AI is rescuing physicians and providers from burnout, with David Norris.

Hi, thanks for joining us for episode #109 of the Doctor Podcast, Sicard File Show. And as usual, I'm your host, Doctor Robert Sicard. Please subscribe and follow Doctor podcasts and please also like, share and repost this episode so that we can have even more great guests like we have today. Our guest today is David Norris. David is a Co founder and CEO of Athenian Health Company, which we'll talk about at length. His mission is he's a pioneer in AI solutions to combat provider and physician burnout, which is a huge topic these days, and also to transform healthcare so it not only helps physicians and providers, but most importantly patients as well.

He has over 20 years experience as a serial entrepreneur. He's founded multiple successful healthcare companies over the years, and his goal is to streamline provider workflow, saving doctors, clinicians, providers many hours weekly so that they can prioritize patient care and not get burnt out. So David, thanks very much for joining us today. I'm really excited discussing this topic, especially because it deals with AI and burnout, which are two of the hottest topics in medicine these days. So thanks for taking time from your busy day to join us.

Absolutely. Really nice to be here. Thanks. So tell us about your background in in healthcare first of all. No, I've been in healthcare for many years, about 20 years, and have worked on the provider side, the payer side and the employer side. So I've had a pretty rounded experience dealing with healthcare from all sides. And of course, I'm a consumer of healthcare also, so I get to experience all the good, the bad and the ugly like the rest of us. Right now, tell us about provider burnout. What exactly does that mean?

Can you divine define it and why is it such a growing crisis in healthcare? I just read an article this morning that was published in Annals of Internal Medicine, which is very top prestigious medical journal and it says the rate of burnout in internal medicine doctors is about 10% nationally and it could be much higher in other specialty. So tell us what burnout is about and and why it's a growing crisis. Well, it's a pretty big problem. As consumers, we all have experienced the challenge of trying to get an appointment with your physician and it's difficult.

You know, it takes time. And currently, based on the projections that the government's put out, there's going to be a shortage of about 100,000 doctors by the 2030 kind of time frame. And so if you imagine it's bad today, it's going to be much worse then. And one of the big contributors is burnout. Providers have a very difficult job. And, you know, we as patients probably don't make it that easy for them. You know, we go to them with strange conditions and ask them what's wrong with us. And they have to spend time figuring it out.

And I think what has happened over the last 10 or 15 years is that there has been more and more pressure on providers who see more patients and to do a lot of administrative work behind the computer that takes them away from seeing patients. And all of that translates into a very difficult job. And many providers today are deciding that they just don't want to do it anymore and they're going in to do other things. And that's what's causing this burnout problem to be really an epidemic. Right. Your point is well taken.

I'm an ophthalmologist. I see patients during the week, many patients and I've noticed that in in the last year I have trouble finding doctors that I can refer my patients to. For example, I often have to refer patients to neurologists because their eye problems may be related to neurologic prompt and all the neurologists are booked for four months, six months and other specialties as well like internists, primary care doctors, they're all booked up patients complaint to me that they can't get an appointment for months.

And if you have a problem that's urgent or acute, that's that's not good enough. So patients wind up going to the emergency room, which is overworked as well and not the appropriate place to go. So why are doctors getting burnt out? And what does that do to a Doctor Who feels burnt out? How does it impact the quality of healthcare that they provide to patients? Well, the the first question, you know, it really was caused by a number of factors. One in particular about, you know, 15 years ago the government started a program to put electronic medical records systems in place.

And that was a good thing in the sense that now you can exchange medical records between different health systems. But on the flip side, it created a lot of administrative work for the providers, so they now spend more than half their time behind the computer rather than in front of patients. But they're still expected to see a lot of patients every day, and so generally that means that they end up spending late hours every night trying to keep up with all the paperwork they have to do. Oh, you've been watching that?

Exactly. And that, you know, that can get old after a while. So if if every night you had to go home and stay up till late hours trying to just keep caught up, just trying to stay above water and you did that for a few years. And then there's all the other pressures of trying to see more patients. So compressing the schedule, you know, shorter visits with patients and more volume that that's like a treadmill. And after a while, a lot of providers are getting tired of it. What, what that can result in is not only frustration and, and just burnout with the providers, but you can imagine how a provider might not be as focused when they're seeing a patient.

