Interview with Guardoc founder Hadassah Backman

Hadassah Backman, founder and CEO of GuardDoc Health shares her personal story, from growing up in New York as a family caretaker, influenced by her father's illness and her grandmother's survival of the Holocaust, to her initial career in literature and writing. Discover how her path took a pivotal turn after a personal caregiving experience, leading her to pursue nursing. As a single mother, Hadassah navigated the challenges of nursing school and built an impressive career at Northwell, gaining invaluable experience in various medical units.

We explore Hadassah's transition from bedside nursing to compliance consulting. Her passion for genuine patient care, coupled with experiences in hospice care, inspired a shift toward risk mitigation. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic reignited her dedication to hands-on patient care, even as she faced the complexities of systemic issues in healthcare. Hadassah's story highlights the resilience required to navigate personal and professional transitions, especially during crises, while striving to make a meaningful impact.

Finally, we delve into the realm of technology and healthcare compliance with Hadassah's move to Tel Aviv, where she spearheaded the development of innovative solutions at Guardoc Health. Learn about her collaboration with her sister to improve long-term care documentation and her determination to create user-friendly software for nurses worldwide. With key investors backing her vision, Hadassah's goal is to set the gold standard for CMS compliance, emphasizing the irreplaceable role of nurses. This episode offers valuable insights into leadership, entrepreneurship, and the future of healthcare, making it a must-listen for anyone interested in the transformative power of innovation in nursing and healthcare.

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

0:00:01 - David Williams
Nurses went into the profession to work with patients, but they spend a lot of time on charting and other non-clinical tasks. They need help to find charting errors, gaps and discrepancies to improve patient care and their employers' bottom lines. Hi everyone, I'm David Williams, president of Strategy Consulting Firm Health Business Group and host of the Health Biz Podcast, where I interview top healthcare leaders about their lives and careers. My guest today is Hadassah Backman. She's founder and CEO of GuardDoc Health, which gives nurses peace of mind and provides improved patient care and make sure providers get paid for their work. Do you like this show? If so, please subscribe and leave a review. Hadassah, welcome to the Health Biz Podcast. 

0:00:50 - Hadassah Backman
Thank you. Thank you so much, David, for having me. 

0:00:53 - David Williams
We're going to talk all about what you're doing now with GuardDoc, but I want to start off way back and ask you about your childhood. What was your childhood like? Any childhood influences that have stuck with you throughout your career? 

0:01:04 - Hadassah Backman
All right, we're going to try to stay away from the childhood trauma because it's not that kind of podcast, right? 

0:01:10 - David Williams
Well, it depends, you know as long as it's, you know as long as you have a good recovery story. But however you want to spin it, I think it's all right. 

0:01:18 - Hadassah Backman
So my background is I was born in New York, born and raised in New York, like hardcore. At a certain point my parents moved us to the suburbs outside of New York City, to Rockland County, and I always served as the caretaker in my family. My father growing up, my father was very, very ill. He had a type one diabetes that had you know, at that time there wasn't as many advances as there are today, so that it manifested in cardiac disease and disease and kidney disease, liver issues, multiple, multiple issues and the role that middle child sometimes plays to kind of take care of things and manage things. 

And I think this was a real precursor for the career that I chose. Also, interestingly enough, my name is for Hadassah, which is the largest hospital system in Israel, and also it represents it's a biblical name of a woman who was also a caretaker and, you know, very involved in making sure that you know people were safe. Yeah, it was sort of a pre-conceived or you want to say Freudian thing that my parents did to me, but I had to go into nursing. 

Yeah, I think that's an understatement of the biblical role but yeah, Well, I wasn't going to go into the whole history because I'm not particularly very you know fluent in it these days, but yeah, Very good. 

0:02:42 - David Williams
Well, it had something to do with Persia, so yeah it is very good. 

0:02:44 - Hadassah Backman
Well, it had something to do with. 

0:02:45 - David Williams
Persia. So all right. So did you know you're going to be a nurse, or was it? Do you think, like you had like any independent thought about that, or there's just like the natural thing you already? 

