Interview with Amenities Health CEO Dr. Aasim Saeed

Dr. Aasim Saeed, CEO of Amenities Health shares his distinctive insight into the challenges faced by provider organizations post-pandemic and how to solve them. 

The interview focuses on the technological evolution in healthcare, highlighting Amenities Health's initiatives that are influenced by companies like Amazon and Costco to enhance patient experiences. Key topics include the strategic importance of operational decisions in improving digital healthcare services, such as open primary care schedules and the development of consumer-oriented digital interfaces. We delve into the economics of patient experience prioritization and explore advancements in healthcare technology, including the use of provider directories and the integration of open scheduling with Electronic Medical Records (EMR).

Our conversation also covers the emerging concept of a membership model in healthcare, drawing parallels with Amazon Prime, and its implications for patient engagement and financial success. We conclude with a discussion on the potential and challenges of AI in healthcare. 


The episode also highlights the growth of Amenities Health and its efforts to implement membership models and streamline healthcare services. The book "The Rational Optimist" is recommended for its perspective on challenging conventional thinking, a viewpoint that aligns with Aasim's vision for transforming healthcare systems.

As of March 2025 HealthBiz is part of CareTalk. Healthcare. Unfiltered and can be found at the following links:

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Host David E. Williams is president of healthcare strategy consulting firm Health Business Group.

Episodes through March 2025 were produced by Dafna Williams.

Transcript

0:00:10 - David Williams
Provider organizations are struggling financially and strategically in the post-pandemic world. They want to differentiate on the patient experience, but most use the same Epic Patient Portal software. They're experimenting with alternative payment models, but not dramatically altering the caregiving approach, and they're embracing AI without really figuring out where it's taking them. Hi everyone, I'm David Williams, president of Strategy Consulting from Health Business Group and host of the Health Biz podcast, a weekly show where I interview top healthcare leaders about their lives and careers. My guest today is Dr Aasime Said, ceo and founder of Amenities Health, a digital front door that embraces lessons learned from the likes of Amazon and Costco. If you like the show, please subscribe and leave a review. 

Aasime welcome to the Health Biz podcast, thank you. Thank you for having me, david. We started out. I want to make sure to pronounce your name right. You told me like awesome, but I said just call you awesome to start with, because that's I look at your background and that's pretty much what it says. So even if your parents had named you that, we'd have to call you that right here. 

0:01:13 - Aasim Saeed
I'll take it. I'll take it. 

0:01:15 - David Williams
So let's talk about your background, your upbringing, any childhood influences that have stuck with you through your career. 

0:01:23 - Aasim Saeed
Yeah, I think two things. So one I come from a family of physicians, and to some degree. I disappoint them every day by not practicing medicine. 

0:01:31 - David Williams
So I went to med school. 

0:01:32 - Aasim Saeed
my parents were. My earliest memories were them in med school. So I think that was obviously an influence that we'll talk about at length. And then I think the other one is probably just kind of the immigrant story and mentality. I mean, I grew up as a South Asian immigrant in very rural Texas and I don't know, maybe that started this kind of empathetic journey, which is to say I'm always wondering what it's like for the other. So even though I'm a physician, I find myself more inclined to say like, what does it feel like for a patient? And trying to navigate that. So I'm far less forgiving of the physician experience than you'd think I might be, and maybe that's rooted in that origin. 

0:02:19 - David Williams
It's not a political show, but I am an advocate for immigration and if I have, a high percentage of the people that I have on the show and those that have actually made a difference of the American economy and healthcare and elsewhere have an immigrant story to tell and we're much the poorer in many ways for clamping down on that. So I'll just say that let's talk about your education. Normally I start with college and so on, and I could with you because you go on and on. I think you hit all the Harvard's professional schools, at least maybe not the Divinity School, but starting at high school. I saw in your LinkedIn profile it seems like while you were at high school there was a tragedy that occurred as well and it shaped some of your experience. 

0:03:01 - Aasim Saeed
Yeah, if you're referencing the shooting at Santa Fe, so that came much later, that was a couple of years ago. But yeah, I'm very much from Santa Fe, texas, to that point about rural Texas, and it's really a huge part of my identity. Now too, just to be very clear, like I'm very Texan. When people sometimes hear me or see my picture but then meet me and they're like, why do you sound like this? 

