Interview with DexCare CEO Derek Streat

DexCare CEO Derek Streat shares how his early experiences in a small industrial town and the challenges of growing up in a single-parent household instilled a strong work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit. These formative years paved the way for his commitment to making a significant impact in healthcare, a commitment deepened by personal experiences, such as his daughter's serious illness and subsequent kidney transplant. Derek's dedication is further highlighted by his involvement in non-profit initiatives like PEDSnet and IROC, which focus on improving outcomes for children and kidney transplant patients through data-driven solutions.

Listen in as we uncover the origins and evolution of DexCare, a platform initially developed by Providence Health to enhance healthcare accessibility through a unified care experience. Derek discusses the transformative role of former Amazon employees in adopting an "Amazon-style" approach to healthcare, aiming to make services more discoverable and bookable. We address the persistent challenge of untapped capacity within health systems, debunking the myth of hospitals always being at full capacity. Derek explains how better data management and transparency can unlock these resources, enhancing the efficiency and reach of healthcare services.

Finally, we explore the future of healthcare delivery in a post-pandemic world, where virtual and hybrid care models are increasingly prominent. Derek discusses the potential of asynchronous and AI-driven care, especially for low-acuity conditions, and the evolving role of patients as active participants in their healthcare journeys. We also consider how Gen AI can empower patients to make informed decisions and how healthcare systems can optimize capacity and resources by leveraging a broader range of care providers. This episode promises a thought-provoking look at the innovations shaping the future of healthcare.

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

• Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/2GTYhbNnvDHriDp7Xo9s6Z
• Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/caretalk-healthcare-unfiltered/id1532402352
• YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@CareTalkPodcast
• CareTalk website https://www.caretalkpodcast.com/

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
Patient volumes continue to rise at health systems which already seem to be running at full capacity. But what if the extra capacity is there already and just needs to be tapped? That's what today's guest promises. 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 Derek Streat, co-founder and CEO of DexCare, which helps health systems manage capacity and digital demand to optimize resources and improve patient access. Do you like the show? If so, please subscribe and leave a review. Derek, welcome to the Health Biz Podcast. 

0:00:49 - Derek Streat
Thanks for having me, david, excited about this. 

0:00:51 - David Williams
And my first question, which I should have asked before we started rolling, is do you pronounce your last name Streat or did I get it? 

0:01:00 - Derek Streat
You got it right Streat. It's pronounced the way you would expect, but not the way it's spelled. 

0:01:05 - David Williams
Okay, sounds good, all right. So I want to hear about what you're doing now and how we're going to free up all this capacity in the health systems. But before that, I want to hear about how you got there, starting all the way back, and love to hear about your childhood, any childhood influences that have stuck with you through your career. 

0:01:18 - Derek Streat
Yeah, yeah, sure, I've got all the way back to childhood. That's really far back. But I was born and raised in the Midwest, in a small town in the southeast part of Iowa, one of the few towns in Iowa that's not a farming community, it's more of an industrial town Furniture companies and grain processing companies and pesticide companies, things like that grain processing companies and pesticide companies, things like that. But you know, like I will say, one of the things that was nice growing up in that part of the country is that there's, as you might expect, there's, a lot of appreciation for work ethic and going in, you know, not always assuming that you've got all the resources to get something done, just going and doing what it takes to get things done. And that's how I was brought up in a single parent household, my dad and I and it just that ended up instilling on me that you know, you kind of forge your own way and you make life what you want it to be. 

And so, pretty early on, I got the entrepreneurial bug and started building companies. I spent a little bit of time as an investment banker. I did that for several years across a couple of different firms, and that just reinforced what I wanted to do, as I was working with more and more companies and CEOs and CFOs of those companies and seeing the success they were getting. I wanted to replicate that and have impact, and so I started building companies a few decades ago. 

I'm on my sixth one now, which we'll talk about. It's just healthcare, but prior to that they were both companies in the kind of advertising technology and e-commerce space, then eventually, healthcare and the last three have been in healthcare, most recent and that was really driven by a desire to make an impact on a space that was highly personal to me. 