I had a provider the other day that said they're a very different doctor at 8:00 AM than they are at 5:00 PM. And I thought, you know, I can understand that, you know, everybody has had hard days and had long days, but if it was every day, that could get significantly old. So I think as a just as a society, we have to decide, you know, are providers important to us? And if they are, how can we make their lives reasonable and manageable so they can deliver the quality of care that we expect? And so far, that hasn't really happened.

Now with AI, there's an opportunity to try to improve that. But today that that situation is pretty dire. Right. So the problem is it's, it's not only at 5:00 PM, but a lot of doctors are feeling like it's 5:00 PM when it's 10:00 AM in the morning and that they've kind of had it because there's so much work. So tell us how Athenian is, is helping this administrative burden. That's your company like managing the inbox that a, that a doctor has or reviewing lab results, which is a long, tedious process.

And then you have to discuss the results with the patient and this impacts providers mental health and job satisfaction and also may cause burnout if it's not handled properly. So how does Athenian help with that? So what we're doing is applying AI to one of the biggest problems that providers face on a day in and day out basis. And it's, it's the, it's the clinical inbox, which is very different than the consumers. You know, a Gmail account where you're going in. And we all get a lot of emails every day.

But for providers, they're getting slightly different kinds of content. So let's say you go see your PCP for your annual Wellness visit and they order typically 5 to 10 labs. And, you know, in the next few days, those lab results come in and guess what? They come into the inbox. And if you're seeing 20 patients a day times 5 to 10 labs, you're getting a lot of lab volume coming in every day in the inbox. And they're kind of important. You know, you can't just wait until Sunday to catch up on them.

So what a lot of providers do is they stay up late at night trying to get through those labs so they can be responsive to the patients and let them know, hey, I see that this is off a little bit. Here's what we're going to do about it. So Affinion, we're reading AI to help in managing and analyzing and in some cases automating how we handle those lab results to give providers some help. And our solution can save the provider an enormous amount of time. We can typically process about half, about 50% of what's in the inbox every day and automatically handle that for the provider so they can spend time on the more challenging or clinically difficult cases.

So our solution is really making a difference. We're saving about 5 hours a week for PCP, and that can really help them both to kind of keep caught up on the inbox, which is always a challenge because it's never ending. But also it can make their job a little bit easier so they can actually spend a bit more time thinking about the more complicated cases. Right. That's 45 to 60 minutes a day, which which adds up. How do you handle that? Is is AI able to differentiate, for example, a normal lab result from something that's abnormal?

And then those AI interface with the patient and somehow tell the patient your your labs are normal or they're not normal and the doctor will get back to you or something like that. Explain how that works. Yeah, exactly. So we have the ability to accept lab results as they're coming in. We can analyze those and then go pull the entire patient history, which will include their conditions, meds and so on. And understanding the patient, you can then make a decision about how the lab should be handled.

So normal isn't always normal. So if you get a lab result back for one patient, normal might be fine. Another patient normal might be a little different. So we're able with AI to analyze the lab in the context of that patient and then notify the patient, hey, congratulations, your labs are normal or your labs are slightly elevated, but it's not clinically significant. So nothing to worry about. And we can do this using an AI agent that communicates to the patient on behalf of the doctor, letting the patient know pretty quickly.

So this can happen within a few minutes of when the lab results come in, which for the patient can be very relieving because they might otherwise be worried, like, oh, what does this mean? And then more than likely, they'd go to Google and start searching for what that means and see a lot of really bad stuff. So by getting this communication to the patient more quickly, you can relieve their stress. And of course, we're then being able to close it out of the inbox so the provider has one less thing to do.

And being able to distinguish between what the provider should definitely look at and what they don't need to look at is all under provider control. So they decide. So the AI is only doing what the provider tells it to do, and it's an important distinction. We're not leaving it up to AI to make medical decisions, but rather let the doctor make the medical decision and let the AI help implement what the doctor wants. So the AI is also triaging the the results and flagging the most important ones.

