29: Advancing Technology to Innovate Healthcare (w/ Dr. Dirk Perritt & Meade Monger)

Josh Naaman: So, here we are Meade Monger and Dr. Dirk Perritt. Thank you for coming on our podcast.

Meade Monger: Thank you for having us.

Dirk Perritt: Yep, thanks so much Josh.

Josh Naaman: I appreciate you guys taking the time. You two are, some of the busier people. I know and doing a lot as evident by the many meetings that we now spend together weekly, I am grateful to have been connected with both of you Meade and I have worked together for quite some time now and now we work together with Dirk on MD health pathways in the cool things that you’re doing, just real quick and then I’ll let you guys properly introduce yourselves. But just to give some context, Dirk you found MD health pathways to tackle real struggles, that families face, the lack of accessible care and financial burdens, and it’s appropriate because you yourself are a doctor. And so, you’ve seen first-hand what? It’s like, and I want to dive into that. And then what’s cool is Meade. Founded, omniscient, health and helping business owners and healthcare professionals. And other

Josh Naaman: Business at business types like Dirk be more effective and efficient in meeting those goals to help with healthcare. So what a perfect combination? What’s cool is? Usually, I have a partner on the podcast and I talk to them or I have a client who I talk to them, but here we have both. So we have this cool energy and so I’m really looking forward to diving in with you both. I’ll go ahead and let you both introduce yourselves properly Meade. Why don’t we go ahead and get started with you? Just because I’ve known you longer and then we’ll go to Dirk.

Meade Monger: Thanks Josh and thanks for having us on your podcast here through a pleasure to do it, especially with Dirk who will get into talking about how we’re working together a moment. But just give you a little bit of background. I ran the digital practice of a global consulting firm and was worked with companies to transform them, especially using technology to make them a much more efficient and much more effective. And then a number of years back starting working with healthcare companies and especially found that in the healthcare industry. There’s a lot that can be done with technology and there’s a lot of challenges. I think that most people are aware of. I won’t steal Dirk’s Thunder. I’ll let him explain his business. But we’re super happy to be able to lend a hand and what he’s doing. And I guess that’s what we’ll be getting into here over the next period of time during this podcast,

Josh Naaman: Said, there’s so much more to unravel with what you do meet. It’s insane as I’ve discovered, but go ahead Dirk. Let us know what you’re a doctor of how many patients you’ve helped. How many lives you’ve changed and how you’re changing them now? I’m kind of kidding, but at the same time, not

Dirk Perritt: Yeah, Thanks for the introduction, Josh, so I’m Dr. Dirk Perritt, I go by Dr. Dirk not to be confused with Dirk Nowitzki, despite living in Dallas but I’m an doctor of 20 years. I’m that the health authority of a small county right outside of Dallas and have worked really in a busy emergency room environment for the last decade and it’s the things that I’ve seen in the ER that really drove me to found an organization called MD Health Pathways and really the impetus behind that is the lack of access to health care in the downstream effects. And really what the way we based, this essentially telehealth service is providing to the general public. What I’ve provided to my friends and family over the last decade and any doctor that maybe listening can identify with this as doctors. We have friends, family.

Dirk Perritt: They all get sick cousin that family extends very far. When you’re a doctor, It may be somebody that’s just a Facebook friend but you’ll get a text message often in opportune time to say, Hey, I’m sick. My kids are sick and through a simple text message, they’ll describe what’s going on and a quick back and forth. I can decide, Is this something that needs immediate medical attention? Is this something I can handle through a text message and then often it is something I can handle. A kids got strep, throat or upper respiratory infection. Maybe at a good friend, has a urinary infection that I can hear what’s going on and prescribe a inexpensive antibiotic and take care of that and all of a few minutes and that’s exactly what we’ve based our service called Tap Telehealth at MD Health, pathways off of is modeled after how we as doctors treat our own friends and family and now taking that to the masses by partnering with municipalities and cities to offer every resident in the

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Dirk Perritt: be that same level of what I would consider concierge service.

Josh Naaman: That’s huge as a technology person. I’m not gonna say that I’m an expert in everything, but people see that. you work with computers every day. I’ve got this going on. Can you just help me out? And I’m like, Yeah, yeah I get it less now because I think there’s such good access to YouTube tutorials or something or me. Maybe I’ve just helped them enough to where they don’t have those problems, but I’m certainly not a doctor and it’s not a Life or death situation or anything like that. But I feel you in a way that people come to me, for things outside of my, practice, if you will. And I have to text with them and figure out what’s going on and things like that, but I think it’s absolutely admirable.

Josh Naaman: That you and along with your team, are building an awesome tool to take care of people. At the end of the day, you think of Maslov’s hierarchy of needs, right? And you can’t do much if you don’t have your health.

Josh Naaman: that’s number one, I guess food. And water is right there too. But health, you can’t do anything if you’re not healthy and in that allow our society to go and flourish and treat each other better. And so it’s been an honor being a part of this big project and what we’re working on personally, I just wanted to let you both know if I haven’t formally that the work that I contribute with me and my team feels good. I actually am stoked to tell some of the few people that I speak to all the time that, I’m actually feel like I’m helping healthcare and I don’t know if need you feel the same, but that tugs at me.

Meade Monger: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll tell you, I first started getting interested in health care when I realized how annoquated it is compared to other industries and how much of an impact it could have, wasn’t around 2014 when health care providers were mandated to implement R systems and before then most of them hadn’t done that. So I think just about all of us. Can remember the days of going into the doctor’s office and filling out the paper clip. Go more looking at the file room full of paper behind the front desk. And that’s what initially got my attention. Then, as I started to learn more about health care, in general. And I’ve been studying a lot by the thing that I think really brings it all together. Is this concept called

Meade Monger: Triple aim and triple aim is three goals of increasing or having better cost of care.

Meade Monger: A better access to care, and better quality of care. And there’s many arguments out there that it’s hard to do all three. So if you’re going to have better access to carers going to cost you more, if you’re gonna have better, quality of care is going to cost you more if you’re, etc. So you can’t get all three. But with technology I believe it was possible and with what we’re doing with Dirk and MD health pathways absolutely, they’ve come up with a concept That gives access to care to a lot of people and it’s very high quality because we’re using technology to enhance the quality and leveraging capabilities like AI to really be able to treat a lot of people effectively.

Josh Naaman: Yeah, you are also making me think about my realm of design and development where it’s this triad. Speed price and Pick two. I think over time that’s changing a bit. It’s getting better. But it’s hard to get all three of these big components of whatever realm you’re talking about. Because one if you increase quality or something like that, usually, Now I have to spend more time. it’s a difficult dichotomy in a line to draw or to walk, if you will. I wanted to get your perspectives from both of you because Meade, you had mentioned how antiquated healthcare was once you started to dive in. I’m curious healthcare being as old as

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Josh Naaman: time where we had to take care of one another, obviously it’s evolved over the decades of millennia but I’m curious how such a vital System to humanity. Stays antiquated and is For instance, I’m still flabbergasted that there’s not more resources, put into education. That’s a whole other podcast, but I’m curious what your takes are on. Why is Health care still antiquated.

Meade Monger: Yeah, I can start Dirk and then turn it over to you. I think One big challenge in my opinion, is that the US health care system? Really? Does not have a cohesive leadership that we have a bifurcated system between a market, justice system, and a social justice system. So those that are over 65 and lower income have insurance from the public government, where many of the rest of the people have private insurance commercial and then we still have a lot of people that don’t have insurance. And so there hasn’t been sort of one driving force. I think to lead everyone in the same direction while the same time.