0:03:26 - David Williams
I'm like, oh, I've grown up in Texas all my life. Yeah, like where are you from? 

0:03:29 - Aasim Saeed
Exactly that question I was like oh, I'm far more of a hillbilly than anything else these days, but it's wonderful. I mean, I loved every moment of growing up there. I also had a very privileged experience too, that I grew up playing high school football in Texas, and that's kind of a fast pass to a good time, other than maybe a traditional immigrant experience there. But I loved it, but it's also tragic because, yeah, my political views don't always align to the dynamics that Santa Fe was going through during that tragedy. 

I wrote an op-ed about it to the Austin Statement, about just trying to find some middle ground on a lot of these things. And again, I know that's not the purpose of the show today, but it's something that I do think is formative in terms of, like you said, having empathy, just knowing that, like you can't just account for people that see the world like you do. I feel like so many of our problems are built and assessed in silo and that's not going to work. There are these kind of multi-coalitions that need to be built to solve anything really big or challenging, and growing up in Santa Fe is, I think, a root of a lot of that experience, and the tragedy was no different, and the op-ed is just me trying to come up with something that might be more palatable middle ground, not what my ideal would be answer it's far from that, in fact but rather to say what's a more pragmatic one. 

How could something work and even then, by the way, I had people shoot that down Be like never going to happen? I wouldn't accept that for a heartbeat. That's fine too. I'm trying, like that's. All I would say is. I'm just trying to come up with something that I think would be more palatable. 

0:05:06 - David Williams
So yeah, Great, so anyway. So after Santa Fe you were at Rice and Duke, and then, up into my neck of the woods, the various Harvard schools. What was? What was your educational journey like? 

0:05:18 - Aasim Saeed
Yeah. So I found myself kind of drifting a bit early. So even though I was a pre-med student at Rice, because I kind of figured I was going to do that a little bit later I took the opportunity to major in something different. So one semester I took arts, spanish, sociology, political science and organic chemistry. I was still doing some pre-med and ended up just loving political science. I majored in political science. I had to this day 20 years now volunteer with the American Legion Texas Boys State Program. 

I ended up in med school, pursuing a joint degree at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. So it started to permeate. Even though I thought it was just kind of this like fun thing that would be my frivolous not frivolous but like fun aside before the seriousness of medical school it ended up permeating. I recently got a chance, very privileged, to participate in the Presidential Leadership Scholars Program which is put on by the Presidential Libraries, and this is just a thread right that kind of permeates through. 

And so I would say, even going far as back is the Texas Boys State Program that I participated in again as a high school senior in Texas. The program has two central themes, which is learn by doing and servant leadership and I think that that's kind of my philosophy. That ended up tracking all those things. Now, that being said, I, as you mentioned at the very beginning, at the Kennedy School, one of the coolest things was you could really cross register. So I spent some time at the business school, spent some time I took negotiations at the law school instead of the other one, which was very fun and interesting School of Public Health, even the Fletcher School at Tufts for International Law and Diplomacy. 

So I'm a very distractible person, so a lot of interest, and so I took it full on advantage of those things. 

Now how did you like McKinsey? So McKinsey was a really a formative training ground, I think, for me. I didn't. I don't think I knew exactly what I was getting into, other than I was like, oh, this would be a great internship experience and obviously there's a lot of procedure around it. But then I didn't track, for when I took the summer internship I actually preferred it to clinical practice. So for me, like McKinsey, the first week of the summer internship, which was before I graduated and decided if I was going to go into clinical medicine or not, you're sitting at the board meeting of the health care system talking about which kind of portfolio, how to right size those things, and kind of. From that moment I fell in love and said well, this is what I want to be doing longer term. Why am I going to go through residency just to try to get back here when this seems to be a fast track? That was the reasoning to go to McKinsey. And so the clinical route. But I'll also be remiss to say like I don't think I realized then the skills are so differentiated, so often I find myself. 

I have other friends and colleagues who were also in med school and went on to clinical routes and one of my good friends ended up being a CEO of a hospital and I remember asking him like how do you feel trained to do that? 

