Transcript
Mike Manson (00:00) what’s up ash?
Hassan Zahir (00:01) How much are you filming about this call? I’m good man. How are you filming about this call?
Mike Manson (00:08) You know, I think it will go. Okay. I don’t know how much it’s going to move the needle forward. It’ll be interesting to hear his feedback, but I think we want to just kind of figure out how he’s… thinking about automation. How is he thinking about building on verifiable or any solution? Does he have use cases in mind? Does he have resources that he has available to use it? I mean to, you know, to put it on hand to build this, does?
Hassan Zahir (00:46) Verifiable support bot usage against their platform like, yeah.
Mike Manson (00:54) Yeah… as far as like what we need from… laden, you know, he’s probably not going to have a lot of information about, that would need to be a follow up as.
Hassan Zahir (01:06) Well, we can run that way. Let’s just kind of, I feel like we should just ask him. Like, what is his thought process? Like, how is he thinking about this? Like our goal is to talk to him about like, you know, how we approach this? How our AI is like, you know, all those, all of those sorts of things. Yeah, but it’s like what was he thinking? Because we’re rolling out some cool automation features, functionality like, yeah.
Mike Manson (01:36) I think we approach it almost as like he’s a product Guy. And so, I think we almost approach it as like, hey, we want to know what your product asks would be, so that we can take it back to our, like we have an idea, we have a roadmap. This is how we’re thinking about it but want to hear like, what would be, you know, potential feature requests or product related requests that we can take back to our team. And that’s… how I would think about this call.
Hassan Zahir (02:04) Yeah, that’s exactly how I’m thinking about it too. Cool.
Mike Manson (02:11) Yeah, this is a tough deal. I just… it’s a great account for us, but… I think we need to go back to their CFO?
Hassan Zahir (02:26) Yeah, it’s a matter about getting high and staying high. Yeah.
Mike Manson (02:30) We have the CFO’s attention and he said he wants to be kept in the loop on this, but he was like, you know, you got to go win over my team, but I think if we’re going to get stuck in like a turnaround time battle, then we might need to just go back up to him and say like, hey, your team is hiring temporary resources to come in and do this work. That’s not a sustainable model… even.
Hassan Zahir (02:56) If we get stuck in like a features battle, we don’t want to get stuck in like a features battle. We want to say like what is your vision? How are you viewing this? What about, you know, where are you seeing the potential for advancements in AI and your process? We’d love to have a discussion with like how we’re seeing this? How we’re looking at this? And then I’ll tell him that my role is what again one more time.
Mike Manson (03:17) I said director of technical solutions.
Hassan Zahir (03:20) Okay. Yeah. Like, yeah, I lead the technical solutions team which includes the solutions consultants like josh, but also we think of, you know, new and innovative ways and approaches to implement AI. I can even share like what I shared with Armand and all of them the other day. Yeah. About the, about the.
Mike Manson (03:47) He’s here. I’m gonna let him in.
Mike Manson (03:56) Hey, Cole. Happy Friday.
Cole Dudley (03:58) Hello, hey guys. Sorry for being a couple minutes late here.
Hassan Zahir (04:00) You’re good?
Mike Manson (04:04) You’re watching March madness at all or?
Cole Dudley (04:07) Not as much as I would like to. I’ve been reluctant to check my brackets but fingers crossed.
Mike Manson (04:13) Yeah, this is the first year. I actually did not do one in a very long time, but it’s usually broken by day two anyway. So, my Alma mater actually, hofstra made it for the first time since 2000. So I’ll be watching that it’s about to start.
Cole Dudley (04:28) Cool. That’s fun.
Mike Manson (04:28) Yeah. So cool. Well, we’ll get right into it. We’ve got 30 minutes. I wanted to get you introduced to Hasan zaire, Hasan leads our technical solutions team. So he oversees josh and his team, but he also works really kind of cross functionally with does a lot of work with our product team as well. And I thought it would be good to get you all connected. We do owe you. We’re running some analysis based on the information we got from lotta and I think we still have a couple of open questions for her that josh is following up on to come back and do a side by side comparison on that. But I think one of the interesting things that came up in our conversations is kind of how you’re thinking about potentially building out automation, you know, whether you’d stick with verifiable or potentially go with us and, you know, we have our thoughts and a lot of VC money behind our product team, engineering and building solutions exactly for this. So, I think purpose of the call today was like wanting to get an understanding of how you’re thinking about that so that a, you know, we can either two things. Either we already have it on a roadmap and we’re already building it, and we love to kind of give you that insight or two because haasen works very closely with our product team like we want to be engaging in kind of how you’re viewing the future and how we can take that back to our product team so that they can start thinking about it as well. Yeah, yeah.
