Well, hello and welcome back

to another episode of Surgisnacks.

My name is Al Norweb.

I am the Chief Growth Officer of Surgimate, and

if you like to geek out about the business of

surgical practices, you’ve come to the right place:

SurgiSnacks.

Our idea is to provide bite-size content,

hopefully about ten-minute long sessions with something

interesting that hopefully helps you with your day

to day running of your surgical practice.

My fearless co-host Justin Rockman isn’t with us

today, but I’m very excited to be here with

Evan Steele, the founder and CEO of rater8.

Welcome to the show, Evan. All right.

Thanks, Al.

When I look at your name on

the bottom left, it looks like AI.

I get that a lot, and I’m hoping that

it’s a career accelerator for me because it seems

to be a pretty hot topic these days.

Well, it’s really great to have you on the show.

I know you have an incredible

wealth of experience in this space.

For those of you, those in our audience

that don’t know you, could you give us,

like, a real condensed bio about Evan?

Yeah, I have finance

and accounting training by background.

I was in banking for a while, and then I left.

I actually became a practice administrator for a busy

ophthalmology practice in New York City for nine years.

Wow.

And while at that practice, I founded and ran an EHR

company called SRS Health, which I sold in 2012.

And in 2015, I founded rater8.

And 2018, we started selling the

product to the medical industry.

And fast forward five years, and we now have

just about 10,000 practitioners on our platform.

And what we do is we build

online reviews, and we also provide practice

improvement software through patient satisfaction surveys for

medical practices and hospitals.

Well, I’m sure many practices are happy.

You got out of the nasty business

of finance and got into healthcare. Yes. That’s amazing.

That’s an incredible story.

And in my experience in the space

have come up across your company, both

of your companies, in many, many ways.

I know you’ve made a lot of happy customers.

That’s fantastic.

All right, so on SurgiSnacks, we always have a topic,

and our topic for today is “When Patient Reviews Sting”.

It happens to the best of the best of us.

As practices, you could have 99 really happy patients, but

every once in a while you get one that has

a bad experience, and when they put one of those

nasty reviews on your website, it definitely stings.

And so to complement our topic, we always have a snack.

So we thought the appropriate snack for today is

Starburst, because we’re looking for five-star reviews.

So I’m going to start off here actually

reading a nasty review from a customer.

We’ve anonymized this, so it’s not actual real patient

data or anything, but we thought it’d be kind

of fun and painful to show what kinds of

things a practice might see from a patient.

So here’s a short one, Evan.

I don’t need that.

This is a reputation and brand business, right?

So these hurt.

Tell me more about, you spoke about it a little bit,

but what rater8 specializes in?

Well, when I started the company, the very first

thing we did, the very first thing, even before the

reputation management, and even before asking different questions about

practice operations like staff friendliness, office cleanliness, and even the

parking, the check-in experience, the first thing we

did was just rate people.

So we had these little circles and the survey

would have the doctor and the front desk staff

and checkout person’s face in a circle.

It was just about rating people.

And the whole idea is that if I could

have a dashboard where that amplified the voice of

the patients and was able to just see right

away, just one click on all the one-star

unhappy comments and just quickly read what’s going on.

So I would know, for example, if some far-flung satellite

office that I have, if I had Mary or Joe checking

in the patient and Mary or Joe is on their cell

phone or eating a burrito upon check-in and a patient

complains about that, I want to know about that as a

practice administrator and I want to rectify those problems.

A lot of one-star reviews,

they’re all caused by people, right?

Very rarely, sometimes someone will complain about the bathroom

was dirty or the office was a mess, but

usually when we search through our database you

search for the word rude, it comes up time

and time and time again.

A lot of times it’s the doctor,

but even more often it’s the staff.

So the idea is just to understand the patient experience

and be able to parse out the complaints, listen to

them and act on it and actually try to improve.

And if that means identifying employees that you need

to put on a performance improvement plan, or identifying

employees doing a really good job, and you want

to give kudos and engage that employee and reward

positive behaviors so that you could up the bar

in your practice, that’s what it’s all about.

So it’s using software to improve

the patient experience through people.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

At Surgimate, you’re working with all

types of clinics and specialties.

We primarily focus on surgical practices, which

is a subset of probably your customers.

But the surgery experience itself is obviously

fundamental to those types of practices.

If you’re not getting good results in surgery, you’re

probably going to have problems in that realm. Right.

And surgery is a very high-stress time for a patient.

You’re never under more stress.

And I have to book surgery, and I have

to go into the operating room and all that

uncertainty and worry, and patients get fraught with anxiety.

So what do you do in Surgimate to help

your clinical and administrative staff better perform their jobs and

better communicate with patients and make sure you don’t get

these one-star, unhappy, nasty reviews online?

Yeah, I mean, you’re exactly right about the

anxiety, which is not a surprise, right?

But when you think about a good review, a

lot of it, the emphasis would be on the

clinical experience and the outcomes of the surgery, which

is obviously fundamentally the most important piece.