Does it do that as well? Exactly. Yeah, we can sort them so that as a provider's going through their day, let's say they have 100 or 150 things in their inbox, when they have a little time to squeeze in some inbox time maybe between patients, now they can focus on those more critical, really important lab results. And later in the day when it's a little bit less critical that you can do the the, you know, lower priority labs. And I think that's for most providers a big relief the way they've done in the past.

It was just a whole set of things to go through and you had no idea which ones were most important. Right. It's kind of like an emergency room having a triage nurse to decide who needs to be seen right away and who might be able to wait 1/2 an hour an hour. Exactly. Yeah, we've got an AI triage agent. Exactly. Now is this agent, that's another hot topic in in AI, everybody has an agent now that does everything they can plan their trips or go shopping and, and this is a healthcare agent. Is this proprietary AI agent, or are you using one of the giant AI companies and customizing that for your specific need and the doctor's needs?

Yeah. So we built a proprietary platform that allows us to do this. And so we had to train it on how to handle over 2000 different types of lab results. You can imagine, you know, doctors will order a lot of different types of labs and there's, there's no off the shelf training data to say how should you handle this type of lab. So we built our own proprietary data to train on how to handle these. So it, it was a big effort and we had a, a large clinical team that had to do this. It took over a year just to build the clinical training data.

But once we had it, then we're able to help providers in a very special way. And, you know, anybody that could cut your inbox in half just that's pretty nice, you know, And when you talk about agents, you know, the idea of having an agent that can do something useful, the inbox typically is one of the bigger problems a provider deals with day-to-day. So having an immediate relief and some help is really amazing. And the reaction we're getting from providers is you, as you would expect, pretty, pretty awesome.

You know, they love it because they've never had help before. You know, it'd be nice to be able to hire an assistant that would just triage your inbox all the time, but nobody's got the budget for that. Right. I was just thinking, it's almost like hiring a nurse practitioner to go through your inbox and deal with all the lab results and contact the patients. So. Exactly. That's very expensive. Yeah, our ours cost $2.50 a day, or as we like to say, half a cup of coffee. Wow, that's a lot of money, 250 really that's that's how inexpensive it is.

Exactly. And, and that you can have an agent that will triage the inbox 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all the time. So this, this agent works Saturdays and Sundays late at night. So whenever lab results come in, we're processing them immediately for the provider, which again has the side effect of helping the patient because they're, you know, I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but you know, sometimes you'll, you'll go get your annual physical, the lab results will come back. Maybe you'll get them at the same time your provider gets them.

And then you're wondering, OK, what does this mean? And it might take them a week to send you a note saying it's everything's OK. But during that week you're stressed out. Like wow, I'm worried now you don't have to do that anymore. Right. This is a big problem. All my patients complain about it. They go to the doctor, they have MRI scans or X-rays or blood work. They get the results right away in their electronic medical record and they have no idea what the results are. They call the doctor's office and they're sweating until the doctor gets back to them.

And that's required by law. Now for all the EMR companies, they they have to give the patient the result even before the doctor sees it. Exactly 1 of the side effects of that, which was unintended, but it does happen is us as patients sometimes, you know, we'll wait maybe a day or two and then we'll send a message to our doctor, which of course goes into their inbox, which compounds the problem. So if the doctor doesn't respond pretty quick, you know, I'm, I'm not going to wait more than a couple of days.

Like, hey, what does this mean? Now their inbox just blows up and the inbox volume for providers is going up about 20% a year. So you can imagine their problem is just getting worse and worse. And you know, this all comes back to burnout. Like after a while when you just can't stay above water, it becomes unreasonable and providers often just make a choice to go into a different profession. Right, it's a problem because doctor can't keep up with it gets frustrating, then the patients get angry at the doctor and then the doctor gets annoyed and just doesn't want to deal with it anymore and is more prone to making errors in that state of mind.

So this is very helpful. Now have you? I'm sure you have, but I just want to know, have you checked how accurate and reliable this is? In other words, what's the rate of the AI agent that Athenian has making an error and telling a patient, oh, your labs look OK, but they're really not OK? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, that's one of the biggest challenges that that everybody in AI has today. We've all gone into ChatGPT and asked a question and gotten an answer is like, wait a minute, that's not right.