Like you have no confidence. I mean, being a doctor does not train you. Like what's a P and L? What's a balance sheet? How do these statements work? Like you have no training, any of that. And I just find that like it's so odd to me sometimes when we go these clinical routes and they're like well, we'll just assume they'll be great leaders this, not that of course physicians can't be great leaders but like I very much look at McKinsey as my residency in the business of US health care and it very much was that. I mean you get some other things like the quote consulting toolkit about being able to handle large data sets, financial models, being able to build out business cases that consider a lot of different strategic options. Those things are all great, but at the same time it was just grounded in a lot of different skillset than I would have otherwise gotten in residency. 

So very happy with it, but at the same time was also it's a great place to be from, like. I think McKinsey is very anchored in the like what's going to make money? Now? I mean, they make claim and I'm sure there's a PowerPoint somewhere that talks about the innovation of McKinsey, but I think, at the end of the day, it is about like feasibility, current business models, large dollar ones, as opposed to like the big risky environments of you know true innovation of disruptive, like unicorns that come out in Silicon Valley and other things. 

That's not to say that again there's been wildly successful former McKinsey startup entrepreneurs and you know I hope to be one one day, but it's it felt very different in that sense, like that risk tolerance was very different. 

0:09:42 - David Williams
Yeah, and you wouldn't stay in your residency forever and you know as a physician, so we wouldn't expect you to stay at McKinsey for 30 years or so until they put you out to pasture. 

0:09:51 - Aasim Saeed
Yeah. 

0:09:52 - David Williams
When I was a Boston Consulting Group, you know, we had some people had a trained as a physician and they said, actually the key to being consultant is sort of hung up their stethoscope. You couldn't think exactly like a physician in order to be a to be a consultant. And I think you're right about looking at those that have these big business roles and sometimes I think physicians figure well, I went to med school, I've done all this stuff, you know. Of course I can do all these other things and some of them can and, but not all, and there's some blindsides to it as well. 

0:10:17 - Aasim Saeed
Yeah, and if I'm being blunt, it's just very different skill sets. I mean, I think there's clinical professions that are very much about knowledge base, memorization of large data sets which again we know in the future is a big question on to itself and there's other ones that are highly mechanical, about doing the same thing every day orthopedic surgery, etc. And fine-tuning things. Those are not at all the same thing of, like, the analytical mindset of consulting and business evaluation. So yeah, anybody who overlooks that and just assumes that does not make the right call. 

0:10:51 - David Williams
So what was Livewire? 

0:10:54 - Aasim Saeed
So Livewire was my first four-way into startup life. So I left McKinsey, partly because my biggest deficit of it was, you know, our biggest product was PowerPoint solutions. Yeah. 

I started to do a lot more technology stuff towards the end of my tenure at McKinsey but at the same time that little bit of exposure got me super excited about products and I didn't know this at the time. But I ended up playing the Chief Product Officer role in the early stage startup and just fell in love with product. So Livewire was a financial marketplace for tax, accounting and financial advisors. Even today it's kind of miserable or difficult to find a new tax or accountant or financial advisor. I mean the majority of people you talked to me like I don't know, my dad has a guy is like still the answer in 2023. There's a lot of challenges to why that marketplace doesn't exist. 

Two-side marketplaces are kind of notoriously difficult. But I got to learn all about it as I launched an early stage tax accounting startup and it was acquired early stage by H&R Block. It was never huge but it was a great learning ground and, frankly, when I got to really flex and fall in love with product which is kind of more how I fancy myself now and then more so even than a clinical background I have, you know I can build a clinical model for diabetes or something without having to go hire a doc to consult for it. But it's the product mindset that I think I leverage more regularly. And then the other thing that was really surprising and fun about Livewire was so my next move was back into healthcare. How much of the two-sided marketplace concepts and struggles and problems applied directly like one-for-one back in healthcare. And so I got to lean on that pretty heavy and, frankly, had spent more time thinking about it than I think, anybody else in the country at that time. 

0:12:39 - David Williams
And was it? Was that, Baylor-Scott and White, your next move? Yeah? 

0:12:44 - Aasim Saeed
so I was very excited to get back into healthcare after that acquisition. 

