As Chief Operating Officer for Radix Health, Emily Tyson drives the company’s efforts to scale its delivery model while maintaining a flexible operating structure and “clients first” culture. Emily boasts an outstanding track record of proven results across fast-growing, innovative healthcare technology and service companies.
Prior to joining Radix Health, Emily was responsible for the vision and direction of naviHealth’s product offerings. Amid ongoing acquisition integration efforts, she operationalized the Product Strategy, Product Management, and User Experience functions for the company’s $220 million health plan and health system business lines.
She possesses extensive experience creating, implementing, and scaling new initiatives at naviHealth, as well as Curaspan and athenahealth. Emily received her MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.S. in Business Administration, summa cum laude, from Washington and Lee University.
Follow Radix Health on LinkedIn.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- How the market has changed. Are we seeing a change in the adoption of or demand for digital health solutions?
- How Radix Health’s customers been affected by the crisis. What new challenges are they helping their customers solve?
- The new products and services that Radix Health has launched to address these challenges.
- How they have navigated work from home.
- How Radix Health is supporting their team’s mental health and well-being.
Show Transcript
Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia, it’s time for Atlanta Business Radio. Brought to you by OnPay. Built in Atlanta, OnPay is the top-rated payroll and HR software anywhere. Get one month free at onpay.com. Now, here’s your host.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:31] Lee Kantor here. Another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But we couldn’t be doing this work without the support of our sponsor, OnPay. So, please support them, so we can continue to share these stories. Today on the Atlanta Business Radio, we have Emily Tyson, and she is with Radix Health. Welcome, Emily.
Emily Tyson: [00:00:50] Thank you, Lee. Excited to be here today.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:52] Well, before we get too far into things, tell us about Radix Health. How are you serving folks?
Emily Tyson: [00:00:58] Sure. So, Radix Health is a patient access software company. So, we work with large medical groups and health systems around the country to make it easier for patients to see their doctors and for the practices to, actually, manage the operations on their side to make that possible.
Lee Kantor: [00:01:13] So, now, if you weren’t around, how would they be doing that kind of thing?
Emily Tyson: [00:01:19] A lot of it happen, you manage it with the calendar. And so, you’ve got someone or many people with Post-it notes and paper with trying to remember what are all the rules around patients, and which doctors will see which types of conditions or complaints when a patient calls them. And so, what we do is we take all of that that’s living in people’s heads and on paper and, actually, automate it to try to figure out how to better match what is the supply of available appointments with the demand from patients that are coming in the door and find it really works better. Patients can see doctors much more quickly in most cases, and doctors are able to better see the right patients. So, you’re really matching and finding the appropriate appointment for that patient.
Lee Kantor: [00:02:03] Now, because of the pandemic, have things changed? I know in my own personal life, I’m not too thrilled about going to my primary care doctor because I don’t want to be around sick people. So, has this impacted your business? Are more people leaning on your kind of service because that’s just a more efficient way to manage kind of the inflow of patients?
Emily Tyson: [00:02:25] It’s a great question. It’s really a mix. So, there’s two parts to it. I would say on the one hand, our clients have certainly been impacted and affected by the crisis. If you think about it, elective procedures, for example, could not be seen. And so, patients cannot go. And so, patient volume, appointment volumes were down significantly. It would impact their operations and financial positions. And then, you’ve got patients waiting for care and couldn’t see it. So, we’ve been working with them to manage through that and clients having to do that.
Emily Tyson: [00:02:59] A lot of what they have done where we’ve worked with them is actually, how do they increase their telehealth capacities? And then, as the market are slowly starting to resume, where they are able to see elective procedures and facilitating reopening plans and having to do that. But there’s been a pretty serious impact. Exactly as you said, patients can’t go to the primary care doctor. And so, in general, the practices have been very limited in what they’re able to do. They’ve responded quite quickly, and we’ve been working with them in how to use the digital health solutions to both manage patients more effectively remotely, thinking about tools like telehealth and virtual visits, and how you turn that on quickly and make it work across a number of locations, providers with different types of appointments, while, also, now, looking to the future and kind of how do they operate in this new normal and how our tools can support them.