So with Athenian, we actually spent a lot of time building a platform that performs at a level that exceeds what humans can do. So we're at 99.9% accuracy. And if you had the person that we discussed earlier, let's say you hired an assistant to triage your inbox, most humans aren't going to be able to achieve 99.9% accuracy. It's just not, not going to happen. So we're actually better than the alternative of using a human. And it does it 24 hours a day, which is nice. And it's very consistent. It doesn't make mistakes.

So it, it's very, very reliable. And I think that's the big thing for providers is that they don't really care if it's AI or not AI. You know, if you look inside of an MRI machine, do you think there's any AI inside of there? Probably, but they don't care. All they care is does it do the work needed? Does it give a good image? So with our solution, most providers really look at it that way, You know, does this thing do what it's supposed to do? Does it do it reliably? And can I use it as a tool?

Is it a new thing that I can use as a as a tool? I heard a great saying the other day that I actually think makes a lot of sense. One person was saying, you know, are is AI going to replace doctors? And I think the saying was doctors, you know, AI will not replace doctors, but AI will replace doctors that don't use AI. So doctors that use AI have a competitive advantage. And it's no different than using an MRI machine. If you went to a doctor that didn't have an MRI and you needed one, you'd probably think, well, I'm going to go to a different doctor that uses the more advanced tools.

That's how to think of AIS. It's just another tool that you can use that gives you an advantage. That's a great analogy there. I love that one. I'm going to use that one if you give me permission there. Sure thing, but it, it is becoming a more competitive situation with providers and, and I, I have actually seen most providers like using the newer technology if it can help them. And of course they want to take it out for a test drive and try it. But once they try it and it works and they can depend on it as they like it, they're they're kind of, you know, open to help right now.

Right. How did you come up with that 99% accuracy? Did clinicians or doctors actually check what the AI said and made sure it was accurate? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We have a human in the loop system, so our system can automatically escalate to a human any lab result that comes in and have it checked by a human. At the beginning, we checked 100%, literally, we checked every result. And then over time, once we trained the system to do it, we were able to check a smaller and smaller amount. Now it's a statistical sampling so we can maintain the level of quality.

So I think that's the way most people should do AI. You know, you don't trust day one. You have to demonstrate and experience it and then you trust. So that's what we've done. Right. Trust and verify as they say, right? Exactly. Right. Interestingly, you said will AI replace doctor? So I've interviewed many doctors and I also speak to my colleagues and different specialties and I always ask them, you know, do you think AI is going to replace us? Every doctor I speak to says, well, it's going to replace other specialties, but not mine because we have some special stuff that AI just can't duplicate.

So it's it's interesting, but every I like, I don't think AI can replace ophthalmologists or do my surgery, but they're already have robots out there that are run by AI, which may be as good a surgeon as me in a few years. So I think I think you're right. AAI will assist the doctor to be a better and more efficient Dr. and AI never burns out right? Exactly. Yeah, I think, I think AI is, it's just a tool, but it's a powerful tool. And I think providers that embrace these kind of new capabilities will have an advantage.

You know, let's imagine a scenario where AI could help in the screening of a patient that you're about to go in and see, and AI could give you its opinion about what the condition of the patient was. That would be just one more data point, no different than if you walked in and you did an exam. Those are all data points for you to try to figure it out. Well, AI is another tool to help you do that. And I, I think that's absolutely going to happen. I don't, I don't really think that it in, at least not in our lifetime, I don't think that it'll ever replace the relationship that providers should have with the patient and the ability to take a broader picture of the situation with that patient.

You know, their lifestyle, their conditions, their meds. I think that's where doctors will guide AI to do things that will be helpful to the provider, other than the other way around. Right now, you mentioned Thinian handles the inbox and labs. Are you working in other areas as well? For example, one of my biggest beefs is I get all these prior authorization requests from insurance companies when I prescribe various eye medications. And I have to fill out two or three page forms to explain why I'm prescribing this.

And it's read by a clerk who may have just graduated high school, can't pronounce any of the medical conditions or the medications. And they make a decision as to whether my prescription is right or not. And sometimes after I fill out the first form, they'll send me a follow up form a day later with more questions. And then sometimes a third form, believe it or not. And then occasionally I've gotten a fourth form says that, oh, we made an error. This drug actually is authorized. So you don't need to fill out any of the authorizations.