We're all patients and consumers of healthcare at some level. That's part of what comes with being human. So I already had that experience set, which I think we could all agree is not great from a healthcare access standpoint. 

And then my daughter also, when she was a year and a half old at the time, contracted a pretty serious illness. That, long story short, ended up taking out kidneys and needed a kidney transplant at three years old. That was a pretty harrowing experience. Almost lost her a couple of times but was able to thankfully get through it. And now, very amazing teenager does amazing things. 

0:03:59 - David Williams
And. 

0:04:00 - Derek Streat
I wish I was. You know, half the teenager, half the person she is at 17. But when going through that experience, like a lot of entrepreneurs, you sort of suspend disbelief, particularly because my frame of reference was technology at the time. The other mistake we make as technologists is that we just apply technology to a space that can be resolved. And so I went into it that way and started building companies in the space, and some worked, some didn't, but nonetheless made a commitment that all my for-profit, non-profit work this is going back in 13 years ago, 14 years ago was going to be dedicated to health care and I've stuck with it since. 

0:04:44 - David Williams
I see you've got a couple of uh non-profit things that you've been pretty involved in uh, peds, net at seattle children's, and then uh, and then iroc, which, uh, when I was growing up that was the international race of champions that went with like the z28, but I think it's improving renal outcomes, uh, in your case. 

0:05:00 - Derek Streat
So it is. I thought you were going to go. 

0:05:02 - David Williams
Yeah, with the Iraq Z the very yeah, that's what I'm talking about, yeah 80s car. Yeah, yeah. 

0:05:07 - Derek Streat
Yeah, so a through line for all the businesses that I've built even the non healthcare ones is that they're all fundamentally about discovering or liberating some set of data, applying compute power at it or to it, deriving some insight from it that would be of value to somebody and then if that somebody, if there's enough of them and they have enough money, then you can make a business on it. Um, and and even the for-profit work I've done I've just I've always been a data nerd and and uh, before gen, ai was a thing you know back when it was machine learning before ai before that, and the machine learning before that, and the, the neural networks before that. I was always fascinated with that space and so even the for-profit work. 

Pedsnet is the largest data sharing network for rare diseases affecting children around the country. It's an NIH-funded program. We've got nine of the largest Peds institutions in the country all sharing data in a common data model and applying technology and computer to learn what works for kids. Iroc does that in the kidney space and we've got 43 of the largest transplant leading transplant centers in the country. We're covering about 60% of all kids that are transplanted. Their data, their knowledge, goes through our network and at the end of the day for kids. 

If you're a, if you're a kid, you have a serious illness. If you, if you, have an illness that that's really impacted them, then by definition a rare disease, because kids aren't supposed to have serious illness. So the only way to solve the problem is to get all the ends, all the kids, together, at least the information about them, so that the providers and the caregivers can then learn what works for one and the other and improve things that way. And so DexCare we'll talk about as a data-driven intelligence company, but all the stuff I've done has been in that space. 

0:06:52 - David Williams
All right, good. So you've got a consistent theme that you organized around the person I was talking to the other day. In addition to doing stuff like you're doing in healthcare, you'd also for a while had a cake baking company. That was just. It wasn't part of the it, just he got involved in it. 

0:07:11 - Derek Streat
Yeah, I often wish I was more of a Renaissance person and actually could have, you know, things like hobbies and things like that, yeah, yeah, in another life, you know, yeah, my brain always ends up going. Where's the data-driven intelligence? 

0:07:23 - David Williams
Yeah, yeah, Well, that's good, because you know, as we'll talk about in a minute, if you're going to have a hope of solving any problem for health systems, you better be fairly focused and driven to that. So let's talk about DexCare and maybe you could talk about what the origin story is for that. You know, was there a specific unmet need? That's usually how businesses are started up. Yeah, of an unmet need. That's usually how businesses are started up, yeah? 

