In this episode of The Heals Pod, we dive into the world of innovation and healthcare with a special guest who has a unique perspective on changing the game in Las Vegas. Our guest, a local entrepreneur with a background in IT and physical therapy, shares his journey from Zimbabwe to North Dakota to Las Vegas, where he found inspiration to create a groundbreaking EMR system.
As the host, I was initially skeptical when I heard about our guest’s venture into building an EMR system, considering the challenges faced by large companies in this field. However, I was quickly blown away by the innovative approach our guest had taken, not just building an EMR, but revolutionizing the way healthcare providers interact with technology.
Our guest’s passion for efficiency and patient care shines through as he shares his vision for a platform that streamlines the coordination of care, simplifies the patient experience, and empowers providers to focus on what truly matters – delivering quality care to their patients. Through his platform, he aims to bridge the gap between patients and providers, making healthcare more accessible and efficient for everyone involved.
Join us as we explore the journey of this remarkable entrepreneur, his challenges and triumphs, and the impact his innovative platform is making in the healthcare industry. Tune in to learn more about the future of healthcare technology and how one individual’s passion for change is reshaping the way we approach patient care.
Full Transcript
DIEGO TRUJILLO:
And ladies and gentlemen, it’s great to welcome you to another episode of The Heels Pod. We’re very excited because in the past we’ve done episodes on innovation in Las Vegas, things that are happening here in Las Vegas. And recently we did a podcast with Dr. Hines-Peters, and she spoke about changing the innovation mindset of Las Vegas, putting our mindset towards innovation. And today I have a very special guest with me. that started originally from very, very far away, but he is a Las Vegas local now. He is doing amazing things with the community, and I want to welcome onto the podcast today Ephraim Macuve. Am I saying that correct?
SPEAKER_01: You’re saying it absolutely right.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Thanks a lot, Diego. It’s great having you on the podcast today. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. How long have you been here in the Valley in Las Vegas?
SPEAKER_01: So I came here in 2012, so I guess that’ll be, my math is not that great.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: 10, 11, 12 years. Yeah, 11, 12 years or so, yeah. Depends. But about seven or eight good ones, yeah?
SPEAKER_01: Seven or eight good ones, and the other ones, we’ll talk about that a little later.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: They’re all good here. That’s excellent. I’m glad to hear that. Good stuff. So, uh, so you run an organization, right? I, uh, a while back we were introduced and, uh, I was quick to find out, right? Somebody shared with me, they said, well, you know, there’s someone here locally that built an EMR. Right, right. And so I heard and I was like, uh, I’m not going to lie to you. There was a little bit of an eye roll inside. I was kind of like, okay, like, wow, what a challenging task. You know, large companies have been already at work at this, right? And so I was incredibly blown away at, uh, the way that you have not just built an EMR, but rather made something very unique and different. And I want to unpack it a little bit. But before we do, I want to get into where you’re from. You said you came here about 10 or 11 years ago. Where do you come from originally? What brought you here to Las Vegas?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so North Dakota is what I call home. But before that, I was born in Zimbabwe, lived there for most of my young years, up until I was in my 20s. Moved to North Dakota, and then had a brief stay in Washington state, and then moved to Las Vegas.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: So you bounced around a little bit. I bounced around a little bit. You miss the cold from North Dakota?
SPEAKER_01: Well, it depends on the day.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Minus 40 degrees is a little too cold. I’m one of those Las Vegans that complains about 50 degrees. I know, I know.
SPEAKER_01: I’m going to throw a scarf on. The blood thins out. I mean, you’ve been here long enough. 50 degrees starts to feel a little dicey. But I was in Colorado just a few weeks ago. And you get right back into it.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yeah? Yeah. Excellent. So a big change. You started off in South Africa and then bounced around the US. What made you land here in Las Vegas? Was there a specific opportunity?
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, this is the most diverse place that I had, uh, been to. I used to, I worked in the gaming industry for a long time, uh, when I lived in North Dakota. Uh, so naturally I would come down here for, uh, conventions and, um, technical style, um, uh, meetings with some of the vendors here in Las Vegas. And it was interesting because, you know, you’d walk around the strip and you’d hear almost every language in the world, right? And, uh, my kids were just getting to the age where, I was thinking to myself, you know, where do we get these kids to where they can get a culture that’s really even-keeled, where they can understand the world from the lenses of many different types of people? Las Vegas was really at the top of the list. I mean, it may have been the only one on the list because it was just the one place I knew that was really diverse. And it kind of fit in with the gaming, right?
