Join host Phoebe Gutierrez as she chats with Justin Liu, about his journey from engineering at Google and AI startups to revolutionizing healthcare with AI-driven chart reviews. They discuss inefficiencies in billing, patient care standards, and the challenges of building health tech as outsiders, plus the future impact of AI advancements and regulations.
In this episode of Telemedicine Talks, host Phoebe Gutierrez interviews Justin Liu, to share his background as a Bay Area engineer, from Google to AI infrastructure at Rockset (acquired by OpenAI), and how he and co-founder Scott transitioned into healthcare without prior experience. They explore the inefficiencies in the industry, the importance of manual processes before automation, gaining medical coding certifications, and speaking the language of diverse stakeholders—from venture-backed startups to rural clinics. The conversation covers AI's potential to improve quality control, diagnose conditions, and handle complex tasks, while addressing regulatory challenges, value-based care shifts, and upcoming AI developments like GPT-5. This episode is essential for health tech enthusiasts, providers, and innovators navigating AI's role in transforming healthcare.
Three Actionable Takeaways:
About the Show:
Telemedicine Talks explores the evolving world of digital health, helping physicians navigate new opportunities, regulatory challenges, and career transitions in telemedicine.
About the Guest:
Justin Liu is the CEO and co-founder of Charta Health, an AI company that reviews patient charts for billing accuracy, reimbursement, and adherence to care standards. With a background in computer science, he engineered at Google and helped build Rockset, an AI infrastructure startup acquired by OpenAI. Justin holds medical coding certifications and focuses on using AI to address healthcare inefficiencies.
Website: https://www.chartahealth.com
About the host:
Phoebe Gutierrez – Former state regulator turned telehealth executive, specializing in compliance and sustainable virtual care models.
Connect with Phoebe Gutierrez:
https://www.linkedIn.com/in/pkgutierrez/
phoebe@telemedicinetalks.com (mailto:phoebe@telemedicinetalks.com)
. [00:00:00] All right everyone. Welcome back to telemedicine Talks. So we have a great guest speaker for you today. And if you don't know what you're listening to, this is Phoebe Gutierrez. I am the compliance side. My counterpart Leo is stuck in a medical emergency. He is an actual real doctor, believe it or not.
So today we are, so grateful to have Justin Lou here with us. Great to be here. awesome. , I think Justin, , let's just start , from the beginning and maybe share a little bit about, your background and like why you got invited to come on telemedicine talks in the first place.
Yeah, absolutely. it's great to be here. So I'm Justin, one of the two co-founders, and the CEO here at Charter Health. Background. my background primarily is on the engineering side. I'm a Bay Area kid. I grew up here, parents worked in tech, spent my whole life here.
Went to school around here, studied computer science. , I was, like an engineer at Google for a number of years. did a couple of things [00:01:00] in between, but, Most recently, before starting this company, I spent a number of years early, , at a startup called Rock Set, an AI infrastructure startup, , that ended up becoming, , open AI first, true product acquisition.
so super lucky timing for us. at a time when, like a couple months after chat was really is that,my co-founder and I, Scott and I, started this company together. try health to take some of that technology over to the world of healthcare. so super lucky timing end.
I started this company a couple of years back, to take some of that here. do you want me to get into details of the company or how do you wanna do this? , I think, yeah. Why don't you tell just a little bit, I know we don't want this to all be about Charter, but why don't you just tell people a little bit about what Charter does.
Yeah, absolutely. so chart of health reviews, patient charts with ai. , At the highest level, that's what we do typically for, , things in one of two categories. , So we'll partner with, hospitals and healthcare providers to review medical records for, in one category is around, billing and reimbursement and.
and helping make sure that,all the services you performed are not only well documented, but carefully coded and reimbursed for you, get [00:02:00] paid for all the services performed. and two, , the second category, , is around improving patient care. , And this could be like a chief medical officer who comes in, establish the standard of care around, Patient comes in with shortness of breath. these are like the services we expect you to perform, the screens, to do, the medications to prescribed and ensuring that standard of care is followed. and healthcare is just, as you know better than I do, one of those industries where it's not so easy to actually track and make sure that the standard of care is being performed.
And the best way is by reviewing these medical records, which is a huge area of what we do today. No, I mean I think it's just, it's really interesting because it's taking the quality control side and just layering in some, I don't know, additional layers where you can look at something at volume and really pull out those outliers so you can address, key things in more real time, which I think has been, I don't know, one of my criticisms of just, , when it comes to some of these manual processes that just take time.
