Back to NewsroomOhMD Co-founder and CEO, Ethan Bechtel, was recently featured on Vermont Public’s In Good Health Program. He was part of a panel of Vermont-based health tech leaders to discuss how innovation is improving patient care. Read the transcript below, or have a listen to the full discussion on the Vermont Public website.
In Good Health: Health Care and Technology
Mikaela Lefrak: This is Vermont Edition. I’m Mikaela Lefrak. Today is the fourth installment of our weekly series in good health, all about health and wellness. In the new year, you’ll hear a new segment each Thursday in January.
Exploring Health-Focused Tech Companies
Mikaela Lefrak: Today we are exploring one sector of our region’s, tech, economy, health-focused tech companies.
These innovative businesses are trying to make our bodies and our medical systems work better. Here with us for the full hour today is David Bradbury. He’s the president of the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies. It’s a Burlington based hub for innovation entrepreneurs and startups.
David Bradbury on Vermont’s Startup Ecosystem
Mikaela Lefrak: David, Welcome back to the show.
David Bradbury: It’s great to be here. Thank you. [00:01:00]
Mikaela Lefrak: Tell us a little bit about the role that health-focused companies play in the broader kind of startup industry in Vermont? Sure. I think it’s robust. It’s as good as I’ve seen it in my 20 years working with young firms here. And thank God, because we have aging populations.
David Bradbury: The challenges for cost and care, the regulatory frameworks, reimbursement models, all this jargon is just really making it more difficult. To stay well for longer and to stay well in place. So that sort of macro trend is creating all sorts of opportunities, disruptions where entrepreneurs that maybe have experienced firsthand friction in the enterprise or frustration as a consumer.
The Role of Health Tech Startups in Vermont
Mikaela Lefrak: [00:02:00] Why might a startup that is focused on something in the health sector want to base itself in Vermont versus another part of the country?
David Bradbury: Yeah New England proper is a fantastic place and leader in healthcare, technology, medical systems.
So we’re in a really great neighborhood. We have the alumni or the IDX mafia, if you wanna call it that. What is that? Yeah, it’s a PayPal mafia. It’s really people that went through a large scaling process with a company that had a successful IPO or an exit and might’ve given them some talent as managers, some specific insights as product operators maybe some capital or networks of capital to go on and start the next thing.
So you see this churn anytime you get this healthy. Economic churn of people, capital ideas, in an economy it’s beneficial. And [00:03:00] specifically for healthcare, IDX kicked that off 20 something years ago, and that’s we’re still seeing the benefits of companies and alumni that have started things.
Mikaela Lefrak: Galen Healthcare, RCX Rules, Marathon Health and on. When you say that we’re in a good neighborhood here in New England are you talking about the like hospitals and medical systems that are here the tech hub that Boston has become? What, tell us more about that.
David Bradbury: Yeah, sure. Exactly. Certainly proximity to Boston and even the Montreal markets. Okay. You have a lot of highly regarded academic medical centers. Dartmouth and UVM are the two big ones here. Amazing talent, amazing research, amazing students, post grads that are just thinking differently and they’re looking to solve real problems.
Additionally, our neighborhood, again, is demographically getting older, so almost by definition there’s more stuff to figure out and solve. And [00:04:00] that’s sad, but in the context of business creation opportunity and problem solving.
Interview with Aaron Stein of Resonant Link
Mikaela Lefrak: We have Aaron Stein joining us. He’s the Chief Technology Officer for Resonant Link, which is based in South Burlington.
They build wireless charging platforms for medical devices inside the body. Aaron, welcome.
Aaron Stein: Hi, Mikaela. Thank you so much for having me today.
Andrea Laurion: Yeah, we’re so glad to have you. Aaron, tell us a little bit more about these devices that Resonant Link makes. They’re for medical devices that could be in your body, but also a bunch of different types of technology.