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yeah, totally. You look at Los Angeles or Houston or New York, probably the gaming aspect didn’t appeal, so it’s very interesting. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And have you worked on, as we explore your background, you create an EMR, right? So you’re a software developer by trade?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so the first part of my life, and I’m talking, you know, from the time I graduated from high school, I went to college, I got a degree in computer science. I got a degree in management information systems, and I worked up the ranks. I mean, for those who still remember dial-up modems, I was… I do. 56K, I was very excited. I started with a 9.6 all the way to a 56K, but I really lived in that industry from the beginning of the internet all the way up until 2008 when I decided to go back to school, and that’s… I went back to school in North Dakota to become a physical therapist. I’m a doctor of physical therapy. That’s what I did for, I mean, I still hold a license in this state and a couple other states. So that’s what I did all the way up until I started this new venture.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Right. So which informed which, right? What was the point? Your company is called Hutano, correct? Correct. And if people want information, that’s hutano.com?
SPEAKER_01: Correct, yeah, Houtano, so spelled H-U-T-A-N-O dot com.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Fantastic. So you start your company, Houtano. What was the seed that kind of was birthed in you? I’ve always been very curious on what was that one spark? There had to have been a moment where you’re just like, this is ridiculous, right?
SPEAKER_01: Someone can do better. So coming from an IT background, especially having some software engineering capabilities, Um, I think my first, uh, job when I was still in school, um, doing clinicals at, at a hospital in North Dakota, um, I, it was, the, the, the moment for me was when, um, my, my supervisor said, no, you can’t put any more than 256 characters in this box because that’s just a limitation of the software. And I said, well, that’s just, um, the software engineer not understanding what we do for a living because, uh, there is such a, input box that can take an unlimited number of characters. I can, if you gave me the source code, I could fix this. And then I realized that from that day on, it was almost a recurring theme. There was always something that I would look at and go, wow, wouldn’t that be just nice if these software engineers understood what healthcare providers do. And that’s really a cumulative process of putting all those frustrations in one box led me to start this company.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: I remember, you know, I thought it was funny when we were speaking early on and you began to share this, and inside it was boiling. I had mentioned to you in the past I had worked as a chaplain, And some people would ask me, well, what moved you from chaplaincy over to marketing, right? And one of the big influencers for me is not only was it the documentation, which was a big part, I was like, wow, I spent 40 minutes doing really meaningful work to spend an hour or 30 minutes writing about the really meaningful work, right? It was very frustrating to me the amount of time I had to waste documenting. But aside from that, and this is a funny story, one of the times, only times I got written up at work was actually due to my documentation. And when they started speaking to me about it, I remember I got pulled into the office. And I typically, I’ll take my licks. If I’ve made a mistake, you know, I apologize. I’ll learn. I’ll grow. And I remember at the very end, and I won’t name the software, though I really want to, but… It was a charting software. I remember at the very end, she went through it and she goes, you know, you didn’t add this box and you didn’t do this and this and you didn’t. And as she’s going through it, it was all related to the way that I would have to interact with what must have been the most horrible user interface I’ve ever dealt with as far as computers. And I told her, I was like, hey, I just want to be very clear with you. I’ve taught myself to use Photoshop. I use VFX. I use Logic, Reason, these different, very complex softwares. I’ve managed to learn how to do them. I’ve been doing this for three months. If I made a mistake at this point, unless it’s in my document, like my writing, that’s not my fault. I don’t know who built this. But it was like navigating. I was old enough to mess around with MS-DOS and command prompts back when I was very, very young. I think that was like third or fourth grade. We would run MS-DOS prompts. That’s how I felt using the software. So yeah, when you mentioned the frustrations, you’re like, yeah, I ran into these challenges. I was like, yes, I know exactly what you’re talking about.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and you bring up a good point, right? I think the The basis of creating EMRs, electronic medical records, was a safe storage of… of patient records, not really user-friendliness. Yes. Because, I mean, you can get somebody who’s… You can tell by how terrible the software is.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, every social media platform, I think, has some complexities in the ways they work, but nobody really gets a lesson on how to use a social media platform. They’re still able to upload stuff. They’re able to comment, like this, all these other things. And yet, if you were to do something similar in the level of ease on an EMR, Um, those tasks would take minutes because it’s just, you know, check marks and clicks. And a lot of times it’s just we’re using technology and user interface items that were developed for software, say, in the 90s or the 2000s. Not really what we have now in this day and age.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: And I think even the understanding, I’m sorry, I kind of nerd out on this subject because I like reading about this, right? And I remember one time reading the quote that if the software is difficult to use, it’s not the user’s fault. It’s the… No, no. It’s not the user’s fault, it’s the engineer’s fault, because we began designing software in a way that should be intuitive. It should be easy. Those have been the softwares that have succeeded the most. Um, even when you look at, let’s say, complex phones, right? And someone was like, well, you know, sometime, one time, someone made fun of the iPhone, and they’re like, yeah, it’s for grandparents. And I was like, yeah, because they’ve made it very easy. It’s very easy to use. They were very much going for that, right? And I always compare when you, when you get into the Android and iPhone argument. Even though I have an iPhone, I really enjoyed my Android because I always felt it was like a manual transmission versus an automatic transmission. One, you just jump in and go. Right, right. The other one gives you a lot more flexibility, but you’ve got to know what you’re doing, right? It’s going to take a little more work and training. And so with software, that should not… When you have a clinical team that’s worried about patient care, they shouldn’t have to become software developers to figure it out. And I feel like software was built around, how do we keep these medical records and then make sure we comply, right? With regulatory compliance. The end user has never thought about it. I think I’ve seen a lot of changes in the last five years that have been very motivating towards that end, to where things don’t look like spreadsheets, and they’re a little bit friendlier.
