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      Lets Address the Big Panda in the Room…Panda Health That Is!

      Healthcare Rethink - Episode 96

      On “Healthcare Rethink,” a FinThrive podcast, host Brian Urban addresses the big panda in the room when he engages with Ryan Bengtson, the President & COO at Panda Health. They explore Panda Health’s mission to mitigate the overwhelming challenge healthcare systems face when evaluating and integrating digital health solutions.

       



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      Brian Urban:

      Yes, this is the Healthcare Rethink Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Urban, and today we're going to address the big panda in the room, Panda Health, that is. I had to play with that tagline a little bit, Ryan. So we're so excited to have from Panda Health the President and Chief Operating Officer, Ryan Bengtson. Ryan, thanks for joining our show here.

       

      Ryan Bengtson:

      Absolutely, Brian. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

       

      Brian Urban:

      This is going to be a lot of fun. We've rescheduled our conversation a few times, but through that we've gotten to know each other a little bit, so that's what makes it even more fun to dive deeper into your work and then you personally. And let's start there. We love to start every episode, Ryan, with getting to know the individual first, the leader first, how you got into healthcare, why Panda Health and everything under the sun there. So who is Ryan Bengtson before the president and executive title here? How did you find yourself getting into healthcare? Where did your story begin and bring us up to current speed?

       

      Ryan Bengtson:

      So started off right out of school, working for a consulting firm, Anderson Consulting at the time, now Accenture. Started off doing general consulting. Very first project was actually implementing a supply chain management solution in the OR at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital down in Houston. And from there, I just ended up going into a lot of different healthcare and hospital-oriented areas within Anderson. So worked at Cardinal Health, worked at numerous healthcare systems and grew up in that space. Really enjoyed that. I had a couple of projects that were in other industries, but always found myself being drawn back to healthcare and the opportunity to do well and help those in need. Had an opportunity to then leave Anderson and go join a smaller boutique consulting firm, specifically in healthcare. Did that in about 2003. That was Stockamp & Associates, which was ultimately acquired by Huron Consulting Group.

       

      So basically I did, between Anderson and Huron, did clinical healthcare consulting for almost 20 years. Loved that. My last role at Huron was managing director within the clinical operations practice and then in 2015 wanted to get a little bit closer to the IT tech solutions and so I had an opportunity to join a digital health startup out of Boston. They were doing some great work in predictive analytics and applying those capabilities to both rev cycle and then building out more of a clinically oriented practice. And that was where they brought me in to help lead that piece of it. A few years later, we had a successful exit, got acquired by Waystar and at that point was doing a little bit of independent consulting. So taking that consulting work and digital health experience and trying to work with both hospitals and healthcare organizations that were looking to acquire technologies and needed some help or guidance as well as working with the plethora of digital health solutions that really had not been in healthcare before.

       

      As you know, there's a lot of technology firms that are chasing the fact that it's 17%, 18% of GDP and there's lots of money, so let's create a technology and figure out how to sell the hospitals. And come to find out they don't do that very well a lot of times, so I was trying to help advise on that front. And that's when a former colleague of mine introduced me to Panda Health and asked if I'd be interested in coming on board and working with that team. So joined Panda right as the company was forming in 2020.

       

      Brian Urban:

      That is extremely helpful because for me, every guest that we have on, it's a research project for me. And piecing the puzzles together is usually no deeper than knee, but for you, I can now see more full picture having heard your story of Arthur Anderson. I don't want to say you dated yourself, but you are.

       

      Ryan Bengtson:

      I've been doing this for a little while.

       

      Brian Urban:

      That was back in the day, which is cool because it gives I think a really historical view to your background and the theme that you had going from there into a smaller firm that was then with Huron. And then you went from the consulting space into what I would say is more of the delivery space and actually being with an organization that is tech enabled, but has a very strong consultative service model, too, at Panda Health. And I think it's a really fascinating story.