Meade Monger: Security is especially a huge issue in healthcare.

Josh Naaman: Like this.

Meade Monger: I think that a lot of healthcare providers were looking for quite some time, until security got better, and then cost, it’s a big cost. So I think there’s a confluence of factors and, something needed to be done. And then, there was a mandate that started to force the issue. And I think now that that’s happened, we have a decade So now of data to work with and some really great things are going on with technology and healthcare. Now,

Dirk Perritt: Josh, I can’t agree more with your assessment that sometimes healthcare seems slow to adopt and yet, sometimes they’re the first to make miraculous discoveries. I think we have Two, two.

Dirk Perritt: Competing dichotomies One is healthcare actually has some of the latest and greatest technology when it comes to treatment. So the latest designer drugs or imaging modalities. But when it comes to delivering healthcare and the efficiencies is where we really see technology be slowly adopted and it’s kind of interesting as your doctor. Just five years ago I was still wearing a beeper a pager on my belt because that’s the way we did pages and…

Josh Naaman: No way.

Dirk Perritt: communication and calling back after a page or a trauma alert, despite having a cell phone in my pocket. That could do a text message and I could immediately respond back. Another example of that is on the delivery of healthcare.

Dirk Perritt: Every emergency department and hospital and pharmacy, still has a fax machine. and frankly, that’s because the federal government deems, the fax machine is HIPAA compliant. Despite anyone being able to walk up and take those papers off a fax machine, but an email or is considered less HIPAA compliance. so there’s some regulatory policy issues. I think that whole thing’s back and then ultimately into delivery of healthcare at all revolves around.

Dirk Perritt: Where does the money come from? And that’s, the private payers, the federal government and they dictate the terms of delivery and that ultimately dictates the modalities in which you can deliver health care and treatment and specifically with our program, It is historically a little more difficult to get paid doctor to get paid for text messaging their patients. so despite texting being ubiquitous and probably the most common form of human communication adopted by

Dirk Perritt: Those that are super young all the way to your grandparents because they want to participate in the conversation and texting family photos back and forth. it is not widely adopted in healthcare, largely revolving around reimbursement through for a message in text messaging. The payers haven’t really figured out a great way, although they are starting to adopt that and in some manners yet video and is widely adopted but has its limitations telehealth that it’s inception was modeled off of the way, a in-person doctor visit occurs which means you develop all the inefficiencies of an inductor busy, you have to schedule an appointment. There’s a wait for the doctor to get to you where a modality like text messaging allows a doctor to communicate with patients simultaneously you might and our scenario with our workspace. We might have a mom getting her. Kids ready for school? That has one of them sick. That’s

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Dirk Perritt: but only texting every 10 minutes because she’s got to get the other two kids off to school. And then you might have a retired individual, that’s texting real time. because of technology that allows us to treat both patients simultaneously and no one’s better at doing simultaneous tax and tasks than an physician. And so, it creates the efficiency of not having to schedule an appointment, like a video would So I like your comment about the outdated modalities and medicine. And I think if we could solve anything to create efficiency, it would be that.

Meade Monger: And not just want to expand on this and…

Josh Naaman: .

Meade Monger: and just kind of as a segue from what Dirk was talking about and really stress about how great of a solution that health pathways has come up with that that addresses a lot of these challenges because the patients now have immediate access to care where they can text the MD Health Pathways team, that’s extremely affordable, and there’ A lot of these patients are challenged to get primary care special. When you look into rural areas, where a lot of the folks don’t have commercial insurance, they don’t have Medicare because they’re not old enough. They don’t have Medicaid because they may have too much income, but they don’t have insurance because they don’t have employers, that provide them the commercial insurance. So they’re forced to get it on their own or just have a hard time getting

Meade Monger: in order to make ends meet. And so this is such an economical solution to be able to get. Just the basic needs of care, just by simply texting with a medical team and having them help you with prescriptions having them, refer you to the right specialist having them, give you the feedback you need to take care of yourself. it really is amazing and it’s awesome to be a part of it.

Josh Naaman: I think it’s pretty cool. How technology has advanced to keep things simpler. That once was more complex, you can think about, I don’t know, choose something other than healthcare like what’s coming to mind it because I’m trying to figure out a flight to come see you Meade. It’s like, I can just go on my phone or my computer and really quickly buy a flight Within three minutes. I could be done with the checkout of purchasing a flight.

Josh Naaman: on a huge hunk of metal going across the nation, quickly. And it’s when you kind of stop and think about that, that’s pretty amazing because of how much is going on the back end of that, from the processing of that calendar and the flight schedules and scheduling the flight attendants and the pilot to then build the plane and then getting it there and all the safety protocols in the airport and the road structure to even get to the airport and my car it’s pretty wild. So I too am a fan of this, simplifying things that once were more complicated than they need to be in Dr. Dirk you put

Josh Naaman: Pretty much summed. up that a difficulty on that is, how do you account for the payment when something becomes so simple? But there are ways to address that, you’ve created That is creating a service that works and functions. It’s just about those relationships and those partnerships and making something work and having those conversations. So, I respect it very much because those are the kind of barriers that ultimately need to be broken down, especially in something like healthcare. And I think the same could be said for education in science as a whole, we were talking earlier. And it got me to think about scientists. because Dirk you had mentioned,

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Josh Naaman: But we’re actually having some of the most cutting-edge technology, but then there’s this disconnect on, the process of how that technology has put into use to connect to the population. And I thought immediately about a scientist in general, people working at CERN and discovering things about the atom that we had no idea whatever. It may be developing new technologies microprocessors. And these guys are just doing guys and gals, whoever they are Deep deep within their work and ultimately at the end of the day, How do you communicate that in disseminate that to the grant the bigger population? And then how much time does it take for that technology to roll out into the world? And so I think momentum is a part of this too. Where, thinking about health care specifically,

Josh Naaman: there is so much going on daily in a hospital or an ER, And it’s like How do you step back and Okay now we need to change the system. It’s like when do you change the system? Because people are coming into the door with a broken arm or a bullet wound or whatever it may be every hour or whatever. It’s like, When do you make those changes? How do you roll them out? It’s complex.