Meanwhile I've spent about an hour doing all those forms. Can you help with that? Can Athenian help with that and and other types of things that just waste doctors time and as a result waste patients time and create problems? Yeah, it's a great question. Well, there are a lot of different work flows that providers do today that could use help. Certainly prior auth is one of them. But I think for Athenion, we are very focused on the inbox and the things that surround the inbox. So I'll give you an example.

So today we handle things like lab results or prescription renewals that come in and can be very time consuming for the staff and for the provider. We're introducing a new solution that does care gap closure. So if you can imagine your provider orders a mammogram or a colonoscopy or a Cologuard, and about 30, forty, 50% of the time patients don't do them and that's a problem. So we're actually helping to close those care gaps and get those patients to do the things that the provider has requested that they do.

And that's good for the patient. It's good for the provider. It's also often good for the insurance companies, you know, for the payers because many of these are preventative. And it's a big problem. It's it's costing the country a lot of money and it's certainly costing, you know, payers a lot of money when patients fail to do these things that have been ordered by the provider. We're in a unique spot because we're in the inbox communicating between the provider and the patient to help address that problem.

So we're introducing a solution to do that, and I'm super excited because I think that will make a big difference for people's health. We're also introducing an AI voice agent that will be able to call patients and explain their lab results. So not all patients have a portal account there where they can go in and see them. So a lot of practices have to hire staff to call the patient because like you said, there's a legal requirement to communicate the results. And if they don't have a portal account, you got to call them.

And that's very costly and and time consuming. So we're using AI agents to actually do that, to address that problem. So it'll actually be an AI calling the patient and there'll be a voice communication. That's interesting. Exactly. Yeah, it's, it's amazing when you actually try it. It's so fun and it works really well and you know it. It's not intended to solve all problems, but it does the very effective job of communicating your lab results. And of course they can talk to a human if they need to, but that's where this is going.

You know, that's not a job that a lot of people want to do. You know, calling patients to explain their lab results, that's not a lot of fun. Right. Speaking of that, I just tried Elon Musk's Grok AI, which now has a new app that actually has voice. So I can ask grok any question and grok replies in a male or female voice. You can pick which one you want and it's very accurate and precise even when I ask medical questions. So I guess your agent is doing the same thing but it's more medically oriented.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Chad DB TS had the the voice interface for a while. And now with Grok, I think everyone's going to have it. And it works pretty well. I mean, it, it, it makes Siri sound terrible. You know, you know, some of the previous things and they barely worked. These work really well and that's you're getting a little exposure to how our solution works. When you're play with Grok, you know, it's quite nice. You know, you talk to it, it has a very good interactive style. The voice sounds really, really good.

It's not robotic product like some of them. So it, I think 2025 is going to be the year of two things. It's going to be the year of the inbox solution and it's going to be the year of voice agents. And you're seeing them pop up all over the place, mostly because the underlying technology is now where it needs to be. You know, you don't have to have those long delays. Sometimes with AI, it's very intense processing and sometimes you could say something and it would take it like 5 seconds to respond.

Well, that won't work. Now they've got it down to like 250 milliseconds so you can have a nice conversation. Right, I was on with Grok yesterday. I was on a noisy bus and I asked Grok a question and Grok replied by first giggling. And I thought that was bizarre. So Grok giggled and said, I see you're on a noisy bus. I love it. Yeah, because I, I also had the video on, so Grok was able to see what my camera on my smartphone was seeing. And Grok says I see you're on a noisy bus and was laughing. I couldn't tell it it wasn't human.

It's it's really incredible so. Yeah. Well, that's where this is all going. I think if you take that experience you had and now apply that to the various problems in healthcare that we would all like to be addressed, the opportunity's huge. And I'm more excited than if I've been in healthcare 20 years. This is the most exciting time because it's making a big dent right now. Like we're making a difference and that's translating into more time with patients and better care. And that's as technologies, that's really what we aspire to do, right?

We want to make a difference in a positive way. And I think this is just a super exciting time when you actually see a provider relax and breathe for a moment ago. Thank you. Like we, we have providers all the time that will have two or three thousand things in their inbox and they can't catch up and they've got labs from three months ago, four months ago. You know that you're like, that's a person. You need to get the results to that person. And we come in and within a week they're caught up and now they're able to maintain their current status.