Aaron Stein: Yeah, absolutely. So essentially you can think that within your body, there are a bunch of different implantable medical devices that really help people live more comfortable lives, more complete lives, and really perform some key, some normal [00:05:00] functions of body.
So some people living with chronic pain might have a spinal cord stimulator, somebody who’s having a failing heart. Might have a ventricular assist device or a pump that goes in your body that helps your assist your heart in that in the pumping motion. And just like your cell phone, these devices that go inside your body have to remain charged.
But unlike your cell phone there’s this fundamental barrier, which is your skin, that keeps you from just plugging it in. If you’re gonna plug it in, it’s gonna be pretty painful. And so really what Resonant Link does is we help bridge that gap from inside the body to outside the body so that these devices that are helping people live fuller, more comfortable lives be able to recharge quickly and within their corner and conveniently within their kind of normal everyday experience.
So it just becomes a part of how they live. As opposed to having to reshape how they live. Oh Dave Bradbury and I were just talking about this beneficial neighborhood that we’re in New England with all these different medical centers and [00:06:00] other tech startups in the area. You developed the core technology of Resonant Link while at Dartmouth.
Mikaela Lefrak: What role did that institution play in the growth of this company?
Aaron Stein: Yeah, Dartmouth was really our foundation. That’s where we got our home. Obviously Dartmouth is a great school. There’s a lot of great innovators and it provided a foundation and I think once we left, we’re leaving Dartmouth and ready to go out and build a company.
We looked out and said where’s a great place to build a business? And one of the big answers for us there was Vermont was actually Burlington, Vermont and obviously there’s the things that we all love about Vermont, the mountains, the views, the recreation, the outdoor activities, but really the things that make it a great place to grow a business is the community and the people, right?
There’s a core tech hub of engineers and scientists that are local here in Vermont. They’re very mission driven. They’re very community focused. And they’re really out there to make a big positive impact on the world around us. And those are [00:07:00] the type of people that I’m really excited to work with.
Those are the type of people we filled Resonant Link with and has made being successful in growing a business. And so that’s been a really big part of how Vermont and the community here has helped Resonant Link be successful and vice versa.
Mikaela Lefrak: Dave, do you think that community that Aaron is describing, did that exist 30 years ago?
David Bradbury: Not to this extent, and certainly not in the breadth of sectors and industries. As a small place we only have a couple things we can have comparative advantage at and one is our network or sense of community access to leaders might be a regulatory question. It could be a scientific question.
For example, this Gallium Nitride tech hub. Effort that is there, right? That very much is relevant to a company like Resonant Link, right? And semiconductors. And you tie it into, again, to these very smart, proven people that have networks of customers, networks of fellow technicians, employees, [00:08:00] and capital where it’s required.
Mikaela Lefrak: And there’s a lot of federal funds flowing into that sector right now. Is that correct? The GaN
David Bradbury: Gosh. Yeah. Yeah. The GaN effort. UVM very proud of myself for.
Andrea Laurion: Knowing that acronym Yeah. Gallium Nitride. Thank you.
David Bradbury: It took a while for sure, but give UVM a lot of credit for taking leadership and Kirk Dombroski, Doug Merrill and crew for taking a really.
Complicated… You gotta be in it, the weeds to get excited about it and humanizing it. So it developed a lot of different unique partners and I think we’ve got over $30 million gonna be coming to support all sorts of sectors using those technologies.
Mikaela Lefrak: We’re talking about lots of different parts of the tech sector right now.
Challenges and Growth in Vermont’s Tech Sector
Mikaela Lefrak: Now Aaron, we last had you on Vermont edition in March, 2022. You said back then that one of the biggest challenges for growing your company was recruiting in Vermont, and we had talked about the ways that the state could support growing the [00:09:00] tech sector by helping with housing and public transportation, and even increasing flights from Boston and San Francisco to other big tech hubs. Has any of that come to fruition?
