The following interview is a conversation we had with Samson Magid, Co-Founder and CEO of HealthSnap, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $12 Million Raised to Build the Future of Remote Patient Monitoring.

 

Samson Magid
Thank you for having me, Brett. It’s a pleasure. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building there at HealthSnap, please just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background. 

Samson Magid
Sure, absolutely. So I’m based in Miami, Florida. I am a former New York native. I’ve been in South Florida for about twelve years. I went to University of Miami for undergraduate and graduate school, and my background is in exercise science and nutrition. So I have a bachelor’s degree in exercise science, a master’s degree in nutrition, and my biggest passion in life is helping people live healthier, chronic, disease free lives. And that’s something that I was very passionate about growing up as well, being a former athlete. And I try my best still today to be an athlete, but that’s certainly something that I’m still very passionate about. And science and medicine was something that I was always interested in growing up as well. 

Brett
Nice. Take us through a typical day for you from a health perspective. Are you like Brian Johnson status where you’re just a freak eating these I don’t know what you’d call his meals. Have you followed him at all? 

Samson Magid
I have. 

Brett
I still want to tell how Brian Johnson are you? 

Samson Magid
Well, I’m definitely not eating testicles or liver every day for my breakfast, so not on that level. But I definitely take care of myself as best I can, giving the trenches of entrepreneurship. But, yeah, I actually got introduced to about a year ago from my Co-Founder and were laughing about it, but still follow him. I’d say that nutrition is definitely something that keeps me going. I think taking care of yourself and kind of getting away from the hustle culture is something that I try to make sure I do, otherwise you just won’t make it. Certainly taking on the approach of this is a marathon and not a sprint, and certainly something that we have seen over the years on our end. 

Brett
Yeah, absolutely. And two questions we like to ask now just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder and entrepreneur. First one is what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them. 

Samson Magid
I read a book about three years ago and I was, like, just starting to get some initial traction here. And it was Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. Phil Knight is someone that I look up to and something that resonated with me initially was like, there’s no one else that’s going to do it. It’s all on you. His ability to create demand out of nothing and traction. And just similarly, what I just talked about, he spent decades building Nike into what it is today and people don’t really realize that or know that story. So it was extremely inspiring for me to hear the early, humble beginnings of Nike, him selling shoes out of the back of his car. And he’s definitely someone that I look up to as a CEO that built one of the largest companies in the world that I also am a large consumer of as well. 

Brett
Nice. That’s such a good call out. I think it’s easy to look at the tech entrepreneurs and the tech founders today and be inspired by them, but it’s really fun going to non tech entrepreneurs and studying what they did. And, yeah, I read that book a few years ago and it’s such an amazing story of just hustle and pain that guy had to go through that I think tech founders maybe don’t have to go through those types of challenges these days. Absolutely. 

Samson Magid
I mean, he started Nike back in the 80s when venture capital was scarce and he self backed it. And I think we’ve fallen into a trap. And we’ve seen the results of that in the last 1215 months in the market today of what too much capital can do and not really recognizing that sustainability and people first is one of the leading ethos of building. A successful company that’s built to last not for one, three, or five years or an exit, but for decades beyond and building a larger vision and mission of the company beyond just kind of shareholder return in a short period of time. 

Brett
Yeah, sometimes I wonder what these, like, OG entrepreneurs must think when they read the headlines and tech crunch about companies getting these insane valuations with no revenue. It must just give them a heart attack when they reflect back on their early stages of their companies. 

Samson Magid
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I’m sure they’re banging their heads against the desk and want to probably choke someone through the screen when they see every one of those headlines. And then I’m sure they’re saying, Told you so, when you see the other flip side of it, when people are getting unfortunately laid off and companies are doing the reverse of what should be happening right now. So, yeah, couldn’t agree more. 

Brett
Yeah, absolutely. Nice. Cool. Let’s switch gears here and let’s dive into HealthSnap. So can you give us just the origin story to start with? 

Samson Magid
Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll give you the kind of longer version since this is something that’s very near and dear to my heart and I think that’s so important when building a business and starting a company. Most importantly, it’s what’s your why. My lifelong dream was to actually go into medicine. So I was premed as an undergraduate. That was something that growing up, I always wanted to get into medicine. And a passion of mine, like I said, was helping people and understanding the science behind the latest and greatest to actually make people live healthier and disease free lives. So I was premed studying exercise physiology. And what I found, and most people, when they hear exercise physiology, is more like personal training. And what I found is that were actually in our program, 90% pre med students, and were learning about the etiology of chronic conditions. 