       

      There's some great people associated with Panda Health and I think what you're doing now is monumental from alleviating the burden of looking at all these different tech vendors from a hospital perspective. How do I figure this out? And to your point, there's so many healthcare technology firms in the space today. Mental health, payment integrity, virtual intake, back end analytics and we're not even going deep into the EHR space. There's just so many, so I think that's where maybe the Panda Health story can begin for our listeners here. Tell us what you all do today, who you all do it for and tell us the growth story, too, because we love a good startup growth story.

       

      Ryan Bengtson:

      Yeah, so Panda originally was conceived back pre-pandemic when a few health systems came together and CentraCare, ThedaCare, who's now merged with Froedtert, and Gundersen, which now has merged with Bellin and become Emplify Health. But those three health systems came together in 2019 with a common challenge, which was they were both desperately trying or they were all trying to digitally advance their organizations. And they quickly found out that there was just way too much noise in the market. There were so many solutions that either couldn't fulfill their promises or that were confusing on what they delivered, how they delivered it. And they just didn't have the bandwidth internally to actually do the level of due diligence and research necessary to find the right solutions that were aligned with them. And then lastly, once they did find those solutions, it was still taking months and months and months to contract, figure out the final scope of work, deploy those solutions, et cetera.

       

      And so I think in one example, Gundersen, their first foray into this took about 18 months just to get to the point of having a signed contract moving forward from when they originally started this process. And so they were looking for help. They knew they couldn't do it alone and they thought if we could combine some resources and kind of develop this company that could help us, that would be the impetus for this. And so what Panda Health really does is twofold, first is that digital health industry intelligence. So we essentially go in, look at categories of digital health, do the full market scan, understand who the players are, vet those solutions in the same manner that the healthcare systems themselves would. So we're doing cybersecurity evaluations, we're doing RFPs, we're doing deep dive reference checks. We're looking at their tech stack. We're really understanding what are the capabilities and use cases that they address and how do those best fit into the ecosystem that other health systems may be looking for.

       

      All of that information is then aggregated and made available to our members so that they can compare and contrast and do that research in a more organized format. In the past, they might go to Google, they might go to KLAS, they might go to several others and we're trying to basically be a one-stop shop for that. And along with that is also the peer-to-peer connection. So a lot of these organizations want to talk to their colleagues that have been in the space before. So much of that today is done via text message threads of friends that you know or folks you met at a conference, but it isn't searchable, catalogable, easy to track down and keep. So we basically are within our platform creating an opportunity for health systems to connect around those same types of challenges and issues as well, so you've got that one stop shop for research.

       

      And then the second piece is really a marketplace. So once we identify the top tier solutions, and we don't pick a winner in any category, we fully recognize that one size does not fit all. There are dozens of viable solutions. There's thousands of solutions out there, many of which are not viable, but there's dozens of viable solutions within different categories. And once we identify those that meet the criteria, meet the use cases, are secure, have proven integrations and ROI, we'll then invite them to become a partner on our platform. And doing so, we pre-negotiate a contract on behalf of our members with those organizations. So for those health systems that ultimately use our intelligence services and find the solution they want to work with, they can also then leverage our procurement and contracting services and jumpstart that process quite a bit.

       

      And so we've had examples of where an organization finds a solution to our platform, uses the pre-negotiated contract. In a few rare cases, there's no further red lines to that contract. But even if there are, that contracting timeframe is cut from months and months down to a handful of weeks. Usually within six to eight weeks from the time that they start that process because you're starting from a much more level playing field.

       

      Brian Urban:

      Wow, so there's the value on the marketplace end. And then on the market intelligence end, that's where I can see I think all of your connections, your network, your interview and insight skills really coming to play to help inform a lot of your members that work with Panda Health. What's the best decision path they need to start down in terms of a new EHR vendor or a new billing practice or whatever? And even healthcare, Internet of Things, too, we're talking about cybersecurity IoT you started to go into as a new category. So it seems like you cover the gamut, let alone the rev cycle space and part of your background getting woven into it, which is a key component of healthcare these days and advancing payment integrity as well. So just such cool work, Ryan, and I wanted to get into a couple of the categories that you've publicly announced you're launching into. And this was a good learning for me in terms of how you organize this information and how you take it to market for your members' visibility and ingestion.