SPEAKER_01: Right, right. No, totally. And, you know, in a world where, you know, the work is not done until the documentation is done and there’s an entry that actually says what the clinician did, the software becomes the only reference point that we have of what was done and what needs to be done after this patient has been seen by this clinician. So really, software plays not just an important role, it’s a pivotal role. It’s the only communication that we have between providers, third-party payers, and that kind of stuff. So if it becomes something that doesn’t work quite as efficiently as it’s supposed to, you can be guaranteed that if clinicians are given a choice between giving more time to a patient or more time to the software, they’ll give more time to the software, because the software is what gets them paid at the end of the day.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: I mean, I hate to put it that way, but that’s really what it is, right?
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, so we see that discrepancy in time spent between seeing a patient and documenting has almost flipped in some cases, where people are spending way more time documenting, because that’s the thing that pays the bills, and then less time actually seeing the patient, because that in and of itself, as long as it can be explained in the software, then we know we’re going to get paid.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: So the monumental task, right? So you just talked to me a little bit about that, that drop in the bucket that kept adding up, and eventually something must have spilled over where you said, you know what? Someone has to do it better. I’m going to do it. I think that was a moment of madness. I think most people listening might be like, wow. But in all seriousness, there had to have been a moment where you’re like, something has to be better than this.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. All the time that I spent in IT, I want to say maybe a good two-thirds of it was in private business where I owned my own company. I always thought, especially in the U.S., where you are expected to come to appointments on time, and if you don’t, people just look at you a little strange in your business etiquette. One of the, what we have come to accept is just, it happens. The DMV doesn’t honor any appointments, and doctors don’t honor any appointments. So as a consumer of health care for most of my life, that always bothered me. I would always think to myself, why is it that I have to show up 15 minutes late to be seen an hour late? It doesn’t make any sense at all. So I think it was my third or my fourth doctor’s appointment that I came in, and not to mention, The amount of paperwork that I was being exposed to, again, as a database administrator in my previous life, I always knew that if you enter data once, you should be available as many times as you wanted. You shouldn’t have to enter it multiple times. But every time I went to a doctor’s office, I mean, sometimes I would have to enter my date of birth. three or four times on four different pieces of paper.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yeah, on the same clipboard. On the same clipboard, right. I mean, we’re not even talking about different visits. Right.
SPEAKER_01: This is the same visit. Right. And this isn’t a place where you’ve been to before, so you’re thinking, they should at least know who I am. So anyways, those things really got me wound up to a point where I just said, you know, it would be nice to get a system that could alleviate some of this pain without duplicating what other systems are already doing. And that’s where we started on this journey.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: So did it start late? I want to go to the birthplace. Yeah. So this must have bubbled for a little bit. I mean, you make me laugh. Why do I need to be 15 minutes late to wait an hour? My father used to get out of doctor’s appointments because he would tell them after 15 minutes, hey, I’m going to start invoicing you. I invoice at $80 an hour. I don’t see why the doctor’s time is more valuable than mine. I was like, you said that? What did they do? They got me in in three minutes. I was like, jeez, dad. But so you notice these inefficiencies that start coming up?