Samson Magid
So how does diabetes form in the body and how does diet, lifestyle, behavior impact it? How does high blood pressure form in the body? How does heart disease get developed? Cancer, obesity, and all the pathways associated with all those chronic conditions. And I fell in love with that space. So naturally, my best friend, who was the same major in premed as me and our professor back in 2012, we started a research initiative on supporting the University of Miami employees that had high risk chronic conditions like the ones I just mentioned, monitor and manage their care while they’re home. And we would give them personalized care plans and behavioral change programs and recommendations about their lifestyle, foods to eat, foods to avoid activity, personalized to their age and gender and specific goals. And it was a wildly successful program. We spent three years working with over 3000 employees. 

Samson Magid
We collected a tremendous amount of data and built really robust algorithms that are actually still used today in some capacity at HealthSnap. And flash forward towards the end of that research, I’m ready to go to medical school. I did my cat set to go and in 2015, unfortunately, my grandfather passed away. He was someone that I looked up to, he was my idol and someone that was a mentor of me growing up. And he unfortunately was diagnosed with heart failure in his late 40s, which is really young, but it’s not unique to him. He was diagnosed with type two diabetes in his early 60s, had another heart attack in his seventy s, and towards like the last couple of years of his life, when I was actually doing my research, I got a really firsthand behind the scenes glimpse at how our healthcare system as a whole in the entire country is just literally not designed for remote, chronic disease management personalized to the patient itself, depending on their condition, state, their diseases, et cetera. 

Samson Magid
And then I saw kind of the research and the impact were having where were delivering personalized medicine at scale, what we call always on health care, whether they were in the physical bricks and mortar clinic or at home or somewhere in between. We were always available to help them, and they were always in the know about their care plan and what they needed to do to stay healthy based on their condition. And I just saw a much bigger opportunity. So I made the difficult decision to forego medical school last minute. I somehow convinced my best friend to join me on this crazy journey as well, and we decided to take kind of the findings of our research and spin it off into what HealthSnap is today. 

Brett
How’d your parents feel about that decision? I feel like parents would push back on you going into entrepreneurship and skipping med school. Typically. 

Samson Magid
I’m extremely grateful. My parents, they support me and what I want to do. Obviously, when you invest five years of your life to studying medicine set to go to medical school, and it’s something that you grew up wanting to do, it’s certainly a difficult decision. But I think they’ve always taken the stance of, like, if you feel like it’s right for you, we trust you’re going to do what’s best for you, and if you f*** up and it wasn’t the right move, then you’ll learn from it, and medical school is not going away. And that was the conversation we had, and it’s very true that’s not going away, but you kind of only get one chance to do what you want to do and try to debate in the market, and I think that’s the beauty of entrepreneurship. 

Brett
Absolutely. I feel like that’s the part of the story people miss. If you do drop out, you can always go back. It’s not like you’re making this decision for the rest of your life and you can’t reverse it. 

Samson Magid
Exactly. It’s not a final, definitive decision. I think everyone in life is very black and white, either or versus end. I think Gary Vee uses something like that. It’s like you can still do both. It’s just a matter of what’s right at the right time. And I was 22 at the time, so I always said, hey, if this crazy idea doesn’t work and two or three, four years go by, then guess what? I’ll be 25, going to medical school, and life goes on. 

Brett
Nice. That’s a good way of thinking. Now on the website, I see their big, bold letters chronic Condition management is broken. Can you just describe the status quo for us today? 

Samson Magid
Sure. I think this patient journey will resonate with a lot of listeners because it affects most people in the country. The stats are crazy. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, but over 50% of the US population lives with at least one preventable chronic condition, type two diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, cancer, kidney disease, et cetera. It costs the system $3.4 trillion a year. It’s over 80% of our health care expenditures nationally attributed to these preventable chronic conditions. So, again, most of someone’s parents or grandparents probably have experienced what I’m about to say. The status quo is reactive over proactive care. You typically go to the doctor when you have an episode or a health event happen, and everyone kind of has the same thing. All right, you have to call you’re waiting online on hold for an appointment. You get the appointment scheduled. 