       

      So the one thing that I wanted to start with was patient flow automation. I think we think about capacity today. I think about I guess the staples of the industry from a bed flow perspective, like TeleTracking has been around for many years. I think innovation is something that they need personally. And maybe you even help them. You probably help a lot of different organizations that are vendors as well. Capacity is the biggest challenge and it can't be just one vendor tackling it, so your insights here are probably so valuable. How are you starting to see some of the insights and intelligence that you're gathering in the marketplace be unveiled or used to some of Panda Health's members today? Is it starting to take strong adoption and actually help them change quickly or is it a big learning process particular to patient flow?

       

      Ryan Bengtson:

      Yeah. Well, in terms of the adoption, it actually is both right. There's several folks that are able to move more quickly and adopt. There's other organizations that just by nature of their size and their own internal resources are able to move more or less quickly. But I think when we look at automation broadly, you're 100% correct. Capacity is a huge issue within the health systems. Bed management and their physical capacity as well as most recently a whole lot more on the staffing, whether it's clinical or non-clinical staff and general shortages across the industry. And so automation broadly has been a huge category of interest for our members. We look at rev cycle automation as one category. We look at patient flow automation, as you mentioned. There's administrative automation and that can take on several different flavors as well. All the talk these days, of course, is around AI.

       

      There's a whole lot of just rules-based repetitive task type automation that is hugely valuable in the industry. And a lot of those solutions have been around for a while, but we're seeing increased adoption of those now as that need becomes more and more acute within the health systems. Rev cycle automation has always been and continues to be a high focus because there's a clear hard dollar ROI there. When you're effective with back-end automation in particular, you're seeing decreases in AR days and increased cash flow. And again, looking at the past 18 months in particular, those have been very desirable solutions in the industry. Now, as you think about patient flow automation and maybe a little bit more of a focus on both the management of resource in the health system staffing as well, as well as patient experience and the feeling that the patient has going through the organization and making sure that they're feeling well attended to and that folks know where they are and what they need, there's been a shift towards consumerism.

       

      I think that was peaking pre-pandemic and then I think the pandemic kind of threw us into such a focus on virtual care delivery and obviously the financial and economic stability of the health systems. But it now seems that there's a little bit of a pendulum swing back towards consumerism. And I think those patient flow automation technologies help support that as well. So again, kind of different legs of the triple or quadruple aim stool, if you will, but automation is definitely on the rise, whether it's generative AI solutions, old school rules-based automation or anywhere in between is really having material impact in the industry these days.

       

      Brian Urban:

      Well, thank you for taking a step back and bringing it to the automation level and then going down into the deeper categories that you're mentioning, patient flow, revenue management cycle. But that is extremely helpful because it obviously shows where you've come from in the background that you have and how you're trying to set up things for success at Panda Health going forward. And you mentioned something, Ryan, in particular, which was the back end analytics, I think back end reporting side of revenue cycle. And it seems like today obviously Epic is a huge leader in the space in terms of volume. Not too far behind. Well, pretty far behind, I guess. There's a certain amount of the meta text of the words in terms of volume, but it seems like their investments across the board in a competitive outlook, everyone's trying to figure out how they can improve performance on a mid cycle and back end and then analytics and reporting as well.

       

      So I'm curious with some of the automation work that you see and what you just mentioned, is that where the big investment is, is the very back end of rev cycle? I think the front end's pretty covered off right now, but the back end in terms of what you were just mentioning the last year and a half, regardless of the recent cyber attack, too, which we'll talk about in a moment, but is that where the continued investment is long-term and the continued maybe innovation, the back end side analytics?