Dirk Perritt: That said, That’s really interesting. You, bring that up When I started emergency medicine about 20 years ago, about 70% of what I saw in the emergency department were true. Emergencies, they were the gunshot wounds, the car accidents, the strokes and about 30% of what I saw are what we call the everyday, medical care needs. And it’s usually people start there for three reasons. they don’t have health care insurance. Their doctors office is closed or frankly, they just don’t know where to start because the medical system’s pretty complex. And what used to be 30% of the Common Neighbor Day illness is showing up in the emergency department, 20 years ago, now is about 70%, and 30% are that our accident stroke. So what happens when those numbers flip like that? So severely a couple of things

Dirk Perritt: Is those that need that truly emergent care, Hence the name emergency room aren’t getting it easily and it’s kind of the needle in the haystack. So you may have people sitting in your waiting room that appear like every day, medical care needs that truly are emergent and it’s our job to sift through those. I’ll give you an example of a patient I saw

Dirk Perritt: six months ago and it was a guy that came in chief complaint was I ache all over after writing my bike with my daughter and I thought, that’s it. Weird complaint. And this guy was waiting in the waiting room for I don’t know, 45 minutes and we were kind of deadlocked in the er, and so, when those things happen, I like as an doctor just to search through the complaints of the patients waiting, they haven’t seen us yet and try to pick out maybe ones that really need our attention and that one just kind of struck my attention. I’m like that’s kind of weird. This guy says he aches all over after writing his bike with his daughter. because first thing that came to mind is, if you have your really athletic person that’s going to do crossfit and they overdo it, you can get robbed in my license. That’s like a breakdown of muscle tissue. Cause you to ache all over your urine’s, pretty dark. And there’s some pretty classic sense and symptoms you can elicitate when you go see someone. So

Dirk Perritt: More out of curiosity. I was going to see him to see if that was the case, but it didn’t fit that he did this while he’s with his daughter. I’m like, Wow, your daughter must be really in good shape but she can keep up with you if you’re pushing yourself that hard. So I go out the degree dam. I get a little history, his daughters, all of eight years old and they rode their bike up the hill and back a couple of times. And suddenly, he felt like this, I’m like, explain to me what’s going on? He said I feel this sense of anxiety and feeling like I can’t sit still, and I just kind of achy all over it. Goes up into my jaw and my arm

Dirk Perritt: those are kind of the classic words but he didn’t say that to the triage nurse. Now he’s really got my attention that this is a missed myocardial infarction or a heart attack so I immediately walk them over get his EKG. Sure enough. He’s having a heart attack so when you overwhelm the system with these unnecessary complaints it makes it really hard to really pick out those that are having emergencies. And so there is a huge need for our emergency departments in America. They’re one of the most valuable resources, same with our 911 system but they are being overwhelmed with individuals that just don’t know where to start. Maybe don’t have access their doctor’s office is closed and they don’t have any other way to access the medical system except through the ER. And so what we’re trying to do is get to the people before they ever have to check in the awesome offer them an easy opportunity to interact with us and if you don’t make it simple, if the minute you

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Dirk Perritt: For a barrier and that barrier might be.

Dirk Perritt: the doctor will see you in medical terms, six hours is expedient. That’s excellent. You tell someone, they gotta wait, six hours for something. They have a medical complaint for their chances of going to what they think is gonna be immediate goes up tremendously but if you offer them, the ability to immediately text with a medical provider, a doctor and get some answers. then the likelihood they’re gonna stay in their home and text you on their phone. It goes up tremendously and the likelihood. They’re gonna go seek medical attention in the ER goes down and so it’s really of reducing the barriers, the weight for them to contact that medical provider and you’ve got to do that in a number of ways. You got to one reduce if you think of the office staff, when you walk in the emergency department, first person, you see is usually registration person to get your insurance card. Then you’ll see a triage nurse That get your medical.

Dirk Perritt: Complaints. And then you sit to the waiting room until you can be seen. With our system, we truly connect you with the medical provider immediately. There’s no in-between. We’re not collecting insurance information. Quite frankly we just care who verifying your identity and then connecting you with the medical provider and we can only do that because of technology in one, it creates patient satisfaction simplicity, but it also reduces cost. Imagine all the people we just eliminated in the chain of cost by connecting you directly to the patient, all the middlemen that need to do those things in technology can do all those and so it reduces our costs simultaneously.

Meade Monger: Dirk and Joseph, I’ve got to jump in on this topic because the title of my first dissertation in my PhD studies, was non-emergency visits to the emergency room?

Meade Monger: And what I was able to gather was data over six years of every emergency room, visit in the state of Texas. And I was able to see that a significant portion of the patient visits because I could see every procedure that was done for every single patient or situations where the didn’t provide any procedures. So they basically just visited with a nurse or a doctor and we’re not treated at all. And so then I looked at maybe they were on to impatient or So what was the And the discharge reason was that they were sent home or put on self-care. So you got this as Dirk was talking about this. Huge proportion of people that go to the ER that are going for primary care needs. And that’s because number one emergency rooms in America are required to take everyone that walks in

Meade Monger: And number two, there are not primary care facilities available to people that need this kind of care and don’t have access to care. So they go to emergency rooms. And so the point of the dissertation, the concluding point was based on some analyzing cost of what it takes for an emergency room to create a patient versus a primary care facility, which there’s a substantial difference. It’s very expensive to go the emergency room. If we just had primary care facilities available to these people, instead of the emergency room, we would say

Meade Monger: Tens of billions maybe hundreds of billions of dollars a year in healthcare costs. what Dirk and MD help pathways are offering is something that’s even more affordable than primary care facilities. So this is a significant opportunity as I think everyone knows their healthcare costs. The United States are extraordinarily high. They’re double all the other developed countries across the world and this is a big area of opportunity to reduce those costs and with what MD halfway health pathways is doing is a great solution for that.

Josh Naaman: Yeah, clearly it’s Always. I don’t know frustrating to the right word but hindsights 2020 in that why wasn’t this created sooner than later? But the fact is we’re here and you’ve created it. we’re building it and so great, at least it’s being done. It makes me think about, just what barriers were In large systems like this. when you can do a dissertation and I’m not undermining it in any way, that didn’t take you a significant amount of time, but I would imagine there’s a lot of people who know, That that is an answer that. instead of an emergency room, let’s make some primary care facilities. Open, 24/7 to make it more efficient, Why wasn’t that

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Meade Monger: Good question.

Josh Naaman: Yeah, I guess it’s rhetorical at this point. Real quick before we dive deeper. I want to know with each of you, what inspired you to start working in your particular industry as a professional. So Meade getting into the data science and the technology and Dirk. Why did you become a doctor to begin with?

Meade Monger: I’m gonna go first Dirk.

Dirk Perritt: So I was an engineer before, I was a doctor, that was a biomedical engineer. So I really love breaking things down in their most simplest components and trying to come up with the downside to engineering at least when I started was there wasn’t a whole lot of social interaction, but I have more respect for my engineering friends or some of my smartest friends. I decided to move on to medicine. Want it fascinated me the human body and then two I really like the aspect of getting an interact with other people and other individuals. So kind of drove me on to go that next step to take it to medicine. Then ultimately I feel like I’m circling back

Dirk Perritt: To my engineering, having seen what I’ve seen in the ER and trying to come up with the solution. It’s kind of interesting. The way MD health pathways came I came from a number of years of me complaining to my wife, that the single mom that comes into the ER she’s got two young kids, it’s late at night, the ER is not an environment for two young kids, late at night. There’s things you just don’t want them to see. So having three daughters myself, I’m very cognizant of that. I try to get to those patients as quickly as possible. Always knowing I’ve got to get to the true emergency first and then kind of circling back to those families and often it doesn’t take me very long. It might take me five minutes to see two kids that have a minor complaint. Maybe it’s an infectious peering rash or strep throat or something. I write a five dollar prescription for and I walk out of the room and over here hospital registration. Ma’am, we see you have no insurance but we’re not for profit hospital, but normally would cost.