0:02:54 - Hadassah Backman
thought I was never going to get married. 

never have children and travel around the world and take photos of all the amazing things that I would do. Life did not have that. I went. My first degree was literature and writing. I thought that was something that I could do very mobily, and then I, like everybody else, got fell in love, got married, particularly on a young age, and at the same time that I got married and I started that, I had uh, I had two children. 

My grandmother, who I was very, very close to, was probably the greatest influence of my life. My grandmother was a holocaust survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. She was actually interestingly enough about her she was a political prisoner. Even though she was Jewish, she was considered a political prisoner, so she was there longer than most of your average, but she was a real survivor and humanity and taking care of other people was a really big focal point for her, and philanthropy as well. And I grew up literally in her home and then she began to show signs of Alzheimer's and dementia and this happened at the same time that I had my two children and I was getting divorced and I began to become very active in her care, in her day-to-day care, and it sort of gave me throwback to when my father was very ill when I was growing up and how involved I would be in the care and really be like a patient advocate and I spent a lot of time in skilled nursing and that sort of made it very clear to me that this is the pathway that I wanted to go into, that I really wanted to be there for the people who can't speak, particularly for older adults. 

So I went to nursing school and my grandmother passed away while I was in nursing school actually, and I, right out of nursing school, I was very, very lucky to receive opportunity to go straight to Northwell. It doesn't happen for new nurses, particularly at that time. It wasn't, you know. It's interesting because that was the time that the market was saturated with nurses. We weren't getting great jobs, but I was particularly lucky and there was a residency that I wanted from emergency medicine and I went to Northfall Forest Hills. I worked there and I did emergency, I did medical surgical. 

At that point I was a single mother, so whatever shift I could pick up I would take. But also because of my nature, I didn't want to just know how to do things, I wanted to do them well, so I'd get certification or training associated with that type of unit that I was servicing, like if I was going to a post-op. I would want to know how to be a really good nurse post-op. Same thing with telemetry being able to read monitors well and be able to detect when there's any kind of anomalies. Um, but it was really my moment that I think, changed me as a nurse was an emergency room. I was working in the er and I had a patient that came in and it was you know. We had just migrated from paper. That all yeah, but we migrated from paper to uh. At the time it was called sunrise but it's. Then it became all scripts. I have no idea who owns it now. The time it was called Sunrise but then it became Allscript. 

I have no idea who owns it. Now it was pretty much dominating the industry as an electronic healthcare record, but now I think we've moved on to Epic and Cerner. But at this time the communication between the nurses was very, very poor because everybody was getting their bearings on how to use the electronic healthcare record and in general it's emergency emergency room. It's a crazy environment. I had a patient who was um uh, who came in, who had, you know, showed signs of sepsis, and I hung um zogsin I'll never forget it the antibiotic for the patient. And when I went back to the chart to double check I realized that the nurse had documented in one place that um, like in a previous admission because I was so careful in a previous admission that the patient was allergic to antibiotics, to this type of antibiotic, but it wasn't documented in my chart Right away clamped the antibiotic, you know, used saline to flush out the veins, told my I'm, told my managers to sentinel events. Patient was fine. 

But the thing that really hit me and I think stayed with me my entire career, is that we'll go back to my being 15 years old, being the little caretaker that I was of my my dad and my dad had been given penicillin when he was allergic to it, for the same reason that the, that the information was housed in one area and it wasn't communicated in the other area for the nurse, and this fragment in the communication impacted the nurse to give him penicillin. But his reaction was much more dire because they caught it later on and this basically accelerated his end of life. So here I am, years later, thinking I'm super nurse and I'm making this mistake, the same exact mistake that happened a good, I think at that point it was 15 years earlier, and it really struck me on how fragile the system is and how much it relies on us to get things right. And that could create anxiety in a nurse, because you want to do the right thing and you realize that so much is on your shoulders. For me, I really do believe that it helped me check my work a little bit more carefully and ask questions and also not try to override things. But we do that sometimes. When pop-ups come our way, we override them. 

But to make a long story short, shortly after I had taken a certification in hospice and palliative, and because I always loved older adults, I knew that was my calling and I fell madly in love with it. I built up a hospice and palliative program for NJHS and New York City, primarily at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and then I went on to manage the New York City, bronx, westchester teams. I really, really loved it. I really really loved it. 