Lee Kantor: [00:03:53] Now, what about Radix Health dealing with the remote work, is that something you had been doing in the past?
Emily Tyson: [00:04:01] We had not done much remote work in the past, though, as a technology company, I’d say we were fairly well suited for it. So, of course, it was a transition, and you end up with Zoom meetings and connectivity challenges. But overall, for us, it was a fairly seamless transition, and we’ve taken extra steps in that process to think about for our team members who have been as busy as ever, how do we better support them. And it’s everything from equipment from the office. We had them go and take their desk chairs home to make that transition a little bit easier, I would say, and really making sure we keep our clients at the forefront, knowing the impact that this has had on our clients and, thus, on their patients as well.
Lee Kantor: [00:04:49] Now, how did the whole idea come about for Radix Health? Like, what was the genesis, your origin story?
Emily Tyson: [00:04:58] Absolutely. So, two of our co-founders, Dr. Mohan, who is our co-founder and CEO, is actually a physician by training. And the idea started, he was trying to get a patient in to see a specialist, and the told story is patient’s got to wait, appointment will be three weeks out, for example. Really hard. He’s frustrated. Patient can’t wait that long. It just so happens, the physician with whom he wanted the patient to have an appointment, he saw in the doctors lounge later that day, and said, “Things are going well. You’re really busy.” And actually, she said, “I’m really not that busy. I don’t know what’s going on with my schedule. They’re doing something. Have the patient first thing in the morning.”
Emily Tyson: [00:05:43] And it turns out that is actually a very common problem that happens. And that’s where this whole, “Who do you know? And do you know someone?” that’s how you get your doctor appointment doesn’t really work for patients and it doesn’t really work for doctors either. And so, he then partnered with Anup Lakare, who is am industrial engineers, supply chain background to think about this and apply some of the principles around maximizing supply and demand and optimizing it from that perspective to bridge that gap.
Lee Kantor: [00:06:14] And then, how did you know that this was going to work for others? Did you have the ability to kind of beta test in other practices and then get some feedback? Like how did the learning go at first?
Emily Tyson: [00:06:26] Yes. So, Radix Health actually initially partnered with a large gastroenterology practice here in Atlanta, and And really sat side by side with the scheduling team to manage. Most of this, what we say was the front door of access for patients to the practice, understanding how they operated, what the workflows were, what the day-to-day challenges were, and how we may apply those learnings to technology. What could be automated and what could not with intelligence that needed to live in the solution.
Emily Tyson: [00:06:56] And so, we are lucky enough to be really working hand-in-hand with that organization at the start. And really, for the first two years with the company, we’re building out and figuring out what exactly is the solution, how do we solve it. And then, working with other local practices and going from there. Everyone, there’s more learnings, but it turns out they have a lot of shared challenges across them. So, we really benefited from close partnerships with our customers who are willing to open the kimono, and let us see how they work and what they struggle with, so we could figure out how to solve it for them.
Lee Kantor: [00:07:29] So, now, what stage is Radix Health at now in the growth of the business?
Emily Tyson: [00:07:34] We have grown. Over the past just five plus years, we’ve grown. We’re in over 30 states now with about 5000 providers that we’re serving across the organization, and about 70 employees. So, we’ve grown quite quickly. And I would say we are growing incredibly quickly certainly before COVID-19 pandemic impacted things earlier this year.
Lee Kantor: [00:08:00] And what’s the sweet spot for a good client for you?
Emily Tyson: [00:08:04] There is a pretty big range. Typically, it’s going to be a larger medical group. Multiple physicians, multiple nurses physician assistants, multiple locations and can be from that side. Call it if you have 10 doctors in a practice to thousands of doctors, if you’re working for a large health system across specialties and everything out. There is a wide range. Where it is less of a sweet spot tends to be if it’s an independent, a single one or two, a very small practice, and the complexity of managing across locations, and times of day, and which doctor we’ll see which patient doesn’t exist. And so, we’re able to add significantly more value in the larger practices who are really trying to coordinate and optimize not just for one individual provider and one set of patients but across many of those and how you do that as one combined network.