SPEAKER_01: Right, right. The inefficiencies at the, and they’re on both sides. As a clinician, I’ve also had my own private practice. And of course, the main thing there that you want to think about is when a patient walks in that door, what are the problems that, or the friction that you have between you and the patient that are causing this patient to then end up seeing you five, 10, 15 minutes late? And at the top of that list was that paperwork that we haven’t filled out. And then, of course, the fact that there was no controlled treatment process in the back that had a very defined end time and the big one being the documentation time. As much as you try to work around the system and maybe document as you go, That also has its own issues, because now you’re taking away time from a patient, you’re taking away from the contact that you should have with a patient. And this is kind of a contact sport when you’re with a patient and you’re talking to them about something really important that’s going on in their lives. You need to be present in the moment. If it looks like you are more interested in the software and documenting, the patients pick up on that, and that affects wellness as well. So those are the things that I kind of noticed in my own practice, and probably as I was starting to adopt and accept that as a clinician, this is how I was going to be for the rest of my life. I just said, I think there’s a better way to do this. And I don’t want to be that clinician that’s spending more time with my eyes glued to a computer and not focusing on my patient and reading the body language of my patient and trying to figure out, what are they really telling me? And where do I need to go with this conversation or my questioning so that I can help them a little bit better?
DIEGO TRUJILLO: So it sounds like the mountain was building the whole time in front of you. At what point were you like, okay, that’s it, I’m climbing this mountain, I gotta cross over.
SPEAKER_01: Oh goodness, so it was 2019. I’d have to say, and it was kind of a diffuse, kind of a trickle, trickle, trickle thing. Okay, it was a lot of drops. It was a lot of drops. But I think the moment when I called one of my friends and I Literally, I think I had been to my doctor’s office here in town. And it’s the most weird story. I get out of the clinic, and they say to me, you need to get some imaging done. I said, oh, great. Well, when can I get it done? And they said, well, we have to call another number. I kid you not, Diego, I was sitting in there for 15, 20 minutes, only to find out that The facility that was contracted with my health care provider would see me in a month and a half, which to me, obviously when you’re sick, everything is cancer and it’s going to kill you. So I’m convinced that time is of the essence for people in health care needs. So I picked up the phone and I called a facility here in town, who I would be glad to mention their name someday. and said, hey, listen, do you guys?
DIEGO TRUJILLO: You can say the name. We’re not, we won’t block it out.
SPEAKER_01: If you want to give him a shout out, we can give him a shout out. No, I’m kidding. No, it was Simon Med. Actually, they have an office really close by. But I had known Simon Med to do imaging for cash in the Valley. And I’d sent some of my patients out to him. So I just called him and I said, hey, listen, how much would it cost for me to come and see you for this imaging? And they said $80. I said, oh, well, that’s cheap. When can you see me? And I said, well, can you come this afternoon or tomorrow? I’m like, oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Wow.
SPEAKER_01: Am I still in Las Vegas? So I took off, and the next day I had my imaging done. It was red, and it was benign. But to have to carry that suspicion of something might be absolutely wrong with me for another two to three months would have probably given me an ulcer or something else or raised my blood pressure. And that’s the moment that I sat down and said, How can I connect a person in my position at the time that I left my doctor’s office with a facility like this imaging center and get those two to communicate as quickly as possible so that my care can get taken care of? At the end of that transaction, it worked out really beautifully. I got my work done really quickly for a price that was probably less than what my co-pay was. The facility got paid instantly on the spot. They charged my credit card and they got to pay whatever it is they need to pay as expenses on the spot without having to wait for claims and all the other things that they would normally have to do in other cases. So it worked out really beautifully. So that’s when I started to think, you know what, I can put a platform together that can put these two people together in a transaction that makes sense.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: So you’re saying that the fax machine that was invented in 1964, as we know it, might not be the most efficient way in modern era to get a referral from one place to the next?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and the fax machine. And I hear so many arguments. It’s safer to send things by fax. And I say, we might as well just bring out pages. You could put it on a homing pigeon and send the pigeon to the other office. Right, right. Yeah, and you know what? So many transactions. The book has been written pretty well by other industries pretty well. We think about the industries that are regulated very heavily, real estate, banking. You hardly ever see anything faxed anymore. Nowadays, I think I bought my last house without ever seeing a piece of paper. Everything was e-signatures, and that worked out. that passes the test of being legally binding to the point where I actually do own my house. So I think healthcare- As far as you know.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: As far as I know. As far as you know for now. Until the day comes when I’m sorry. They said you should have faxed it. You should have faxed it.