That is super just, that's just amazing. When that happens, you just feel great because we just helped, you know, thousands of patients that were otherwise sort of behind, you know, and wondering what happened to their lab results, you know? Right, For many years now, it's been known that medical errors are a huge source of patient morbidity and occasionally mortality. So if if this can reduce that, that'll be awesome. But on that topic, I have some patients who've told me they're kind of nervous about AI and even trying AI 'cause they're afraid of errors.

How do you deal with that? And I'm sure other physicians have been told that by their patients. You know, I think it's a complicated question. We're involved in some industry organizations. One of them is Chai, which is really an organization trying to define standards for the safe and effective use of AI in healthcare. And part of the perspective that we believe in is transparency. So if a voice, if an AI agent calls you on the phone, it needs to announce that I'm a, I'm an AI agent. I'm calling you on behalf of the practice.

You know, you know. I don't think. Well, I don't think you ever go down the path of trying to hide it, but rather you embrace it so that the consumer knows what they're dealing with. And I think that is part of the solution. The other part is that we need to make sure it works well. You know what you you go in and you have an experience in a ChatGPT where you get a bizarre answer. And that good and and definitely does scare people. If you think about a self driving car, you would hope that it doesn't make an error like that because that could cost you your life.

So the, the solution to this, I think is a combination of on the one side transparency and on the other side validating, testing and assuring that we have a high quality standard. So that results at least meet or exceed what humans would do. And if you reach that standard, I think that's a pretty good bar. And you've you've probably seen the data on self driving cars. I mean, they've basically proven that they are safer than human drivers, but they're still not perfect. They still make mistakes.

So, you know, I think if we set a bar that's reasonable, which is is at least as good as humans were doing it or better, that's pretty good. That's a good analogy. I like that the full self driving that that Tesla has must claims now. It's it's better than humans and apparently it's going to be approved soon. I guess the same standards can be applied to AI and and your company affinion as well. We certainly see a lot of practices that we go into today where we can look at their historical data and see errors that have been made in the past.

We can we have that ability, we can go backwards and look at what was done and it's just part of being human, right? People are going to make mistakes. So we have we have the ability to, and I think this is where AI should definitely be thought of in a certain way, which is it doesn't have to be 100% perfect. If the thing you're comparing to is humans and they're not 100% perfect, what you want to do is make an overall improvement, which means be as good or better than humans. And I think that's that's a different way of looking at it.

A lot of people just think, well, yeah, it's got to be perfect or I won't use it. No, it's just got to be better than whoever you were doing it before. That's a great point. The benchmark is what humans do right? Yeah. And and they're definitely not perfect. I mean, the error rate, depending on what The thing is, could be quite significant. So if as consumers, if we just get better service because there's less errors, well, that's great. Right now, which specialties does Athenian work with? Now?

Which medical specialties? We worked in a broad set, you know, typically it's the ones that order a lot of labs. So it's, you know, PCPS, oncology, OB cardiology, rheumatology, you know the the. Practices. Exactly. The practice is that do a lot of lab work and we're introducing imaging next quarter and at that point we'll begin working with some of the specialties that are less lab heavy and more imaging heavy. But right now it's about half the doctors out there. So you know, it's about half the providers.

That's great. Now, does Athenian somehow interact with the doctor's current EMR or electronic or health medical record? How do you connect it to the doctor's EMR system? Yeah, we, we do. And that that was one of the big challenges in our perspective. The way system should work is that they should not require that the provider install some new software or log into some new system. It should just work within the EHR as it is. So we integrate directly into VHR very tightly. So for the provider, it's super easy.

They don't have to change anything about the way they work. They just get additional value. And that has been a real secret to our success because providers love it. If you ask them to install some new thing or log in to some new things, they might do it once or twice, but they're not going to do it day-to-day. And so that too much burden, too much time. It takes so much time to get used to a new software interface. For all, for all of us, you know, I know I I hate, you know, it's only a new app that you have to learn if it's like an e-mail app or something that you use every day.