Dirk Perritt: 2800 for your two children, if you put 1800 dollars on your credit card today, we’ll call it even. And there’s just some level of guilt that every doctor that walks out of that room, they know that patients believing that that money is going to the doctor and they’re going. man, that doctors, make it a killing or that greedy doctor and really almost every doctor. I know feels for that single mom, she’s gonna make a decision, is she gonna pay this pay for a rent? And so, often the disc dissatisfaction and doctor when they go home they’re really difficult emergency cases and then the social cases like that. And you say that enough and you talk to your wife enough, my wife, and I actually met in high school. So, we’ve been married for over 25 years and then the comment all over the last 10 years is like, Okay, you can continue to complain about that, are you should do some about it and it can feel overwhelming for someone to say that to you. Like you’re telling me,

Dirk Perritt: Go change the way medicine is practiced. no way that’s impossible. This is a behemoth of a system. There’s no way one er doctor has any chance of changing that. and then,

Dirk Perritt: Right around 2020 during the pandemic. I became the health authority for a county and I helped navigate them through the pandemic. And I did a lot of health care work outside of the hospital system and got to interact directly with patients in the community. and what we did is we obviously vaccinated a lot of people that need a vaccinated, but moved on to monical and antibodies and we’re able to keep a tremendous people out of the hospital system. Because at the time, we learned, if you got covid and end up in the hospital, the chance of mortality skyrocketed. But there is this unique treatment at the time called a monoclonal, antibody. That essentially was giving people antibodies that you have if you’ve been exposed to covid before and it was keeping them out of the hospital and saving lives. And it was this moment that my goodness. There is an opportunity outside of the established healthcare system to provide care.

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Dirk Perritt: There’s this new pathway hence MD health pathways. We really named it after that because we were paving a new path into the healthcare system and it was learning that there’s this opportunity outside of the established system to create some efficiencies now myself and my partners had run a telehealth company for about nearly a decade.

Dirk Perritt: And our whole goal was, we partnered with the hospital system after you were discharged from the hospital paid for a free telehealth visit up to a week. For any patient that was discharged to keep you from bouncing back to the high cost center the ER and the a moment hit is like, we combine this care that we learned that we can do in the community with this experience we’ve had of delivering telehealth and put it at the front door, Let’s make it the front door into the healthcare system and help navigate people. And you can do this when you do this on a population scale, really cost effectively. And so long-winded story of really combining my engineering and medical background and how we came up with this solution.

Josh Naaman: Seems like a perfect mix. and I’m glad you spelled it out like that because it’s even that more meaningful now to be working with you. And to hear that story really, this interview is just an excuse to dive deeper with you guys. But how cool is it that people who will use this service in the future or are using it or interested in it whether they be a councilman or mayor decision maker or a mom can hear it directly from the founder and then who’s helping build the technology and then I guess another founder is just interviewing them.

Josh Naaman: It’s neat.

Dirk Perritt: Hahaha.

Josh Naaman: But go ahead. Meet floors, yours.

Meade Monger: And speaking of all having something in common being founders. I realize when Dirk mentioned his three daughters that all three of us are all fathers of daughters. So go girl power and just a quick side note there.

Meade Monger: So I have a real passion for addressing really big challenges and have a history of being in situations to do that and using technology to address them and quickly standing up technology, solutions to manageo challenges. So just a couple of examples, I was on the team that restructured General Motors, you may remember during the recession, it was very challenging times and a lot of the auto suppliers in the country were really on the verge of all going out of business. And we went through a rocket fire process to sell General Motors to the US government and hey, all the auto suppliers and connection with that. But there was a lot of things that had to be done and a lot of agreements.

Meade Monger: Had to be worked out with tens of thousands of auto suppliers and there was no system in place for that and we immediately created a system and a process and were able to do that. And that to me was incredibly satisfying. Another situation was, you may remember a major oil producer that had a massive oil spill in the Gulf Coast. They don’t have a system in place to deal with that either, And so as you probably saw an incredible amount of cleanup effort, a lot of claims by individuals that were affected by the oil spill So another situation where we had to stand up a technology solution to deal with all that. And then here comes MD Hill pathways. I am jumping jumped at the opportunity right when I first met Dirk. I think I called him every day after we talked for the first time and

Meade Monger: Helps him understand how we can build a great technology solution to do what he’s doing and not to take anything away from what Dirk and the team have already put in place because it’s working and working. but we want to create a really powerful solution that gives not only patients the ability to have instant access to primary care help. But also information about their medicine, we want to build in and information about specialists. We want to build in AI capabilities where we can support the medical team and quickly diagnosing and answering their questions and really take this to

Meade Monger: A level where ideally it becomes commonplace, that it’s something that a lot of people will use to rely on their primary care needs and live healthy healthy lives. So this is another situation where it hits right at home with my passion and, I’m loving the process as we’re going through it right now.

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Josh Naaman: Love it. Clearly you’re both experts and passionate, so those are great combinations and I’ve gathered that over the time working together, especially you Meade knowing you for longer, but I look forward to uncovering it more with you, Dr. Dirk is fun to say it just flows. I want to talk about AI here in a second, but I wanted to ask have either of you read the book, The Checklist Manifesto. Now. Yeah,…

Meade Monger: Now.

Josh Naaman: it applies to processes within entities in general. And when Dirk you were talking about the medical processes meet when you were just talking about, an oil spill in how there was no process for that, it’s pretty wild. I’ve uncovered that working with several businesses, some are

Josh Naaman: my recent one that signed on has been in business 67 years and they’re doing great. They’re number one in the nation for what they produce. But I cannot believe some of the things that they don’t have in place still, it’s pretty wild. But anyways, the checklist manifesto is a whole book of examples of why checklists are so important. I’m sure Dirky Dirk you’ve encountered in the simple checklist for particular scenarios. this is happening. It’s like a bulleted. One, two, three, four, five, the simplest possible list. Airline pilots have it and the first bullet, if something, that the engine’s out number one, why the plane number two, really simple stuff. And I fell in love with that book. I was required to read it at a company before starting Naaman Creative.

Josh Naaman: Even learned about Van Halen. He had a checklist for the venues that he played at and specific details and if they didn’t follow those details, he was nervous about going on stage because safety, protocols and essentially, one of the things was about Eminem’s. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard but that, no brown it. I want eminem’s in a bowl in my green room. But I don’t want any brown m&ms and that was part of the big checklist and there was one time where there were brown ms in that and he didn’t go on because he was nervous about their priorities of other things and attention to detail and apparently the stage fell through and he avoided that. But as a way to, kind of check. But anyways, I just curious about that great book. It’s kind of geeky, but I think you guys would dig it. But anyways, …

Dirk Perritt: Medicine is full of checklist.

Josh Naaman: go ahead.

Dirk Perritt: A good example is that I worked at clinical shift this morning and…

Josh Naaman: Yeah.

Dirk Perritt: we had a simulation of a mass casualty event, so imagine explosion of a bus and people coming in and do it up. I mean, we really get our paramedics bring these patients in. It’s a bunch of college students that essentially dress up have makeup on and they come in screaming and yelling and everything. but to cut through the chaos, what you really do is create a bunch of checklists and you go down through the checklist because you tend to forget really important things when emotions and anxieties are running high. But if you can fall back on that checklist and try to take as much emotion out of it, as you can, you’re likely to deliver the best care possible. And so medicine is full of checklists and keeping and people of

Dirk Perritt: Those and training them to have those either internally memorized. But there’s always a visual that anyone can see that to keep that checklist. So yes medicine is full of that. So, it sounds like a book. I probably Josh needed to pick up and read.

