Embracing Opportunities and Being Prepared: Lessons from Dr. Lyle Berkowitz

Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices podcast, where we chat digital transformation challenges and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now, your host, Ed Marx.

Hey, it's Ed. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. Thank you so much for listening. I know there's so much great content out there. I listen to a lot of different podcasts. And you've chosen to spend time with us and we're going to make it worth your while because I have Dr. Lyle Berkowitz as our guest. Lyle, welcome to Digital Voices.

Hey, thanks, Ed. Looking forward to it.

Yeah, this is super fun because you and I go way back. We couldn't really figure out how long. Uh, we probably don't want to know really how long, but we've, we've interacted, known each other, Facebook friends for many, many years. So I, I'm guessing probably 20 years. What do you think?

Yeah, it's funny, right? The industry makes a lot of, uh, interesting connections over the years. And I always, I tell my son, right, you know, the people you're going to meet now in your 20s, you don't know what's going to happen, but be assured some of them will pop up in and out of your life for years.

Yeah. So treat everyone with kindness. So the most important question, Lyle, that we ask every guest is what are the songs on your playlist? So like when you have downtime, what do you like to jam to?

So, you know, and I, this may come up later. I don't do a lot of downtime, you know, so I, you know, I'm old school. I like, you know, my Billy Joel, Simon and Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, the Stones, Bowie, you know, some alt rock like Green Day, et cetera. And, you know, I'll listen to whatever's popular on there, but I am, I am not a music head. So not, uh, Uh, so not as great an answer as some will probably give you.

However, I know it's not related directly to music, but I know that you've spent many years as a physician consultant to a wide variety of movie and television theatrical productions. That's super interesting. Tell us a little bit about that.

I'll make it even more fun. My dad was a primary care doctor in Chicago. did it for 25 years and passed it on to me. So I was going to movie sets as a kid with him. Together, we took care of most of the major movies and TV shows in Chicago for 50 years.

Wow.

So we have a lot of stories. So we would get, you know, they would come to our office, we would get called to the set. Um, and, uh, yeah, lots of stories I can't talk about, but absolutely fun. I've always loved the movies. Uh, TV, et cetera. So it's been fun. I, I, my dad had me act as an extra. He, he set that up when I was a kid. So I've seen it from all sides. It's much more fun to be the doctor walking in. They, you know, you have this prominence on set when you walk in with your little doctor bag, uh, half the time just giving vitamin B12 shots, but sometimes really helping save the day now and then for a sick actor, director, et cetera.

Yeah, that is so cool. Yeah, someday offline, you'll have to regale us with some super interesting stories. What about your life message and mantra? I know you have a website and I saw a lot of great quotes and messages on your website, but what's one that really helps kind of drive who you are?

I love a good quote. I've got a couple, but one certainly I'll often give out is chance favors a prepared mind. A lot of people say, oh, you know, you got lucky or this happened same time, but people often don't fully embrace how important luck is and timing. And a lot of people work hard. Why do some people succeed? Sometimes it's just, it's, it's a combination of things, but it is, I love, and this was a Louis Pasteur quote, chance favors a prepared mind. We all have luck coming and universe conspiring every single day.

Yeah.

But if you're not prepared to accept it, embrace it, and take advantage of it, it's going to pass you by. And so when people say, I don't have luck, I'm like, you probably had it, but did, were you prepared for it? And did you take advantage of it?

Yeah, that, that's true. That's a good, that's a good mantra and words to live by. Tell us a little bit, and we already broke the, you know, one of the headline stories about you and your dad and working on movie sets and things like that. But tell us more about your personal story, both personal and professional. You can start as young as you want and take us all the way to present day.