0:07:45 - Derek Streat
So short answer is yes. It's a bit of a unique origin story in that we spun out of a large health system. Providence just goes by. Providence now it's time is Providence Health, but that's an organization for those that don't. There are 51, 52, I think, hospitals around the country, obviously tens of thousands of providers and clinics and so forth about a 25, $30 billion health system in seven states. So some scale. And DexCare itself is actually a project that's been in production for eight years now, even though the company itself has only been around for about four years. 

And that's because, before I came here, I'm a person who starts companies, but they're rarely my ideas. I just find people that are smarter than me and then see if I can help them get something to scale. See if I can help them get something to scale. And so, before I showed up, there was a group at Providence and it was a mandate from then CEO, rod Hockman to make the various care options I would call them ways of giving care organized in a way that provided a unified experience for patients, with the goal of making care more accessible, ie more people get seen. And so what he did very smart is he hired. He went over to Amazon right down the Streat here we're in the Pacific Northwest and hired the guy who literally ran books if you believe that, for Jeff Bezos at Amazon in the publishing division. And then he hired a bunch of his friends and they came over to healthcare and they created Amazon style experiences for patients looking for care. 

And so unified home care and virtual care and things like same day clinics appointments and things like that into one single pane of glass and create a system that was really effective in helping make care more discoverable so more people could find it more easily and then get it booked. When I got involved, I told my last company to Johnson Johnson. It was in the surgery space and I knew the Providence folks. They were both customers, partners of that company, and then I'd known Aaron Martin was the Amazon person and some others for a number of years and was asked to come in and see if what they had done inside of Providence could actually be scaled to other organizations as well. They'd invested about $40 million into it at that point and it was right. 

During COVID literally April 2020, when it went into Providence and in the course of the year, we determined that when we made a bet, that care was going to emerge from this more confusing, more omni-channel if that makes sense than it was before, because now virtual was on the scene, but people were still going to come to doctor's offices at some point and, sure enough, that's what happened. 

So we knew that we needed to understand capacity really well in that process as well, because we already know that we've all gone through the process of waiting too long to get a doctor's appointment. Yeah, we all see the stats, knowing that you know schools aren't graduating of doctors and nurses and so forth, and so there's a capacity problem and you can't solve it by just producing more humans. You need to find some more creative ways of doing it, and so our motion to do that has been to understand deeply the resources in the health system, the provider resources and where there's capacity, and then match that capacity with demand and in doing so you can actually serve more people in the process, and that's what we're doing today. 

0:11:11 - David Williams
So one of the things that's frustrating as a healthcare commentator, observer, expert is that you always hear that health systems, they're at capacity, everything's always full all the time, which you just know can't be true. So your emphasis that there's actually untapped capacity out there I know it. Anybody who's seen a factory or something knows it. Just like nothing runs 100% all the time. So what is it that inhibits systems from realizing the potential of this capacity? I mean both probably some analytical parts and cultural parts, maybe the way reimbursement is driven. But like what? Help me understand why I always hear that the hospitals are completely full. 

0:11:48 - Derek Streat
Yeah, we're absolutely right, david. We've all, we've all felt it. And the way we know, by the way, is if you're, if you're in the system, like you're to healthcare, you're doing a podcast and you're connected to healthcare, you're running a company or whatever, like you can call a friend and the friend can get you to the line, right, and that's a problem, right? Yeah, because not everyone can do that and that's bad for society if that's what can happen. 

But to your point, they're there and so the reason there's this, it, it, there's this perception that capacity doesn't exist is because fun there's a bunch of reasons, but I would, in the interest of time, I would say I think the fundamental reason is that there is a lack of understanding, lack of transparency around the information that would help us understand better how to utilize that capacity and it's it's quite fundamental. So I'll give you one example. The whole notion of capacity is often it often doesn't exist as a field in a data set somewhere, like really people don't know it, they haven't counted it. They'll look in their electronic medical rack and they'll say here's who is available, but that doesn't tell me whether or not that person is available. It just happens to be available right at that moment. But they're way over capacity, they're burnout. They're the last person that would be seeing me right now, yeah, or vice versa. And that's because you need to understand is that, if that person, if they've utilized 100% of their capacity, is that because they're only putting this much availability out there, or are they actually? They're only showing 60%? You know 60% utilization, but they're showing 24 hours of availability. Therefore, like they're over capacity, right, and so you need to fundamentally understand the data and what's going on. 