Lee Kantor: [00:09:04] Now, is it kind of agnostic when it comes to the specialty? Like would this work for an orthopedist, as well as it would work for just general practitioner, or even that dentist, or plastic surgeon?
Emily Tyson: [00:09:17] Yeah, absolutely. It is agnostic. The way we think about implementing the tool and some of the things we do to configure it will vary a little bit by specialty. Some of the unique aspects of it can differ. And so, you think about, for example, orthopedist practice is one thing that’s really important is with new patients when they first come in the door, how do you decide which physician that new patient should see if they don’t have a specific referral or request. That’s a really critical part of their operations. If you think about women’s health, for example, how do you make it easier to schedule sequential appointments? And so, there are some differences in how the solutions may be applied and used, but it’s really built to be something that can serve all the different aspects of the market.
Lee Kantor: [00:10:03] Can you share a story maybe where you came into a practice that didn’t have anything like this and were able to really make an impact? I mean, you don’t have to name their names but maybe just tell the story about it.
Emily Tyson: [00:10:14] Sure. It’s funny. For some parts of our solution, we have a platform, and there’s several different products on it. And you would think that in many cases we’re replacing an existing solution. But in most cases, we’re really not. It’s the new area and we’re replacing paper. And so, I can think of a local client where we went in, and sorted things, and improved the first pain point with scheduling accuracy, for example. So, they had just tried to consolidate; whereas, opposed to you have a different person who handles scheduling, one person who manages the schedule for Dr. Smith, another person looks at schedule for Dr. Thomas, and so on. You have a group of people who can schedule across all of them. As you can imagine, that’s really challenging because then you have to understand the rules related to it for every single physician that’s there and trying to centralize that is quite hard.
Emily Tyson: [00:11:10] So, they were really struggling with accuracy. Patients are showing up for appointments. Providers are saying, “I don’t see this type of condition.” How do you get it right? And so, we’re able to improve. Within the first three months, improve scheduling accuracy. It’s how we think about it as, did the patient get to the right provider, the right appointment to over 99%. The same time, utilization, which is how we think of, how busy are the providers? Are they sitting there with gaps in the schedule? Are patients actually getting in the door? Do they have full schedules? Improve several percentage points, which is something that is very meaningful to be able to deliver that increase in activity without needing additional resourcing for the practice and patients can get in that much faster.
Emily Tyson: [00:11:56] And then, also, improving their online presence and getting newer patients and more patients able to find something online without having to call around. You can imagine how hard it is to book an appointment during the day if you have to actually speak to someone on the phone. And so, there’s a lot of different angles where we help, but it’s really a combination of having the practice be more efficient and really making sure patients are getting to the right provider. And for patients, just giving it more of a modern consumer experience and being able to book an appointment online at your convenience, which we can do for a lot of other things in life, but for healthcare appointments, it’s still quite challenging in many cases.
Lee Kantor: [00:12:35] Now, I assume it plays nicely with all the other software that a practice would need and use regularly. Is that accurate?
Emily Tyson: [00:12:45] It does. We invested a lot from the very beginning, and we continue to invest a lot in terms of our R&D resources, and how we play with the other solutions that practices are using. The most important, of course, is the electronic health record or the practice management system that are containing all the clinical records and all of the billing records. So, a significant portion of what we do is devoted to ensuring that data’s flowing really seamlessly between those systems to make it easy for the practice and to make sure that the information for the patient is there and it’s consistent.
Lee Kantor: [00:13:20] And then, I’m sure it’s also flexible in times like this. Like I know I went to the dentist recently, and they had a new onboarding. I had to fill out some special forms because of the pandemic that required me to do certain things, a certain way. I had to text them in the parking lot. You’re able to kind of integrate all those pretty easily from a patient standpoint?
Emily Tyson: [00:13:44] Absolutely. It’s been really interesting to see if we think about the changes we’ve made to better help our clients and our patients navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic. And for the most part, because our tools were built around, how do you make it easier for patients see their doctor, how do physician practices actually manage operational implications of seeing patients, we were really uniquely suited to do this.