Yeah, so son of a doctor, right? So I grew up in and out of the hospital and, you know, just understanding that type of thing. I always thought I wanted to be a doctor, but I also had a bit of a technical mind. I was a kid, I loved computers, trained on BASIC and Fortran, did programming. Yeah, I was, I was at the right time. Punch cards were over. I didn't have to do punch cards. I could, I had a personal computer and one of the early computers that I was able to buy, high school computer programming. So I actually became an engineer, a biomedical engineer. I honestly thought I was going to create the next Bionic Man. I love that TV show. And I was like, I'm going to learn electrical and biomedical engineering. And be a doctor and like build the bionic man. Turned out I was not great at mechanical and electrical engineering, but I was really good at computer engineering. Um, and I had a minor in chemical engineering, which is really a lot of math, et cetera. And we all did computers and, you know, had a second where I thought I might go into pure engineering, but knew I wanted to go to med school. Wasn't sure what I'd do. In, in my final year of undergrad, I worked for a doctor who was doing what was sort of early medical informatics stuff. This is in the '80s. And he introduced me, as often luck will have it, to someone at the med school I was going to, University of Illinois. I was at Penn undergrad, University of Illinois med school. And he said, oh, meet this guy, Arthur Elstein. He's a PhD, but he's into medical informatics, which I had no idea what that meant. But all of a sudden, 1988. I'm his research associate and he becomes my mentor, teaches me about the science of decision-making, use of computers, gave me a lot of leeway to do a lot of stuff. And so I'm learning, um, doing research for him and recognized this is my career. I knew early in my life in med school, I wanted to be somebody who could be a doctor, but could also apply technology and computers into medicine. And in the late '80s, early '90s, like that was considered foolish. Um, but I knew that's what I wanted to do. So it was easy enough. Um, and I did my residency at Northwestern in internal medicine, primary care, joined a group there. I said, can I be the director of IT? It's 1995. And my, my mentor friend, you know, Dr. Coben said, why would you want to do that? He's the chief medical officer of the group. And I said, I think it'll be important. And he goes, fine, Lyle, you can have 20% of your time to do that. Tech stuff, maybe we'll need it. Um, and I learned all about physician adoption by actually convincing my doctors, uh, to get a computer just to use email and other stuff. But I started studying electronic medical records and I went to, uh, some dinner, um, by some EMR company. And by the end of the dinner, I'd asked so many questions. They said, do you want to be our chief medical officer? So, right? Chance favors a prepared mind. I'm like, sure. What does that mean? That was really important. Because all of a sudden I'm doing that part-time, practicing part-time. I'm learning about, you know, what is, you know, what it is to be, it's a publicly traded company, learning about what that means from a business perspective. I'm learning about project management and all of these interesting things really early on. And that went on. Then I wound up working in another company as chief medical officer. So during my course at Northwestern, I was a physician who on the side did a variety of business jobs. And eventually as an executive at Northwestern, I did director of IT. I rolled out EMRs, first Cerner, then Epic. And then I spent about a decade doing that, another decade setting up our innovation department, really learning about innovation nationally in healthcare. I wound up writing a book about that on the intersection of IT and innovation in healthcare. Uh, with a good friend of mine and a mentor of mine, Chris McCarthy. Uh, and I just was an advisor and sort of starting companies. I started HealthThings based on some ideas I had, um, uh, as a refill automation company, a workflow automation company. I started a bunch of other companies that didn't work.

Yeah.

Um, advised a bunch of other companies, became the board member for OneView, which was a publicly traded company. So I just, I had a fun, varied career. I left all that at the end of 2017 and joined MDLive, one of the big telehealth companies. Really was the first time I had a single job focused as chief medical officer over operations, but also EVP over product and strategy and learn, learn, learn as we scaled. Sold that to Cigna eventually, sold HealthFinch to Catalyst. Started just investing, became an investor for a little while, a consultant, but As we'll hear later, wound up starting Key Care in partnership with Epic as during COVID a clear new idea, old idea combined together to say, what if we created a telehealth company but built it on the infrastructure that a majority of health systems use rather than start from scratch?

Yeah, that's an amazing career. That's why I've always liked you. I've always loved our interactions. You always like create so creative and energetic and passionate.

Well, one, I can't keep a job and two, I just keep stumbling into stuff. And again, chance favors a prepared mind. I've been lucky, Ed, and I've had some great mentors and great people who've helped me along the way, like we all have.