Cole Dudley (05:57) For sure. So, I guess.
Hassan Zahir (05:59) Austin, if you want to introduce yourself or yes, for sure and Cole, the goal is that this is really conversational. I was talking to Mike. We were in New York yesterday, for a conversation, with, you know, someone who’s becoming a customer right now. We were just kind of talking to them about the automations and all those things. And he was really just talking about how innovative you are and me, my degree is in computer science, so background as a developer and, you know, getting into health and health tech. But also really my role allows me to say, hey, this is what we’re hearing from the field. This is what we’re hearing when we’re onsite speaking to customers. This is what we’re hearing from demos, and so I get to help drive the direction of the platform. And, you know, there’s a couple of things that I think are really cool on our roadmap, some things that I’m working on and helping push from an automation and AI perspective. I’m sure you’re staying on top of, you know, all the agensic workflows, and, you know, how people are utilizing AI, you know, beyond, the chat bots and all those sorts of things nowadays, and just thinking how we can utilize that for credentialing. Obviously, there are certain places where requirements, you know, regulatory and otherwise require humans in the loop. But that, that’s kind of like where my brain goes. And so, I would just love to kind of have that conversation. But yeah, just wanted to introduce myself I’m Haas and lead, the team here, at medallion that josh reports in through, and then some of the other individuals like our principals, solutions, consultants, and solutions designers as well, to really help deliver. So, just thank you for taking the time on a Friday.
Cole Dudley (07:36) Yeah, glad to be here. I guess, by means of intro, I reached out to Mike and team back in December. I’ve been with midi for… about six, seven months now and work on our product team, and generally like we’re really, our team is very focused on all of our care delivery tools. So, we go very deep there in terms of our product area, but we also go kind of broad on anything that touches our clinicians, whether that’s you know, acquisition to training and HR systems, but also, you know, credentialing, and the payer enrollment piece. And I’ve been, you know, largely just like trying to define a north star direction for us to have connected systems across the board. A lot of that’s more discovery work and not like shovel ready yet, but, I think in a lot of ways, credentialing is where we would start. So, before we, you know, go down the path of just working on the status quo, wanted to make sure we had a fresh read on, you know, different approaches by different vendors and even maybe combinations of vendors in certain places and that’s sort of that’s sort of where we are overall. And we currently don’t have a lot of, a lot of automation especially automation driven through integration through, throughout our systems. And that’s basically what we’re putting some roadmap together around, some of that I think would be within product, and then some of that will live in more in enterprise systems land. Once we actually like have a team spun up in that area, and then it brought a lot of, and then who’s the business owner, within credentialing and in that space, so high level that’s sort of, what our scope is. And we’re just trying to figure out, what is the set of systems we need to scale and grow the business? Yeah.
Hassan Zahir (09:29) Super super cool. And I love the way that you’re thinking about this because you’re looking at it like holistically across, you know, all of the applications, and what the best usage is like you said kind of at the enterprise level versus, you know, within the different spaces, the credentialing space. And so how we’re looking at this just to kind of give you a little bit of vision is that we, we’re doubling down on the things that we can automate first and foremost, right? Like where do API connections exist? Where can we just go and get data from, and pull it into the platform in a way that’s meaningful where we don’t need to think about like an agensic workflow? And then we’re thinking of like, how can we expose the automations that are running? How can we get those integrated with other systems? And then, how can we present that data in a way that’s really meaningful? And so like one of, the, one of the kind of projects that I’m working on right now is really like a conversational operations layer on top of our automated workflow. So, let’s think about the fact that, you know, we’ve got the platform, we got the automated workflows, and then the task system that exists within it. And today, you can go into medallion and, you know, you can click through enrollment requests or you can look at credentialing requests. You can filter to what’s actually running, what’s in process, what’s going through psvs, if we’re doing direct enrollments with health plans, like, you can see that. But my vision for this is that if we are offering end to end services then I want it to be like a conversational operations layer with actions. So as opposed to, you know, just querying an LLM and saying, hey, how many enrollment requests are active? And it’s telling us that I want to be able to say, hey, what’s the current state of John white’s enrollment with I’m in Ohio. So, BCBS of Ohio and having the agent translate that into identifying the correct John white asking appropriate validation questions if needed verification of the entity and group, explaining to me where that sits in plain English, but then also being actionable. So, for example, like the response from that agent could be something like John white has an in progress BCBS of Ohio enrollment for this group. This tin combination application was submitted on X day or he has an existing credentialing application in process. And eight of the nine psvs have been. Automatically verified and are available. And then if there are like duplicate requests or if there’s another provider who works out of the same office and do we want to take the same action because they’re the same provider