SPEAKER_01: You should have faxed it. Sorry about that. Yeah. So yeah. There are many areas where I think healthcare has, I think is over lawyered in some ways. We are afraid of the that less than 1% case scenario that might happen, which really ordinarily in this day and age doesn’t even happen.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: But we’re here to kind of… We shape the laws based on one criminal or one horrible story or one… And I’m being a little dramatic when I say just one. I mean, it happens more, but I agree with you. To what point do we seek out safety over efficiency To the point where the greater goods safety is really being detrimental. Sitting around for a month and a half, two months, sometimes three months for an image can really make a big difference in somebody’s cancer treatment. Can make a lot, you know, that’s the difference between stage 2, stage 3, 4, right? And I think that’s criminal. Yeah. It can make that. The only reason I know that is because not due to the scheduling, but, you know, looking at imaging and the shortage we have in workforce and imaging here in Las Vegas, right? We hear these terms and it’s very sad to me when people say, yeah, I have to wait four and a half months before they can get me in for imaging. Right. And it may be stage four cancer. This is a conversation I had about eight months ago with the son of One of my mother’s friends, who he was trying to take care of his dad, and they’re like, you know, he’s suspicious of metastasized. We have to wait two or three months because there’s a problem getting us in to see, to get the imaging. And I was blown away. I mean, luckily it wasn’t stage four, but I remember thinking in that moment, wow, how helpless can you feel? And then if, yeah, even worse, I wish we would have caught it earlier. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: You know? No, no, very true. And then I think what’s distressing is when you find out that there are facilities in the valley or around the country that would have seen that patient for, as a friend of mine put it across, it was going to be a 1200 copay. for his brother to get an MRI, and it cost $250 to get it cashed. So you kind of go, you know, so, I mean, there’s gotta be a way for us to cut the bureaucracy so that patients can get the care that they need.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Just make it a little more simpler.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: So, I mean, it really looks like you weren’t just trying to target one thing. It seems like you were just unsatisfied by various processes. To be very honest with you, it just seems like you’re a person that doesn’t appreciate inefficiencies. Yeah. And just got frustrated with the different ways, right? It’s not just one thing. It’s multiple adding up. Like, why is this so difficult? This does not have to be so hard. Especially with technology around. I mean, you, you know, if you’re familiar with what technologies exist, sometimes you’ll, you’ll see the people that are a little older that are unwilling to learn new technologies, and you see how much more work or how harder they have to work to get done with somebody younger who took the time to learn. much less develop that software for us to be able to get to those places where we can become more efficient. Right, right. We can cut out those inefficiencies for the greater good.
SPEAKER_01: Oh no, totally. You know, I think, I mean, I would consider myself fortunate to straddle the two domains that I exist in right now, which is healthcare and technology. Defining what the problem is and then trying to figure out where the inefficiencies are, I think is inherently very difficult for a software engineer who is getting an interpretation of what healthcare looks like from a clinician to try and solve that problem. In my case, that came naturally because obviously I’ve written several applications in my life, and I’m a clinician, so I can actually marry the inefficiencies with some technology.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: See, you’re in the perfect place for that reason. I remember one time hearing, they were talking about a workforce shortage within the development of software, and they’re like, you know, the hard part is The people that are very good at charting tend to be older and know very little about technology. And the people that build the software don’t know anything about charting. Right, right. And so getting them to say, yeah, we’ll just make it this way. I can’t just make it that way, right? So when you have the best of both worlds, I even brought up to them, I was like, well, why don’t you just create a group for nurses that are charting on a regular basis that is focused on gaming? Because typically people that play on their computer have built their computers since they’re kids. They have a better understanding of how commuters communicate. But it seems like you kind of did that, right, by getting your degree in physical therapy, and then having also worked in software development, no one had to tell you or explain to you. You just said, this is very inefficient for this and this reason. This is what could have been done, but they didn’t.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, as they say, the struggle was real for me.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: I got, I, yeah. No one wiped you on your head, all right?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, nobody had to explain it to me in any way. I mean, I experienced it on a day-to-day basis, whether I was working in the hospital, a rehab facility, a skilled nursing facility, or I was working in my own practice, the inefficiencies are in your face. And if you were to survey any number of clinicians, I wonder what the numbers would come out as, people who are absolutely satisfied with the software that they’re using to document the encounters with their patients. People who absolutely would say, this is making me more efficient than I would have otherwise if I was writing on a piece of paper. I think that’s a telltale sign because every clinician I run into, the first thing they tell me is that the software is really getting in the way of me doing what I need to do. And yet, I have to use it, because if I don’t use it, I don’t get paid. So that’s a challenge.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: So you take the step, right? You go from programming to physical therapy, and now you’re kind of mixing the both of those worlds together, right? To create something unique, something different, you set out to set out these inefficiencies and straighten them out. What were the challenges, right? You’re taking on the new role as founder, because now it’s not simply just developing software, but telling people about this software, you know, adapting the software, making a better user acquisition, all the things that come with that.