Samson Magid
You go to the doctor’s office. They say, all right, Brett, you have high blood pressure. We’re going to give you a blood pressure medication, and you’re going to go home. You’re going to take that medication every day. And if you want, you can take your blood pressure to track it. You’re going to write it down on a piece of paper, and then you’ll come back in six months later. That’s what we call, like, the black box of care. They have zero idea. One, if that medicine is working. Two, if there’s any symptoms associated with it. Three, if your blood pressure is actually getting better and they’re getting the clinical outcome that they want to try to see by giving you that medication in the first place. And then over time, those gaps in care eventually lead to critical health events. You might have a heart attack in between or your blood pressure is not getting better, and then having to go to the hospital or the Ed and the emergency department and then boom. 

Samson Magid
All of a sudden, now that’s another $15,000 bill to the system when that could have been prevented. If someone was monitoring you remotely and could have identified a trend in the wrong direction before a critical health event took place. And that’s the status quo. It’s this pinging between the bricks and mortar physical clinic to the home with very little care in between. And that’s exactly the gap that we identified back in 2012 when we started our research. 

Brett
And I’m not a conspiracy theorist guy, so I hate saying this because I’m going to sound like one, but are there forces within the status quo that don’t want these types of changes? Aren’t there a lot of companies that gain or stand to make money from keeping the system the way it is? Or is that just like, an outsider view that’s wrong when I look at this industry? 

Samson Magid
Yeah. So here’s where you start getting into the health economics and our system design. And we could probably spend hours talking about this on another day, but our healthcare system is predominantly what’s called fee for service, meaning it’s fee for volume or fee for transaction. You go to the doctor, you have that office visit, it filled to the insurance company for that office visit, but the doctor is not getting paid based on whether or not that visit actually got that patient healthier or not. And that’s kind of like the very high level part about where people say, hey, our system is broken because of fee for service. You get paid based on utilization, not based on outcomes. And the system is in or has been, I’ll say in a transitional phase of trying to get to more fee for outcome or value based care. Delivery will be like the industry jargon. 

Samson Magid
And the challenge with that is like, well, how do you put a value? What is value to one person versus another person could be very different. So how do you actually associate an outcome with quote unquote, value or cost savings? Well, there’s so many variables associated with that. Where I think there’s a really interesting in between is exactly what we’re supporting and our programs, what we do at Healthnap is all covered by the US government. Medicare, through the center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, actually reimburses physicians for remote patient monitoring and chronic care management. That was not always the case. Chronic Care Management Services was released in 2015. Remote patient monitoring has been around for a very long time, actually going back to the early 2000s. But in 2019 they what’s called unbundling a reimbursement code from one code that was basically impossible for a doctor to make money based on the time they were spending for a program like this to three codes in 2019. 

Samson Magid
They changed it from three to four in 2020 and then COVID hit and physicians had no other option but to actually adopt programs like ours. And so going back to what we said before of it’s not an either or, it’s an end, you can still see the doctor in the physical clinic based on Escalations or you’re trending the wrong direction. But now we’re adding in that extra layer between the visits and saying, hey, you’re getting an office visit while you’re in the comfort, safety and security of your home and most importantly, convenience for an elderly 65 year old and up that doesn’t need to travel to actually go to the doctor. But they’re getting all their care coordinated from the comfort of their home, whether it’s a medication, refill or adjustment or actually a physical call with the doctor itself. And all of that is treated like an office visit, but just on remotely. 

Brett
Super interesting. So what was that like then during COVID Did things just boom for you in an insane way? Is that where you really started to see the market pull you in and started to see adoption? 

Samson Magid
Yeah, I think as a whole the phrasing was always like, hey, the telehealth or the virtual care genie is out of the bottle and is it here to stay? And were always just like, hey, we know it’s the right way to do it. I think the industry knew that as well. But it was certainly a forcing function. And most importantly, over the last 24 months since COVID it was on companies like us to demonstrate that it’s sustainable and that this is a more effective way to deliver care. Because the biggest challenge, especially during COVID and beyond is physicians actually trusting in programs like this. And it’s a new way of medicine. So if you’re talking to a 64 year old primary care doctor who’s been practicing medicine the same way for 30 years and then telling him, hey, you’re going to partner with us. We’re going to monitor your patient’s blood pressure, and then we’ll coordinate their care remotely for you, and you’ll get notified all remotely in real time, that’s a really big change in their workflow and the way they practice medicine. 