Yeah, no doubt about that. What would you say out of all those roles, and maybe there's one that you didn't mention, maybe when you were a teen, I don't know, but what's been the most informative? Like, I know it's hard to pick one because you've had such a great career thus far, but what would be one that you'd think that really helped me, you know, took me to the next level?

I mean, as a doctor, right, your 3rd year of medical school, you go from dry book knowledge to taking care of patients. And so much of who I am and what I am is about that year is the most intense year of anyone's life. Um, we don't talk about much, but that is the year where you literally start taking care of patients and you learn so much.

Yeah.

You see so much. And not only did I learn as a doctor, but as an innovator, because I often question stuff. I'm an engineer and we're always asking, how can it be done better? And what I learned early on was some doctors, senior doctors really appreciated that. Wow, that's a really good question. Let's think about that. Maybe we could do it better, et cetera, and encourage that. Others were like, shut up, you're being stupid. We do it this way. Don't ask, don't question. And, you know, it's a tough world out there and innovation is really hard. And I knew one of the other sort of mantras I tell my kids, I tell people is you can't please all the people all the time. If you're going to be an innovator, if you don't piss people off at some point, you're not doing your job. You're not, you know, if you don't make mistakes, upset people, you are not doing a good enough job of pushing the boundaries. And I learned that early on then from a business perspective. I think my first job, my first role as chief medical officer at this advanced health company, I had a great mentor, a guy named Rob Allinger, who's still a friend, teach me about the ways of business. And I think those 2 things combined and really, I was young enough as a doctor to challenge, why don't we do it this way? And that stuck with me. Why don't we just make technology make our lives easier as physicians? And that will eventually make life better for patients as well. And it's really much of the mantra of how I design Yeah, I love that.

Those are 2 super important things, Lyle, and I just want to call them out. But you challenge the status quo and you can't please everyone because then you won't fulfill what you've been called to do. Those are my words, but you've got to be sort of a little bit of a rebellious spirit in order to really move things forward. So that's what I appreciate about you and how you've done so much for the, for, for healthcare and the tech side of it, bringing together all that engineering and tech understanding and the physician component. Yeah, let's jump into Key Care. So, so interesting. Share the Key Care story. So for those who don't know, tell us about Key Care, how it started and what you're doing, what it does.

Yeah. So, yeah, Key Care is a national telehealth group. Company that works on Epic. So imagine if you had a national medical group, primary care medical group, that's all virtual. And we use Epic. And we are optimized not just for doing virtual care, but for doing it in coordination with our nation's health system. So we look at ourselves as we're building up a tech-enabled virtual care team. We have our own instance of Epic, and that allows us To therefore connect to all the other instances of Epic. Epic, as you know, is 60% of health systems are on Epic. 75% of patients have some data on Epic. So when we see a patient, a lot of times it's in partnership with a health system. We are partners with them. We're co-managing those patients. They're sending the patients to us. We do 24/7, 50-state urgent care. So we can see that patient. We have all their data from the health system. We take care of the patient and then we send it back with all the data back. It's a higher quality experience. It's a more seamless experience for patients and the doctors, the officeologists, the doctors in the health system who are in their offices, they get to share in all the data. Um, we started with urgent care. We're expanding, uh, doing primary care. And then we are partnering with other specialty care groups. to also sit on our instance of Epic to support the health systems in particular. And the result is we've now taken care of patients in all 50 states. We have helped health systems improve access because that's our core purpose of being is to improve access to healthcare, but to do it in a coordinated way with health systems. And a lot of times, I'll suggest we are not really a telehealth company. We don't sell telehealth. We sell access to this tech-enabled virtual care team. And I look at us as a population health enablement team. We help you, health system, manage your population. And we focus on doing highly efficient online work for the routine patients that are often what I call the triple R threat that are overwhelming our doctors. Routine, repeatable, rules-based care. Doctors love acronyms. So that's my RRR. And I'm like, what if we could shift some of those online? Because you health system, you lose money taking care of those patients. They're not high value. They're just quick visits. We'll do it online. Patients prefer that much of the time for their routine issues, as long as they know they can get in for the more complex issues. So we are a, you know, a physician amplifier in that we build teams. The concept of population health. of team-based care. That is not new. We're simply enabling it in a way that we can execute in a scalable fashion and provide an option for health systems who want to be able to provide more access, but don't necessarily want to do it all themselves because they've got better things to work on.