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so, you know, and when I started this company, I also, you know, having been a founder in the past in the technology field, and not having done as well as I thought I would have done, I knew that there was information that I was lacking in my brain that I needed to acquire somewhere. So I went and I started an MBA program in healthcare management just to, so that I could bridge that gap to try and figure out the business side of things. I would have to give credit where it’s due. My mentor, Don Pierce, who passed away a couple years ago, was the one person who really channeled my energies in a way that I could understand the questions that you’re asking. How do you market? How do you scale a company? How do you tell the story? How do you define what it is that you’re doing? He had been in the executive office at Pepsi for many, many, many years. So he knew how to run a billion dollar business. This was really easy for him to kind of transfer that knowledge to somebody who was at the ground level trying to figure out what are the things that you might not do today that you will wish you had done later on, or what are the things you do today that have a higher payout tomorrow. So that’s kind of where I started was to find a mentor and somebody who was, and I spent, probably every once a week I met with Don, and Don would just sit me down and walk me through the list. What do you got going on today? And so from the day that I started the prototype to the time that I launched the business, and you know, he passed away after the product was out in the market, but I wish he would be here today to see where we are now.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Yeah, to see you succeed. I completely understand that feeling. So where are you at today? Where is Houtano? How did you come up with the name?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so Hutanu… It’s a Shona word. Shona is spoken in Zimbabwe. I think Rwanda and Uganda may be wrong on that. And it’s a word that means Hutano. It means health. So health means Hutano.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: It means Hutano. Fantastic. So you release Hutano. You get started on it. What has been the reception? How has the struggle been since you got it done, right? You said you got the idea, the insatisfaction. You got to a point where you’re like, that’s it. I’m doing something. You found a mentor to help you build this out. What was the next step?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so the next steps was to find, so there’s a chicken and egg every time you run these software as a service businesses. Think about marketplaces where you have to have buyers and sellers. In this case, we have a marketplace. We have patients and providers. What do you get first? Do you get patients first or do you get providers first? So we figured out the best way to do this is to get providers and then it’s easier to market to patients after that because once you have providers, it’s easier to tell patients that we have providers that can take care of you. Because one provider can take care of anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 patients. They can have that many. So we can scale the platform a lot faster that way than going the other way. So that was the first thing, was to get providers who we could enroll in our beta. And once we enrolled them, then it was getting patients to come in and start working with those patients. However, as most founders will testify to, your first attempt at anything is never the end of it. There’s always something that shows up that you go, oh my gosh, I would have never known unless I had come to this spot. So along the way, we had a hospital that had heard wind of what we were doing, and at that very point, we had a meeting with them, and they said their problem was primarily with coordinating discharge planning with patients, because a big challenge for hospitals is patients who are returning to the hospital on a regular basis and using the hospital as their primary care, because they don’t have primary care. or because they cannot get into the primary care. So we have a myriad of problems on the outpatient services. And then what we found out was that we have several providers in the community who are spending an enormous amount of money in marketing because they don’t have a referral source. By just the token of that.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: So some people need patients, and some people need to send their patients somewhere.
SPEAKER_01: Exactly. So naturally, you have this kind of good relationship that can exist between a hospital that’s discharging a patient today. And in the case of patients in Las Vegas, it could be a patient from England who is going back home in three or four days, but needs to follow up with a provider in this community before they leave. They may not have insurance, but they have the cash and they can pay the provider cash. Well, what our platform then does is match those two together, getting that patient the care that they need so that before they leave, they are not in a position where they are getting sicker and then coming back to the hospital. at a much higher, higher cost. So that became kind of our go-to-market strategy, which is what we’ve partnered up with the hospital now here in town.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Congratulations on that. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01: Someone took the plunge. Yeah, somebody took the plunge.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: How exciting. So the hospital faxes the referral to you, and then you fax it to the provider, get confirmation, and fax that back to the hospital?
SPEAKER_01: No. Fortunately, we are doing away with faxes. And the hospital is excited, as we are, of course. It’s just about having that power in the nurses’ hands to direct the patient where they need to go and make an appointment as easy as we make appointments with a ride-sharing service, for example. And we know that that transaction has been made. The provider on the other side has acknowledged that it’s going to be made.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: You can track it. You can track it. When I order an Uber, I know the guy’s seven minutes away, six minutes.
SPEAKER_01: And that’s exactly what our platform has. Almost the same functionality, which says my patient is 10 minutes away from my office. We have that. Or you can go in and say, I just want to have telemedicine. And your patient, you can see them by telemedicine. Because sometimes it’s just not always feasible. It’s not needed for them to come in, or yeah, a million reasons. And then finally, you can have patients.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: And this is all available on one platform.
