Rebecca Willumson:
Hi there. I'm Rebecca Willumson. I'm the publisher of Fierce Healthcare, and I'm here today with Ben Albert, CEO of Upfront. Ben, thank you so much for joining me today.
Ben Albert:
Rebecca Willumson:
So Ben, before we begin, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your role at Upfront?
Ben Albert:
Sure. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Upfront Healthcare. We're based here in Chicago. I'm a longtime healthcare entrepreneur who found this passion early in my career and I'm really focused on helping build companies that have both a social benefit and can build an economically sustainable company overall. So healthcare is a natural alignment to that vision and focus. And then having personal experiences in healthcare that have led me down this path for the last 25 years, really helping every patient get the care they need through a technology platform that supports them in a personalized way.
Rebecca Willumson:
To start us off, tell me why did you start Upfront Healthcare and what are Upfront's vision and mission?
Ben Albert:
Sure. I started Upfront Healthcare following an experience of founding a prior company called Care Team Connect, and Care Team Connect was founded because of a family experience where my grandfather had had a couple of strokes and the care around him wasn't necessarily the tightest and he was in and out of the emergency room and my dad was in Chicago and I was in Boston at the time. Watching the care coordination ultimately fail him led me to think about how can you better coordinate care in the community? And launched a company called Care Team Connect, which was a care management platform for population health. That company had some success and was then acquired by The Advisory Board.
And through that experience, it really became evident to me that not only do patients like my grandfather need care navigation, every patient needs it. And it's not just a population health story, it's in every patient story. So how do you truly enable every patient to get the care that they need is what led me to launch Upfront Healthcare following that experience on the population health side and really blend that fee for service and population health shared risk environment into one solution that enables every patient.
Rebecca Willumson:
So talk to me, what is patient engagement and access and why is it so important to driving outcomes?
Ben Albert:
I think that's a loaded question obviously, and one that there's a lot of different points of view on. But to us at Upfront, patient engagement is truly how do you help every patient and enable them so that they have the information that they need to make the right decision on the care that they need to complete? And access is, once you know that that care is needed, how do you actually get it? Where do I go? How do I utilize the system? How do I utilize services in order to meet me where I am to get that care that I have been presented? Today, they seem like they're two separate work streams in a lot of occurrences. So you can get engaged, but then where's the access going to come from? Or you can be offered access, but do I really know if I need that care?
And those two have to come together, they're a symbiotic relationship. They have to come together. You have to be able to engage someone, teach them about that care that they need, and then provide them with options to receive that in an omnichannel way. Whether that's digital services providing that care or whether that's in-person services, retail services, doesn't matter. Someone needs to guide them to that care and optimize their access once they're engaged. And that's why we believe they have to be a part of a single platform in order to truly engage a patient and provide them with the access to care that they deserve.
Rebecca Willumson:
What does this look like if I'm actually a patient and how do you do that?
Ben Albert:
It's seamless for a patient. There's not much for them to do at all. And that's the whole logic behind it. So what a patient would receive is an omnichannel communication, oftentimes a text message, that's very personalized to them. Uses their physician's name, uses a lot of the content that we have that we know compels them to take action. And then links them into a responsibly designed page that we call a microsite that's personalized and embedded with the access option that's available to them for the care that they need. That page has imagery that speaks to them, has content that's health literate, and enable them to take action. It's HIPAA compliant. We're HITRUST certified, so it checks all the boxes, but it removes any friction of needing to go to a portal or needing to download an app and remember a complex password. It just enables them in a very clean and eloquent way to get to the care that they need.
Rebecca Willumson:
Now you mentioned omnichannel personalization. What does that mean to you and why is it effective?
Ben Albert:
Omnichannel personalization has really two elements to it. The first is what we just discussed, which is more in line with how do we best communicate with this individual? What modality, what channel of communication do we utilize? Or what combination of channels do we utilize to help this person understand that the care they need is critical to them and gives them access to that care? So the first step is how do we communicate? What language do we use? What imagery do we use? And what channel of communication do we use to bias this for success for the patient and thus for our clients?