No, I love this. And as you said earlier, chance favors prepared minds. So you had this experience working with an EMR company. Long ago, then MDLive. And so you're able to take all this knowledge and experience and help create something new. I think you were talking earlier about, you know, sort of the old melding the old with the new and creating something that helps people. So yeah, it's awesome.

It is. It's my health system experience, my Epic experience, my national telehealth experience, my startup experience. And none of it matters except for one thing, COVID. None of it would have mattered.

Yeah.

Not for COVID. All of a sudden making telehealth, particularly at health systems, extremely important, viable. And as they say, genie's out of the bottle. All of a sudden patients realize, well, this actually makes sense to do virtual care for routine stuff. And health systems and doctors realize this, this actually does make sense. But now that we're getting past COVID, the office-based doctors, the officiologists, as I call them, They are getting back to just doing office care. So some people would say, oh, we're seeing telehealth go away. Volumes are going down. I'm like, no, volumes are going down because doctors in the office don't want to do it anymore. Because quite honestly, they're optimized in the office to do it. It's a cognitive dissonance to do a bunch of different types of care. Virtualists are the new wave of types of doctors, just like hospitalists rose in the '90s.

Yeah.

We're seeing virtualists now. And the idea is, again, without COVID, I would not have even thought about starting this company. And with COVID though, an opportunity presented itself. And the fact is also Epic, yeah, yeah, is become the mainstay. 10 years ago, Epic wasn't as wide, but now it is. Also in the past 10 years, Epic built out the interoperability because to To Epic, it was really important that if a patient is seen in one Epic instance and goes to another, that all the data is shared. They created Care Everywhere, their data interoperability schema that is, you know, I think, if I recall, they exchange 15 million records a day. And they've furthermore built what we'll call workflow interoperability tools that allow, for example, cross-instance scheduling. They can use direct messaging and other things to allow us to order within different systems, to do referrals across systems. They've really built up these tools to allow 2 Epic instances to talk and work with each other. Let's face it, most health systems don't want to do that necessarily with each other. We become the independent Switzerland that can help health systems in a way that doesn't feel competitive because we have no physical space. Yeah.

And it's the best thing for the patient and the clinician. So, no, that's awesome. And you mentioned Epic a couple times, so that's sort of a unique thing as well. I think you're probably a pioneer perhaps in developing the kind of partnership that you have. So how did that come about?

Well, like a lot of things, it's about relationships, um, and trust. Um, yeah, I, you know, At Northwestern, I helped roll out Epic to our primary care group, you know, and so spent time with them there. When we built HealthThings, you know, we initially had a little conflict and I sat down instead of saying, oh no, Epic's, you know, going to do something similar. I sat down and I said, well, how do we help each other? We both want the same thing. How can we work together? And Epic said, great, this is how we can work together. You focus on this, we'll focus on this. And Yeah, I was also promoting this concept of an app. By that time, HealthFinch had won best app award on Allscripts, on Athena, and Epic was coming up with their App Orchard idea. So we said, why don't we make this the prototype of what it should be like? We became one of the first apps. You know, we were based out of Madison. My, my co-founder, John Barron, was CEO. He worked with them and we became one of the first apps on their App Orchard. And again, we learned how to trust. We had common goals.

Yeah.