Oh, that's painful. It's like, no. Right, so which Emrs are you working with? There's a very broad set. So we started working with some Emrs in the beginning and we've now expanded out across most of the popular ones and we are continually adding them. There are a lot of little ones out there and it's amazing. Different specialities have own specialized EHR. So we're, we, we introduced a program to allow electronic health records systems to embed our software inside of their software so they can do a deal with us where they just make it part of their solution.

That makes it really nice because then it's out-of-the-box available to all the customers. We don't do that with all of them, but that's something that's available and and I think that's what will more than likely allow this solution to be very pervasive. Right. So you're actually working with the EMR companies and and installing it there and then the doctor can just automatically use it. Yeah, yeah. That's, I'd say that we do both. In the first scenario, a doctor could come in and buy Affinion and have it installed and and set up, which is super easy.

Yeah. But some of these embedded deals where it would literally just come with the EHR and you, it would just be there. You push a button, turn it on. That I think is where this is going. And I think we're in the middle of a bunch of deals like that now. So over time, I think this kind of functionality is, you know, AI still a new thing, but I think most providers are now kind of expecting it to be just in the package. You know, they don't want to have to worry about installing separate things. So I, I'm excited about that.

I think AI matured faster in healthcare than any technology I've ever seen. You know, it usually these things take a while, but you know, I don't know if you've seen like ambient note taking solutions, which have been very pervasive. And in a matter of 12 to 18 months, a lot of doctors went from not using AI to using ambient note taking. Right, Yeah, that's that's spreading pretty fast and Microsoft is behind that and pushing that as well. Now you mentioned earlier the cost, it sounded really inexpensive.

It it almost sounds like a huge bargain. How do doctors sign up for affinion? You know, they can just go to our website, so www.affinion.com and there's a form that you can fill out and that starts a process where our team will help get them set up and configured. It was intended to be priced at a level where providers could all have access to it and that's one of the reasons we. Did it at such a low price. So it's $50 per provider per month, which for most providers that's insignificant enough that they can buy it.

And I think that's what should happen here. You know, we we are really in the business of helping providers and it doesn't help if you give them a great tool that is so expensive they can't buy it. So we opted to make this more of a pervasive kind of technology where everybody can have it and it's at a price point where A1 Dock practice that's struggling with their inbox can buy it or a large health system that's got, you know, 10,000 providers can buy it. That's sounds like a great deal. That's very inexpensive, certainly magnitudes cheaper than hiring a person like a nurse or some other trained person to do that.

So, so that's great. Yeah, it's it's a lot. It's not practical for most providers to have their own dedicated assistant to triage the Xbox. You know, it's just wouldn't happen. Right. So on another note, I'm a runner. I noticed from looking you up that that you're into cycling, right? I am. I'm a very passionate cyclist for sure. Really. Tour de France is coming up and. I'm ready for it. I'm I'm totally ready for it. It's going to be a lot of fun. I I can't wait. Every year there's a lot of races that are great, and I live in Colorado where there's a lot of mountains and a lot of climbing, so it's a lot of fun.

So you do a lot of racing. I do. I do. I try to do as many as I can. It's difficult as ACEO of a very fast growing company. You know you don't always have time to do all of them, but I try to do as many as I can. But that helps you recharge and stay healthy and alert and motivated for all the challenges that you have, right? I think it's kind of required as ACEO, you know, when you're under a lot of pressure and building fast growing company, having a strong base really does help, especially when you're traveling and all the stuff that goes with it.

So I I'm definitely a big fan of staying strong and staying so. That's awesome. Who's going to win the Tour de France this year? Yeah, tour guitar is going to win. He, he, he's, he's definitely. He's won everything else, right? He, he's, he's crazy good and I think he's going to be one of the best we've ever seen. So he he'll win. Yeah, it seems that way. Anyway, I really enjoyed speaking with you today and I learned a lot and I'm sure the doctors who are watching this and also patients out there will appreciate this as well.

I'm sure many patients are now going to call their doctors and say you got to get afinion because I can't wait a week to get my lab results from you. You know, I, I think it's just such an exciting time and I'm, I'm really glad that you're helping to publicize all of these new technologies that can really make a difference. You know, I, I think let's go help providers. That's my motto. You know, they have an incredibly difficult job. Let's do everything we can do to help them. That's great. Thanks again for taking the time today.

I really appreciate it. Very nice to meet you, take care all. Right.

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