SPEAKER_01: It’s available on one platform, yeah. So everything we did was… Is this a website or is this for those that don’t know? The patients have an app. So what’s facing the patient is an app. They can also use a website, but typically they’re going to use an app on Android or iOS. The providers also have an app. The app is really for them to manage appointments that are going on in the moment. They can also do documentation. But if they need real estate, like the big screen, they can use our website. So they can log into the portal, and they can manage all the documentation and stats.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: OK, fantastic. So for people working on a desktop, like in medical offices, they can look up records, check everything, make sure everything’s submitted or has been filled out or et cetera. Right, right. And then on the patient side, it’s as easy as ordering an Uber or ordering some groceries through DoorDash.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you know, there’s some just minor differences, obviously, with healthcare in that every patient, despite the demographic information, you know, your age, your gender, they also have, you know, your insurance information that you would want to know. So what we were trying to eliminate, Diego, was Let me take you back to your last doctor’s visit, whenever that was. So I’m assuming that if you… I don’t believe in medicine. I’m assuming that if you didn’t know who you were going to see, so in other words, this is a new issue. Somebody says you probably should go, I don’t know, see a gastroenterologist and you’re going, oh my gosh, what is that? Where do I find one? So my guess is you’re probably either called somebody to say, hey, do you know anybody? Or you went on Google and you searched and you found something. But the next thing you would have done, for sure, is you would have picked up the phone. And you would have asked if they take your insurance or not.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Right, after waiting on hold.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, after waiting on hold forever. And then from there on, you probably, if they do take your insurance, you would have been asking questions like, what’s my copay, all the other stuff.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: How soon can I come in?
SPEAKER_01: Right, how soon can I come in? And this can only happen Monday to Friday from 8 to 5, right? Right. OK. So this is what we changed on that particular part of the process. Instead of going through all those steps, you can open up the app and you can say gastroenterologist. And then it will show you all the gastroenterologists.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: This sounds very complicated.
SPEAKER_01: Right, right. Better than a fax machine. Gastroenterologist, it shows you all the gastroenterologists. And if it’s one that requires that you have A referral from a primary care provider will show you that. But let’s just suppose that you could just go see one anyways. So gastroenterologist, and then you could refine the search and say, well, show me the ones that are within 10 miles of my house. Or better yet, show me only the ones who take my insurance. Now you’re narrowing the search down to almost something that makes sense for you. You’re not driving too far, and it’s somebody who takes your insurance. You’ve eliminated, I don’t know, however long it took you to get to this stage. You’ve eliminated your 30 minutes in research and all that. I shouldn’t say all the good stuff. All the bad stuff that went on, right? So now, the next thing you want to do is obviously book the appointment. Now, wouldn’t it be much better if you could just see that provider’s schedule and calendar right there and say, Monday at 3 o’clock is open. Therefore, I’m going to book the appointment for now. It’s the same thing we do when you order your Uber or when you, I don’t know, order a Domino’s pizza. Domino’s pizza, Domino’s does a good job at this, by the way. Same thing, right? And then from there on, it’s just a back and forth between you and the provider using the platform. If you want to reschedule the appointment, you can reschedule the appointment using the platform. If you want to cancel the appointment, you can use it using the platform. This can be done at three o’clock in the morning and not have to wait until eight o’clock in the morning to be on the phone waiting for 30 minutes to get a hold of somebody to cancel an appointment.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: I think it’s when the software starts working for you, right? And I only say this because I was giving someone a lesson on technology not long ago, and as we were speaking, I said, well, you know, and the person said, wow, you know so much about technology. How do you learn all this? And I said, honestly, I just type in Google. And they go, yeah, but what do you type in? Exactly what my problem is. I was like, you know, this company exists and spends billions of dollars to not just get you an answer and just here’s 30,000 answers, but to give you the most relevant one. In other words, if I look up gastroenterologists, Google already knows to show me the ones in Las Vegas. It’s not going to show me every single one across the US. And all you’ve done is taken this a step further to be able to filter through insurances. Which ones are close to me? Which ones even have any availability? Who can I book an appointment with? I mean, simplifying that process, while it sounds kind of obvious, It clearly isn’t, or many other people would have done this already, you know? And so, it’s not an easy step, I’m assuming.
SPEAKER_01: Right, right. No, totally, totally.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Which is why I say you’re a bad math. I don’t know. Which is why it’s so important to be done. And to see those results, and see that come together. I remember the first demonstration, like I said, you weren’t even the first person to talk to me. Someone showed me the software, and the minute I saw that, Because I had just heard, right, that one of the reasons that residents didn’t want to stay in Las Vegas was coordination of care. It’s too hard to coordinate care. And I was like, oh my God, this is a clear answer to that. I mean, forget everything else on the other side and write what the other person was talking about. My mind just went in a completely different direction on, wow, the amount of good that this can do.