So that's, it's super interesting, I think what chart is doing. I think. One of the things that I think is interesting and I, you [00:03:00] don't hold this against me, but whenever somebody comes in and they're like, I'm an engineer, and they choose to go into the health tech field, I'm always like, why?
Why? Because healthcare's So complicated. So what was your thought process, in that transition? That's a great question. So, you know, I think. My and I are starting this company. , I would say, . A lot of healthcare founders have a great story about , how they got into healthcare, especially if they're outsiders.
Maybe you had a family member or friend who, who really got you into healthcare, but a lot of people have , some kind of like experience in healthcare that really got them in that really inspired them to do this one thing. Scott and I were not in that boat.
, So we were super, like Silicon Valley bubble kids. We spent our whole lives here, grow up here. like in the worst version of the story is for a long time. We knew that we wanted to try selling a company, and we had no idea what kind of company we were gonna build, and we just knew it was gonna be really hard.
and when it came time for us to try and finally do this for the first time in our lives. , Really, I think the most important thing for us was trying to make [00:04:00] sure that like we were working on something that we like, truly believed would be like a huge, impact, on the industry and the world.
, That could have the opportunity to grow into a massive company. , But really that means you have to solve a really big problem and, really be the right product and the right team to actually tackle that problem. and so. Scott and I took a very organic approach, I think to like trying to find, what we believed could be a really good idea that we could see ourselves working on for a long time.
Healthcare, to start off like, , it was one of several industries we explored at the beginning, but I think what really drew us to healthcare was, really the sheer amount of, inefficiency, that really happens in this space. I think Having spent much of our time in, in tech, it feels like a lot of companies are looking for every little piece of, bit of arbitrage or value that you can convince the next, software company that you should buy and there's some ROI here.
whereas in healthcare from at least a product technology standpoint, it just certainly felt like left and right. There are so many opportunities know to try and actually improve the system, whether it's around patient care or back office operations. [00:05:00] and so it really drew us, I think, to the space in the first place.
but I think like landing on a really good idea within healthcare and really I think like gaining this appreciation,as you pointed out for how deep this space could be , is still something that, we really took, a long journey to get through. Scott and I, even after choosing healthcare as an industry, spent more than a year in self trying like all kinds of ideas, within healthcare to, to see how we can improve the system.
But I think most importantly, it was really just about getting to know the space better and trying to deeply understand, what it actually takes to build in healthcare. What it takes to actually understand what doctors and, hospitals and healthcare providers really want. why technology has struggled so much in the past, , in such a massive industry to, to keep up.
and, it's the reason why, you know, as my co-founder and I both got,our medical coding certifications. it's something we actually require folks on our team to do today. like anything that we're doing with ai, we require that you understand how to do it, as a human first.
and yeah, I think. Learning the space,as we got [00:06:00] deeper and deeper into it, is what, , helped us, I think, gain a deeper and deeper appreciation for how hard it is. but I totally agree with you at the service level, certainly seems like a recipe for disaster. two young engineers come in, no background in healthcare, , thinking they can change the world.
it's certainly the start of a very naive. founder story? I mean, I Think it's beautiful though. I think the way that you went about it I think is really interesting. I think it's like the right way that you're supposed to go about doing things. You do all your discovery, you talk to a bunch of people,collect as much data points as possible.
You do the process manually before trying to automate it, which I've seen that happen backwards so many times. ? So I think it's actually really interesting when you were doing some of your kind of like initial. Let's say, discovery, what were some of the things that kind of shocked you, that you learned about just like healthcare's inefficiencies?
, I think like we learned pretty quickly actually that building in healthcare with technical founders is almost like certainly a trap. , Trap in the sense that there is so much. [00:07:00] Inefficiency and such, like bad technology or, at least like ancient, technology, and, all over the place , and worse products, like the standard is just much higher, coming from tech.