Samson Magid
And so that was the opportunity for us to just say, hey, this is the right way to do it. We’re going to make it really easy for you. And that’s where all the challenges, I think, came in over the last two years for us, is how do we make it easy for the physicians? But it blew up the whole market of just remote care and virtual care error, and it’s a really exciting market to begin. I think we’re starting to see now that huge inflection point of adoption over the last two years because of, I think, COVID just showing people that it can be done the right way. 

Brett
Yeah, it seems like that’s one of the positives that came from COVID is it accelerated trends that were already happening, but just made them happen much faster. And remote care for sure. Seems like one of those where it was kind of mind blowing that even three or four years ago, pre COVID I still had to go to a doctor’s office, sit there and wait for them for 30 or 40 minutes. And then I talked to the doctor for ten minutes and I was out. Like, the whole process was just so stupid. Now it’s a quick video call and it’s done. So it’s been cool to see how that’s been embraced by essentially most doctors, or at least most doctors I’ve seen. 

Samson Magid
Yeah, I mean, put yourself in the shoes of an 82 year old with four chronic conditions who’s depressed and isolated and alone now, you have a real problem on your hands. And that’s the opportunity where you have people like that desperately need care between the visits. They don’t have to go into the actual physical brick and mortar every time for every little thing. And their care is being coordinated in real time through partnerships like ours. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And talk to me about the healthcare organizations that are embracing this and adopting this. Do they tend to be very technology first and open to technology and not resistant to change? Or how would you summarize the ICP that you’re targeting there and seeing Embrace the product? 

Samson Magid
Yeah, absolutely. So we partnered with four of the top 25 health systems around the country. These are, I think, the equivalent of, like, the Fortune Ten organizations in the business world. They are multibillion dollar organizations and multistates, so they’re very large. The consolidation from these systems has been crazy over the last couple of years and decades of how big these systems have gotten. And there is a weird dichotomy because you have the enterprise systems that have their C Suite and executives driving the initiatives like ours and saying, hey, we’re going to be progressive, we’re innovating in this space, we’re going to do this. And then you get the kind of boots in the ground physicians that can be resistant to actually adopting this for their patient populations. So there is a really tight balance of us working with executives at the C suite who are clinical in nature and saying, hey, here’s how this is going to work, here’s how we’re implementing it, and here’s why it’s better for your patients, and our system. 

Samson Magid
And then with us being able to execute and say, hey, we’re going to walk you through every step of the way, we’re not adding more work to your plate as a doctor. We’re going to make your life and your patients lives a lot better overall. And that’s the type of top down approach that we’ve taken that we found to be very successful. 

Brett
And what do you do with those physicians who are resistant to change? Because I can just imagine if you’re a 65 year old physician, you’ve been doing things the same way forever, and then this tech company from Miami comes in and they say, hey, here’s a new way to go about your practice. I could see them saying, I don’t want to change. I’m happy with the status quo. How do you overcome that? 

Samson Magid
Yeah, it’s a challenge. I will say that I’ll give a specific example because this just happened to us. I won’t name the organization, but there’s a very large health system, multiple billions in revenue. They service over a million and a half lives in multiple states. And we deployed. We have nearly 60 other physicians live on our program, quickly approaching 6000 total lives of their system. And one physician escalated up to their chief medical officer saying that we’re committing fraud and our nurses are documenting all this time that’s not appropriate, and talking about my patient’s pets instead of their care. And what he didn’t realize was that a patient who’s again in their eighty s or late 70s, who’s sick and needs to start talking to, like you said, you’re not just treating them for seven minutes of time in a physical office. We’re building relationships with them. 

Samson Magid
We’re actually getting to know about their life, what makes them happy or sad, what support systems they have in place. If they have a pet and that pet is not doing well or whatever it is, we’re going to talk about it because they’re going to engage with us and be able to open up about their care. And he just didn’t get it. And so what we did was basically kill him with data and say, all right, well, of the patients that you’ve had enrolled. We’ve had this many patients with alerts that were out of range for their readings. So you’re probably not maybe not delivering the best type of care for them. And were basically trying to put it back on them and saying, hey, your patients are not getting better based on the care plans that were in place before us. And we can help you actually close that gap and get them better and most importantly, educate you and them about why this is so valuable for their care. 