Which was to make life easier for doctors and better for patients at the same time by automating routine repeatable workflow. So that became a very successful project. And then after I was done with, you know, with my other companies before, I told Epic, I said, hey, we got a national emergency. What can I help you with? I just went to them with open arms and say, how can I help you understand virtual care telehealth better? I'm here just as a servant because this is a national crisis and you guys are out there, you know, building up your telehealth system. And one thing led to another and we said, well, yeah, it would make sense to, you know, have a medical group that was on Epic doing telehealth using all of these things. And I just, I knew how it would all work. And I said, well, do you want me to advise you on doing it? Or, you know, and yeah, they're like, well, we're a tech company, you know, we don't do services. Mm-hmm. And I said, well, will you let me do it? You know, where I buy my own instance and I have to raise money and all this stuff. And they, you know, it wasn't overnight, but, you know, we sat down and said, well, this makes sense. We have a common goal. We want to see improved access via virtual care at the health systems where all the data is, because to see patients go to these isolated telehealth vendors to get care done with no coordination with the health system. It's just not good care. And I'm a health system guy and, you know, I'm a tech guy. And so it just all made sense. And it was as simple as that.

No, that's awesome. Before we sort of dive into leadership, Lyle, because obviously you're a great leader, can you share maybe just one story of, of a patient or a clinician success, you know, using KeyCare?

Um, yeah, so, you know, we've got a couple of great stories. Our friends at WellSpan. You know, Hal Baker perhaps is a physician and the chief digital officer at WellSpan, one of our earliest clients and users. What they have done is partnered with us so that we can provide this 24/7 virtual urgent care. They furthermore, we actually work with them to credential our providers into their system. So we assign the billing. So all the patients that we see can be billed by the health system. Because we're working so collaboratively together, and so we've made not only access to care, but we've made it affordable, and we've started replicating that with other health systems. Similarly, at Memorial Health System down in in Florida, one of the first things they wanted to focus on was their employees and sponsoring care for their employees because they know that whereas whereas with WellSpan it was about increasing capacity. Increasing the funnel, the more patients you take care of, the better. At Memorial, the employees, they were self-insured for, so they knew anything that could decrease ER visits and office visits by gaining appropriate virtual care was going to save them money, decrease lost workdays, et cetera. And so both are great examples of how we created not only access, but affordable access. And it had benefits in a variety of different ways.

Yeah, those are amazing examples. Yeah, so let's switch to leadership. So you mentioned when you were telling us your story that you've been part of many startups, including KeyCare, and some didn't work, some worked. So what's your single best piece of advice for an aspiring inventor or someone who's trying to do a startup?

Well, to really understand Incentive alignment. Um, I, when I was sitting as the, you know, a leader in innovation at Northwestern and a new startup would come to me, I would, the first thing I'd say is answer 3 questions. One, who has to literally use you? Does a doctor have to use you? Spend a minute. Is it nurses automatic? 2, who pays for it? Um, you know, is it the payer? Is it the doctor? Who pays for it? And 3, who benefits from it financially? And then show me how those things are aligned. And it is shocking how often they would come and they say, oh, well, it just takes the doctor an extra minute. Oh, and you have the doctor pay for it and the patient benefits. Like, well, who financially benefits? Well, the payer would benefit. I'm like, how does that align? And they're like, you know, there's 25-year-old kids who invent some cool tech and they're like, um, well, but it's just the right thing to do. Uh, you know, if this was available You know, my aunt would, you know, would have had a better experience. I'm like, this is not how the world works.

Yeah.

Um, healthcare is hard. There, it's a multi-pronged system. And if you don't understand how to align the right thing, uh, with financial incentive, you're not going to get adoption. And if you're going to ask a doctor to spend a minute extra when they have limited time, um, and they don't have a huge benefit from that, that's, that's a problem. I always worked on how do I take time off the plate? So HealthThings saved the doctor 30 minutes a day. Yeah. That, you know, the doctor will pay for that.

Yeah.

Um, Key Care ideally is making, you know, not just making money for a health system, but is taking what I'll, I'll call this routine work off of a doctor's plate. Um, we are going to talk at some point about physician incentives because that becomes an issue. Um, so right now we're really well aligned with the health systems and/or the payers, and they're the ones who'd be paying for it. But to get wide adoption, physician adoption, you have to make it easy to do the right thing and you have to make sure incentives are aligned.