Josh Naaman: you probably inherently read it in a way because of your training, but I think you dig it because it has great examples and for me as a business owner

Josh Naaman: it’s helpful. And I always can improve. That’s a beauty of owning a business and working hard. there’s always room to improve but I like the simplicity of what that does. Because at the end of the day, I’m a designer like, my bread and butter is designed and a huge principle of design is to keep it simple. The less is actually more in a lot of ways. Look, how successful Apple is. I would you’re wearing apple headphones. I am. I’m on a apple laptop. I mean they’ve dominated the space trying to make things as simple as possible and it’s funny because you think that’s easy but it’s actually really difficult. try to design a logo. That’s never been designed for someone people go. Why is a logo design? Why isn’t it like a hundred bucks? To design a logo? It’s really hard. Thanks a long time and a lot of work but you had mentioned like that. there are a lot of outlined checklists.

00:45:00

Josh Naaman: And it got me to think of the connection of what you can do with You can feed an AI those checklists and say, are your parameters. Here’s your knowledge base is based on these checklists, This person has a rash on their eyebrow, their nose, and they’re healthy otherwise. So they probably have x and you could kind of make all these logical parameters based on those checklists and information. So obviously AI is huge. Now and you’ve mentioned it and speaking both of you, How is MD health pathways going to utilize AI for this tech and furthering to change the world?

Dirk Perritt: thank goodness to meet in his team who are experts in this that are helping us achieve some of these goals that we have at MD, Health pathways and I see AI As a tool to do two things right now, at least at our application in medicine. And it’s one, to drive quality and like you mentioned Josh.

Dirk Perritt: if you skip a step and forget to ask a question, you may miss the opportunity to sift through that needle in the haystack much like that patient that, ached all over riding their bicycle. If the triage nurse had probably asked and delved a little more about. Hey, do you have jaw pain or chest pain and pick that up, He probably would have been immediately walked over to have an EKG, identifying his heart attack. AI is great at making sure you don’t miss some of those things. And I think our intention is at least in our current system. Patients, come to us with a preconceived diagnosis. So often we’ll have somebody text into our service and maybe see der Female that says, Hey I think I have a urinary infection because it hurts when I pee and our tendency as humans is to go. Okay I agree. Probably have a urinary infection, let’s get that treated but if you don’t ask enough questions you might miss the fact that they’ve been having left.

Dirk Perritt: Abdominal pain and they might have something like a diverticulitis that’s actually causing them to have pain when the inate. And it’s not a simple urinary infection or maybe they have a fever and flank pain and they have a more significant type of infection called a pileonephritis or kidney infection. And so AI is really good at making sure we don’t jump to conclusions and we kind of run down that checklist. So’s one aspect is quality of care that AI is gonna provide and the other aspect is efficiency. And so what doctors went to medicine to do is to make medical decisions. we love solving puzzles, like every patient is and its own way, a puzzle. And it’s kind of fun to figure out. All right. How do I solve this puzzle? And how do I get to the answer? I want to get to

Dirk Perritt: And to do that, you have to ask a lot of questions and those questions in medicine are called the history of present illness or HPI for short and they’re variations of the same question maybe you present with that urinary pain urinary frequency, you ask a bunch of questions. where’s the location? How many days has been going on? Do you have fever?

Dirk Perritt: And those questions aren’t very fun to ask for a clinician. We ask them over and over again. Imagine on my average shift I’ll see 30 patients. imagine how many times I have to ask very variations of the history of present illness. If you told me I could walk in the room, all those questions have already been asked to their full stability and I could ask two to three more probing questions. I could come up with the diagnosis and solve that puzzle. So that’s what we’re trying to do with AI is leverage AI to do some of these repetitive tasks and asking and gathering the information. We don’t want AI to make the medical decisions. We wanted to prompt us not to miss things, but we really want it to take out some of these repetitive tasks and the HBI is one of them. And if you can do that, not only do you create efficiency. A lot of doctors, see more patients. You actually increase a doctor satisfaction. A doctor is happier when they’re doing what they enjoy doing. And so there’s less burnout when you do that. So Meade and his team are really on the

00:50:00

Dirk Perritt: Front of technology and in implementing AI for applications like this. So we’re pretty excited as we start to build this out in a stepwise fashion of what that’s gonna look like. And I’ll let Meade speak a little bit more to that.

Meade Monger: the way I like to think about it is that and just kind of going off of what Dirk was talking about on the quality side, quite frankly, a computer.

Meade Monger: Can diagnose a patient much faster and much better than a person. a computer can take a thousand page medical textbook and understand everything that what’s said in it and use that as a basis, to make a recommendation where a doctor may not have that thousand page medical textbook completely memorized or they may not be thinking about it at the time, Sort of what Dirk was talking about. And so I think it’s also really helpful on the efficiency side that Dirk was talking about is if we can get a process in place where a lot of these routine questions, can be answered right away and create more efficiency for doctors. That’s great. I think it needs to be sort of an evolution whenever I think about machine learning, as sort of the starting point, and then you get more to the

Meade Monger: Generative AI later. So the machine learning is basically where we put in a rules engine. And so if we take the list of the top, 50 patient situations sinus, infection chest, pains, what have you and come up with the list of questions that we want to ask for every one of those situations and then give direction based on the answers to those questions we can implement that rules engine in the system so that the AI works. Now if a patient shows up with a situation that’s not on the list and that goes into an exception list that then goes into the machine learning process and so we’re continuously building on that.

Meade Monger: That’s different than the generative of AI, where you’re kind of letting more the computer think, for itself without following this specifics of a rules engine that part, I think we need to learn more about, especially as we get into healthcare. I’m not sure yet, but my thoughts are still out on this but not Yet that we want computers to go there. The other thing that I’m not sure about is

Meade Monger: How much we want to give information? Directly to the patient as opposed to direct the medical team. I think it’s great that we have a rules engine, that tells the medical team. Here’s the question you should ask or We can pop these questions in there. Are you going to do is push Click, if you agree with it. But basically let it go through the medical team before it goes to the patient. Maybe the wise way to go and I think the starting point and then once we get comfortable with it, Ultimately we may go to where it goes directly to the patient and let them sort of self-diagnose some cells but that’s generally how I think about AI and healthcare.

Josh Naaman: It’s a rabbit hole. Once you start to fire up that engine because of some of the last things that you hit on is Okay, how far do we go down? I mean It’s kind of hard. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle at certain milestones. It’s out, nuclear technology, that’s it’s what we do with it. you could use it for a force for great or destruction, but hopefully we get better at it. And it’s kind of cool to be on a team. That’s on the forefront of that stuff. So you have pretty excited.

Meade Monger: yeah, of course, we don’t want to Treat the patient, the wrong way to where it harms them. And that’s what, I don’t think. We’re totally comfortable with. let the computer do all of it,

Josh Naaman: And that’s why you need a doctor Dirk there. Holding hands with the AI to check it or at least do as best as possible because at the end of the day we’re all human. Anyways I mean even without AI it’s just a normal doctor could misdiagnose because they didn’t ask if there was something wrong with that person’s jaw and therefore it’s not a heart attack, it’s something else And Quick. But it’s also I wanted to mention on the component about how powerful it is is that you can feed it a textbook that’s 900 pages a medical textbook on rashes, let’s just say, That.

00:55:00

Josh Naaman: Knowledge in the scientific community is going to be updated in five years or sooner. And a new edition of that textbook is going to come out with revisions and updates and enhancements and new knowledge. And for a rash.