type, same profile, type, same group, same tin. And so like that’s where I’m pushing the envelope a little bit for medallion is getting a genetic within our own application, making sure that we have connections via apis or webhooks to other systems, taking advantage of our directional API to push, you know, to push data or pull data in and out of those sources. And then we just kind of from, you know, from that point in time, making the data in medallion more actionable. Having the ability to communicate and collaborate with the platform in an automated way. And then also saying, you know, send John white a phone call and then that utilizes our conversational AI agent, remind John white via phone call to complete this task, right? You don’t have to go in and say, okay, when’s the last time did we have outreach? What’s the cadence? Like just being able to take the insights from, that, make them actionable as we continue to ramp up and improve the automations, like I said, be that via like webhooks or API to get more accurate data to get the data faster, but again, more so on the platform level. So I would love to kind of hear like, you know, what you were thinking like AI wise from a credentialing perspective. And if you’re you know, if you’re thinking like more along that lines, if you’re thinking more like automating some of the processes that support getting those results in or just kind of where your thoughts are.
Cole Dudley (13:33) Yeah. I mean, I think like, I think it largely depends on the platform, the specific problems. Like there are some things that we’re looking at that I expect we’ll solve using more traditional methods. We just kind of need like straight up, you know, we have, we already have structured data. We just need to like automatically provision a new provider in verifiable, for instance, I think where we’re more interested in agentic solutions are.
Hassan Zahir (13:59) The things?
Cole Dudley (14:01) That were just not really solvable without those types of solutions. And one of those is following up on payer enrollments is a good example there where like it’s kind of one thing kind of known problem, known solution space to just, you know, create you can use traditional automation or just, you know, rely on some humans to like submit these applications. But the follow up work, you know, we find that the more that we use humans to follow up the faster things close. So that’s one area where we’re like, well, hey, this seems like not a bad use case but raises a lot of questions too, like what do the payers think of that? And do they respond positively or negatively? Does it ultimately, you know, result in faster turnarounds? And then I think we’re also interested to see like to what degree will the payers build their own agents to respond to the agents that we’re sending their way? And what happens there? So, I think we’re looking at all this at a pretty conceptual level at the moment. And, you know, it’s the kind of thing where we’re not like our internal team’s not like actively building anything, but we’re thinking about revmap for the future, but I think it’s often where using… agents first for the places where like there really is no other alternative… and maybe that’s not the highest opportunity but that’s just at least where we have the gap at the moment. Yeah.
Hassan Zahir (15:29) No, I mean, and I think that makes sense. And I think that’s the way that a lot of organizations are thinking about it. I’m going to share my screen really quickly but give you kind of a peek behind the scenes. I don’t know if you’ve gotten this peek behind the scenes a medallion yet for how we’re kind of doing some of that today and then kind of give you a little bit more of the vision as well. It’s going to be transparent with you like this isn’t something we normally share because this is kind of like the, you know, the secret sauce that helps make medallion. But I’m also seen as a super admin and like you can see it’ll say, hey, you’re using the stats account, be mindful the force is with you or, you know, use your power wisely… but when I go into actually I’m not going to hit it from there. I’m going to go from the staff menu and I am going, to go to payers. And then when I go to our payers directory, like we’ve got these different directories for payers all across the country. And you can see we tag them across the different service types in the way that they work. Like, Ohana is a part of centene, but when we go in behind the scenes, this is kind of like what currently drives the way that our platform utilizes automations. And this is where we want to get more agentic in our follow up and figure out kind of what you’re saying and, you know, the thing is like medallion, we’re backed by Google and sequoia and all these places, right? We’re trying to lean on like some of our portfolio companies too, and the ways that they’re building out some of these agentic solutions to be able to do this differently. We can track all of the request types. We can see across the type of requests that we’re making. We can say this is a new enrollment. If this is for a provider, we can do this across the state, manage medicaid. We can do this across medicare advantage plans. And then what happens is what we do is we put together these kind of process guides that tell us this information. This one is just like a simple one. Because again secret sauce, I can’t show like something super populated, but like we track any prerequisites and dependencies, we track what the best application method is. Is that going to be online? Is that going to be, you know, a web form? Is that like in the hospital application sense? Where we get a one time code and we use the link, they have a multi factor authentication process. What are all the steps? Like are there required documents? Like what you were talking about? Though I think is what’s really relevant? What we try to track is what is the escalation process? What’s the outreach? Like what does the payer post? But then what have we tried? And so it’s like the payer says, hey, you can reach out every 10 days, but we found out if you reach out every 12 days that they normally update the status on day 23.