And like the fact that. That is the case and you look left and right and there's so much money here, but all the technology is so behind. like one of the first things we learned in a weird way was like, building great technology, and product, is not enough, to win in healthcare. If it was, it would've been changed a long time ago.
and, And yeah, so I think that's one of the first things that we really learned coming in was like,trying to build in healthcare is, goes much deeper than just coming up with a great user experience. or just building technology that works. it's really, I think like understanding nuances of speaking the language of healthcare, building the relationships in it, actually earning the credibility to do business here.
talking to people and really understanding . Why certain systems are the way they are. Like why is it so hard to get, physicians to adopt things or back office folks to adopt things? And a lot of the reasons why are [00:08:00] outside of just building,a great product.
which in many ways is it's a paradox for us, especially. 'cause, my co-founder are not go-to market people we're like, , engineers by trade. And so yeah, so that was , our first big shockers coming in. Yeah, it makes sense. I think, , I always joke just 'cause like my whole career has been in healthcare.
so for me I understand like all the complexities. and so I do it. Is it is always historically been something that's just so complex, so huge. I think it also just has a lot of. like top down rules that are really hard to adjust and change. And I think that's one of the reasons why this industry has struggled to get up to speed when it comes to some, technological advancements and just almost like having people be on the same page.
, Even when you talk about EHRs, it's geez, there's, , so many. absolutely. shifting gears a little bit, how has it been stepping into this pretty big role? going from an engineer to now I'm the face of the company, the voice of the company.
You have to come on all these [00:09:00] podcasts and talk about stuff, like how has it been that transition for you? Yeah, that's a great question. yeah, and to be clear, I don't have to be here. I was very excited to be here. Of course, it's a personal choice. we have some agency here, but,
it's certainly very different. I tell a lot of people this, I think like the, idea of being a founder is a lot more attractive, to most people who wanna be founders than it actually is. the enjoyment of being a founder if you're actually in those shoes.
another thing I've really learned is, I think is I think a lot of people could actually be very successful founders. like much better than myself, certainly. And but a lot of it is You may not enjoy it, enough. and maybe that's what leads, to, to your lack of motivation or ultimate success.
the thing about being a founder, I think is, it's really hard. I think first and foremost, it is really hard to fall in love with any individual piece of work or process in what it takes to build a company. if you truly love engineering or, marketing or sales or product or whatever it is your background's from, One of the first things you have to give up, at least being the CEO of the company is You don't get to work on anything for [00:10:00] very long. not only that, no matter how good you are at something, if you're the best person at the company to do that thing, the company will never be successful.
you should, hire not just one, but many people who are much better than you at doing that one thing. And so again, like you have to like, give up that responsibility and you don't get to work on that one thing. If you truly do love it, you probably will not, really enjoy the day to day of being a founder.
So that's, I think like maybe one of the biggest shifts I've, learned like after coming to the role is, yeah, there's a lot of things like you have to really, enjoy the high breadth,of things you learn, every day. It's, extremely stressful, but it's never boring. and, I think that's for some people and, it's not for others.
Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. I think, somebody once told me you have to, almost be. Obsessed with the product, but as a whole. which basically means that you're obsessed with no, no specific element of it, but you're just constantly obsessing on how to make it better. yeah. Which I think it's, pretty interesting is, somebody looking in, on, you know, it's, [00:11:00] it's a.
Massive feat to, have to go through all the stuff that some of these health tech companies go through and, founders and, founding members go through. and I know that you have had a very busy July. and part of that was getting your Series A, how was that whole experience?
I have never actually been at a company that was going through fundraising. so I don't know the stress or the not stress of that process. Yeah. I can speak a little bit to this. yeah, and we've also raised back to background here and had different experiences raising both. And we can maybe get through either of this.
first of all, I would say like how well the company is doing. Is like basically the most important indicator of like how stressful or how easy fundraising will be, which is I think very obvious to hear. But, everybody has like very different fundraising experiences. Sometimes it's super easy and sometimes it's drags on forever and it's existential and you'll lose all your sleep.
so it really depends here. I think like we were very [00:12:00] lucky, to be in a position, in our most recent round where We had,raised a round of funding from Bain,not too long ago, earlier this year. And we had been working very closely with the Bain Capital team.
on a week to week, month to month basis, meeting in person. They were very familiar with exactly what the, how the technology was progressing, how our adoption was progressing. and when. the early science kind of came in that the business was moving in the right direction and things were going really well, and we really saw the opportunity to really double and triple down on something that we really believed was working.
we were very lucky, I think, to have already the people at the table that we really trusted, which is why we ultimately had Bain lead. the, the same group of people we were working with are the ones who doubled down, which is, great for morale internally and externally.
and so it was a much. I would say like simpler process, than going around and fundraising, kinda the first time or if the business is not doing so well, I dunno, I joke a lot also, like, I, I, I still found it very stressful. it's still annoying to me, but it was very frustrating and I always just wanted to be over with.