SPEAKER_01: Right, right. No, totally. And you know, Diego, I mean, we talk about the software and the innovation, and that’s definitely exciting, you know, where we’ve come from and where we are. we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there’s a patient on the other side. I used to say this to my students. I teach physical therapy students, grad students, and I always say to my students, when you have a patient in front of you who’s had a knee replacement, and by the way, it hurts like crazy when you’re rehabbing your knee to get it back to normal after a total knee replacement. I say for the therapist, this could be the 100th knee I’m seeing in a space of a year. But for that patient, it’s their very first time ever having knee replacement. And they have already played out the worst case scenario in their heads, which is, I will never walk again, right? Software is not just a tool for us to use, but if it can expedite the care, but more importantly, if it can give me the luxury of seeing my patient for a little longer than I do right now, and actually spend more quality time with them, it then becomes not just a solution to this problem of efficiency on the documenting side. but it actually becomes a care solution where as providers, we’re actually now starting to provide better care to our patients because we don’t have this stumbling block that’s sitting between us and our patients. So that’s where I think, you know, we try as a company, we try to always come back and say, What are we trying to really change? Is it the software? Are we trying to change the patient experience? And it really comes down to the patient experience. It has to be the patient experience, but also the provider experience. Because we, as a provider, we have been sentenced to too many hours of typing. And we didn’t go to school to type. We went to school to heal people and help people out.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: No, and I agree with you. The approach on this, as I was listening more about it, and we have to kind of close out, I really want to encourage people to go to Hutano.com, that’s H-U-T-A-N-O dot com, to get more information if they’re curious. But that was one of the things with this approach, it wasn’t, when I was listening to you speak about it, I was like, wow, it’s not just the patient, it’s not just the provider, but it’s allowing them to do what they need. For a patient, I’m not just googling, you know, what size screw, you know, or on the Home Depot website looking up what size screw to fix my toilet. I’m in a lot of pain. I do not feel comfortable right now. And on top of that, I have to do all of this work that is sometimes unnecessary, or I show up to the office, I don’t have my insurance card, I don’t remember what the numbers are, all of these different things. And all of a sudden, This software takes that weight off of me as much. And then on the flip side, I never heard people say, well, you know, the doctor just talked to me so much. He spent so much time with me. That’s not what the complaint. And vice versa. People don’t brag about their provider saying, oh, you should have seen. He saw me for five minutes, but he documented 50 minutes wonderfully on me. I mean, the notes this man wrote. Yeah, nobody says that. And so you’re kind of setting aside all the things that get in the way of doing what providers have that calling to do, which is to take care of patients, to make sure that they feel better, to make sure that they’re taken care of. And I think that’s probably one of the biggest things when I look at the software that you’ve put together. versus at least the softwares that I have used, that I was very, very impressed. Not just with your passion, you know, oh, I just love developing software, or I just love being a physical therapist, but somehow those two things all of a sudden came together, and you’re like, hey, I have an opportunity to make a really big impact in this space. And in a very competitive space, it’s not, you know, this is not easy to get to. This is like launching a perfume brand and wanting to be heard like a food product, right? These are very competitive spaces, and so I want to commend you, especially since it happened here in Las Vegas. No, I want to commend you on your willingness to be able to take this step, to be able to fight that good fight, and to kind of persevere through this. Like you mentioned, right, that the hospitals, a hospital had taken the plunge here in the Valley, and I’m very excited for you and hearing that good news. And I think, honestly, it’s just the beginning. And so I want to thank you for coming on to the show and sharing a little bit with all the listeners and with me the different process of how this company came about and how you came to that spot of saying, you know what, I’m going to do something.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I appreciate it, Diego. And thanks a lot for inviting me to your podcast. And hopefully I’ll get to see you again on this podcast at a later stage when things have moved along a little bit.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: Houtano.2?
SPEAKER_01: Houtano.2, that’s right. But yeah, no, thank you so much. And from myself and the rest of the team at Houtano, we really thank you for the support that you’ve given us over the past couple of years as well. So I appreciate it.
DIEGO TRUJILLO: No, it’s an absolute pleasure on my part. Like I said, I was blown away by the software, and not even because of the way you guys presented it. Just what it could do for coordination of care. Just what it could do for medical records and patients having access to that. Just what it could do for sending a referral with notes from one provider to the other. I was just, wow, this is incredible. And so, just the way that you’re linking all these loose ends, I have to give it to you. In my book, you definitely beat the fax machine. Okay? Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Absolutely. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen, everyone that stuck through this podcast. Again, if you want more information, make sure to go to Hootano.com. That is H-U-T-A-N-O dot com to get more information and learn a little bit more about the innovation that’s occurring here in Las Vegas. Thank you very much, and have a great day.