       

      Ryan Bengtson:

      Yeah, it seems to be. And again, I think there are separate from the EHR, there are a ton of separate niche solutions and maybe not even so niche anymore that seek to address that as well. So one of the categories that we have available on our platform is patient financial engagement and that really is that back ... And it actually includes some aspects of front end, back end revenue cycle, but it really is helping to improve collections. Not just through trying to go after them, but how do you set up more effective payment plans? How do you actually understand where the patient's coming from and give them more of a consumer focused tool that will help them better understand their bill upfront, know how to get those collections? And there's a lot of analytics that go into that, so I think Epic and others have seen a lot of opportunity in that space.

       

      There's been opportunity in that space and there were some standalone digital health companies that went after that. I think Epic and the other EHRs are noticing the opportunity there. And again, as I mentioned earlier, there is some hard dollar opportunity in that space for those healthcare systems. And so I think Epic is appropriately going there and, again, empowered with the back end analytics that they have. And I agree with you, that there's some opportunity for Cerner and MEDITECH to catch up there. I think the interesting thing, the EHRs, whether you're talking about that specific solution or not, the EHRs are always looking for where's their opportunity to expand their footprint? And they're great products, they're necessary, they've come a long way in the 15 years since meaningful use. They're really addressing patient experience and care delivery and financial and all of those things. The challenge I think with the EHRs broadly is that it's very difficult to be all things to all people.

       

      And so they see those areas where these more focused digital health solutions are going in and where they start to have success, they want to explore and start developing that area. But an organization of that size, whether Epic, Cerner or otherwise, can only go so far and so fast in that many different directions. And so I think that's where you see the opportunity for some of these niche solutions that are probably going to have more advanced analytics sooner because of the level of focus and discipline they have in those areas. Epic may eventually catch up, but I think the question for these health systems is how long do you want to wait for what level of product or capability? And where's there opportunity today versus where do you just look at the Epic roadmap and say we're willing to wait 18, 24, 36 months for what may not be out of the gate as high quality of a solution?

       

      But if economics are a factor and it's already baked into their license, then they're making some of those hard choices. So I think you're right. back end analytics is an area of focus. I think it's because it's been proven out and now it's seen as an opportunity for those EHRs to move in.

       

      Brian Urban:

      Yeah. And I love to use the example of that space in particular in regards to your background, what Panda Health is launching a new category. So just a really cool perspective to get from a executive's desk here who's been in the industry for a while. So thank you for those comments, Ryan. And I'm curious, too, I think the patient financial assistance side of what EHRs have today and then what they have third-party vendors include or have sit on top of their services and their technologies. And it's a booming space I think for hospitals, healthcare systems that are larger. If you have a collection agency as a part of your, I guess, operations, it's bad form. It just doesn't look good. We're not addressing things holistically as we should. So getting way upstream, yeah, that's not necessarily back end. That's way upstream. And how are you [inaudible 00:19:48]

       

      Ryan Bengtson:

      You can do it in a much more consumer-friendly way by proactive engagement of the patient, of more awareness of what they can expect on their bill and transparent pricing and some of those things. So you're not dealing with collections the same way on the back. Now, again, everybody's situation is different. There's always going to be that challenge, but I think a lot of these solutions, whether EHR or point solutions, are doing a good job of trying to address that in a more consumer-friendly way as opposed to here's a surprise bill, now beat them into submission to pay it. Right?

       

      Brian Urban:

      Yeah, especially with trust being a core piece of servicing socioeconomic, vulnerable populations that will come to you with an exacerbated condition and stay five, 10 days and may not be able to pay a portion or all of their bill, may be underinsured or uninsured. So there's a lot of different components with that, depending on the geography, the populations and overall what you're trying to say you do in healthcare now. But probably a completely separate podcast, but I didn't want to take us too far down that route, Ryan. So let me circle us back to something we mentioned a moment ago, which was the milestone event of all events in terms of cybersecurity inside of healthcare. It's been noted the last several years as healthcare as an industry is the most targeted, sought after in terms of cyber attacks than any other industry in comparison, even though we've seen a lot in the retail space and direct consumer play and personal identity.