But it’s everything around that surgery is really

important as well for the patient experience.

And I’d say the number one thing that we find

as a source of frustration is breakdowns in communication.

So to your point, if I’m a nervous patient,

I’m anxious and I’m not getting clear information

or conflicting information or updates or something changes and

I’m not made aware of it, that’s not going

to lead to a good result for that patient.

So one of the things that we do try

to emphasize is standardizing processes for patient outreach.

That’s one way. A lot of practices don’t do that.

And so you have different schedulers, observing

different ways to reach out or coordinators,

and you end up with uneven results.

And another important way, I’d say is when you have

four or five or six different people that are reaching

out to a patient before a surgery, it’s very easy

for them to be providing conflicting information. Right?

And part of that is because everybody lives in

their own silo of information, the hospital or the ASC

or different parts of even within the same clinic.

And so getting people in one uniform place to see

everything around a case and know the right information is

a really good way to help reduce it.

That’s, I think, one of the things we really

try to emphasize on, and that tees up here.

Evan, I got another nasty review for us to read up.

Again, these are anonymized, but this is one I

think is exactly on the point of our discussion.

So here we go.

So it’s a good example

where communication breakdown really hurts.

But you guys see all

this data across different elements.

What else do you see as, like, the

common reasons for patient dissatisfaction out there?

Well, just to that point, I go into some

of the things that really upset patients the most.

My wife had a surgery.

She was younger, she had fallen off a horse and

broke her hip, so she needed a hip replacement.

So we did it at the hospital for

special surgery in New York City.

And I remember that it was like at 9:00 at night,

and some nurse with a clipboard comes around doing a survey,

and we just got kind of into a conversation with her

about why would a patient give a bad review?

You’re such a great institution.

And she says, almost 100% of the time, whenever

there’s an unhappy patient, it’s a process problem.

It’s not the people, it’s just the process broke down.

And that woman who complained that her appointment was

canceled and she drove 50 miles and 50 minutes

and wasn’t even told, that’s just pure process, right?

There wasn’t a process, a workflow in that

practice for as soon as something’s canceled like

this and this and this has to happen.

We have to call these patients in this manner,

in this number of minutes, and give them this

much heads up that there’s no appointment.

That was probably a process problem.

And we see a lot of that.

The biggest complaints by far.

We look at all the scores of our one through five-star ratings, waiting room time by far, not even close.

By like three-tenths of a point.

Waiting room time is the biggest

complaint throughout our whole client base.

And we’re talking about

650 clients, 10,000 practitioners.

We actually interviewed our client who

has the best waiting room score.

It was an orthopedic group in Oklahoma,

and they’ve increased their satisfaction score.

We saw a positive trend, so we reached

out to them, like, what’d you do?

We actually have a blog about it.

If you go to the rater8 website, go to

the blog section, and search for waiting room time.

When we interviewed the client and they did a lot

of work on sometimes I’ll give you an example.

If you’re waiting for a flight and there’s a two-hour

delay or an hour and a half delay, would you rather

wait an hour and a half and hear nothing?

You’re just stewing.

You’re in that waiting room.

You’re not hearing any communications.

That’s for an hour and a half.

Would you rather wait an hour and 45 minutes?

Actually, 15 minutes more, but every

15 minutes, you’re getting an update.

The pilot, the plane, the part you would

rather wait longer if you were kept informed.

So they have this board and this board system they use,

and they write each doctor and how long the wait is.

So it’s full communication.

So even though the patient’s waiting probably

the same amount that other practices, the

perception of waiting is a lot less.

And they offer patients the option to wait in

the cars so they could be in the cars.

They’re not in a crowded waiting room.

They put on the radio.

They could talk on their cell phone

privately, and then they’ll just text them

or call them when they’re ready.

So things like that could be rectified.

And again, that’s the process, right?

They didn’t fix the waiting room time problem.

They’re communicating better with patients, so

they have the highest scores, and

they probably have long waits.

Also, doctor’s bedside manner, I mean,

we just hear tons of that.

So what we like to do is have these

patient feedback summaries, so every month, the doctor gets all

the comments the patients made sorted by worst to best.

So the one, two, three-star comments show up first.

And the hope is that they

don’t get buried in myriad comments.

And the doctors read like the hearing,

like, hey, every month, they’re seeing what

their patients are complaining about.

And do all doctors change?

No, they’re hard to change.

But you know that by just reading the

comments from the patients and listening to them,

we’re hoping that we’re affecting some change. Yeah.

In my experience, working with practices, when you

can show them data that’s dispassionate just simply

like, hey, here’s the facts, they tend to

be very responsive because they’re such a logical population

in general, and that’s a really powerful way

to help create some consistent change over time.

Evan, I believe we are up against our time for

session one of our discussion today, but I’m excited that

we’re going to be continuing our discussion in a second session.

So tune in for our next session of SurgiSnacks, which will be coming to you soon.

I really want to thank you for joining us here today,

and I look forward to speaking with you again soon.

Same here, Al. Thanks.