Yeah, those are, those are good, good 3 questions. And you mentioned a couple times, Lyle, that your success has been predicated on building great teams. What's the single most important criteria you might look at in a potential team member?

You know, I, we have a couple of behaviors, you know, that I look at. I think, you know, the common answer for a startup is often grit, right? You know, that nothing's going to stop. I mean, having the passion and grit to just keep moving forward. Um, my, one of my innovation mentors, a guy named Peter Salozi, was a patient of mine, um, you know, who, um, really inspired me. He would often say, don't tell me what you can't do. And what I find is when I hire people who come out of health systems or large corporate jobs and they say, oh, I want to be in a startup. I love startup. I've always feel like I'm constrained. And yet they come in and they can't help themselves. Yeah. They, they focus on what they can't do. I can't do this. They won't do that. This, and like, don't tell me what I can't do.

Yeah.

Show me that, you know, the stuff, tell me what it will take. I'd rather you come, you know, with 100 crazy ideas than 100 reasons why you can't do something.

Right.

Yeah. Yeah, that's good. And so, yeah, it's just, it is. And it's really hard because people, they believe in them. They believe in themselves that the start, you know, they, they see a TV show and they think that startups are all fun and donuts and everything. They don't understand it is up and down every single day, every single day. Something great happens and something horrible happens almost every day. And you got to have the grit to just say, I've got my mission, I got my passion, I'm just going to keep moving forward and I'm going to continually figure out how to problem solve this.

So people listening are probably like, okay, family man, entrepreneur, startup physician, how do you integrate your life? How do you get downtime? We touched on it in the very beginning. What do you do to rest or where do you get replenished?

So the good thing, Ed, is I'm a workaholic. Yeah, it's funny because, oh yeah, work-life balance. Fuck it. I don't have work-life balance. I work. I love work. That's how you're going to succeed. You got to work hard. And yeah, I, yeah, it's wonderful to see these people. Oh, I run marathons and read books. I'm sorry. I can't do that right now. Maybe someday. With that said, do I love to golf? Yes. Do I like, you know, will I do downtime? Yeah, I usually do this. I work all day till about, you know, 5 or 6. Then, you know, I take a break, dinner, maybe go out, maybe do something, um, refresh, maybe watch TV, go for a walk, et cetera. Um, and then I'm back at it about 11 o'clock at night. Yeah, I've got, you know, for whatever reason, my, my energy's high then.

Yeah.

You know, I don't, I, I'm not an early riser. Yeah, I'll get up at, you know, 7 or 8, but I, I do not, I'm not one of those guys who gets up at 4:30 and You know, I know you run, I mean, you do some crazy stuff and good for you. I am such, I, I don't feel like I work. I am having the best time of my life. I love everything I've done. If I don't like it, I quit. Yeah, I can't say quit, but I changed my job. I changed my job about every 5 years. That is my refresh. With that said, I wish, wish, wish I had taken some more time off. I wish my health system had said, wow, after 5 years, take a month off, go refresh.

Yeah.

And the constant grind. I'm fortunate I like it, but a good vacation now and then makes a world of difference to me. I probably should exercise more, et cetera, but I don't, I don't like it. I love working, so I just keep going to that.

Yeah. No, that's good. They, that's what they say. I'm going to get the quote wrong, but you know, you never, if you enjoy what you're doing, you never work a day in your life or something like that. But I'm the same way. I love, I love what I do. I love, I always have. And so I love working. I never felt like I was like overburdened or anything. Lyle, this has been fantastic. We covered so much ground in 30, in less than 30 minutes. And it's great to get to know about you and some of the fun things about your life, you know, with all the movies and things that you helped out in Chicago there. And then just your whole education process and your thought process about discovering ultimately what you want to be. And then we talked a lot about your career because I think that's Super helpful, uh, to everyone listening. And then Key Care, uh, learned a lot about Key Care and, and the partnership with Epic. And we talk about leadership. Uh, I think your 3 questions are great for any startup, uh, and talk about teams and inspiration, all sorts of stuff. What did we miss, or is there anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.