Hassan Zahir (18:25) So we’re better off reaching out day 12 and then day 24 because we would have got it updated at day 23 as opposed to if we reach out every 10 days, that update from day 23 isn’t available to us until day 30, right? And so like those are the sorts of things to where we’re investing millions of dollars to try to figure this out? We’ll identify like the escalations, how we can escalate, and all of those things as well. And so just wanted to kind of highlight. I think the way that you’re thinking about some of those things, it’s definitely the way that we’re thinking about it and ultimately, what we want to do is we want to be the leader in this space. We want to be able to have these sorts of things. We want to be out in front of this credentialing is what we do. It’s all we do. And so the goal is that as we evolve and add these sorts of pieces of functionality to the platform that we’re able to have communications and conversations with people like you to say, hey, if medallion is able to do this, he froze, huh.
Mike Manson (19:29) Oh, yeah.
Hassan Zahir (19:30) He like his eyes were closed for a second. So I’m like let me keep going.
Mike Manson (19:36) Let’s see if he jumps right again. Yeah, I think like the point I want to try this is good. Hosh, I appreciate it. I think like when I want to try and cap this off is like, hey, we want to know what your vision is and like you focus on building your platform. And as long as we’re aligned… yeah. Oh, there he is. All right. Hey, Cole.
Cole Dudley (20:04) Sorry about that. My internet went out and then I tried to dial in and then everything came back. So.
Hassan Zahir (20:09) Okay. Yeah, no worries. I’m not quite sure the last thing you saw. But did you see the screen I was showing that had kind of the schedule?
Cole Dudley (20:15) You did? Yeah, I did. It has like sort of number of days between for follow up and everything like that and you’re like.
Hassan Zahir (20:21) trying to 12?
Cole Dudley (20:21) Days? Yeah… ultimately.
Hassan Zahir (20:26) What, ultimately, what I’m saying there Cole’s, like we try to find innovative partners, individuals like you to say, hey, if you had, I won’t say unlimited resources.
Hassan Zahir (20:37) But if you had the resources, if you could improve credentialing from your perspective, because we have the backing of sequoia and Google and these folks, can we have conversations, can we improve our platform in a way where that automation meets your needs? And you say, hey, medallion is doing all the things that I would be doing myself and I’ve got a great partnership with them. So I may be better suited just using medallion for this and then utilizing my internal resources for something different, right? Other automation, improving the data flow across my existing systems. And that’s the type of organization we want to be. We haven’t grown through acquisitions. We’ve grown through. This is our platform. We’ve built it from the ground up. We’ve listened to the market because everybody out there just honestly was just a little bit stuffy. It was bogged down. It was slow platforms and they were doing things like in a traditional way, we want to be non traditional. We want to be the partner that has these design partnerships. We’ve been flying some leaders from the payer space out to napa annually and trying to partner with them to say, hey, what’s the easiest way for us to get information to you? What’s the easiest way for us to get information from you? How can we get updates? Give me an API into a reporting system that you have. So that I don’t have to call you on whatever this set cadence is, post your updates to this endpoint and let’s form a partnership. So just wanted to kind of highlight. I think a lot of the things that you’re saying are places where we’re looking to find efficiencies. And so, from the medallion perspective, we love to just like I said, chat with people who are innovative. We call those design partnerships. And then we find ways to roll that into the platform.
Cole Dudley (22:34) Yeah, yeah. I am familiar… with that kind of relationship and I think most times in my career we’ve done that, it’s been great. So, I think this is one of those areas where that is relevant for us and where we have, you know, general interest and, you know, that would factor into kind of how we’re thinking about, you know, overall partnership… especially because I think that I don’t know every business probably thinks they’re pretty unique. We find at least in the ehr world that, you know, being national partners, telehealth growing fast is not representative of a lot of customers using ehrs. And like there’s a lot of stuff in our ehr that we use athena health that like we have to bend and break and modify just to make that work. And we do have this kind of relationship with athena, but it’s also like it’s a little different getting ehrs to move along with you. But when we really need to, we can. So this is something we’re looking at as part of, you know, what our, you know, what our partnerships are with our most strategic vendors, across the stuff that we really need to be, have at least some level of influence over in terms of making it work for our business.
