side, and the business side. And I think what I’ll leave with is really: Don’t be afraid of new or different perspectives. I’ve learned that from an early age, and I think it’s been a strength. You know, it isn’t a political stance, but we may not agree. There’s value in every perspective, and whether it’s political, health care, vaccine, or everyday life, I just value the power of that different perspective, because all of us live in a little bit different light. But we’ve got to come together and do it. And I think in health care, in starting a company, and in tech, it will only improve your chances of success in delivering your message.
Kevin Pho: Thank you so much for sharing your time and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.
Kirk Heath: You’re welcome.
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