Obviously, my background was gonna be in healthcare and FinTech was a bit of a deviation to start with, but again, great training ground for product and being out of my element there. But Baylor-Scott and White in 2017 was they had already created, but just very recently, what they called the Digital Health Office, and I think that's all the rage these days with different innovation digital teams. We ended up growing to be, I want to say, the third largest one in the country behind UPMC and Providence. So at my departure, two years ago now, I managed a team of about 150 FTEs and $40 million annual budget, so we were pretty sizable one and we had grown into quite a sophisticated product shop. But it was also just a delightful fit in the sense that, like it was back in Texas, I'm here in Dallas. That's where I live today, which is the headquarters of Baylor-Scott and White. It's a great culture. They were very open to the idea of a physician product technical person, so I kind of fit the environment, as I mentioned. 

I love Texas, grew up in Texas, wanted to stay, and I think that was part of the good fit as well, and so it was a wonderful experience. 

0:13:52 - David Williams
So let's talk now about amenity's health, and the first question I have is what need did you see? Why bother start up something totally new? 

0:14:03 - Aasim Saeed
Yeah, so one of the things that we did at Baylor and they're very much related, but then I'll try to call out where that departs from the experience of Baylor but it was often like innovation, was this, this wide open thing, like what should we do? And often, especially in 2017, it was like a lot of pet projects. I mean, I literally said we were like vacuum salesmen, door to door. We're like would you like some innovation, doctor, so-and-so, or would you like to try this dermatology app? And it was all a waste. I mean, just to be very blunt, like these little marginal for those things like let's create a wall chart and re-figure how people look at the screen of the EMR together in the room, or just kind of like very minor use cases that we're never going to change the big picture. 

I was a bit obsessed with what about the basics, like the fundamental things that every patient hates about healthcare? I can't figure out what doctors you have, I can't see when they're available and I can't book that appointment by myself. So those are the things that we ended up very much focusing on, and we had a wide range of innovation. Still, we had robotic process automation, all these other things we were responsible for. But once we started fixing those things, those things worked and they worked so well. And some of that was technology. It was designing a better product, it was integrating directly into Epic for scheduling and things like that, but some of it was also just operational calls. The leadership made. We didn't have a big conversation about opening schedules for primary care, they just did that and that wasn't us. 

That wasn't a digital team, that was an operational call that we very much appreciated, because there's a lot of health systems. We talked to you today that say, hey, we want to build a new app. We have just Greenlit this major initiative. It's gonna be amazing. Can you help us do that? And my first question back is great, do you have open schedules for primary care? And they said, no, we're working on that. I'm like great, would you download the Pizza Hut app if you couldn't order a pizza in it? Why would anybody want your garbage app? Like, I'm very blunt about this. Like you got to have the thing that people want, and if you're a big health system, they want the appointment with a doctor. So if you don't fix that first thing so that's what we did with my BSW health, which was a $25 million investment, a massive kind of say, hey, we can't just stay on my chart, we got to build something bigger, better and it's going to be the front door of a lot of things. 

And that investment paid off, in space even though that's hefty and the vast majority of health systems can't make that type of investment easily these days. It paid off 10X literally. We added half a million new patients through that tool and through that website, and yet we still see a lot of health systems with having some weird Rorschach test version of what is a digital front door. We're like it's a consumer grade website and mobile experience branded to you that gets you the patient and gets them what they want, which is a doctor appointment. 

And yet we have all these chat bots as the answer to that question, somehow, it's just crazy to me. So, anyway, amenities was two things. It was one to say health systems shouldn't have to build this over and over again themselves. That's just incredibly wasteful. So we do that. We are best in class. 

If you love my BSW health, which a lot of people do, it's that again for others. And then the second thing is it goes beyond that, because the other thing that really I felt was missing and the reason I left Baylor's Garden White to go do this as an independent company was okay, getting better registration into the app, getting better provider search, getting to be able to book an appointment that's great. But just to be clear, that's getting the suck out of healthcare. We haven't made a massive world changing difference, and what I really wanted to build next and why the name amenities also was I feel like there's ways to fix a lot of the experience problems in healthcare. If we just had a business reason to, because today we fundamentally believe that health systems and most providers don't compete on experience and that was one big thing we're like well, why don't they? It's insane. 