Samson Magid
And so for instances like that, it’s always just demonstrating how we’re improving the patient’s health and getting patient testimonials or showing the clinical outcomes. And at the end of the day, we’d rather not even have him on the program and he’ll miss out on the ability to do this. So if that does happen, we’ve had it happen before we’ve had to take some physicians off the actual program if they don’t want to be a part of it and we won’t force them to do it. I think it’s just any natural part of technology adoption. 

Brett
Yeah, makes sense. And I like that sentence you had there, kill them with data and that’s how you deal with the slow adopters. I think that’s very useful insights for others who are taking tech to market here. 

Samson Magid
Yeah, absolutely. I think as objective as you can get, the better. This way you’re not kind of having a p****** match on who’s right or wrong, especially with a physician who a lot of doctors are not used to. They won’t typically admit that they are incorrect, especially if they see the data just to demonstrate it. So we try our best to be as objective as possible. 

Brett
Yeah, I can see that. Now, talk to us about how new technology is sold in the healthcare space here. So we’re very familiar with how It products are sold to enterprises and how cybersecurity products, where essentially these big massive companies go to gartner say, hey, I’m looking for this specific category. Who are the leaders in the category? Help us choose someone. Does that same thing happen with healthcare systems? Is that how they buy or how does that buying process work? 

Samson Magid
Yeah, it’s a great question. Enterprise health systems are a unique animal. Depending on the system itself, some will put out national RFPs and so we have had to go through kind of the trenches of RFPs nationally and you compete in the market for those opportunities and we have won those over the last two years. So that’s like some of the cases there. The other part of this is in my mind and in healthcare, so there are any health tech founders listening. It’s all about building trust and rapport with the C suite and most importantly, depending on who you’re talking to, understanding what makes their job easier and what is top of mind for them in this market environment. Right now, health systems are hemorrhaging money. A lot of them are actually margin negative. And so if we’re going to assist them, we’re not selling them a cost savings approach. 

Samson Magid
We are selling them a revenue generating approach. And like I talked about before, our programs are all reimbursable. So there’s a direct ROI. I always say we’re selling you revenue and there’s no capital expenditure up front to partner with us. And typically, when you get to that conversation from a CFO perspective at a C Suite, the conversation stops there. They know it’s great, better for patients and what we’re doing. They know it’s the future of healthcare delivery. But there has to be an economical ROI use case for them, or else they will not adopt this solution. So I think that’s step one. The second part of it is actually being able to demonstrate, all right, well, who else are you doing this with? And as an early stage startup, you kind of have to leverage customer one to customers two and three, and then customers one through three to get the next ten. 

Samson Magid
And we’ve done that very organically. Over the last two years, we have over 150 healthcare organizations as partners, whether it’s private physician groups or large enterprise health systems. And you have to be able to build a referral channel and a referral base for other C Suite executives. So if I’m talking to a new system, I’m going to get a COO to talk to another COO, or the chief medical officer to talk to the other chief medical officer that can attest to doing us, saying we do what we’re going to do. And I think the skepticism in healthcare adoption is very real. Cutting through the noise is a major challenge. And by killing them again with success stories, references, that’s where you can really cut through the noise. And there’s no magic formula. It’s execution when it comes to healthcare. And it’s about being a really good person and doing what you say you’re going to do, and not trying to just tell them you can do everything, because they will find out. 

Samson Magid
You’ll fall really quickly on your face if you tell them you can do all these things and not execute, and they’ll terminate and cup bait really quickly. I think that’s something that we have learned over the last two years is kind of like Missouri, right? Show me state. Do exactly what you say you’re going to do. You don’t need to lie in healthcare, or else you will get caught real fast. Plus, you’re dealing with real people’s lives. And unfortunately, there’s some bad apples in our industry that don’t, I don’t think, truly recognize that. 

Brett
Yeah, I think Elizabeth Holmes is probably a good example of that. 

Samson Magid
That’s a great example, and people will learn, but it continues to happen, especially non healthcare individuals getting into health care that think they can just follow money and everything’s going to be great. Yeah. 