Meade Monger: And new diseases,…

Meade Monger: new covid variants, Yeah.

Josh Naaman: Exit. Exactly.

Josh Naaman: And it might take a doctor How do you mean keep up with all that But instead you could feed an AI the most updated textbook and Then forget that textbook. Here’s the updated version. Boom. So there’s a lot of power in that too on keeping up with the science in the discoveries and what we know just the knowledge base of humanity.

Josh Naaman: Boy, that’s a rabbit hole but I want to keep going. And then we’re going to do a rapid fire, which I have fun with real quick. Before that you had mentioned burnout. Dirk We’re all going hard near, redlining it. For you as a doctor Meade, as a founder of a business and doing all these things with technology. How do you both? What are your ways of avoiding burnout yourselves?

Dirk Perritt: It’s interesting. You say, burnout There is a recent study done on specialties of medicine that have the highest burnout rate and emergency medicine is now again at the top of the list. So it doesn’t surprise me after the pandemic and everything. Our colleagues had to go through and in general, I think the average physician works about 14 shifts a month and to the average person, they go 14, shifts about. That didn’t seem like that, you got 16 days off.

Dirk Perritt: And what they don’t realize is, we’re cycling through nights and days. so almost every because physician will cycle through nights and days twice during a month. So I work for a facility, we have eight different shifts during a one month period, I’ll work probably each of those shifts nearly twice and cycle through a night today cycle two times and so that partially contributes to the burn. And I think the other thing that contributes to the pronouns, but we talked about earlier is most of us when an emergency medicine to treat emergencies to treat that the critically care patients and it is very difficult for us to treat some of these other patients, because it’s difficult to Follow up care. It’s difficult when we’re dealing with someone that can’t afford the care and navigating helping them to navigate a system that sometimes seems and navigate.

Dirk Perritt: And because that limit of 15 shifts a month or a pilot might have how many hours they can fly if you breach that it kind of contributes to burnout. What we have found is the doctors that staff our system can actually work more than that limit because they’re outside of the high stress confines of an emergency department, they’re working from their own home and treating patients through the telehealth system and there’s in a different type of satisfaction. You get out of that because you’re seeing patients, really appreciative of this low cost, simplistic immediate care, you’re offering them and getting that kind of feedback can be a tremendous boon.

Dirk Perritt: To your own mental health as a medical provider. And so, because of that, we’re able to capture a lot of doctors that are interested in working on a telehealth platform like this. Where never in the history of an, physician, could you practice outside of the confines of the hospital? Maybe you could go work for an urgent care that’s stressful, sometimes in itself. But now we’re offering some other opportunities to extend the lifespan of a practicing physician. Another one is a type of persona of a provider that we pick up and bring on our system is once the young mom that wants to have kids to be at home with their kids.

Dirk Perritt: You can only imagine training, eight to 12 years to achieve your medical degree and then wanting also to have children as well. and for a short period of time, maybe it’s five years, that you want to really be home with your children and supporting them and the emergency medicine lifestyle makes it very difficult. But if you

Dirk Perritt: That woman’s often then face Do I do? I give this career up all together because if you leave medicine for three years is really hard to enter the field, kind of, as your kids grow taking on something like a telehealth job in the interim, really allows those women to maintain part of the workforce and then migrate back to if they desire afterwards. So there’s just really a lot of opportunities. This type of medicine practice is offering that the medical competing community and helping him, keep away from burnout.

01:00:00

Josh Naaman: so, what I gather is that you avoid burnout by creating a system to avoid burnout,

Dirk Perritt: That. Yeah, if specifically for myself, I solving some of these problems I’ve seen in the ER, does create that satisfaction. And if I had to do either of these full-time, I think I would experience some level burnout, even just ing, all my focus on the business aspect itself but having a good balance between both inpatient care and some of the solutions that we’re offering does even though I’m working more does create that balance. that helps me, avoid that burnout.

Josh Naaman: Go. how about you meet?

Meade Monger: burn out of positions is actually been a research topic of mine. the research I’ve done shows that doctors spend over 15 hours a week doing administrative work and that administrative work is one of the biggest reasons for their burnout and that goes back to, how antiquated the industry is in the processes. So after every patient, doctors need to document everything about the diagnosis that the treatment, the prescriptions and everything, and then that documentation needs to be taken and assign codes to deal with trying to collect from all the different insurance companies. So it’s a really laborious process and actually Dirk. And I have been talking a little bit about this and we,

Meade Monger: We are exploring some of these new opportunities to record these visits and use digital transcriptions to create the documentation as well as coding the bills and that sort of thing. And of course what the MD health pathways platform, we’re going to have everything digitally, through text anyway. So I think that, if we’re able to address that challenge for doctors, it’s going to reduce burnout a lot either. they can spend more time at kids soccer games, or they can see more patients which would create access to care. But to me, this is a really big opportunity that should be solvable because there’s no reason why they should be spending almost half their time documenting their patient visits.

Josh Naaman: And what about Your hard worker. How do you avoid it?

Meade Monger: yeah. personally I have very much a routine. And I’ve trained myself to shut it off. at the end of the day or in my case at a certain time in the evening or night that, I’m not gonna be productive the next day if I don’t. And so, Yeah. I mean we all kind of have our ways of going about things and I’ve kind of developed my own sort of routine to be able to kind of do everything I want to do but also get a lot done, I guess.

Josh Naaman: That’s great routine. That’s something I learned about with my daughter. She just turned two, and once we got her routine because we had a baby coach from Turkey that my wife was friends with give us a map of a day and that was a game changer, and I kind of adopted So I’m right there with you and that I’ve been trying to change my ways I get up real early. Now, instead of staying up super late and definitely, and then I’m burnt the next day, but that routine helps me, stay on track and stay fresh. So that’s good to hear that. I’m on the right track because clearly you’re doing it right?

Meade Monger: I’d struggle really if I was in Dirk’s shoes because if I had to do the night shifts and have an erratic schedule, I think you have Dirk it would be hard for me to have that routine. and I’m impressed with how you’re able to do, everything you do and with a different schedules that you have to deal with.

Josh Naaman: Yeah. Same I’d be remissed before rapid fire. Dirk, can you tell us, maybe the wildest story that’s happened to you in the? ER, Maybe it’s like a heroic story and so a wonderful success but, just something maybe that’s top of mind where because I know it’s not the first time, someone’s asked you, I can’t go through an interview like this and the listeners are like,…

01:05:00

Dirk Perritt: Yeah.

Josh Naaman: Why didn’t you ask that question? Because …

Meade Monger: Yeah.

Josh Naaman: I had a police officer on and I had to ask him that question, otherwise people would be pissed.