But every, investor and founder I've talked to has just told me how, entitled and privileged I was to think that, given I think that we were not, we're very lucky to [00:13:00] not be in a more stressful state. Ultimately, I think the most important things when it comes to fundraising, especially at the early stages, is one, like you have to have really happy early customers.
I think that's probably the most important thing, like your actual traction, from a numbers perspective only matters, as a proof of concept almost, that there's something here,what the business is today, even the growth trajectory you have at the very beginning.
Like it's not enough data for, an investor to really build on financial model to know you're gonna succeed in the future. 'cause there's no telling whether your growth rate will, go 10 times faster or, completely taper off. and so like the only real data points that they have are your initial hand of customers.
and so I think like that's really important. A lot of people really focus on the numbers, but I think like ultimately, The first few customers you get, you wanna make sure, like you truly meet all of their needs, you don't overprice it for them. they will, every single investor ends up calling all of your initial customers anyway, whether you like or not even prospective investors who like are not talking to you or calling, to see exactly how well you're doing.
Yeah. so you definitely wanna make sure, like those are your real [00:14:00] bosses. Like those are the people you wanna make sure really happy. but yeah, otherwise I think it's just You have to make sure your, like the story and the vision you believe in for like where the company is headed and how you're actually gonna solve this big problem actually lines up and it's something like you truly believe in.
at the end of the day, like investors are like for whatever people think of them, they're very smart and successful people generally, at least very good investors. and for, all the talk that they talk, they're very smart people, so you have to still convince 'em to give you a lot of money.
They're, they see this. All day long and it took a lot of people. and yeah. So you have to truly, I think, have a compelling vision that,they can get behind and you can really get behind. yeah. that's worth investing in. Yeah. and and too, I think the landscape is just getting more and more competitive.
from. A couple years ago what you could raise versus what you could raise now. you really have to have a standout product and what you were saying, you really have to have customers that are willing to vouch for you. a lot of my experience is in the client success, customer success consulting side, so I'm very big on, yeah, maybe.
the product, yes, we're working on through things. We're working [00:15:00] through problems, we're getting there. But if they like their main point of contact at the company, like they will stay and they will, sing your praises. And it, It totally makes sense. like focusing on the customer base and making sure, how you treat them.
I'm assuming you're still working with those customers too,that's always absolutely great to have that retention and that, that trust. yeah, one of the things also I think like that, I think it was actually our, our our, our, our lead investor who first told us this, your goal really with building any company, but certainly at the early stages is like building this machines where like you take like new customers in and you like, like output really happy customers and your ability to build this funnel and build champions on the other side is what will help you repeat the cycle and be able to grow and faster.
That's like really all that matters. if you're getting a bunch of dollars in, but you're not outputting really happy champions that, are telling everybody how great you are. it's really hard to build a successful business. And yeah, so I don't know.
At the end of the day, of course, customers are everything and in the business world, yeah. Yeah. I also think [00:16:00] sometimes you're able to lean into those. Those relationships and actually pull out really helpful information that could be instrumental to, unlocking a feature or, and, like a different service line or a different market that you haven't thought of.
so again, it's just, yeah. yeah. Customers rule it right. Always. shifting a little bit, AI is the talk of the town, right? So a lot of telemedicine companies nowadays are either layering in different ai, enhancements, tools, you name it.
what are some of the like AI innovations that you're most excited about? Charter, not charter, just in general, in the AI realm. Yeah, that's a great question. the way I really think about this is actually when it comes to using AI in really any industry, specifically in healthcare, there's a lot of cases of this, especially when there's a large services component of the industry like healthcare does.
one of the easiest ways that you can start creating initial value is like you take an existing piece of work that is being [00:17:00] done by humans. You use AI or any technology to make that more efficient or replace that piece of work. and then, it's 10 to a hundred x or more cheaper or faster, better, whatever it is.
and I think there's real value there. Certainly there's real value there. but I think like where it gets more interesting and nuance is, there's a lot of use cases where the total amount of work doesn't actually change. we, a few examples of this are like medical coding or, maybe Authorizations or something like that. the total amount of claims being processed, for example, if that number isn't changing, medical coding may cost, X amount today. If you can do it for a hundred times cheaper, what ends up happening over time is okay, AI replaces all the humans doing this, but the size of the industry just shrinks by a hundred x literally because like instead of a costing X, it's now X over a hundred because it's so much cheaper.
and that doesn't necessarily create for a very interesting or, company or something that really I think is like truly and profoundly changing the industry. authorizations are a similar thing. Again, if like number of total authorized services isn't changing, then authorizing more, getting, doing it cheaper doesn't necessarily,provide [00:18:00] any real unlock.