Brett
I think that was the interesting thing with Fair notes, right. Her tactics and her approach is maybe, okay, when you’re in the enterprise SaaS world that’s just selling a productivity tool or things like that, maybe some of that stuff’s, okay, probably not the fraud stuff, but kind of having a big vision and the product’s not there yet, that’s okay. But when it comes to that in healthcare, where it’s impacting people’s lives, that’s like some real s*** that you don’t want to mess with. And I think that’s obviously where she got into a lot of trouble. 

Samson Magid
Yeah. The diligence cycles, I will say, have definitely changed on the buying side. It’s why a lot of companies struggle to sell into healthcare. And it’s one of the reasons why building the right team, especially, is so important with individuals that have been there, done that. If I say, hey, I have experience with this company that worked with your system in another life, it just creates that level of trust and the guard goes down a little bit where you can get a seat at the table. But yeah, spot on. I mean, you can’t kind of lie your way through these sales and implementations on the enterprise side with healthcare. 

Brett
And when it comes to sales, are you still largely Founder led or have you built out a sales team and transitioned away from doing sales yourself? 

Samson Magid
I support the sales cycle, but we have built out a I am biased, of course, but I think one of the best sales organizations in the country when it comes to healthcare, individuals that have decades of experience in healthcare It solutions, companies that have gone from zero to one. In particular was the largest health It sale of all time. And he was their 56th employee. And I thought, our chief revenue officer So decades of experience in the space. And like I said, that holds a tremendous amount of weight when you’re talking to individuals at the other side of the table that have been on the buy side for 20 or 30 years as well. 

Brett
Was that hard for you, transitioning out of Founder led sales? Because that’s something that we hear from a lot of the founders that we have on. Is that’s one of those kind of scary points from them where they have to give up control and put it into the hands of their sales team. So did you have any struggles there? And if so, how did you overcome those struggles? 

Samson Magid
I don’t think there was like a point in time where I was like, hey, I hired you. Like you’re on the hook now. This space specifically has only really been around for two, three, four or five years, and we’re learning all the time. And so more of my as the CEO skill set is more in like the go to market team, sales, marketing, customer success. So I still support those teams how I can more from a messaging and positioning perspective so that we’re always cutting edge and that we’re making the unique value props very clear to our buyers based on what we’re building. But I’m always in its some capacity and most importantly, the feedback loops between our go to market teams that we are extremely tight. So if there’s a question that gets asked, they didn’t know, or we have internal standard operating procedures or documentation on objection handling, whatever it might be. 

Samson Magid
I’m involved in a lot of that formation early on and now it’s gotten to the point where it does scale on its own. But that was an iterative process for the last 24 months, just in a very fresh and new market. 

Brett
Yeah, I can imagine. And speaking of markets, how do you view your market category? Is this just combining together Rpm and CCM or is this going to become a category creation play where you create a totally new category that combines those and maybe some other elements as well? 

Samson Magid
Yeah, so for the last decade and we’ve seen the big players, teladoc, Amwell, that’s more in the telehealth market and I think a lot of more on the analysts and the market side, they get confused with what we’re doing where we’re not a telehealth company. I don’t hire and employ physicians. I and our company are not practicing medicine. We partner with the providers themselves to support their physicians and the way that they and augment the way that they practice medicine in a more personalized and predictive and proactive way. So our market is more in like remote care and virtual care management. There’s a McKinsey’s article that just came out that showed that 25%, about $125,000,000,000 of Medicare dollars is moving to the home in the next decade. And that’s the market that we play in. It’s not the telehealth market, but it’s a subset of that which is in virtual care and remote patient monitoring alone is a $30 billion market itself. 

Brett
Wow, that’s crazy. We had the Founder of Teladoc on actually like four months ago. Have you ever talked to that guy before, looked into his story? 

Samson Magid
Not directly, no. But I have spoken to individuals that have been a part of the tele.org and they’re certainly someone that again, it’s complementary. They are obviously the market leader in telehealth. They had the massive Lovongo acquisition to get into more of chronic disease management that’s more in the self insured employer and payer space. And we’ve just found that not many organizations have been able to crack the provider market. And what I was referencing before and more about the reimbursement side of things, the revenue cycle side for remote patient monitoring, chronic care management. And I think that’s a really unique niche that we’ve been able to crack and are actively becoming a market leader in the space today. 