Dirk Perritt: it’s so interesting that I could easily answer this question when I first started emergency medicine because everything, look left an impression. I had a million good stories in a month and then the more you work, emergency medicine, the more things become routine in the more you have to just get those crazy cases out of your head. And so what those shocking stories of, someone driving on a motorcycle into a poll and the poll, literally you can see through it and it goes through their abdomen. those leave definitely the spot in your memory but it’s more the social interactions now and the things that you find kind of interesting and funny that often or are more memorable,

Dirk Perritt: I had a doctor friend of mine that just as halloween’s, coming up this next month that it kind of had, as a funny story, it’s nothing shocking. But it was a young, Hispanic mom that had a two year old that came in. This happens, every Halloween moms bringing candy that they think had been poisoned or they’re afraid, their kids are gonna eat that are poisoned. and this one year, this mother brought in an orange, but it wasn’t just any orange. It was a blood orange. And as you know, if you ever eaten the blood orange they kind of looks bloody, like maybe there’s some blood in that orange. and that Mom brought in this blood orange, and I had thought her child, was being poisoned. And so my good friend went in the room and he speaks Spanish and was explaining to the mom. Hey, this is a blood orange, nothing to worry about. She just didn’t believe it. She’s like, Hey, we need to do a test on this. we need to send this to the lab, it needs to be tested. You see this there’s blood in this orange and

Dirk Perritt: And my kid. I don’t know. Maybe he’s died of a bloodborne infection. so he asked for the orange? Yeah, unpeels. It a little more takes a little slice out, holds it up. He’s like this. You want this tested? She’s like, yes, he puts it in his mouth. Choose it a little bit because that’s delicious And she goes. Okay, I’m ready for my discharge paperwork. So it’s things like that. That leave more of an impression what I also will say is I don’t know the age of your audience, but I will tell you all my friends have non-skid flooring in their bathrooms. After the number of foreign bodies found in the wrong end of your body and the common excuses that I slipped in the shower. So, every friend of mine has non-skid shower surfaces everywhere in their bathroom, after hearing the number of times. I’ll tell a story like that, so,

Josh Naaman: Note That’s wild. thanks for indulging us. I couldn’t move forward with this interview with the least ask it, but that blood orange. That’s a great story. I was wondering right when you started to say, What are you gonna do to test it? I was like, he’s gonna just eat it in front of them as the best way.

Dirk Perritt: yeah.

Meade Monger: Yeah.

Josh Naaman: Okay, fine. There you go. cool. You guys have made it to a very special segment called The Rapid Fire.

Josh Naaman: Sound effects and everything. Obviously, if you need to expand on something, go for it, but especially with two people. I’m gonna challenge you, try to keep it quick and what for the sake of time, it’ll go to Meade first and then Dirk you can answer right after you guys ready.

Meade Monger: I’m not sure what rapper fire is but I’ll give it a shot.

Dirk Perritt: I love the Meade has to go first.

Josh Naaman: Yeah, It’s all good fun. I have four questions. Usually have a little more but for time sake, these will do. So number one, what is your biggest source of inspiration?

Meade Monger: Biggest source of my family.

Josh Naaman: Good answer. How about you, Dirk?

Dirk Perritt: Absolutely. I mean it’s kind of seem like a cop-out but it is true. I mean absolutely. My wife is someone I go to we’ve known each other. This seems like almost all my life but since I was 17 years old, so someone is my sounding board and inspiration as well.

Josh Naaman: From 17 on that is basically your life. You’re just starting to wake up at that point. So that’s super special that you guys have all that experience together. How cool? I would agree.

Dirk Perritt: Yeah.

Josh Naaman: My family is my biggest source of inspiration. I just cheated in rapid fire.

Meade Monger: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Naaman: It’s not about me.

Dirk Perritt: Hahaha.

Josh Naaman: It’s about you moving forward. Me. What is your favorite book?

01:10:00

Meade Monger: I read this book a long time ago and if you probably never even heard of it and everybody listening probably in her the heard of it, but I still remember the name, it was called Core Performance. And it really changed my life around from managing my own health. It was written by a guy named Mark Vesterjen, and the way it was explained that there’s all these different things that you need to do to take care of your health, including you eat, the way you sleep, the different kinds of exercise. And then the reason is called corporate performance is because of the core party or body and how important it is to stretch the core part of your body. And that’s books really stuck with me. I’ve kind of followed the guiding principles from it ever since and I read it many years ago.

Josh Naaman: Sounds like a good one. Have you heard of that Dr? Dirk

Dirk Perritt: No, I haven’t, but it sounds like I got to pick up on my reading after this podcast today. There’s a couple good books. I need to pick up

Josh Naaman: What it’s all about, how about you?

Dirk Perritt: I’m a big Malcolm Gladwell fan. So Tipping Point is probably one that comes to mind that applies to both medicine and business. So yeah, I’m a big fan of his

Josh Naaman: Did he write blink? Yeah. Yeah,…

Dirk Perritt: Yes. Yep. Absolutely.

Josh Naaman: but blink, I would imagine also in your realm. I read it when I was, I think in high school and it really resonated with me because of your gut reactions to things and making split. Decisions. And being an emergency room like someone’s bleeding out. What do we do? Yeah, I can’t imagine

Dirk Perritt: Totally applies. blink is a great read and it really does create a good overview of the way an doctor has to categorize and think fast.

Josh Naaman: Don’t you guys are doing great. We’re halfway through this one might be the hardest one for you Meade.

Meade Monger: 

Josh Naaman: It’s usually the hardest ones for me. Do you have a favorite musical artist or album?

Meade Monger: Yeah yeah let me think about that surprisingly I really like the more modern stuff and…

Josh Naaman: I know it’s not fair.

Meade Monger: so I’ve been listening more to kind of indie rock kind of stuff And I like it a little bit more on the hard side because it gives me energy, to work out and stuff like that, but it’s hard to pick One particular.

Meade Monger: if I had to pick a classic one, I would say the Led Zeppelin Is who I would say would be someone I’ve always kind of gone back to you time and time again over the years.

Josh Naaman: Yeah, that’s a safe one. It’s also hard because I imagine what you’re struggling with is, what particular flavor am I in the mood for today? And that’s what you put on. Yeah, That’s a beauty of music but Led Zeppelin you can always let out,

Meade Monger: Yeah.

Dirk Perritt: Come on meet every time. I’ve been around you. You’re playing Taylor Swift. He’s a big Swifty.

Meade Monger: Yeah, those are my daughters.

Dirk Perritt: Josh, don’t let him.

Josh Naaman: Of course.

Dirk Perritt: He just told you he’s got daughters. So don’t let him fool you. He’s been to a few Taylor Swift concerts

Meade Monger: Right.

Meade Monger: Yeah, I’ve paid for a few Taylor Swift concerts…

Josh Naaman: hey, I mean, there’s a reason why she’s big You paid dearly,…

Dirk Perritt: Hahaha.

Meade Monger: but I haven’t been here. Right.

Josh Naaman: then, I will back meet up that all the time that I’ve known him because we chat about music. That’s something that we get along great together. And he definitely is into the harder rock realm. that’s a fact. Like I told him, I went to see Lip Biscuit the other month and he was like, You got to tell me how That’s right on.

Meade Monger: Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Naaman: How about you Dr? Dirk

Dirk Perritt: I’ve been listening to a lot of the bleachers recently and then I’m always been a big fan of Coldplay, so

Josh Naaman: You can’t go wrong with Coldplay. They’re great. They’re older stuff, Like a Viva La.

Meade Monger: They’re good.

Josh Naaman: Vida was a wonderful album like Front to Back,…

Dirk Perritt: yeah.

Josh Naaman: just diverse and All right. Last question. How do you define success?

Meade Monger: Happiness.

Josh Naaman: Love it. So maybe you wouldn’t be so surprised, but that is probably the most common answer on this show. 100%.

Meade Monger: yeah. Yeah. I mean if everybody’s happy then Everything must be going right, everything must be a success so that pretty much sums it up in one word in my mind.