I think like the more interesting use cases, to get to your answer, to get to your question here, I think are really in the AI use cases that, You can really see a, some kind of unlock something that was like previously not really possible. something that was not necessarily being done by a human, or at least done in the same capacity, that is now like truly unlocked.
a good example people talk about often, like outside of healthcare, and it's actually something people debate on at theorize is like ai, like software engineering, like coding. if the cost of software. to create software goes down by like a hundred or a thousand times, which it certainly looks like, it is and not already.
If the total amount of software doesn't change, then software engineering as an industry just shrinks by a thousand times. But, if the cost of creating software is now a thousand times cheaper, but we spin out a thousand times more software because now it's so democratized, everybody can create software, maybe you actually truly unlock something, like a new market or some new possibility that's actually truly changing the way the world operates.
So I think healthcare, there's like a number of different examples where this is like more interesting than others. I think [00:19:00] like I charter for example, when we review medical records, when we work with groups, like nobody really is actually reviewing a hundred percent of their records today with humans.
for any use case like that would be insane. and yes, there may or may not be, some people like sampling records, but the fundamental challenge here is It costs way too much to review a record. and so whether you're trying to improve, clinical outcomes or billing outcomes, your best bet is like doing a random sample of notes.
'cause like literally the cost of individually, reviewing an individual note, if you read every single note, you'd be running charity 'cause you'd be losing money across the board. 'cause there's not that much value to find. and if we do a hundred percent review, but it's much cheaper, the idea really is like you may be able to unlock, some use cases that you may not willing to have been doing before.
like before there's maybe some standard of care you really wanted to enforce. you didn't really have the ability, for example, to go through all of your notes to ensure that all these things were being screened for, that, we were trying this new standard of care or, actually enforcing this.
but you may be able to implement that now. Not that you have AI doing it. I think clinical diagnoses, which is one of the areas that we work in, but there's a lot of places that do diagnoses where [00:20:00] this is actually interesting, like something that like AI is. It's truly unlocking that wasn't done before.
for us, for example, one of the things that we do is we'll do a pre-visit, review of a patient's medical record. as if, a primary care doctor for example, had, or any doctor had, hours to review, 10 years worth of medical history for any patient coming in. in, almost all cases in healthcare.
Nobody actually has the time and bandwidth to do that. but if you did, maybe we could prep your chart in a way that, people try and do some of this today. maybe we can find like all the potential conditions that you have, possible interactions that we should be aware of.
things that we should screen you for, identify like a high A1C test where you don't have, a diagnosis for diabetes and you don't have insulin medication. We can stress all these things forward. a lot of these things that obviously get missed, because there's not just this kind of, time available.
I think those are the more. Interesting use cases. AI scribing is another really good example of a use case actually, where yes, there's like a p, like there was a human doing this in the past, usually very poorly and not all cases, you even had a separate medical scribe. but AI turns out is just really good at this.
really good at this. Great at writing [00:21:00] notes. not an area that charter works in today, but I think it's just an example of a use case where it's not as simple as,just replacing a piece of work that's happening now you're able to like, print out a note that is like much better, than it used to be.
And you can actually perform actions off of that, including coding or other areas that you can reason about, clinical care. and so anyways, I think there's the category of use cases is really around the ones that I feel like are truly. doing something to change, the way the system operates.
Yeah, I think, one of the things, 'cause I work with a lot of physicians, if Leo were here, he would be also telling you about how, he was a burnt out physician too. And I think that the interesting piece is like, again, taking away some of the. Mundane requirements that physicians or clinicians or anyone really has to go through in this industry.
And being able to surface that information in an easier and more digestible way. it's so interesting to me that you're gonna be able to look at, years of history and populate a summary of, here's some potential things that you could, maybe discuss on a preventive, Landscape or, even again, just a lot of the things that, I think Charter does now [00:22:00] where, again, just like pulling out outliers and flagging those things. I think a lot of that stuff is gonna be almost demanded for going forward. just especially as healthcare, we all know there's access issues.