       

      But healthcare has been immensely attacked and sought after for the last few years here. And we've seen that take place here with the recent change healthcare cyber attack. So right after that event, we had a huge HIMSS conference that was almost 40,000 people US and globally coming together and that was a big topic. It's a big topic for trends reports coming out. You all were a little bit ahead of the curve in February. You came out with your health IoT security as a new category. You came out with a few other categories around the same time, February and March, but I'm curious to learn, Ryan, what has been some of the intelligence that you've, if you could tease us with it, that you've put to your members and that you found that's really compelling for healthcare to start to invest more strategically in security? Anything that you can find, I guess, in your memory bank that's been most useful for hospitals and healthcare systems today and some of the reports and scans that you've done so far?

       

      Ryan Bengtson:

      Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure if I've certainly got the answer. If that was the case, we'd be in a different spot. But no, I think first of all, to be fair, I think we were a little bit ahead of the curve because we were being led by our members. So I think the health systems have been aware of this for a while. And as I said, we're a member backed, member led organization and so our health systems are really the ones that have guided where we tend to focus our efforts. We serve at their pleasure. And so if they were focused on consumer oriented solutions, that was kind of the direction we headed. If they were focused on virtual care solutions, that's the direction we headed. Cybersecurity evaluations have always been a part of what we've done. So regardless of what categories we're looking at, part of our evaluation process beyond the efficacy of the solution and the viability of the company and ROI and those pieces has been a deep dive into the info sec and cybersecurity evaluations.

       

      And so we have partners in the industry that we use to help with that. We collect the evidence. We obviously look and see if they're SOC 2 Type II or HITRA certified. And then as you mentioned, we've started recently looking at digital health categories that are focused on cybersecurity. So Internet of Things security is one that we just launched. There are niche solutions that specifically are looking to address that as you look at how many more connected devices and everything there are. And so we've really been led by our organizations to focus on that area and recognized well before change that that's an area. We had one of our founding executives come to one of our conferences a couple years ago and speak and he shared the amount of money they were losing or spending related to cybersecurity and just trying to keep their organization safe was off the charts and was growing every year and their cybersecurity insurance and things of that nature were on the rise.

       

      And so that's been a key area of focus. I think the only thing I would say from a lesson learn standpoint is, and nobody doesn't know this at this point, but you've really got to make that a key piece of your evaluation. No matter how good the solution is, no matter how good the company is and don't even worry about the reputation. I mean, Change is a great example. Change is a huge organization, part of Optum, been around for a long time. You can't kind of just take the brand at face value and assume that everything's going to be fine. You want to do your own diligence. And so we do a deep dive as we evaluate those solutions. Almost all of our health system members take what we've done as a foundation and we'll still do additional work on top of that.

       

      We may save them 75%, 80% of the time in gathering some of the evidence and going through the basics, but they've all got their own custom unique level that they want to dig into. And it wouldn't be viable for us to do that to a 100% level, nor would any of these organizations want to fully trust a third party to do that, completely outsource. They need to dot the I's and cross the T's themselves. So I think making sure that that is a critical part of your evaluation process almost before you worry about the viability or efficacy of the solution itself. Because you could go way down the path and you fall in love with the solution, but if they're not going to meet your info set in cybersecurity and safety protocols, it's just not worth the risk at this point.

       

      Brian Urban:

      Yeah. I love the way that you put that simply. You can't just trust the brand at face value, especially now. I think we're in a rapidly evolving industry. There's a rapidly evolving need for more security and more connectivity at the same time. So that I think right there, that might have to be the new tagline of our conversation today. Ryan, that I think pulls through a lot of intrigue for our audience. And with our audience, there's a couple of things that I think they'd really find valuable and there's some things that you shared with me right before the show here. I did want to start with the trends report. I think you put out a great trends report every year. A lot of great organizations do this. We've started to do this and a bunch of others in this space, too, but you partnered with Sage Growth Partners.