I have to say that this is where my understanding of health care as a business and how to end the clinical aspect and then the financial aspect really became very clear, because hospice is for, even though MJH is not for profit. Hospice has a very specific function in terms of controlling the costs for patient care, and you really need to fit all of the care that you need to provide for a person who's really critically ill into a capitated rate. And understanding how to do that and how do you utilize your care sources and how to sometimes do insurance carve outs became my thing, like I really liked it and I really actually like, got excited when we could do things that nobody thought was possible for the patient and I think that you know, when I look back at my career, this was probably the greatest turning point and also just the the kind of care that we provided at MJHS. We had a special holocaust survivors program which went into a PTSD program for for veterans of Vietnam and some other wars 9-11. We had worked with a lot of people who had lung cancer or different mesothelioma from post to 9-11. So I think that was a major turning point to understanding how to really optimize care for my patient within the structure of regulation, because regulation is very structured and everyone's afraid of regulation, everyone's afraid of compliance. It's like the big bed wall, like CMS, is coming to watch you. 

But if you really think about what's at the core, yeah, it's essentially there to protect the reimbursement models, but also what you're being asked to comply with is really to ensure patient care. What's the problem? What's the barrier? Barrier is that the amount of you know, the amount of information that's required to ensure that you're meeting compliance, is daunting for a nurse. It's actually debilitating, because you have this balance of providing patient care, good patient care, where you're making eye contact with your patient. You're actually delivering the kind of care that you went to nursing school for with your patient. You're actually delivering the kind of care that you went to nursing school for. 

With trying to meet compliance, which has a number of data points that you need to accumulate as a nurse, I always say nurses, you're not a nurse, you're an investigative reporter, because the way our healthcare system operates is that our electronic healthcare record for our doctor's office is rarely, unless you're in a healthcare care system that all uses. Epic is really the same system that your home care uses, that your hospice uses, that your skilled nursing uses, that the hospital uses. So you have all these fragmented systems and they're not speaking to one another. And all this really important information is either dependence on the patient when you're in stress do you really remember exactly what medications you're on when you're taking it? What's going on? You're in stress or on the nurse really gather that information? And what's happening to nursing Nurses? My time, like I said, it was difficult to get a hospital job, and now we're in a crisis. There are just not enough nurses. So this became more and more of an awareness to me, but I wasn't thinking I'm going to solve the problem. 

0:11:30 - David Williams
It wasn't something that I it sounds like you were I mean. So it sounds like very smooth narrative up here. You figure out what you were doing and you're living your life and boom, put it together. But then it seems like you made a dramatic change. Maybe it all flows together. Why are you going to have your own company too? 

0:11:46 - Hadassah Backman
Well, I'll tell you what happened. It really started with pre COVID. At five years of hospice. I always promised myself, when all my patients converged into one person, like I didn't have the empathy because I had lost two people that I was very close to. And there's a difference between empathy and sympathy and it's a conversation for a different time. But without empathy you cannot deliver that level of care and I was starting to get burnt out. 

So I felt that I spoke to my directors, my VP, susan Leach one of the most amazing women I know my VP over at MJ Justin. I said I don't think I should continue down this road anymore because I'm not the same person that I was and I decided to take some time off. And then I'm like oh man, what am I going to do for a living Now? I can always go back to the bedside, go to the ER. I had a certificate for telemetry. I could have done a lot of things, but I decided to open up a consulting company yeah, really focused on compliance. Again, I would joke around with my sisters and they would tell me you know, it was so cool to say our sisters and the ER nurse. But now what do you really do. Yeah, you know what do you do for a living. 

But I felt that compliance is the area that everybody's afraid of, but it's essential and existential to an organization. You must meet your regulatory compliance in order to get paid in order to be able to function. Compliance in order to get paid, in order to be able to function and to have any kind of financial standing and also actual being able to deliver care. So my consulting company's focus was started off as me as a principal, but then I had to hire other nurses to work with me. It was clinical compliance and I went on to focus on legal nursing, risk mitigation, quality assurance and that was my focus and I loved it. 