We all know there's, provider and, physician shortages. and so it just gets more and more interesting to me that. More companies don't tackle the administrative side of the business versus wanting to do things on the clinical side, super interesting. Yeah. I like,it's really easy, I think to focus on like the things that are more emotionally.
Relatable or attachment in a way, I think. and it's also what makes it challenging. I think it's like for any founder and or like any builder, it's not as, sexy to say oh, I'm gonna go work on like back office operations. Yeah. in healthcare when so close we could be trying to improve patient care somehow, in a very direct manner.
and so yeah. So I think there's certainly just a lot of inefficiency here. But, I think it's, especially inside The American healthcare system that it's so notoriously inefficient and political and so many different stakeholders that all have to like, fight with each other to, ultimately,[00:23:00] have good patient outcomes.
there's just so much inefficiency here that there's just a lot more opportunity,to create efficiency and, actually decrease what it takes to operate and,take care of patients. No, absolutely. Absolutely.
I understand like Charter right now is positioned to, support,larger organizations, but it, it really is ultimately going to impact like physicians as well, like physician livelihood. where do you see some kind of like areas where this does,hit.
The clinician, and like benefit their, general workflow? Yeah, that's a good question. there's a couple of ways to think about this. at the end of the day, so one, I think, I can put this in a couple of categories. The first one I think is. Is money. it's just financially the business side of medicine, I think it's a huge deal.
like cost of care is really high today. I think it's what like 7 cents out of every dollar is spent on, some kind of RCM or admin work. it's pretty inefficient today. we work with a bunch of reta groups that. I think like a lot of specialties,some of the biggest ones we play when like in like primary care and urgent care where [00:24:00] it is really hard to stay above the red line.
they're famously operating on like half or one point margins or just losing money on all. I mean there's they say like famously no money to make in primary care and everybody's burnt out. and,by working with, these individual clinics. and we, you can see on our website we improve for example, revenue uptick by about 11% on average.
It's like absolutely like just business changing for them. Like they literally cannot operate, without this. and by like having the actual freedom to stay above water, you can,have more time to yourself or hire more people or do something with that, that actually enables you to actually run your clinic properly.
so I think like the financial side of this is, it's really hard. To not talk about. but otherwise, I think the actual clinician themselves, Theoretically, everything that we're trying to do here, is to create more time, for clinicians. and, ultimately I think the goal, of any, certainly for our company, it's a huge part of our mission.
but for really I think like any back office company in healthcare, Like your story is really that, we want to, really enable all of healthcare spend and [00:25:00] time to just be about delivering care and taking care of patients. ideally, you don't have to spend any time in the back office, whether it's a biller or a, a physician or anybody else.
Reviewing your medical records or doing some kind of back office work or billing. part of the reason we started doing chart review is we think all back office work starts by pulling up a medical record. And so we thought that made sense. That's like the first place to go.
but really I think that's the goal, right? And I think you can see this like even in the specialties we work in for today. In the billing and coding front. For example, in primary care, again, one of the biggest specialties we do, the doctors themselves are the ones, who are typically doing, their own coding after they see patients.
Especially some of the smaller clinics we work with, they're all responsible for this. so that's a huge area where we can try and come in and help them do that work. we always joke hilariously me and my co-founder and engineers on the team are actually certified to do medical coding, and we're like often more qualified,to code up some of these notes than the doctors who actually have to do this work on a day-to-day basis.
so I think that's a huge area. but even on the clinical side, we spoke about this use case earlier, but doing these, pre-visit reviews, or even post [00:26:00] billing, clinical quality reviews To look through a patient's medical record, trying to ensure that, you are, screening this patient for all things you could have, if you had the time, to really go through this patient medical record, what are all the things you would've surfaced prior to seeing this patient and even after seeing this patient, if you want to evaluate the standard of care, and ensure that your physicians are performing.
all the right services,that there are actually, actually following the standard of care, that you as the, clinical leader at the company, want all of your visitors to follow. again, is huge area where Charter works a try and, minimize that time for you.
yeah. again, like from somebody who's done, operations and oversight and compliance, like to me from a oversight perspective. It would be like a dream come true. truly just because again, anything that you're able to simplify, having to muster through a bunch of different things to collect enough data to get a, to paint the picture, I think is super helpful.
Mm-hmm. So, , what is one thing that you had to learn the hard way as you have [00:27:00] been moving through this process? that's a good question.