Mike Manson (23:55) I appreciate the insight. I think, you know, if I can maybe leave us with this, I think like, you know, as you’re thinking about things and what the future looks like for midi like, you know, like Hasan alluded to, all we do is credentialing, all we do is payrollment, we’re focused on solving, you know, one problem. We’re going really hard at it with a lot of engineering talent, a lot of dollars and investment behind it. You know, we feel strongly that the customers that we’ve successfully partnered with like, you know, they’re very much focused on building out their platform and focusing on what they do best and leave the credentialing and the automation in that space to us and we’ll partner with you on it much.
Cole Dudley (24:48) Hey, hey, sorry.
Mike Manson (24:50) All good. I don’t know if, did I get cut off there?
Cole Dudley (24:54) I… now, it’s back… yeah.
Mike Manson (24:59) All good. I think just what I was trying to say to kind of cap it out is like, you know, when you think about the future of midi, like, you know, we feel strongly we have, the resources here, to really put towards this problem and, you know, ideally, you’re focusing on growing midi, and building out the platform, and we can, you know, take your input, and really put the engineering behind it to build out what you’re thinking about when you think about the future, of credentialing, for your team. The other thing I would leave you with too is like, I know, as you’re thinking about our overall architecture, been reading a lot recently about what disruption is happening in the CRM space, like I think Salesforce is in for a rude awakening, and I think it’ll be interesting to see like, you know, we feel like we can be a little bit more nimble with overall architecture just because we’re not tied to the Salesforce. So just food for thought, no.
Cole Dudley (26:00) I mean, like, I hear that and it’s that’s on our mind too. It’s sort of a wish… we could, read the tea leaves on this one but there’s definitely a lot of a lot of disruption there for, you know, it’s probably not unlike the, you know, many years ago from systems going to, on Prem to Salesforce. Yeah, like now Salesforce is kind of giving me going to be getting a taste of that medicine and I think they are kind of aware of it, but it’s also like it’s that’s a big that’s a big machine they have. So, how fast can you really move there? And that is like as I’ve mentioned to you Mike a number of times like the degree to which we want to be in the Salesforce ecosystem is sort of the main driver of what our long term approaches, with verifiable and that’s the one thing that’s like I’m honestly slightly agnostic about it, but I’m also not going to personally like me and my team. We don’t we will not own that system like long term once we have an enterprise systems group spun up. Yeah. And like that’s going to have to be a perspective. I think I can influence it a lot but, yeah, you know, if we end up hiring someone who’s like really anchored to Salesforce, like that’s one thing if we get someone who’s on the other side of that fence, it’s a different thing completely. So, yeah, totally.
Mike Manson (27:24) You know.
Cole Dudley (27:25) Yeah.
Mike Manson (27:25) I think you guys are going to really, you guys are at a really interesting time as are we like we’re you know, we didn’t just start a year ago. We’ve got some experience. We’ve got customers, we’re growing, but we’re still in kind of that fun space where it’s like, we can be nimble, we can, we’re not big enough to the point where we can’t work alongside our customers to build like, you know, a path forward that we think will be beneficial unlike, you know, some of the legacy companies where it’s like, you know, they’ve been around and they were architectured in the early 2000 and there’s not a whole lot they can do unless they start from scratch, right? So, but yeah, really appreciate the insight. We appreciate, the continued conversations. I think we’ll take this back to our team. And if, you know, if you have other thoughts on this, I know Hasan is, you know, more than willing, to jump in for conversations like this, so.
Cole Dudley (28:18) Yeah, yeah… for sure.
Cole Dudley (28:23) And just on the general front, Mike Lawton’s, been out the second half of this week. She’s on, I think on vacation for a couple of days. So if you’re waiting for something from her, you haven’t heard that’s why she’ll be back on Monday. Okay?
Mike Manson (28:35) Yeah, that sounds good. I’ll put a note to just remind josh, to maybe bump her mid next week and we’ll continue the conversation from there.
Cole Dudley (28:44) Yeah, sounds good awesome.
Mike Manson (28:46) Cole.
Hassan Zahir (28:46) Do you mind if I shoot you a LinkedIn invite?
Cole Dudley (28:50) Yeah, please do. Okay.
Hassan Zahir (28:52) Awesome. Thank you. Pleasure to meet you sir.
Mike Manson (28:54) All right. Yep. Thanks, guys. Talk to y all soon.