Brett
Nice. That’s super interesting. 

Samson Magid
Yeah. 

Brett
On the teledoc Founder side, I can’t remember when he stepped down, but he’s not the CEO anymore, but he was telling me about in the early days of telemedicine, he literally had his office raided by the DEA. They were trying to put him in prison. He had all of this drama as he was trying to pioneer the field of telemedicine and it was just a fascinating conversation. I’ll drop you a link after the interview here. 

Samson Magid
Wow. Yeah, I can only imagine. I mean, there’s a lot of fear too about anytime you’re associated with payers and government policies and government payments and in the industry it’s overutilization that you’re billing for things that you shouldn’t be, then you deal with the state by state licensure issues and who’s actually billing it under what. It’s extremely complicated. So hats off to them for pioneering it and kind of paving the way for the next phase of solutions like ours. 

Brett
And from a regulatory perspective, how much time do you have to spend on that? Is that a major focus area for you or was it in the early days? 

Samson Magid
More so in the early days, and it is very fluid every year. CMS, Medicare, they provide a new Medicare physician fee schedule. So every year and every half year we get updates on what’s changing and or proposed for the next year. So in my seat, I’m heavily involved in the policy side of things because if the reimbursement, for example, goes down year over year or they change the way that you can actually reimburse, it does have very wide ranging impact on our day to day operations. So we work with Premier Healthcare Council that specializes in remote patient monitoring and the entire virtual care management space, so anything related to managing people’s conditions while they’re home. And you really have to have your finger on the pulse when it comes to this type of stuff, because, like I said, a lot of bad apples in the space that aren’t doing that and they’re just creating a lot of noise for the ones that are following the right protocols. 

Samson Magid
And they’re going to lose their company because of it. 

Brett
And is that a lobbying group then? 

Samson Magid
There is a lobbying group that’s working with the American Medical Association. And yeah, we support it as a company that’s in the space with our data promoting the adoption of programs like this every year. 

Brett
And is there someone that opposes them? Is there someone lobbying on the other side? 

Samson Magid
It’s typically Medicare, yeah, CMS so work with them and the American Medical Association, so they have different Medicare like regional sites and you work with them on a regional basis. So it is very complex. And the kind of path forward here is how do you demonstrate with the actual outcomes to say, hey, this is actually delivering a lower total cost of care and here’s why you should be paying for it, just like every other service. And that’s on us. That’s what we’re actively doing right now with our partners around the country is being able to show, hey, patients are getting healthier. It’s a better patient experience. We’re reducing incidents of hospitalizations and emergency room visits. And here’s why you continue to pay for it and in some cases, even pay for certain things in more flexible ways. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. All right, last question for you. Let’s zoom out into the future. What’s? The three year vision for War HealthSnap. 

Samson Magid
Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of not necessarily naysayers, but a lot of people and they look at this space, they go, is this a fad? Is this an add on to what physicians are doing today? And my answer to that always is this is not like a transitory additional add on program. My stance, and I truly believe this, is that every patient in the country over the next 3510 years, whatever it might be, is going to be able to receive care right from the comfort of their home, be monitored. By a nurse or a physician all the time if they choose to do that and get notified if their data points are getting out of range and or if there’s trends showing that they might be having a health event or trending towards a health event and getting proactive care based on the data itself. 

Samson Magid
Our industry has done a really good job at generating data. We’ve done a really bad job of getting that data into clinical workflows to actually move the needle. And that’s the vision where we have is to fill those gaps between kind of the apples and the Apple Watches of the world generating all this data to how do you actually get this into health and care and clinical workflows? And that’s exactly what we do every single day to save lives. 

Brett
Nice. That’s super exciting. Samsung unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today. I feel like I could have kept you on for another hour, but can’t do that. So we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey as you build, where’s the best place for them to go? 

Samson Magid
Yeah, absolutely. I would say we’re most active on LinkedIn, so if you just type in HealthSnap, one word on LinkedIn, feel free to follow us there or send me a direct connection request. And I would love to have you join us in following our journey in growth here as we transform healthcare, delivery and chronic disease management for the next several years. 

Brett
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat, talk about what you’re building and share this vision. This has been super informative. I’ve learned a lot and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision. 

Samson Magid
Appreciate that. Brett Fox in. 

Brett
All right, keep in touch.