       

      And what I found was really interesting, there's so many different, I think, pillars of information in the trends report, but one thing I found that called out to me is the obvious, which is speed. Speed to implementation, speed to being able to understand who you should be assessing in terms of a new tech partner, a new bridge partner in any kind of coordination effort you have with data, patient, consumer care, that space. So the stat I saw, which was so interesting, is healthcare leaders, about 67% of them noted it takes six months at least to assess a tech vendor to determine if they're going to be implemented. So that's even just figuring out, yes, we have a deal and then let's start implementation. My goodness, gracious, this is an extensive period of time.

       

      And it's probably even longer. I think if we found a report on the health plan side, even longer probably, but for different reasons. Is this purely a cultural thing? Why does it takes so long? Is it a capacity, a people, process, tech thing with a lot of healthcare, or is it just inherent, it just has been passed down from generational team to generational team?

       

      Ryan Bengtson:

      All of the above. So as I said, this is one of the problems we were looking to solve when we were first founded by these health systems. We came together and said, "Look, if we're going to keep up with the pace of technology and we're going to meet consumer expectations, we need to be able to move more quickly in this space." And the amount of time that we're taking to find, evaluate, implement solutions, which is too long, so they want to move more quickly. There is still an inherent aspect of healthcare, that you're not going to move too quickly if it's going to introduce any more risk. The stakes are too high, especially as you're looking at care quality and some of those pieces. So I do think there's some nature of the fact that it's healthcare and it's only ever going to move so fast, but I do think there's a lot of administrative and bureaucratic things that you can do to reduce that timeframe.

       

      And so that's been a key focus of us. I will say in the last year there's been several high profile digital health companies that no longer exist. And I won't name specific names, but there's been several. Again, going back to the earlier comment, you can't just rely on brand. There've been some that had a great brand and still have vanished within the last 12 months. And I think that, too, has made some of these organizations a little bit more gun shy. So even as we do a good job of reducing some of the bureaucratic process, in that same report that you looked at we also asked about their confidence in digital health solutions. And many of them said that their confidence had decreased in light of a lot of these failed digital health ventures and they're going to increase the level of scrutiny and evaluation that they go into.

       

      So while there's opportunity to reduce that on one hand, I don't know how far we're going to be able to shave that if we keep seeing some of the cybersecurity challenges, digital health companies going under. And then to your point, there's just a degree of muscle memory that's involved as well. We layer on processes on top of processes, on top of processes and it isn't necessarily the focus to go back and say, hey, how can we streamline some of these things because they view that as, again, maybe opening themselves up to more risk. And so yeah, it takes a lot of time and we're doing our best to at least whittle off as much of the front-end process so we can make sure you've got the right intelligence, the right information, the right data so you can spend your time making informed decisions as opposed to spending all of your time chasing that information just to even get to that point.

       

      Brian Urban:

      Yes. I think that's probably Panda Health's, for me, knowing you in a short period of time, biggest contribution right now to the healthcare ecosystem, is speed to making more informed and better decisions. And with that, you got to have the power of looking ahead a little bit. You did share one thing with me, which is really cool. I'll leave this as a tease to our audience, which is what technology solutions available today will have the biggest impact in the future? I want to get the direct take from the president here himself and COO of Panda Health. What do you think those will be?

       

      Ryan Bengtson:

      I think it is super dependent on what timeframe you're talking about in the future. So I think in the relative near term, I actually think there's a lot of opportunity in the behavioral health space and we've seen a lot of organizations moving that direction. We know how much of an impact behavioral health has on so many other aspects of healthcare. And so I think there's a lot of good work being done in those types of solutions to improve overall mental health and wellbeing, that are going to pay significant dividends in other aspects of how healthcare. Again, I try to avoid talking about AI too much because I just feel like it's so talked about to death, but I do think in the longer term horizon AI will have a huge impact. Now, I'm of the mindset that AI is not a solution. AI is a tool that goes into a lot of other solutions.