Now a lot of this is pretty complicated. We do this work at VexCare. It's not always binary. They're either half capacity or not. It can often it's often relative, right. Well, it's, it's, there's capacity. If you, if you want to understand whether or not it's it's, it's, it's it's, it's going to burn that person out or not. 

Or another example could be if you want to truly understand how much capacity somebody has, you can't only look historically. You have to make a prediction about the future as well. So a lot of the technologies that are kind of hot right now in Gen, ai and things like that, at their core, their predictions, and something as seemingly innocuous as capacity is actually a prediction at the end of the day, because you truly don't know. Even people themselves like I don't. I couldn't tell you exactly how much capacity I have as a human being to do things Kind of depends on my state of mind, things I've done right. So there's a prediction. If I told you right now, david, I'm at 80%, it's a prediction I'm making about where I've been, where I'm going to go and what's important to me, et cetera. 

So my point is that's why I'm always saying you need to understand the data and you need to have an appreciation for the fact that a lot of data needs to be generated. It's not as simple as just saying is it in a field? Somewhere? You actually have to create this and make a prediction, and that's hard to do. That's hard for people to do and the final thing I'll say is, once you do that, it's hard for people in a complex system with a lot of really smart people who went to more school than I did, right, and who are paid very well, to also trust that system, that data, that information, at that point to make decisions on their behalf. That's very hard thing for people to get over. 

0:15:24 - David Williams
You know the other thing you're talking about. It sounds like capacity we're speaking about at the individual level, but then they were in the complex system, and so what I learned in business school was that you know, the capacity of a process is basically the capacity of whatever the bottleneck of the process is. So, yeah, you could have a lot that's available, but it doesn't mean that the patient can go all the way through the system. 

0:15:45 - Derek Streat
So all right. 

0:15:46 - David Williams
So how does DexCare go about operationalizing some of these care venues and channels? And you know you talked about virtual care during the pandemic, but how does that factor in? 

0:15:55 - Derek Streat
Well, we start from the foundation that this is a unique perspective on the rate limiters for access, particularly in this country, and that is that typically, access is resolved by over-indexing on one of three stakeholders either the patient right so I'm going to make something that's a highly consumer-oriented experience, optimizing for patients. That's a problem. If each patient like if I have a hurt knee, if I can just force my way into seeing an orthopedic surgeon and burn that person's time for something that needs it that's a problem. Or they over-index on providers right and they say, providers, whatever you want, we're going to give you what you want, and that results in providers not putting their schedules online because they want to control it. Or they over-index on the entity, the health system and that creates obvious problems if you've just got this corporation not controlling this thing. So our view is that you've got to balance them. You've got to understand the underlying data and then balance the needs of those three stakeholders and provide what is really a data-driven intelligence system to then match demand and supply. So that's what we do. We get a very good understanding of patient intent and motivation, what they're looking for, what they tell us are important to them, what's actually their history has been right, the kind of cases and the kind of care they've gotten historically and what's worked for them and hasn't. We get a very good understanding of the provider information as well. Some of it's binary right what the kinds of things that they do, the kinds of cases they work on, et cetera. Some of it's relative, like what's the capacity that this person has and where they're at in their kind of burnout cycle, and then we get a bunch of information about what the health system is trying to accomplish. Maybe they're long on visits at this clinic in short, over here. Maybe they've got a bunch of providers over here that need to fill up their panels and so they're going to have capacity and actually interest in taking care of you as well. It's good business for them if they do that, and the opposite could happen as well. 

We get an understanding of that. We put it into this data-driven intelligence system. It comes up with a recommendation and that recommendation think of it as a care option virtual, or it could be in clinic, et cetera that care option shows up in a think of it as a box on various screens that you or I, as a consumer or patient, could interact with. So as we're searching online, you know, for care near me on Google or something like that that landing page will have a care recommendation that is served by Google. You got to it through Google, served by DexCare, up in that box. Same thing if you went and searched for care on the health system website, if it's one we're working with. Same thing if you called into a call center at the health system we're working with. That call center operates. 