And then once they're to that and they're engaged, then what channel of care delivery is utilized? We use what's called care traffic control to route them to the appropriate channel of care from an omnichannel care delivery perspective. So we connect them to that channel, whether it's a digital channel of care delivery, whether it's a retail channel of care delivery, or whether it's a physician visit channel of care delivery. We help them optimize their access and we help our clients utilize their services as efficiently as possible to meet all of the patients where they are.
Rebecca Willumson:
I'm going to switch gears just a bit here. What are the market segments and verticals you primarily serve? And then what challenges either business or clinical are you helping them solve?
Ben Albert:
We typically serve large provider organizations, health systems, large physician groups, even the pay providers or groups who employ a lot of clinicians who are providing care. Because we do believe that the best engagement comes from those who provide the care and the patient trust, which is so critical, is often with their provider, not with a brand, so to speak. So when we personalize and engage, we utilize the provider organization as that foundation for which we can enable that patient. Beyond that, the types of solutions that we provide, we help patients come back for necessary care. So whether that's care gaps, hopefully they don't become gaps because you can get them in advance of them becoming gaps and the patient books that and gets the preventative care that they need.
The other is making sure the patients stay with the care that they've scheduled. So not only is it just a simple reminder because a text message for a reminder is not necessarily as effective, it's truly enabling a patient if they need to reschedule a visit or rebook a visit, to give them scheduling options in the flow of that reminder so that they're able to keep the care that they have scheduled and then also potentially efficiently reschedule that care if needed through a visit reminder platform that we provide in addition to what we call recall, which is bringing patients back for necessary care.
The third area is around referrals. Many health systems obviously have a challenge of connecting patients from primary care to their other specialist care or to the imaging that's needed and making sure that that's a seamless experience for the patient so they can move throughout the system and understand what care is needed and they get connected to the access to those downstream services that they need. Those are the big three today that we provide. On top of that, there are some 60 other use cases that we support with the platform is truly an enterprise patient navigation platform.
Rebecca Willumson:
So in your opinion, what differentiates Upfront from others in your market?
Ben Albert:
I think it starts with personalization. The level of depth that we can go to truly understand how to engage someone and then get them to access. It's the combination of those two things based on the personalization and the knowledge of how to best get to that person and enable them in a way that they're successful in their care and they get the optimal outcomes by getting them access to care in the most efficient and effective and timely way. Bringing that all together is a big differentiator for us and truly enables us to be successful.
On top of that, we're more than technology. We have a team of people here who understand design and understand literacy and communication. So we provide all of those services as part of our platform to make sure that the right communication is being delivered, that we're using the right language, that we're using the right imagery, and that we're enabling patients to take action. And the final thing I'd say, that's all in service because we believe that the patient's the most underutilized resource in healthcare. And if you better enable them, ultimately they'll make the decision that's in their best interest and complete the care that they need.
Rebecca Willumson:
My final question for you today, what's your vision for the future of Upfront in the near and long term, and how do you hope to impact healthcare overall?
Ben Albert:
It's all mission driven for us. I mean, it starts with a simple statement. We're going to help every patient get the care that they need. That's what we focus on as an organization. That's the lens we look through at the company to help us grow, to help people be successful in their care and ultimately our clients to be effective and efficient in how they're providing that care. We made one acquisition of PatientBond. We're building onto our platform with organic capabilities within the platform to further our enterprise capabilities across a health system or large provider organization. And that ultimately converges with the ability to provide a single stream of communication to a patient that's thoughtful, that's personalized, and that's intentional to help that patient get the care that they need. We are that single enterprise platform that supports a patient across a complex organization who's providing care through multi modalities. For us, more of that and helping those clients of ours be successful on an enterprise level.
Rebecca Willumson:
Great. That feels like a perfect place to stop. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciated the conversation.
Ben Albert:
Thank you very much for having me.