If you look at the lifetime value of a patient in US healthcare it is, at minimum, half a million dollars to a million five on average, which is crazy, but nobody thinks of it that way. If that's higher than a lifetime value of anything I can think of besides, like private helicopter and yacht sales, yeah right. And yet health systems like feel like they're going out of their way to piss you off. Right, it'd be like oh, we're only open till four, not till five. Ah, you can't register for the app. You got to call these nine numbers. They should be rolling out the red carpet, and that's the concept of amenities, is like let's give them something to be loyal to. 

0:18:32 - David Williams
So let's rewind a little bit, even to your first point regarding the scheduling and open scheduling, because that's something that's been not a technology problem but more of a cultural and a policy problem for at least 20 years Now. Are we at the stage where and I think the idea is people they don't want to reveal their schedule, they don't want to give up control over it Are we at the point where people actually can like pick a time, or is it just kind of like cause where I've seen it in Boston anyway, it's usually more of a schedule request. 

0:18:59 - Aasim Saeed
You know or when it is better, you know. 

So open scheduling sounds like a simple thing, but and this is not our choice, but a lot of EMRs have made it far more complex. So there is open scheduling, meaning anyone can schedule. There's direct scheduling, there's service scheduling, there's request what you've said there and there's like five other ones and the reality is we try to simplify that world exactly to your point. So, absolutely, it needs to be getting an appointment, not requesting one. But the second thing I would say is it shouldn't be more technically complicated than scheduling a haircut, which is to say you need to know the provider, the date and time and the length of that appointment and the location, right, and we've made it way more complicated and, to your point, it's often a negotiation with the providers who are like well, I only wanna see, you know, I wanna see sports physicals on Tuesday mornings. That's how I like to work. Yeah, too bad, is my kind of answer. Like that's not consumer centric, like that's position centric, and so that's why I said like I would say it is mostly operational. 

There is a technological component which is two big things. One is the provider directory. I mean we find that helps us to again really struggle with the basics of like which doctors work there and where do they work and what is their phone number, kind of thing. And then second is the open scheduling. I think is about integration into the EMR. So you know there's a dozen tools. If you're again a barber shop or something and you wanna push that stuff online Shopify scheduling there's all these tools that make it really easy to publish. We all know that's not the EMR, right, like you can't just be like, oh, let's publish and we'll give you APIs for all this. You have to go kicking and screaming going and getting these APIs. You have to custom build them or other things, but the reality is you have to. That's what matters most. If you don't have an app that is anchored in physician scheduling, you're just doing stuff on the margin. 

0:20:57 - David Williams
Got it. So you know you're starting to talk about this. You know lifetime value of a customer and, as you said, right, a lot of times for a consumer Good it could be a lifetime value, could be a thousand or five thousand dollars You're talking up into six and even seven figures for just the average person walking through the door and, by the way, a lot of the paid by the government. So it's like they can. They can afford it over time, even if the country is a whole, can't? Yeah, the organizations that that look at their customers that way, you know they behave in other ways. Like membership model is a common one. I've been a Amazon Prime member Forever and I know there's some discussion about membership models in healthcare and some use of it. Does it make sense to have that membership model in healthcare? And you know what, if anything, makes it different from a consumer model like a Amazon membership? 

0:21:42 - Aasim Saeed
Yeah, fantastic question and enthusiastic yes. In fact. I not only believe that, I'm clearly betting my whole career on it, so the premise of amenities is very much Memberships might get us to care about the experience in healthcare. So I think there's a lot of things that we can't necessarily. I don't have a good answer of how we fix, like I don't know how we fix cost because, yeah, everyone kind of benefits. They don't not, they don't say that openly, but they all kind of benefit, even insurance companies. 

Oh, we have a medical loss ratio. Well, 15% of an ever-growing number is an ever-growing number kind of thing. Right, but experience, if we started competing on it, I think memberships is the way that the world has kind of accepted because it solves a lot, it checks a lot of boxes right, it's recurring revenue, it's a financial commitment and, unlike a lot of other things that we've attempted before, it will I believe it will steer people more than they, than anything else has. Because I think we've we've tried so many different things for steerage, right, we've said, oh, we'll buy up physician groups that'll steer them in network. Oh, we'll start narrowing the network, we'll start building a co's. 