I really, really loved my life. I would go into organizations and I would talk to them about find out what their pain points were. I do excessive amounts of chart audits, forecast trends, look at lost runs. When I was working with insurers, I worked with Hub International as a brokerage doing risk management. I worked with Hub International as a brokerage doing risk management and I built up multiple programs training, but a lot of it always bothered me. There was always something in my stomach that bothered me that we were really just cleaning up the mess after the fact. There's nothing really mitigating the core problem. The core problem is that we have tired, burnt out healthcare professionals who are tasked to establish a patient baseline with minimal information. That's the core of the issue. 

0:14:10 - David Williams
Got it. So you're auditing a chart that can't really be perfect because of all the circumstances surrounding the inputs that are put into it. 

0:14:19 - Hadassah Backman
Correct and it's really after the fact. So it's very nice for me to come in three months, a year later and tell you what how to lessen your risk in terms of litigation, in terms of CMS compliance but what am I actually doing for the patient? Maybe they died, maybe they left the facility? I'm actually doing nothing. I'm just lessening the pain, but I'm not really. I'm not really. It's clean. You know, I joke around with my. I have a 17 and 18 year old now and I joke around with them. I was just out of town for business and I come home and my apartment's a wreck and I asked my daughter what happened. She's like I cleared up. What do you mean? I was like you cleared up but you didn't clean up. There's two very those are two very different things. Clearing up is just sweeping things onto the table. Cleaning up is getting to the root cause of something and making sure that it's. You know that that you, that you've uncovered whatever dirt might be there. 

0:15:06 - David Williams
And I bet she said thanks, mom, that's clear Now I'll take care of it from now on. 

0:15:12 - Hadassah Backman
She said what do you mean? Oh, my God. And I didn't ask anybody over. I'm like I saw it on the camera. You did, but whatever. 

0:15:19 - David Williams
So okay. So why did that? So consulting was a company, but you knew you had to do something different. But how do you know what to do? 

0:15:26 - Hadassah Backman
So we'll go back to the year, so the year that I really really my consulting took off. I think I had to hire another nurse to work with me because I had a lot, a lot of work contracted with Hop International, with other clients. They have a large business for um for nursing homes and I was really that busy with skilled nursing. I started to fly around the country. Then covid caught covid 19, came to new york city. Now, if you know my nature by now, I'm not the type of person who's going to stay home and watch tiger king. I couldn't do it. I decided to talk to my children and say mommy is going to go to the fields, you're going to go stay by your dad's for like a couple weeks, maybe even a month, and I'm going to work, go against the bedside and I took a leave of absence from my consulting company. All of my clients were amazing about it and I went to work at the bedside again as a nurse and I floated. I'm a floater and I'm very comfortable floating. 

So I floated to multiple types of facilities and this really bothered me. I found my documentation as somebody who came in and cleaned up the documentation and made things better and gave the educations and training and boot camps on how to better document, my documentation was garbage and the reason it was garbage was because I couldn't compile the information fast enough and some of the things that I saw in facilities happen to patients could have been really avoided by better communication. Because, if you think about what clinical documentation is, it's really not to punish the nurse and add work to the nurse or the doctor. It's the vehicle of communication from one provider to the other. Without concise, you know, and non-subjective documentation, you do not, you're flying blind. And that's really what went on during the heavy days of COVID, which is obviously an exacerbated situation, but that's when I really had enough. I was like this just doesn't make sense. This industry is not going to be able to continue unless there's a more proactive approach. So I finished my two months working floating around a couple different facilities and I started to research. 

Is there a technology out there that mitigates issues in real time? Because, again, at this point it's the end of 2020. There's got to be. We have AI ready. We know that this is an issue. It's got to be an issue in the industry, and there wasn't. There are multiple, multiple consulting companies Good ones too. Nothing, I wouldn't, you know, negate the great work that they do, that do high-level audits that assist facilities with manual audits using a self-medication jerry-rigged system. 

I went to my sister my youngest sister is a nurse. She's also a former ER nurse and she does informatics over at the westchester medical center, older hospitals and she does primarily she, um, she implements softwares. And I go to her and I say, rachel, what do you do to capture errors in real time? She's like, oh, there isn't anything. She's like, what we do is we use this system to scrub things, but really hoping that the nurses or the doctors are getting their information correct from day one? Yeah, and you have no previous information that's usable anyways. It's coming in a PDF or somebody's rumpled piece of paper when they show up into your facility. So that's when I felt like something needs to happen if no one else is going to do it. I've never lived my life in a very conservative way, so I'm going to do it. 