01:15:00

Josh Naaman: Love it.

Dirk Perritt: Yeah, I had a little bit of playoff of what Meade said, I often gauge my success off the happiness of my family. So if my wife and kids are doing well, then nothing’s better than that. As a parent, the husband and that really does bring you joy to see that. So I’m a big runner. I love to run and

Dirk Perritt: People say, I love running. But as you’re actively running and enduring, it’s not the most enjoyable thing. I mean, there’s half the time, I’m thinking about quitting when I’m running, but when you get done, there’s that satisfaction, you get a sense of accomplishment as well. So I’m willing to endure and then getting that satisfaction after seeing my family, their health and happiness is a great lot of satisfaction for myself.

Meade Monger: Dirkiva concept that I use with my wife and…

Josh Naaman: I love that.

Meade Monger: daughters that I call that I promote a lot called the Happy Family. So I always promote we need to be a happy family. Let’s have a happy family and so when the times you get tough, I remind them all. Okay, we’re happy family. Let’s be the happy family. So, yeah, that’s very important, for the families happy and doing great is when the times are perfect,

Dirk Perritt: Yep.

Josh Naaman: I love that. that’s a great reminder, because yeah, not everything smooth sailing. But if you have those reminders, the last guest I had on was my former master’s thesis advisor and my professor Thomas Lewis, who’s just a great man. He does documentary film production, he’s just a pro. And his answer was happiness at a sustained level. And I really like that too. So I resonated with that you both have one rapid fire. So congratulations, this is fantastic.

Meade Monger: We get a prize.

Josh Naaman: You get a prize, it’ll be in the mail in two years, all right? So just to wind down. I like to ask people a bit about their future goals, so Where does MD health pathways look like, in five to ten years and me. What about Omniscient health? Where does that look like?

Meade Monger: Go ahead, Dirk.

Dirk Perritt: Our goal right now with D, Health pathways is really just growing one community at a time. So we really contract with municipalities and right now, our focused on the rule Texas communities that we outreach. So the more of those we can hit and effect and seeing the success in the health that we bring to those, that we touch, I think is really our goal over that short term. And then honestly really are one of our most valuable resources is our own personnel or our medical staff and really trying to create an environment that they just get a lot of satisfaction out of because being a doctor myself, there’s just not a lot of satisfaction and in some areas of medicine right now, and so if I can create a work environment that not only gives our patience great satisfaction but creates an environment where the

Dirk Perritt: Fighters doctors look, forward to getting up each day and serving that gives me a lot of satisfaction. So that’s really a primary goal is keeping our doctors happy which ultimately will keep our patients happy.

Josh Naaman: I mean it seems like the momentum that you’re after, as long as you don’t stop, both of those pieces are going to continue more towns in cities in areas are going to adopt the wonderful technology as it grows and that team will grow. So I’m very excited to see it happen to be a part of that. How about you meet

Meade Monger: What omniscient health work, we’ve developed solutions, to help healthcare providers, earn more money, and do less administrative work by using technology to do both those things. And it’s starting to catch on and we’re getting a lot of referrals. we’ve recently started the business after having many of us left, a former consulting firm and been researching the healthcare industry for quite some time. And I think we do have proven solutions that accomplish those goals and you want to do more that, I really respect the health care providers in the United States and I think that they should be rewarded for what they do. And I think that they should not have to do as much of the administrative stuff that they’ve been doing and that’s burning them out. And so, yeah, that’s our passion, that’s what we’re doing. And

01:20:00

Meade Monger: Can’t wait to do a lot more of it.

Josh Naaman: Yeah, it’s definitely clear that you’re passionate about that and that you truly care. And so what a fitting relationship. It is with Dr. Dirk and MD health pathways. It’s super cool to have a front row, seat and inside, seat to that being part of the build. Just a couple other quick things. So one main last thing and I’ll let you plug yourself on How do people connect with you real quick though, before that. For both of Anybody who’s listening old young regardless of the profession that they’re in. What’s the biggest piece of advice? You could give someone.

Dirk Perritt: My mind would be don’t wait until life gets easy to Enjoy the struggle. and I think if you wait until life gets easy to have satisfaction, you’re going to be waiting a long time.

Josh Naaman: That’s a great one. I love that. How about you meet?

Meade Monger: My father used to tell me that it doesn’t matter what I do, but do something that I’m a pastor that I’m passionate about and do my best. And I think that, that’s, very wise direction, and that’s the same, advice. I would give to others.

Josh Naaman: Both solid advice. Really sound. I would agree with your father their Meade and I agree with both I really appreciate. Both of your time really quick to end. How do people connect with you? Ultimately how do they get involved or support MD health pathways and also omniscient health.

Dirk Perritt: it’s funny you ask that Josh you’re my marketing guy and head up our website so I think If you told the audience how they should probably best access, I said MD health pathways

Josh Naaman: I’ll find, luckily it’s a great easy domain, MD health pathways.com and there you’ll be able to access everything including the Taptele health system and register. And we’re making the website 2.0, which is going to be even more effective than it already is. Which is really exciting, because, I know I’ve mentioned it but when I’m in our meetings or doing the work and with my team and your team in collaboration, it’s truly is meaningful because I This is actually going to help people and not to say that all the work that I do. hopefully this podcast helps someone who’s maybe a basketball player, whatever it may be, there’s all sorts of help out there, but this is a little more tangible so I appreciate it but yeah, MD health pathways.com, it Do it.

Dirk Perritt: Yeah.

Josh Naaman: And omniscient health.

Meade Monger: Yeah. All I’m excited to announce that the company that I have been operating under and doing research under his merging with another company of people that I’ve worked with in the past and have been working with a lot lately as you two have been as well and we’ve formed a new company called Omniscient, stands for It means everything about everything. And so the actual domain is omniscient platforms and so we develop digital platforms to help know everything about everything and my email address is m. Monger mmo ng er at omniscient platforms.com and love for people reach out and talk about healthcare stuff.

Dirk Perritt: Joshua would have been bad for him to give out my contact info, but give Meade’s cell phone number.

Josh Naaman: We believe it out.

Meade Monger: Don’t expect me to help any of your patients. That wouldn’t what to do. You’re right.

Josh Naaman: That’s a dangerous game you’re playing there because it goes both ways.

Dirk Perritt: Yeah.

Josh Naaman: I’ll make sure though to have the links, your email. what we’ve discussed here in the show notes, so people can copy and paste it into where their browser or their email and easily get a hold of you guys, so we’ll make it easy. And yeah, I just wanted to wrap up by, telling you both how meaningful the work that we’re doing together is it’s wild. When I think about, how did I end up working, How did we end up working together and sometimes it’s not a healthy thing to ask. Although it’s interesting, but it’s and here, we are, doing really Work utilizing technology in such a powerful way, and I just want to express to you, both how awesome it is to be working with you. And I look forward to what’s ahead. And I also will make sure not to let you down and so make sure that this is gonna be an awesome thing on going. But I wanted to just thank you both for coming on taking the time. You both are so busy.

01:25:00

Josh Naaman: And here, we are an hour and a half later, but I promised I’d end an hour and a half.

Dirk Perritt: Great. Josh honestly. Thanks for having us both on and really look forward to the continued relationship. Thank you.

Josh Naaman: Me too.

Meade Monger: Yeah. I enjoyed it. Thanks for setting it up.

Josh Naaman: Thanks guys.