Patients don't recognize any of this stuff you have to kind of make the thing that needs to happen the easier, better thing to happen, and I think memberships are the way to do that, because nobody makes you shop only for Amazon. But how often do you go to another website? And even when you do, you'd go back and check to see if it's also on Amazon to get there right, like we all do, and that's, by the way. That's the inspiration for this is not like. 

I have some other wild membership experience. 175 million Americans are Amazon Prime members and I always say like they figured out two things that change the dynamic, because I used to be an Amazon or Used to shop occasionally on Amazon, but mostly still at Walmart, and the minute that shifted was Free returns and two-day shipping. Right, because they solved the fundamental challenges of e-commerce, which made it better than regular retail. And once you did that, now I stepped foot in a Walmart like twice a year Only when I have to have something now, because I'd rather have the reviews, I'd rather have the two-day shipping, I'd rather a limited returns. Why go anywhere else? 

I know they're not gonna hassle me for why did you return this or did you open it, kind of stuff. In fact they kind of bend over backwards to give you a good experience because they know that lifetime value, they play that long game and so amenities. Our membership approach is to say Not only should we do memberships but we need to figure out what memberships are the two-day shipping and the free returns, not just any memberships, because I would argue One medical is a great example. I'm like great. No one is. I mean, everyone who's a one medical member is like oh my god, did you know I can get a pay an appointment tomorrow. Like the bar is very low with what they're thrilled about. It's not like that was the best doctor I've ever encountered or they solved my you know the trash that no one else could find it was just like they had an appointment tomorrow and their pillows 

were nice in the waiting room, kind of thing, right. And so I Think, for the memberships, in our research we just ask people, what would you like? And we test a bunch of concepts. Now this is back to that, like people would ask for a faster horse to the Model T. People aren't going to exactly know, but we have some indicators that tell us it's not about the care, it's about the peace of mind. So, for example, for us, all of the top features that come back in these surveys that we're running and the research that we're driving Are financial in nature. And it makes sense if, because we also ask them what's the biggest problem in health care, the majority say cost, the worry of bankruptcy, the worry of financial ruin. And so, not surprisingly, we have a feature We've tested called no surprise billing guarantee, and that's the number one membership feature people are asking for not anything that the market has given us today. Got it. 

0:25:21 - David Williams
So you know there's been. I want to shift, moving to artificial intelligence, because there's been a lot of talk about that in 2023 and some action, and I'm wondering, if you look at AI, where do you see the opportunity in 2024 and Beyond for amenities or for you know this overall concept that you've been talking about. 

0:25:39 - Aasim Saeed
So I'm probably the most pessimistic about this. I don't think we're gonna make much progress at all the next two years, and that's because I not only seen this story before, I lived this story before ten years ago. It was IBM Watson. Ai is gonna change everything. Five years ago there was a big market for predictive sepsis risk scores right yeah, bayesian held. I personally did that analysis and tried to bring those in and Without getting into the the rougher parts of it, like there's a reason that market doesn't exist today and it's because of the incumbency and other challenges. We've been down this road before. I think sepsis was an unbelievably good use case and we didn't get our act together. And now what I see us doing is we're not even starting with the use case. We're just like can you see what chat you bt can do. 

0:26:23 - David Williams
It's amazing. 

0:26:24 - Aasim Saeed
Yeah, let's throw it at shit and I'm like what are we doing? Like, what's the use case? I you're not gonna be surprised to hear this. The place where we're exploring it is so mundane. It's scheduling, it's. It's because we're trying to figure out like, could this enable specialist to open their schedules more? Because that's a whole different thing. Yeah, right, so we're not trying to do sexy stuff with it, we're trying to say how do we again solve the most mundane problems we all seem to be avoiding, while we dream up how it's going to somehow Change the dynamic in healthcare, where it's not, because it's, it's a technology, but we haven't defined the application. That is a win-win-win for providers, for patients, for the administrators in the business of healthcare. So, unfortunately, I don't see a lot of change coming, other than a lot of linked in post in 2020. 