0:18:48 - David Williams
Yeah, so you would do it, and so now? So how did you actually then go, though? Because your background isn't necessarily in software or AI, even though it was around and it seems in some ways, most people would say you know, they spent hundreds of millions on an EHR. Shouldn't that be able to do it, you don't need another solution. So how did you then actually insert a piece of technology that would do the job? 

0:19:11 - Hadassah Backman
So I initially I wanted to see if my hypothesis was correct, right? So at the end of the day, I love science. I like science better that everyone jokes around about it. But I'm like very factual. And I have a kid who's like all hippie and wants to talk about feelings and I'm like, yeah, but what's the fact? This is how you do it. You know, this is my nature. So I had a theory. I had a theory that we could reduce losses, we can improve reimbursement for organizations If there was that catcher's mitt. Think about baseball, right? 

A fly ball comes out your way, it could be a home run for the other team or you can catch it mid-year. So if you had some kind of catch, it's mid-in-place, but I need to prove it now. So through my own consulting company, I went to several clients in the long-term care space specifically because long-term care is my field that I'm very, very comfortable with. But also you have a lot of knowns in long-term care. You know how to treat, what treatments are, what nursing care plans should be in long-term care and it's pretty much a formula throughout the long-term care space. So I decided to launch a manual, 100% manual program and it was the most insane thing that I've ever done. But I found a group of nurses who were living in Israel. That's the connection with Israel. They were all Americans, they had moved to Israel as part of like that immigration that people do and they had come out here but they couldn't work because of COVID. They couldn't transfer their licenses, so they all were unemployed. So I set up a network. I created Excel spreadsheets with what a CMS auditor or a legal nurse would be looking for in a chart, and I approached several clients in the long-term care space and I said you had a very bad survey last year. I'm going to turn it around for the next year. Here's how we're going to do it Every single time, your nurse will see a patient in the US, on the back end, my guardian nurse we call them guardians my guardian nurse will audit the chart in real time, like within 24 hours to 48 hours, in the critical timeframe that you can actually make changes. They will push back a plan of corrections and your nurse in America is going to have to make the corrections and we're going to double check that the corrections were done. And my clients, like, really had faith in me. They believed in it, so they allowed me to pilot it. It was a paid pilot I always have to say that because it is really important to have an idea but it had to also prove that people think it's valuable valuable enough to put their wallet into it. 

And we had incredible results Within six months. First of all, we reduced the errors the nurses were making, because it's like working out the more they would see the same error they'd be like okay, I'm going to work out that muscle. I keep making a mistake on medication orders. I know that medication orders is in my weak spot. Now I'm going to try to be more cognizant of the errors that I'd be making. The same hand, we were aggregating information from multiple sources for them, so it was all pulled together so they'd have a better patient profile, particularly for repeat assessments, which was really helpful, and so we reduced errors by 50%. We also were able to show and I say we, because it really wasn't just me, it was this amazing group of nurses that I had working for me. 

I wouldn't have been able to do it, I could be the mastermind behind it, but they were doing the day-to-day auditing and also doing it in a way that wasn't off-putting or felt like you know, big brothers watching you to the actual nurses who were delivering care. So we were able to have really good communication between both groups. And then we had repeat surveys for two customers. One had zero citation zero. They actually hung that up on their wall. The other one had a citation related to nutrition which had nothing to do with us. We couldn't help it. The food was bad, but we really accomplished what we needed to and I built that up to 14,000 patients non-paying customers and then I hit a plateau. It's now to me. It's not manual anymore. It needs to be turned into a software. So when I need to do something that's radical, I go to another sister. 

0:23:08 - David Williams
How many sisters do you have? 

0:23:10 - Hadassah Backman
I'm one of four girls, I'm smack in the middle, and then we have a baby brother and we're all very, very close. And so my oldest sister was working with the finance ministry in the state of Israel and I had known, you know, some tech leaders through her. I had met them, you know, when she was doing different initiatives and I knew that the technology here is unparalleled in terms of the ability, the agility and the ability to move very fast, particularly because of many of the people who go into high tech are coming from one of the units that are really savvy savvy in terms of technology and I had asked her to connect me and then I started the journey into, you know, uh, software entrepreneurship a lot, a lot of mistakes along the way I would tell anybody in my you know to ask, to ask people who know better than you and don't assume that you know anything, because it's completely different industry. 