       

      And so I think as the generative AI capabilities in particular are built out, I do think that's going to have an opportunity to have a material impact in healthcare. But again, there's going to be a lot of regulatory and other things that have to happen. And then the last thing I'll say is I actually think hospital at home in the long term is going to have a tremendous impact. It's interesting. We did a study back in December called the Tipping Point and we were looking at which solutions had the highest ROI, the least ROI and kind of getting feedback from the market. And honestly, hospital at home was not seen very favorably in that report compared to a lot of the other solutions we looked at, but I think that's largely because of where it is in its evolution. People are doing pilot projects, it's very expensive to set up.

       

      They're only doing it with 10 or 15 patients at a time and therefore you're not seeing the impact of that. And there's so much question, too, around regulatory and reimbursement rates and those types of things, but I think when that gets sorted out, that has the opportunity to impact healthcare the same way ambulatory surgery centers did 30, 40, 50 years ago.

       

      Brian Urban:

      That is a great point.

       

      Ryan Bengtson:

      There was only a handful of surgeries you could do at the time, and now sky's the limit. And I think hospital at home will follow that same evolution, but, again, I don't see that being the explosive opportunity in the next two to three years, but five to 10 could be massive.

       

      Brian Urban:

      Yeah, that is a great example pulled from the ambulatory space. And you look now, there's so many different boutique surgical centers there, I call it, and then spawned off that in concurrence. I think you have these primary care centers, the CHEMEDs of the world. And the Oak Street that got acquired in VillageMD, that hopefully will have a new growth there as well, but then you have all these niche virtual care models which I think probably spurred from that, too. You have GI and a lot of also musculoskeletal. So there's so many different things I think spawned from that. Great example you gave, Ryan. Let's turn it back here before I take us down another path. Panda Health, over the next five years, maybe a little bit more, take us a little bit deeper future, what is Panda Health going to look like, feel like and provide to its existing members and new members that you take on over the next few years as well? What are you all going to turn into?

       

      Ryan Bengtson:

      Yeah. I think it really is the fulfillment of that vision of being a community of health systems that are all really focused on advancing healthcare across multiple dimensions. They want to be more consumer-oriented, they want to provide better quality of care, they want to be connected. And I think what we have found is there are so many organizations out there that are trying to do the right thing. They want to share information, they want to be a community. We talk about competition in healthcare and, yes, in certain markets it's highly competitive, but for the most part folks got into this industry because they're really trying to move the needle forward across the ecosystem.

       

      And I think our ability to bring those health systems together, grow our membership to where we really are the destination for these health systems to learn to identify the best technologies, the nice thing is digital health is not going to slow down. There's the proliferation of new technologies, new capabilities. It's always going to be growing. There's always going to be a need to vet and better understand the intelligence out there. And so I think we only see more, even as a lot of the solutions today become table stakes. There's always new capabilities and we see this really growing into a destination for all healthcare systems that want to be smarter and able to move down that digital transformation path.

       

      Brian Urban:

      I love the future that you're painting here verbally for our audience, Ryan. I think there's so much promise to come and there's never an end to more digital health companies in the future. I think that's also a big part of what you left there for us here. So, Ryan Bengtson, the President and Chief Operating Officer of Panda Health. Thank you so much for joining our little show here today. This has been very helpful.

       

      Ryan Bengtson:

      No, thank you, Brian. This is great. Love your podcasts and I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you.

       

      Brian Urban:

      Thank you, Ryan. I feel follow up coming on for certain. Don't go anywhere. I think this is going to be a lot more fun we'll have. And for more exciting insights and excerpts, please visit us at finthrive.com.

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