0:27:11 - David Williams
Okay, well, scheduling could make a big difference and, as you said, the specialty one is more complicated and Is, yeah, I mean, at the skull. That could be a whole its own podcast. I think I've probably done one on Scheduling. I mean, look at the schedule for something and it's like it's so far out that what you don't know is like, what are the cancellation rates? Because by the time you get to Is, however, far out there offering if you don't need it anymore because you're cured or you're dead. Yeah, so chances are. Yeah, somebody. They have an opening today, because whoever made that appointment, whenever these appointments are available, is no longer among the living, or you know they dealt with their problems some other way. So, yeah, yeah, so where? So, okay, so we'll do LinkedIn posts for next year for AI. Where, where you gonna focus on on in many's health, is it basically, you know, starting to scale up some more or what's? 

0:27:58 - Aasim Saeed
the yeah. What's the focus? Yeah, I think one. You're just gonna start to hear about us more. So we've been in two years. 

We're very, very fortunate to work with some early clients who were Helping us build out this initial phase. You're gonna see start, start to see some of those go lives in Q1 of this year and we think it'll handedly be the best digital front door, best patient portal and in the in the market when that happens. So you're gonna see a lot of us in a lot more places, a lot of more referrals on more things like this where we just, I think, get out of Not necessarily stealth mode. We weren't trying to keep this a secret. It was, yeah, we're busy on the product and then we will scale the business. 

So I think we are Not just growing in terms of like engineers and product managers and those types of things, but also trying to very much find Partners that are excited about new concepts like memberships. So, aside from the digital front door and, as we said earlier, getting the suck out of healthcare on those basic friction points, starting to take a risk and say, hey, what does a financial membership look like? What does a access membership look like? What does a concierge one, look like that's differentiated in the market, and or healthy habits, one or other thing. So I think we're having a lot of those conversations actively. But that's where I'm most excited to say how do we go beyond just the mechanics of reducing the friction? How do we start to experiment to figure out what's the two-day shipping and the and the free returns for this industry? Great? 

0:29:26 - David Williams
Well, my last question for you, then, is about books, and wonder wondering whether you have read any good books lately, anything you would recommend, or, since you're being blunt, I'll say anything you would recommend not reading. 

0:29:38 - Aasim Saeed
Well, no, I definitely have recommendations. I don't think I. I normally don't have the patience to sit through a book If I'm not gonna like it. If they haven't got me the first couple of months, even though I'm a curmudgeon, as you're seeing. The one that I recommend that I'm kind of halfway through right now is it's probably not new, I in fact I'm sure it's not new, I just don't know when it was. 

The book of the moment was called the the rational optimist. I think it's a. It's a book about you know we have. If you watch the news you you feel like every day we're going to hell in hand basket, at the world's gonna end because we're all gonna kill each other type of thing, and this just kind of systematically goes through the advantages we have today and it kind of Coms you, if nothing else, but I think even for it's not a healthcare book by any means, but I think it helps you understand like we have the thing that we've designed and I think people know that inherently, but they complain about or they often say like why we have this healthcare system, why is it broken? It's the healthcare system that was exactly designed and what I've thought about with amenities and the book. The thing that this book reminds me of is you have to challenge some of those core Assumptions, like it's not profitable to compete on experience. That's why it's not being done today. Can we change that dynamic? 

to then shift the answer why do we have the healthcare system that we have? And the rational optimist for me is is just a reminder of that way. Outside of Healthcare, which is where my fun reading always goes, like I don't, I don't like I live healthcare every day. It's so deep I don't know. I'd like to read. I can give you those books but, those are. Those are less fun. 

0:31:05 - David Williams
Sounds good. Well, dr Aasime Sayid, ceo and founder of amenities health, thank you so much for joining me today on the health biz podcast. 

0:31:14 - Aasim Saeed
It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me. 

0:31:17 - David Williams
You've been listening to the health biz podcast with me, david Williams, president of health business group. I conduct in-depth interviews with leaders in healthcare, business and policy. If you like what you hear, go ahead and subscribe on your favorite service. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe on your second and third favorite services as well. There's more good stuff to come and you won't want to miss an episode. If your organization is seeking strategy consulting services in healthcare, check out our website, healthbusinessgroupcom.