I was sent to the 800, to something called Team 8. I sent around from place to place to place. It led me up to meeting somebody that I can develop the software with, getting accepted into the MASH challenge as a finalist, getting invested in for a pre-seed round where I raised $885,000 from America and Israel, and then for our most recent round, which is a seed round led by Tango Ventures, which is Israel's number one venture capital, and then followed by Burlesman, which is Europe's European PE they're amazing and American as well, springbank and Fresh Funds. So we had a very, very strong group of investors who believe in this. 

0:24:48 - David Williams
And how did you find because I don't know if you had the background with I mean, it sounds like nursing background software not necessarily found your way into that. How about finance? Was it also you knew about investors already, or how did you figure your way into there? 

0:25:00 - Hadassah Backman
I didn't know, but I knew I needed to get invested in. In the early days I bootstrapped because I had made some profit on that pilot, I had money to invest in and I am the first investor in GuardDoc. I believe so strongly that I moved both my children and myself to Tel Aviv in February of 2023 to sit with Product and Tech, because I believe so strongly in what we're doing. I knew how important it is and I was my. My conviction really led me, but I hadn't didn't know much about fundraising. I had to learn on the job. You need funds and at the end of the day, you need significant funds to build a technology, to build a tech team that's dedicated and really is going to, you know, build it the right way. I always tell everybody we're in compliance and regulation. We don't have margin for failure. We can't do the test on people. We just can't. So we have to do all that before we go out. So fundraising was a learn on the job experience for me. I got introductions and I took negative feedback that I got from people and turned that into positive feedback that I had, and I think that the real turning point was even prior to my pre-seed round. 

I met with Jonathan Glazer, who's an investor at Tango and is my investor and co-board member today. He's an ER doctor and he understood right away what I was pitching. And he understood right away what I was pitching and he rallied for me every step of the way because he saw the value. And he also understood that the problem that we're addressing is a global one, while we're primarily focusing on US right now. It's a very defined payer source. It's a very clear market. The regulation and compliance is very, very clear and it's like 80% the same of what you're looking for and 20% outlier, so it is different than anywhere else. But he understood this is a global issue, that we put this onus of investigative reporting on an overburdened staff that we're having a major shortage in. So he wanted to be involved and he was probably one of the greatest champions, along with Odette Burrell from Fresh Fund, which was was one of our first VCs, and Alana Berkowitz from Spring Bank. She worked for the Obama administration. Brilliant woman. She just really, really rallied for this to be funded. 

0:27:14 - David Williams
So you got the funding, you got the customers, you're moving forward. Where do you see things in five years or so? 

0:27:22 - Hadassah Backman
Well, my goal is to be the gold standard for CMS I can't promise that's going to happen in five years but for CMS compliance. But our goal is to. We will never replace nurses. And I want to be very clear we use technology today and AI, but on the back end, our quality assurance is done by nurses. And one of my customers recently asked me why. Because I said how much I believe in technology, I still believe in nursing the critical thinking that comes along with it and that holistic view of a patient that I don't believe that technology will ever replace. You know, to quote an author I love, yuval Noah Harari. He says doctors might be replaced faster than nurses. And I believe in that because of that whole idea. 

0:28:03 - David Williams
Interesting. So what would you say is the biggest challenge, or the big challenges that you look at, for making this vision successful for the company? 

0:28:12 - Hadassah Backman
Utilization. I think back to the young nurse that you know single mother wanted to go home to both her kids that was told that we were migrating from paper, which was so much easier, to a software. We're not. I think we're now going to see a lot more tech savvier nurses, but my age is somewhere hovering between a millennial and gen X it depends on who you ask and we weren't comfortable with technology. My first cell phone I had to sit there, you know. Know when you send a text message and sit there pressing the button yeah, yeah, I remember that yeah so. 

So we weren't comfortable with technology and I and every single hour I would spend on documentation after work would be cost me money with the babysitter, so like I need to go home and I was overwhelmed by the amount and I can't. I remember joking, remember joking around with my friends at work. Whoever created this technology never spent a day on the unit. 