I think We kind of saw signs of this early on, and we talked a little bit about this earlier, but I think it's something we really didn't really, truly appreciate the depth of until we went through this ourselves is, healthcare is just so deep, of an entry. I think like of, in, in. The Bay Area in Silicon Valley.
when we think like technical depth, everybody thinks like computer science. You know what it takes to be like a very technical engineer. but I think like when it comes to healthcare, when we use the word technical now, like a lot of it can come down to a. Not just the clinical side of things, which is obviously extremely technical, but, understanding healthcare, speaking the language mm-hmm.
Is so deep. I mean, you take like an expert in one specialty of one, region of healthcare and like they don't even try to pretend they know another specialty or another region of healthcare, right? you take somebody who's like really experienced even in value-based care billing for example.
You try to put them in any other sector of healthcare [00:28:00] to do billing. It's totally different. there's so many things considered healthcare, home health, hospice, the rest of the post-acute care world. Totally different model than a fever service world, or value-based care world.
There's so many different, sectors of healthcare. so I think like one of the first steps of coming in that we had to just learn and appreciate was like. There's no really shortcuts here. Like we literally just had to like, get out our textbooks and just start learning. ultimately it's how we came again to the conclusion that we like just had to get certified to do, some of this work ourselves.
and that really is not even close to enough. I think it's just just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what it takes to really speak and understand the language. yeah, I think like a lot of breaking into your industry is like, I mean, even somebody like you, I think like who you, you, you know, you really understand healthcare.
For me to be in a room with you, especially imagine we're trying to like, sell something,really convince these healthcare providers That they should come buy something for us to even speak the same language. And there's all these bias already. We jump in these room with these very experienced healthcare operators.
they see like me jump on, they're like, oh my God, this Chinese looking teenager. they're coming on it's not anything about healthcare. Like, um, yeah, no [00:29:00] way. I'm gonna trust you with anything. I'm gonna give you my patient data, like there's no chance. Yeah. and, I think To try and really earn that respect by really showing that Hey, we appreciate the depth of this. We don't pretend we know more than we do. these are the things that, we know today. Here's the things we don't know and here are the things we're trying to solve for. We really believe we can help you.
there's just not really a shortcut to that. And I think It's really after doing all the homework, ourselves, that we really realized, this is really just what it's gonna take to get there. we won't be able to just spend a little bit of time in the room and be able to pretend, we can speak the same language.
Yeah. Yeah. I think in my experience, that's been the one kind of differentiator. Is, you know, kind of being on the other side of the room, listening to the pitches and hearing,some of the, language that, other kind of like vendors would try to, position themselves.
yeah, it was always very shocking how many wouldn't use. Healthcare language, they would come in with like their tech language and it was almost like very apparent, like the moment That the conversation started. and I think the ones who have, in my experience who I've seen do it really well, have [00:30:00] done it exactly the way that you have.
Where it's, we're gonna take the time, we're gonna sit, we're gonna learn, we're gonna study again. and really try to be able to speak the language to the people that we're trying to sell to. Also, to your point, not pretend we don't know the answers because, I am, I always joke like I'm, I am, I've been in healthcare my whole career, but I know this much compared to the whole world out there, just based on, my experiences.
Value-based care, Medicaid, Medicare. so it's, a little different than, yeah. You wanna talk to somebody about coding or rates or, different things. there's so many different elements that get layered into it, that again, just adds more and more complexity to this like vast universe
Yeah, totally. I actually think, like, to go even beyond that, one of the things we've even more learned is like. Not only is it really hard to speak somebody's language,because healthcare is like so fragmented and there's so many, it's not a even a linear dimension of you can learn this one thing and you eventually [00:31:00] get there.
There's so many layered dimensions involved with different regions and different pairs, different setups of, different specialties. are you a health system? Are you a provider group? Are you a health plan? There's so many things that you have to really understand. A lot of this is like even today, like we jump into a call,with some meeting for the first time and there's a lot.
I don't know, like I've gotten a lot of feedback on In certain rooms, I need to figure out how to talk way slower in certain rooms. I need to talk at a different pace, right? these people really understand tech. These people have no idea, right? this person, yeah, they're technically a CIO or CTO, but they have no idea.
how somebody from Silicon Valley speaks tech. But in this room, maybe it's like a venture backed behavioral health company. they're like insulted if we try and explain them, about anything. and on the other side we say the same language and they're like, I have no idea what you're saying to me right now.
and they're both, it seems like operating in a very similar space and we're, trying to give them the same exact product and outcome. so yeah, so I think like even that, like every day I feel so humbled, like just walking these rooms and trying to understand like, who am I really talking today?