Aaron Stein: Yeah. I think we’ve seen progress in, in that direction, and I think there’s also still more work to do, right? Obviously around covid and recovering from that. The number of flights that were coming in and out of the Burlington airport reduced. We’ve seen a big push, especially I think in the last year.
The number of flights there have increased, which has helped make things easier. There’s no flights but to Detroit and a few other places where direct flights have come back in place. I think we’ve seen the housing. Get a little bit better, maybe incrementally there’s still more work to do. I think those are still the like kind of core focus areas that would make growing a business here a little bit easier essentially, as we can make it easier to live here, easier to navigate in and out it makes it easier to bring people in, whether that’s customers, [00:10:00] employees you name it.
So I think those are definitely still the key areas to be focusing on as we continue to push forward.
Mikaela Lefrak: Yeah. Dave, do you agree with that assessment? I’d love to see more flights for sure. Yeah. And housing. I do think it’s really dependent upon the type of health tech or med tech company you have.
David Bradbury: We backed another company called Vernal Biosciences, an mRNA researcher, producer, and within two years it scaled up to well over 60 people and really tapped into a return home to Vermont, or I had some connection that brought up some very smart people. Many from the Boston ecosystem.
Like I said, they were in the neighborhood and they had a better. Better option. Yeah. So we see that more and more, but it’s not easy retaining, finding great people.
Mikaela Lefrak: Yeah.
Yeah. And this housing issue continues to touch every part of our lives here. Vermont, number one challenge. Yep. Yeah. Aaron I wanna go back to you and your own personal [00:11:00] journey here.
Did you always expect that working in this world of healthcare, health tech would be part of your professional journey?
Aaron Stein: Interesting enough. No, it wasn’t kind of part of my key plan. I started on the academic track at Dartmouth. Dartmouth working with Professor Sullivan and PO one of the other co-founders here at Resonant Link.
And we had this core innovation on power and wireless power. And really we looked out into the world and said where can we have a large impact and really that, an trying to answer that question really brought us in two different directions. One, it talk, it brought us to the implantable space, right?
The skin provides a very natural barrier where getting power through with cables as challenging. And so we found that the innovations that we had could have a really large impact on helping pass power into the body. And then two, we realized had this kind of epiphany that if we wanted to [00:12:00] take a cool technology and actually have a big impact on people, we needed to be the ones that actually commercialized it from an academic work into a product that could actually meaningfully change people’s lives.
And that journey. We found the med tech sector as an answer to a problem that, that we had with a great innovation.
Mikaela Lefrak: Has anything surprised you about the med tech sector or learning more about the healthcare system? Any like complications or big challenges that you didn’t know about until you worked in this industry?
Aaron Stein: I think the the biggest thing is that it’s a heavily regulated industry. Yeah. And I think that makes a lot of sense given the fact that we’re impacting people’s lives very directly and making sure that it’s safe. And so the as Resonant Link has grown up and improved and as we’ve connected with our customers and developed it’s being able to help our [00:13:00] customers and help Resonant Link navigate that regulatory space has become really critical to having the broad impact that we want to have. So you making sure that we not only have a great technology that’s solving a big problem, reducing temperatures, but that we’re also able to help navigate that regulatory space has been a key learning that we’ve had and helped us plug in much more cohesively with our customer base.
Mikaela Lefrak: And can you help our listeners understand a bit more about Resonant Links growth path? Like how many employees did you have a few years ago compared to today?
Aaron Stein: So Resonant link has continued to grow. We are really focused on the implantable medical space. We’re built up of a hybrid organization, so we have some employees that are based here in Burlington, Vermont, we have some that are in Zurich and a really around the United States. We have about 50% of our workforce [00:14:00] here is located in Vermont. The other 50% has been distributed. And that’s been really powerful for leveraging the things that are great about Vermont, but also allowing us to connect with the broader community and world around us to be able to connect with our customers in different pieces around the world.