They have no idea. They have no idea what our lives are like those pop-up alerts and then they give you the access to access out of them, so it doesn't really do much of anything. You can override the system. They didn't design it, understanding what these workflows are, what you're up against when you're on your feet for 12 hours, and how to simplify it in a way that it's not imposing on the end user. 

And so that, to me, was the biggest challenge is that how do I create a software that people love, that people want to use, that people believe in is going to make their lives easier, not make their lives harder? And how do I really live to that? And so that was, to me, the challenge. Because, if we think back to my manual program, it was imposing. They just liked it because it really saved them time. They saw the value when it came to somebody chasing them with a PDF report. So we got by, and it was small scale, but if I'm going to do this on a large scale, okay, across the United States, thinking of we're in rural nursing homes, one all the way in a place called Wabasa, minnesota. 

0:30:11 - David Williams
Nice. 

0:30:12 - Hadassah Backman
Yeah, I love it. Actually I love going out there and those nurses to me are heroes. And then we're in Newark, new Jersey. So we run the gamut in terms of the type of user. So how do I create it in a way that a nurse who has no time and a nurse who knows the patient because she grew up with them in the same town? How do I make it appealing to both of them? And that's always been the challenge. 

We're very, very product-driven and very customer-driven. Initially, when we were in the MASH Challenge, we did a canvas of nurses. We took rural, we took urban, we took travelers and we asked them questions and we had them beta test with us. And then, with each launch that we do, we hold hands with them. We really it's a nurse that is your customer success person. It's a nurse that's your quality assurance person. So there's somebody on the other end who knows the language that you're speaking. It's a nursing heaven company. We continue to hire nurses in these roles. Technology is built by the experts in tech. Anything I dream they can build. That's really nice. But at the end of the day, how we design the product is based on what the nurses want to see and how they want to use it, and when they're having difficulty with something, we listen to them and we make the adjustments. 

0:31:17 - David Williams
Great Well, adasa. The last question I have for you is about reading and books. You already alluded to an author, but we'll see. Have any chance to do any reading, either lately or in the past, and anything that you would recommend to our audience. 

0:31:31 - Hadassah Backman
To entrepreneurs or for my own self. 

Well, anything you've read that you liked, for whatever reason, that's just good for our yeah, for any listener just good for our yeah, for any listener, um, it's a bad word but everything is effed by mark manson because, um, it's about proportion and understanding and I you know, and having a bigger vision and I think, and I think that drives me I have today, I have 20 employees from very different, different walks of life. I have have American, I have Israeli, I have Jewish, I have Muslim, I have Christian. I have very different walks of life and understanding them and seeing how each division and each unit operates from a bigger view has really helped me. And not focusing on the minutia but really focusing on what our bigger picture is helped me. And not focusing on the minutia, but really focusing on what our bigger picture is. We're here to innovate the nursing experience, to take that heavy duty compliance, manual processes that weighs them down so they can make eye contact with their patients again. 

We became nurses because I'm that little girl who sat there giving my father his insulin shots and taking care of my grandmother. 

I'm that little girl who, at the end of the day, like, wants to see impact and wants to, wants to make people feel better, and I believe that is every single nurse I come in contact with when I um lecture, whenever I meet with nurses, I always ask them to write down on a piece of paper why they became a nurse, and nobody ever says to document. 

By the way, nobody said yeah, and we, we want to tap into that and, as a leader, I think it's really important to see what drives all the people who are behind the scenes, you know, like behind the wizard of oz curtain. All the people are making this amazing software that is really helping out the nurses in the field. What drives them to get up in the morning and build the technology to automate, to write code, uh, to work on the product to you, to the nurses, to do quality assurance, to be on those calls on different time zones, to walk a nurse through any difficulty that she's having. What drives them and to be able to hone in on that? So I do think that's a great book. I love Mark Manson and I want to be able to read more, but time has been a little bit scarce, fair enough. 

0:33:43 - David Williams
Well, hadassah Backman, founder and CEO of GuardDocHealth, thank you for joining me today on the Health Biz Podcast. 

0:33:48 - Hadassah Backman
Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. 

0:33:51 - 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.