Looking at a screen that has recommendations that are served up and that recommendation is served up based on balancing patient provider and health system needs to do a match of that patient to a care setting a modality, a service line provider, et cetera, and ultimately find that when you do that, you're able to serve. Depending on the health system that we work with, we're able to increase the number of patients that are serving anywhere from 50 to 70%. We're able to increase the capacity, find additional capacity in the health system. I guess increase is the wrong word, it's always there, we're just illuminating it. We're able to increase that about 44%, right? So you end up more people being seen, more capacity, and then the average time it takes to get care is reduced about 28%. That's sort of days to get booked, and now we're working with health systems around the country servicing maybe 20% of the US population, so more and more people have access to these experiences. 

0:19:47 - David Williams
So we talked about how virtual care gained tremendously during the pandemic In particular. I've been working on this topic since about 2000. I had different doctor-patient web visits, asynchronous such and such, and then you had telehealth that all of a sudden went from almost nothing to majority in a couple of weeks in March or April 2020. And was sustained throughout the pandemic but has since gone down a lot, and I wonder what your view is on what role virtual care is going to play. Clearly, it's a hybrid environment. It's not going to go away completely, but does it ramp back up? Do we see new versions of it other than you know what? Telehealth visit that's just like a video visit on on zoom. Where does it go and how does that fit into the capacity equation? 

0:20:34 - Derek Streat
yeah, I'm I'm really excited about about the future here and it's I mentioned earlier when we were, we were there in 2020, right, and and there were a couple months where yeah, you weren't going into a building, unless it was it was, you know, an emergency. 

It was 100 virtual care otherwise, and we always thought it was going to go back to omni-channel or hybrid, as you say. And the interesting thing is, david. So yeah, there was a time where it was 100% virtual, but at the time, mckinsey was estimating this is in mid-2020, that we're going to land at about 20% digitally enabled care which includes virtual, kind of synchronous virtual is what people think of, and if you look at where we're at right now, it's about 20% and about 80% is analog or in person. Now there's two ways to look at that. One could say, well, geez, it was 100%, it's down to 80. But what I would say and you've been in it long enough, it sounds like you know this like that 20% is about 10x what it was pre-COVID. So this is a big deal. 

And what I'm really excited about is we tend to think in this just because of the history of the way care is accessed there's I go to a doctor's office or I could do a synchronous virtual visit, right, that's the 80-20. But there's a bunch of space in between, right, for certain medical conditions today, you know, people may not think of them as medicine, but they are, you know, hair loss or things like that. I don't even need to talk to anybody to get not only get diagnosed but get treated. You know things show up. You know things show up at my doorstep the next day to take care of that. And you know, within a year or two it'll probably be a drone coming and dropping it off. And so there's all these spaces in between Gen AIs. I know it's kind of overused, but this is a space where I think it's really happening. 

It's going to happen here where the types of depending on where you're at in your care journey and the types of care you need, depending on where you're at in your care journey and the types of care you need and we all go through these periods throughout our life where sometimes you need something that's higher acuity, lower acuity, episodic, procedural, chronic, et cetera. There's going to be different types of care and modalities that are relevant to you at those particular times and it's totally appropriate and great. It's another way. We'll unlock capacity here and at the end of the day it all comes back. You've got to understand where somebody is in that care journey. That's that intention, intent and motivation to match them up with the right type of care. 

I think we're probably where synchronous virtual care is going to be at 20% or so different in certain spaces. Mental health is a great place, for example, to do more versus. You know we're probably not going to be doing you know, surgeries this way, you know, in the foreseeable future. So it's probably there. But I would also say there's a sliver that's going to be async as well. There's a sliver of care that I think is going to be 100% AI driven as well, for particularly low acuity. So, when you look at it that way, I think the digitization of care is going to continue to increase and I always think there'll be some care. 

We'll be going into a doctor's office for as well. 

0:23:48 - David Williams
Part of what you were describing made me think about the arc of the patient involvement in their care. 

