#AIforMedicine - Best Practices For Turning Speeds And Feeds Into Leads (And Stories) With Jenn Maley
Day by day, the call to leverage technology into our business practices becomes louder than ever. Taking that into medicine, Jenn Maley, the Sales Manager at pulseData, sits down with Chad Burmeister to share how they are leveraging AI around health information and more. As the first salesperson her company is working with, she also takes us into her journey of moving from accounting to selling, trading numbers for people. Jenn then talks about the best practices for turning speeds and feeds into leads (and stories) and what she thinks of the future of AI in sales, particularly in medicine.
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#AIforMedicine - Best Practices For Turning Speeds And Feeds Into Leads (And Stories) With Jenn Maley
I've got a very interesting guest with me. Jenn Maley is from beautiful and hot Phoenix, Arizona. She is with pulseData. We're going to talk about the company and how AI is being leveraged at pulseData around health information. We're going to dive a little bit into the sales role because this is the first salesperson that pulseData is working with. Jenn, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
It’s great to have you. Before we go into more about the organization, you said you came from an accounting background. What caused you to move from accounting into sales in the first place?
I ended up moving into an operational role where I worked directly with a salesperson and she kept saying, “Jenn, you would be amazing at sales. You’ve got a knack for it.” I said, “No, I don't think I can do that.” Fast forward a few years, she taught me a whole lot of the things that she did. It was appealing and an opportunity opened up so I took it. It's been a learning process, but I enjoy it now.
My son goes to college and it’s interesting times around the house these days. He's an engineering mindset person, very methodical and attention to detail. Yet he also has an entrepreneur mind. In this day and age, it seems to me the most successful sellers aren't smooth-talking used car sales type. They can solve a business problem. I'm seeing a lot smarter folks make the move into sales because that's what the industry demands. Kudos to you for making the move.
Thank you. I appreciate that. We moved my son into ASU. He's an engineering student as well.
When you move them out of the house, my daughter is right behind him. She's got another year left. We're going to probably look at each of the days between now and the next year differently than we did the last 365 days. Your son is going to ASU, where did you go to school and what was your major?
It’s Western Illinois University and Accounting.
They have a sales program there. Robert is one of the sales professors at that school.
I was not at all interested. I liked numbers. The numbers are easy. They never change.
In today's day and age, sales seem to be the most successful seller.
What are you finding then as the difference as you transitioned from numbers to working with humans? People are interesting. They make decisions on very obscure ideas.
They do. They don't want to know everything in black and white. They want to know how that black and white pertains to them and solves their problems and typically, it does. I have to learn how to frame that appropriately so that I wasn't coming out at you with 100 facts at one time. Your mind is exploding. You're trying to wrap your mind around it especially with things like artificial intelligence. It's hard to wrap your mind around it. It's hard to give someone a five-minute elevator pitch on something like that. I'm trying to learn, adjust and simplify a little more.
One of the best sales classes I took was several years ago with a company called Corporate Visions. The class was called Power Messaging. There are all these tactics like going up to a whiteboard and writing two numbers on it and saying, “What do you think those numbers mean?” The person is like, “I have no idea. Maybe one is in red and one is in black.” Let's say it's 1 and 1 million, maybe the number one and then a one M. I'm going to make the story up this way. Imagine if you were one individual and you were the first salesperson for a company. In under eight months, you were able to drive to $1 million in sales and then you get that stuck. You plant the seed. That was ScaleX in 2017 up until about June. It was 8, 9 months, we hit our first $1 million in sales. They call that the numbers play. If you can think in terms of stories, people get it. Thinking of pulseData from a story perspective, let's say you have an eighteen-year-old that is going to college. Do you have any other kids that are younger?
We have a seventeen-year-old who is going to be a senior and a fourteen-year-old who is going to be a freshman and an older one too.
Think of the 14-year-old, even younger, 8-year-old, say in a story or a numbers exercise, if you were to write that on a whiteboard, what do you think you might be able to do to explain what pulseData does?
I could put fourteen and then I could put 45% as the other number. Forty-five percent of the fourteen-year-olds in the United States right now are overweight almost to an obese level. They're at risk of CKD and diabetes by the time that they hit eighteen. The reason why no one is doing anything about it, the reason why our chronic condition costs are going up by billions every year, and it's projected to go up by trillions by 2030 is because no one is monitoring health data for fourteen-year-old children because they're not eighteen.