Emily Tyson: [00:14:10] And some of the pieces we’ve been most focused on enhancing are exactly what you said. How do you make sure you’re creating a completely contactless check-in? It’s having forms filled online ahead of time, having payment online ahead of time, alerting the patient to notify the practice when they arrive, and so, they’re not sitting in the waiting room with the crowd and waiting. So, how do you do things like that? There’s been a lot of activity around supporting telehealth and driving activity there to enable virtual appointments where appropriate and a lot of the campaigning.
Emily Tyson: [00:14:47] One thing that has been consistent over the past several months is everyday sort of a new day. And what that means for our practices and their patients changes with that. If not once a month, it’s been once every two weeks, once every week for some practices. They’ve had operational changes every day. Location might close because there was a patient that had been diagnosed or someone had been exposed. And so, enabling very rapid communication out to patients appropriately has been a significant focus area for us as well to really make sure that the patients can stay informed as the practices are also navigating what the world looks like given how quickly it’s all changed.
Lee Kantor: [00:15:28] Now, you mentioned that there’s like a suite of kind of software they can buy. Is this something that there’s a point of entry that a new customer goes through? Usually, they try it with kind of maybe one aspect of the software, and then it just kind of expands as they feel more confident.
Emily Tyson: [00:15:48] It’s really changed. And I’ll tell you, there are four products typically that we think about within the platform. There is one that is used as a front desk, someone working the call center managing phone calls to schedule a patient. It’s the workflow that they work through to understand the rules and book the appointment. You can think about that as air traffic controller for the practice that they’re really navigating.
Emily Tyson: [00:16:13] There’s been a version of that, that’s the patient facing online self-service application where patient doesn’t have to call, they can actually book an appointment. And it’s critical as they book an appointment because, often, for practices there, when you want a doctor’s appointment, what you’re doing online is actually requesting appointments, and you still have to have that phone call back, and someone has to talk to you before they can confirm it. But since we built the same engine behind it and the same rules and preferences behind the scenes, patients are able to actually complete the booking process online.
Emily Tyson: [00:16:13] With that, the third one is a communication layer that I mentioned of enabling campaigns, whether it’s as simple as a reminder or something more complex, like care planning and preparation of what needs to be done prior to an appointment. Right now, we’ve seen a lot of communication related to what to expect when you arrive since it’s a very different experience than prior to COVID-19. And then, there’s also this check-in component of what is that digital check-in, how do you limit as much contact and time needed in that waiting room as possible?
Emily Tyson: [00:17:16] Historically, if I went back in time two years, the first product that I mentioned, that kind of deep operational scheduling tool really was a starting point for many of our clients. What we have seen recently is a rapid shift where the online self-scheduling, the patient communications and check-in actually are the rapid starting point. They needed a way. How did they interact with, stay in touch with, and enable patients to operate more independently throughout this process? And so, there’s been a rapid shift there. But all of the products work together or standalone. And so, it really depends on where a client or prospect would be in their journey and what they really need to improve their operations.
Lee Kantor: [00:17:59] And if somebody wanted to learn more and have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on your team about Radix Health, is there a website?
Emily Tyson: [00:18:07] Absolutely. So, it is easy enough. It’s radixhealth.com. And Radix is R-A-D-I-X. So, just radixhealth.com, and you can certainly find Radix Health online.
Lee Kantor: [00:18:18] Well, Emily, thank you so much for sharing your story today.
Emily Tyson: [00:18:22] Thank you, I appreciate the opportunity to chat. And I hope you have a great day, Lee.
Lee Kantor: [00:18:26] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We will see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio. And remember, we could not be doing this work without the support of our sponsor, OnPay. So, please support them so we can continue to share these important stories.
About Our Sponsor
OnPay’s
payroll services and HR software give you more time to focus on what’s most important. Rated “Excellent” by PC Magazine, we make it easy to pay employees fast, we automate all payroll taxes, and we even keep all your HR and benefits organized and compliant.
Our award-winning customer service includes an accuracy guarantee, deep integrations with popular accounting software, and we’ll even enter all your employee information for you — whether you have five employees or 500. Take a closer look to see all the ways we can save you time and money in the back office.