Like, you know, what kind of tone and language do I need to use in this conversation to really match, who I'm [00:32:00] talking to? Yeah, that's actually a really interesting point. 'cause yeah, it's like when you're talking to Yeah. a venture backed company, a telemedicine platform versus a rural health clinic or a federally qualified health center.
I, you do, you really have to speak to them in different ways. I'm able to do like my health tech and then I'm able to do my, like, let's talk Medicaid and I can, let's talk about your county partners and community health workers. yeah, it's, it, that's an interesting point. I never thought about that.
How funny. Yeah. we're coming up on time,just like at the very, End. Is there anything right now that is like really helping shape your future in this industry? Whether charter not, but just things that you're looking forward to on the horizon?
Yeah, that's a good question. Anything that I'm looking forward to on the horizon? I think Maybe this is an easy answer, but, I think it would be weird for me not to talk about this. I think like the developments in ai, are gonna be a huge impact, on our company and our industry.
and I think like at the end of the day,[00:33:00] charter and 99% of AI companies, we are not training like these base. Models, of intelligence, that companies like Open AI and Anthropic and Google and others are like you, you need hundreds of billions of dollars, to even start training some of these models.
meta's obviously famously even spending billions just in, in salaries right now. And, in some ways,we are, very much at the mercy of these companies to be successful. we really wanna solve a lot of the problems in healthcare, and there are limitations to what we can do if this technology succeeds or doesn't succeed, right?
like for example we talked about earlier, like diagnosing potential medical conditions. how intelligent we can get these models to be. is largely dependent. It's significantly influenced by, the infrastructure, of the base level intelligence that a lot of these models provide for us.
even though we have a very complex orchestration on top of 'em and try to tailor it for specific use cases or clients,there's a huge difference and the cost of these models and you know exactly how much the industry can progress. it will enable us to solve, more complex use cases, or simpler ones depending on where things go.
So [00:34:00] that I think is huge for us. every single day we follow this, these developments, I think like in theory a lot of people know about this, and it's true, but as an ai, application layer company who's At the forefront of this, these make a huge difference for us.
I think like GBT five was announced this morning and like it is absolutely going to change our company. I don't know in which direction or exactly how we may have to throw out everything we've ever done and, build everything new again. but only for the better. Because I think,for us we want this technology to get really good.
It just makes it easier and easier for us to solve some of the hardest problems that, we really want to, That's probably, really big for us. Other things that, I look to on the horizon, I don't know if it's good or bad for the industry. I think obviously like regulation is gonna play a huge role.
whether we ship more towards value-based care or less towards value-based care. what, cuts are coming to Medicare or Medicaid or in a weird way, like healthcare feels both like extremely. Nonpolitical, but also very political, depending on the policy, right?
It's like everybody, left or right feels like they're aligned , that we wanna take good care of patients, the spirit . but the way that's actually implemented and the policies that come from it are like vastly different. and yeah, so I'm both like excited but also very [00:35:00] anxious.
if, certain cuts come, it's could be really bad for the industry. or certainly bad for the people that we are working with. or vice versa, right? And so those are all, I think things, maybe slightly outside of our control, but things that I certainly look towards every day.
Yeah. Well, and I, I think they're also all things that I think everybody in healthcare right now is also paying very close attention to, Medicaid, Medicare, even if, you don't participate in those programs, it just, it impacts so many human lives. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Justin, thank you so much for coming on and chatting with me. It was so great to get to. share a little bit more about your story and, understand your evolution. And I really appreciate you, jumping on and, spending some time with us.
Absolutely. It was a pleasure being here. Appreciate you hosting me. Awesome. Awesome. we will go ahead in our show notes, we will put, the link to Charter, we'll share some information, we'll give a little bit of blurb about you. and then yeah, if anybody has questions, you can visit chart's website.
it is it Chart Health? It [00:36:00] is charter health.com. check them out. It is a very cool, very cool tool that I think is going to really significantly help. a lot of organizations personally, like ex regulator here. I just oversight. To me, I'm like, Ugh, that would save me so much time.
So thanks everyone.