We're allowing the fourteen-year-olds to become obese adults. At that point, they are already a CKD 3A, 3B somewhere in there probably have diabetes too. It's probably unmanaged, which means that they're going to have wounds on their legs, hypertension, heart attacks and stroke. All of those things are contributing to the problems that we have right now in healthcare. Nobody's looking at it because it's too hard.
How'd that feel when that rolls off your tongue?
It's staggering when you hear it out loud and all those numbers are there. They're all there. Some of us are looking. Like myself, where do you start? How do you do something that's effective to affect some change?
It's like in politics. Sometimes I feel like I'm throwing a pebble against the wall with everything that's going on these days and yet that you can make a ripple. Throw a big rock in the middle of a pond and you'll see. What you're doing is noble and getting people to see and understand what this means. Thinking of artificial intelligence, a lot of salespeople are using it in the sales motion. You're using it in a way to diagnose and understand. What we talked about before this conversation is let's say a company has 150 employees and they sign up for pulseData. You're able to tell them beyond a reasonable doubt what's going on with all of those employees and think about an average turnover for a company.
Feeds Into Leads: Humans don't really want to know everything in black and white. They want to know how black and white pertains to them and solve their problems.
I worked for a company called RingCentral, which is growing like crazy. Their sales team might have a 20% or 30% annual turnover. As a company, they have something similar. Now with understanding health information, what's going on from a health perspective, you can't solve all 20% or 30% turnover, but you can solve a piece of it. What's the ROI of an investment in technology like pulseData to help with turnover and quality of life for employees as another piece of it?
How do you put an ROI on somebody's productivity at work? You don't. On average, it costs you $5,000 or $7,000, sometimes $10,000, depending on the caliber of the employee that you have to hire just to hire someone. Not to mention the fact that if someone leaves or goes on partial disability or even permanent disability due to the fact that they had an undiagnosed chronic condition, you still are covering their insurance for a portion of the time. You also cannot fire them, but you're paying for them. You're losing productivity.
It's not because that loyal employee doesn't want to be there. It’s because they physically can't. If they lose their job, they can't afford the medical care that they need, which means that they're going to pull from either Medicaid or Medicare, which is causing a problem to get even worse. For $2 a person, and that's what it costs, maybe we give you nine months advanced notice that John who’s been working for you for nineteen years, his family depended and been loyal to you this whole time on his paycheck. If we told you that he was going to have a catastrophic event, would you intervene? I think that any employer would. If they have the tool or even knew that the tool was there, they would use it.
I would say that 40% of that turnover is going to go away and probably 50% of their loss of productivity is going to go away. What if you don't have as many sick days? Those are hard instant savings. We would have to have the knowledge of the employer to prove that, but we could prove that almost instantly. Not only that, you no longer are going to be putting your people into a one size fits all care management. I'm all about care management. Get those case managers in there and help them learn about what it is that's making them sick. Do that, but let's not give a case manager whose specialty is cardiac, a Diabetes 2 patient, who's looking eminent, emergent dialysis that's going to cost the plan $500,000 just to start. That's not the monthly fee. I've seen them as much as $200,000 a month. How do you pay for that? The plan goes broke or everyone's premiums go up like they do every single year.
It’s by catching it earlier in the process. It's interesting, IBM with Watson, I read a study that said that they can predict to a 96% accuracy when someone's going to leave the company. I’m sure it's monitoring the emails that go out. It monitors time. All of that stuff that would normally take a human, you don’t have to hire a team of people in Manila to pound through that every day and night and they still wouldn't get it in real time. It would be too many months too late. What I'm hearing you say is that by putting all this information into a secure SOC 2-compliant database powered by AI that's able to turn through this. I had this weird feeling the other day. I felt the tiny little bump right up here. I'm like, “Men don't get breast cancer,” but I'm like, “What is that little thing?” It's highly unlikely to be anything, but if I'm doing what I need to be doing as an employee and as the CEO of my company, then I would think if I had my data in pulseData, it would tell me beyond a reasonable doubt, “You better get in and get something looked at.”