If we go back kind of pre-internet days and things were a little more traditional, basically you go in doctor would tell you whatever it is, that you'd either understand it or not, or partially, and but that was kind of kind of it. 

And then you got to this point where the internet was out there and people could search and the physicians used to complain about the bringing in these big, you know long lists of stuff and they'd have to spend all their time educating the patient. You know, telling you you don't have that, you don't have this, and that was kind of one place. Now, if we go to where we are today with Gen AI, you know there's some recent studies small scale, we'll see what it indicates. But you know not only that Gen AI could do as well as a physician or a medical student, but they were showing one example where Gen AI alone was doing better than a physician using Gen AI. And it's quite interesting because what that shows is either well, assuming that the study was done well is that the physicians either don't know how to do the prompting or they decided to disregard it. 

So they haven't really learned how to use the AI, but the patient can, at a minimum, I think become well-educated and determine which specialist to consult what they need, and that's going to be a role, that's going to be capacity that is available for systems too for systems too. 

0:25:13 - Derek Streat
I think it's a great observation, david. When you think of, I think we tend to think of capacity in healthcare first and foremost as based on licensure. Right, do I have a MD? And then, once you start, that's sort of the center, right, and you go out there as well. There's RNs and ANPs and they're licensed caregivers, but there's more of them. And there's this concept in our space that we do a lot of our matching and routing based on this concept of top of licensure. Right, let's make sure a nurse is able to do the most advanced care that he or she is allowed to do for that license right, which is usually, by the way, a lot more than people think nurses can do. And then you keep going, right, and there's home caregivers right, anybody that's got an elderly parent in our case, we had a medically complex child plus elderly parent you become a caregiver. I mean, there's no other way around it. You become a caregiver. You may not be licensed or paid for it, but you are. And then, to your point, there's self-care outside of that as well, all of those. There's also community services. 

When you get into social determinants of health which have an impact on care as well, there are these resources that could be brought to bear, that are part of the supply, part of the answer to the supply-demand imbalance, and I agree with you I think, at least the subtext of your point we're utilizing a tiny fraction of them right now. 

Right, because we all assume just the way we're wired to assume the way I get care is I go see a doctor in an office and that's and that to your earlier question, that becomes a huge rate limiter because you're not including a lot of the capacity there. But I think it's a really important, a really important point and it's all. The cool thing is it's all, it's all, it's all an opportunity. If you just understand the underlying data. What's changed is, up until just recently, we haven't had the technology that can aggregate those data and then make sense of them, so we could provide these options. You know, we all get on an airplane when we go and travel somewhere and we don't really think twice about the fact that, yeah, there's a couple of humans sitting in that cockpit there. 

But most of this plane is being flown by a system that knows how to do this, and that's great because you know to probably control every flap or whatever on an airplane I don't fly airplanes that would probably require an army, and in reality it requires two people or whatever to get this done. But we all also understand that we want those two people there because they have context around what's happening there. They can. There's just there are limits to the technology, and so I think that's a great analogy for healthcare. There's immense scalability. That happens, you know, on you know, getting those hundreds of people to their destination in that airplane, and it's a mix of technology and humans that are making that happen. 

0:28:08 - David Williams
So let's talk about a health system that's maybe just sort of, you know, getting its head up, trying to get its head above water. After the pandemic, there'd been certain federal funds that were available and we're into a new normal, or whatever it is, by now. A lot of them are really hurting financially and it seems as though you know freeing up capacity would be an excellent thing to do. What advice would you give a health system at that? Just maybe that's earlier on in the journey of scaling capacity without adding a lot more resources. 

0:28:37 - Derek Streat
Yeah, the first thing I would say is be open to the idea and the possibility. I would say it's near certainty, but you got to kind of see it to believe it, but in our experience it's near certainty. But at least be open to the possibility that you may have some capacity. Look, I understand we work with tons of physicians in our line of work, and I understand that it's a very real thing when a provider says look, I am, I am, I got 15 minutes to see these people, I am booked up. This is the way. It's a very real thing. At the same time, though, what that health system is failing to do for that provider is provide a more intelligent way that they're connecting that provider with patients, so that it actually is more manageable for that provider as well. Right, maybe I may have 15 people lined up to see this particular day, because I'm an MD, but maybe a few of them could be seen by the nursing staff, right, yeah, maybe a couple of them could be seen by my colleague who's in the same clinic but has some free capacity over here. Maybe some of them could be handled virtually or asynchronously in a certain way. And so you hinted at it earlier, david. 