You know, um, I think we, yeah. Let's step back. We need to rethink, redesign primary care. I exist in this world because at 20 years old, I read some book or something that said, hey, if you want to be happy for the rest of your life and your career, pick a goal that you'll probably never truly achieve. Um, because most of the fun is going after it. And that goal was improving healthcare as a whole. And it was a good one because we're never going to really achieve it. But I am a strong proponent of primary care redesign. And not crazy stuff. My, yeah, it is all again, pop health, team-based care. What I find is though, people, I think mistakenly look at value-based care and say, well, I have, I can only pay my doctors a value-based way if we make money in a value-based way. And I'm really, I'm working on a paper right now to talk about, we have to rethink how we pay doctors, primary or physician compensation redesign. I, for whatever reason, I've always been on every physician comp committee in whatever job I've been in. And I think if you, again, incentives matter whether you think they do or not. That's my MBA in a bottle.

Yeah.

And I want to see what happens if you pay physicians to manage a population. I don't care if they're making, if they're getting paid fee for service or your health system's fee for service, you can pay physicians how you want. And if you can pay them to manage a population and give them a team, and what I want to do is give them this tech-enabled team. I think right now we say that a typical PCP can see maybe 2,000 patients max. That's typical. And by the way, they do a lousy job. Studies show 50% patients get about 50% recommended care. So then they're like, oh, let's just do concierge care and everyone see 500. I'm like, that's How does that make any sense in a world where we don't have enough doctors with that system?

Yeah.

We have to figure out, we're going to fix this system, that how does a single doctor manage 5,000 patients and do it in a way where their life's actually easier? And that's where, what I'm focused on, technology and team-based care. How do we get someone instead of seeing me, Dr. Berkowitz, all the time? Um, how do we say you're going to see Dr. Berkowitz's team? Um, and I've done a little of that and patients love it. They're like, great. Your team will take care of the easy stuff, but when I really need Dr. Berkowitz, I can see him. And if we can pay the doctors based on the panel size, which I've been involved in that, uh, when I, in the '90s when we did capitated care, all of a sudden I'm much more amenable to sharing the care with the team, doing more virtual care, et cetera. So we have a, we, I often will say we don't have a shortage of physicians. We have a shortage of use in those patients. And when I look at technologies that say, hey, we're going to help you see one extra patient a day and therefore pay for ourselves, I'm like, that's nonsense. That is what's driving doctors into burnout. We need to go to doctors and say, hey, instead of seeing 25 patients today, you're going to see 12 patients today, but they're the ones who really need you. And your team is going to manage 50 patients a day.

Yeah.

Um, and, and the easy stuff and they'll escalate to you when needed. We have to rethink how we take care of patients. And it's not rocket science. I'm trying my best. This is my last hurrah to do it. Um, and, uh, if I can do it, I'll at least, I'll feel like I've, I've completed my arc of doing the best I can to make the health system better. And because sooner or later I'm going to need it, uh, since I have no work-life balance. But that's my final thing is we remember we don't have a shortage of physicians. Stop listening to people say that. We have a shortage of using them efficiently. We have to, we have a problem we can solve.

Yeah.

And it's not going to be by making it. It's like saying, let's make more, uh, uh, bank tellers, uh, because we don't have enough ATMs. It doesn't make any sense.

Yeah. No, that's, that's a great way to end this episode. Uh, Lyle, it's been a pleasure just, uh, catching up with you and having you As a guest on our show. Thank you.

Thank you, and thanks for all you're doing. I, you know, I've, I've always been inspired by you on a number of different levels and, uh, appreciate the, uh, discussion and talk, etc. And, um, look forward to seeing you, I'm sure, in the near future.

Yeah, in person. And that wraps up another edition of Digital Voices.

Thank you for listening to Digital Voices podcast with Ed Marx. If you If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review. And most importantly, thanks again for listening.