It's going to say, “Something is off here.” When we notice something like that, we have two medical doctors that are on staff. They look at that file. We have a tool that's called body mapping. It's an entire platform. When you look at it, it shows the human body and it highlights any organs that we feel may be affected by something. That's what our doctors do before we send any notification. We don't give care. We're sending a notification to whoever is your benefits champion or your care provider, whoever that person is, that's who we're sending the notification to. Those doctors will look at that and say, “I think it's right. We need to have whoever the care management team is look at this and at least make sure that they're facilitating that this person goes to the proper physician within the network to get this checked because it's alarming.”
I have a couple of questions. First, is what if I don't see my general doctor once every five years or something, how is this data being collected to be able to be that level of accurate prediction? That's the first question. The second is I bought one of these watches with the Garmin that tells me oxygenation. It shows how my sleep is at night. I would suspect that if I had this level of input fed into the AI algorithm lookout world, it feels like that's where things are heading as a society. Yet there's a hesitation myself included of don't chip me. How do you get the data now versus if I don't see my doctor, but once every 5 years or 2 years or something where my kids go all the time on the regular checkups? How do you handle that? Where do you see technology playing a role in the data collection side?
We would identify that as a care gap. If you don't have a lot of claims from a PCP or whatever that looks like, we're going to say, “This is odd.” The first thing we're going to do is make sure you don't have a lot of ER utilization. Ninety percent of the time you do, because you're sick, but you don't know why, which means that you're not diagnosed with something. Let's say you have CKD and you're feeling depressed because when you have CKD and you start approaching the late stage, you do get depressed. It stands for Chronic Kidney Disease. Once you start approaching the end-stage renal disease area, which would be Chronic Kidney Disease or CKD 4 or 5, you will start becoming depressed. You will be tired. You won't know why. To you, it might be, “I'm getting older or I'm depressed,” or you go, “I need to go to the doctor. Something is not right.”
You go to the doctor and he says, “You have a urinary tract infection.” If it's a female, if you're middle-aged, your hormones are changing now. We’ll equate it to that. Whereas it could have cost $90 to my plan and it would not have cost me as an employee anything to give me a urinalysis, give me a GFR reading, check my proteinuria and check all of that. My white blood cell count, it's a $90 test. We can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about your kidneys. Every other little thing going on in there, maybe not everything, but we can tell you a lot. They're not doing that.
They're going to send you home and you will not be diagnosed with diabetes or chronic kidney disease. You're going to have an ER utilization that says urinary tract infection. Our doctors would say, “Case notes, say feeling depressed, urinary tract infection. She needs to go in. We're going to send her to a nephrologist or at least a PCP to get a referral to a nephrologist.” They think that there's something going on and she needs her GFR checked.
The more data we get, the more precise machine learning is, and the more accurate it becomes.
Some of my family are in pharma on the East Coast. My dad was a radiologist. My brother is anesthesiology and my brother-in-law is radiology. Growing up around medical and physicians, it's interesting because I remember I'd go to my dad and go, “My arm is broken and it's even crooked.” You're like, “I'm pretty sure it's broken.” He's like, “Take a little aspirin and you'll be fine.” Over the years, I got to the feeling of, “Look, the docs know what they're talking about?” I go in for my regular checkup. I'm good. I'm covered. It sounds like medicine hasn't gotten ahead of the technology, probably like government because it gets big and it gets like a cruise ship.
They're unable to add these sorts of new school technologies. It reminds me of the AI For Sales stuff we're doing. They usually say, “We've got ten-head count. It’s a $1 million quota. It's $10 million. We're fine.” COVID hit and half those people are gone. Now they come back and go, “How are we going to get to $10 million? There's this little tool that's called AI that helps those five that are left, do the work of 15 or 20.” They go, “Got it.” To me, there's a compelling event that needs to occur in order for companies to wake up to that they should be driving this because there is a value to providing better insights and information to your employees. It doesn't break the bank at $2 an employee for 150 employees. We're talking $300 a month. Do you have a minimum level plan?
We love data. The more data we can get, the more we love it. If we had that 150-group employer, the more data we get on that group, the more precise that machine learning is. The more accurate it then becomes with that particular population. That's why we never turned down data. We don't care what it looks like. If you can send those case notes, we love that because that gives us better social determinants, that gives us the human piece. You can't replicate the human piece. That piece is very important. That is why our platform is different. Even we've worked with entire health systems, we don't ask them to do anything. We don't want to add a system or process to any of those caregivers.