But there is the other thing I didn't mention when you were asking kind of, what are the rate limiters here? I mean it's healthcare. So change management and transformation, those things are hard to do, and so as an organization I would say, first, just be open to the possibility of there being something interesting here, and then it's not that far for people to. I mean, they know this better than you, they're providing care every day. They see what happens right when 20 to 30% of people don't. They see what happens right when 20 to 30 percent of people don't. 

You know there are no shows, right. Well, there's a capacity right there. Right, how do we fill it up? Right? I mean they know what's going on Anecdotally. Just be open to now turning that into action, which requires an understanding of your underlying data. That was one, and the second I would say is think of the system holistically, right. The other problem with healthcare and healthcare technology in particular, is that health systems love to. They actually hate doing it, but they understand they get kind of pulled into these kind of point solutions, right, it's the turn of the hero, right? And so I'm gonna solve this problem with this thing. I mean that's kind of what's happening with the gen AI stuff right now. 

It's like, ooh, where can I shoot this arrow? But instead I would say think systematically. So, whenever we're, we have a lot of different solutions in our platform and usually we'll start with interacting with a new prospect or customer because they're interested in this particular slice. What we try to help them understand is you want to think holistically about the system just because you're trying to get a whatever a provider data management system in place? You should be focused on what that is, not the application itself, but it's a means to what end and we would always bring it back to if you have the right components in place, you can bring more demand in, you can understand your capacity and match that supply better, and it's a way where everyone wins because we're balancing patient, provider and health system needs. So think systematically and kind of longer term about where you're going, as opposed to, let's you know, solving this point solution problem right now. 

0:32:06 - David Williams
So, derek, my final question for you is one that I ask all my guests, which is if you've read any good books lately, or any time, and anything you might recommend for our audience. 

0:32:15 - Derek Streat
Yeah, the book that I've said this a number of times, but I love it so much. It's called Sapiens. Have you read that? 

0:32:22 - David Williams
I have, I have. 

0:32:23 - Derek Streat
Harari yeah yeah, yeah. 

I just, yeah, yeah it's. I'm a I'm a history buff and I did just also read a kind of a dual biography of Washington and Franklin that was. That was very well done as well. I forget the exact title, but what I love about Sapiens is is I mean it? It, you know? You know it goes to kind of the arc of human human history and it just gets real. I won't ruin it for people that haven't read it, but it really gets to why we are the way we are and and and the decisions we make, and it was pretty eyeopening for me and just made a lot of like logical sense, like yeah, of course this is, this is, and it's not a. 

it's as you know, it's not like an easy solve, it's not a oh, here's the one plus one is two. It's like no, there's this like fundamental thing that makes us humans that? That really explains a lot good and bad. 

0:33:20 - David Williams
It's a very provocative book. If I'm remembering it right, that's the one where he talks about the question of whether did did wheat domesticate humans? Right, humans, because there were their crops. And then you could stop in one place, and so it's that type of thinking very eye-opening. 

0:33:33 - Derek Streat
Yeah, it's very much about. It's very much about our just amazing back to capacity, our amazing mental capacity to believe in and rally around intangible things, ideas and things like that. That, really, I mean, I think, does separate us and explain a lot, because ideas can be, can go one way or the other, right. 

0:33:52 - David Williams
So yeah, Good, Well, we'll do a. We'll ask Chet GPT to summarize the book, but it's probably already been done elsewhere. But I do recommend it. You can borrow my copy if you're in town. Well, Derek Streat. Co-founder and CEO of DexCare. Thank you so much for joining me today on the Health Biz Podcast. Thanks, David, Appreciate it. 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.