They do not have the time to be adding extra steps in their process. They have tried to narrow it down as quickly and as efficiently as they can in order to see the number of people that they need to see. There is an overabundance of sick people. That's not a question. The question is, how do we give our superheroes, the nurses, the doctors and the surgeons their cases? The answer to that is simple. We give them their time back. We don't charge you to implement. We don't charge you to run a risk-free analysis. We'll bring in a sample set of data. We'll tell you what we see on a high-level overview and give you an example of what you would expect to get from us.
If that's something that makes sense to that group, then we'll go forward and we will tie every care manager, every vendor that they work with. We don't care who it is. We will give them all access to the entire system. They do what they do. They go out and they make these people better. They go to work every day and they enjoy their families. They run with their granddaughters down the street when they're 65 because they're not getting dialysis 3 or 4 times a week.
With HIPAA compliance, are the records to the vendors anonymized or I would assume there's some level of backend anonymization in the process?
I can get into our demo platform. I have never seen a patient name, a member name or anything. I don't have a reason to see that. Again, we are fully SOC 2-compliant. We are all HIPAA Certified. We take individual classes, not the 30-minute class that you can do with multiple choice. Our class lasts about an hour and there are quite a few questions. We all do that, even myself, and I don't ever see it. It all stays in the US. Whoever has access to PHI gets it. The client needs to tell us that. That's why we're very hands-on. If they don't get access to a name, they don't ever see it. It's anonymized. They have an ID number. That ID number will be unique to a specific individual and whoever they need to notify will know who that ID number goes to.
This has been an interesting conversation. Think of the number play thing we talked about and most reps that I work with and most companies that I work with, “Here's who we are. Here's the problem. It's all the facts and figures.” Imagine changing it to 14% and 45%, and you say, “I've got four kids that range from eighteen. One is older all the way down to fourteen, now you got me at hello. The rest becomes, “I didn't realize that.” You can earn your way to get into the rest of the conversation because now they want to know about that.
Often what I've found is the executive-level decision-maker, if you can get them connected emotionally, right out of the gate, and then they go, “It's $2 an employee. You guys have 2,000. We're talking $4,000 a month.” It's a rounding error. They say, “Perfect.” Once you've had that twenty-minute conversation and you get to a point where all you have to say is, “Yes, we can do that.” “What are you finding is your problem?” “We have 20% turnover.” “I got it. What if you could make it 10% or 8% instead of 20%?” “That'd be worth millions of dollars to us.” “Yes, we can do that.” They go, “I’ll put you in touch with my team. It sounds like we need to do this.” It’s onto something there. You've got the technical backbone. If you want to look up a company, check out Corporate Visions. You can sign up for their newsletter and they have all these kinds. I gave you one of probably 50 different ones that are all story-based. If you think in terms of stories when you're talking to a fourteen-year-old. That's how you need to talk to a 50-year-old as if they're fourteen-year-old.
I will look that up. I appreciate that.
Feeds Into Leads: Data gives us better social determinants that give us the human piece, and you can't replicate the human piece.
How can people learn more about what it is you're doing for companies? How can they reach you? Let’s leave that for the audience here as well.
They can reach me on my cell at any time. It's (928) 232-0843. They can also reach me via email at Jenn@PulseData.io. They can go on pulseData.io. They can also get me on LinkedIn.
Jenn, I enjoyed the conversation. I feel like I need to get my checks done. I get an oil change in my car. I had the shocks and struts done. If we do it for our cars, why aren't we doing it for ourselves?
Consider those kidneys your oil pump. Get a urinalysis and tell them to give you your actual GFR number. It will usually only say greater or less than 60. Tell them you want your number.
I feel like this is a tap on the shoulder by the universe and the universe is held in the hand by somebody else. I'm sure that may be my call to do that here in the next seven days. Thank you for the tap on the shoulder and anybody else that's reading this, go in and get your urinalysis.
Let me know what your GFR is.
What's your number? That'd be the marketing campaign. Thank you, everybody. Jenn, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for coming on the show. We'll catch you next time.
Thank you for having me.
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