Mikaela Lefrak: So what’s going on in Zurich?
Aaron Stein: Yeah. Zurich has a a technology specialist there. ETH Zurich is a school there that specializes in power magnetic. So we’ve had some of our key contributors to the organization come from there from their expertise in power magnetics.
Mikaela Lefrak: Fascinating. And lastly, Aaron, I’m curious about where the money that you all have raised has come from. Do you find that has shifted as the company has grown? I’m thinking in terms of like investor capital, is that coming from in or outside Vermont?
Aaron Stein: Yeah, absolutely. So I think there’s a natural transition as [00:15:00] companies continue to focus and grow. It’s been a seven year journey from conceptualizing the idea that of something called Resonant Link to figuring out what exactly that means. And as we’ve continued to refine our focus as an organization and really hone our focus on implantable medical devices.
Obviously the folks that are interested investing in that have the background in that. And so our investment portfolio has continued to follow that trajectory where more implantable medical device investors are investing in Resonant Link. And then obviously the community here is a really powerful one.
So it’s become more localized and more focused on the implantable space as Resonant Link has continued to evolve over the last seven years.
Mikaela Lefrak: Aaron Stein is the CTO of Resonant Link. Aaron, thank you so much for joining us.
Aaron Stein: Thank you so much for having me,
Mikaela Lefrak: Dave, listening to Aaron Stein speak about the growth of his company over the last seven years.
What excites you most about about Resonant [00:16:00] Link. When we look at any investment or any sort of company that we’re advising do you have undeniable founders that have the grit and the smarts to pull it off? Do they have a specific insight they’re pursuing? Like really know who their customer is?
David Bradbury: And then is it an inevitable market? Is there a rising tide? So when you look at implantable medical device power needs, right? You’ve got the smartest people on the planet doing it with intellectual property backing them. They have a specific insight on how to provide this wireless charging without burning the skin or safety and meeting standards and, if there’s aging populations and we’re gonna need more power in our bodies, right? It’s not too far off before we put power systems in knee replacements. Why not be bionic? In a way, let alone more folks that will need, different sorts of supports for the devices Aaron described.
So you know, it checks all the [00:17:00] boxes there. Really exciting. And I think they’ve been able to find their talent pool where talent lives. And I think that’s the other thing, that all sectors are experiences. It’s here and there. You build it in Vermont and elsewhere. Zurich. Zurich. Exactly. I don’t know if I’ve known another one, Zurich, but why not?
But I think that’s a trend of most all companies. And again, find the talent, build a great company that people want, and, the rewards, the benefits accrue to Vermonters, to the employees, and maybe even their investors as well.
Interview with Keri LeCompte of Aprexis
Mikaela Lefrak: Joining us next is Keri LeCompte, the founder and chief Pharmacy officer for Aprexis.
It’s a Montpelier based startup that builds software for pharmacists to use with their patients care. Welcome.
Keri LeCompte: Hi. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Mikaela.
Mikaela Lefrak: Keri, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a chief pharmacy officer before. That’s a pretty cool job title.
Keri LeCompte: Oh thank you. I agree. It is [00:18:00] it’s a great job title and it’s a great job because as a startup my primary focus is to oversee all the clinical portions. But because we are a startup, it’s fun to just, you end up dabbling in all parts of the company with sales, technology client relations, and then of course the clinical piece.
Mikaela Lefrak: So break down for us what exactly Aprexis does. What problem is this company trying to solve?
Keri LeCompte: Yeah, so that’s, that, that’s a great question.
Almost a loaded question. The problem that Aprexis tries to solve? So what Aprexis does is we build software technology primarily used by pharmacists to perform this service called Medication Therapy Management. And if you’re not in the healthcare space, medication therapy management is probably something that you’ve never heard of.
And if you are in the healthcare space, it’s probably something that you’ve heard of but maybe don’t have [00:19:00] a great conceptual understanding of it. But basically what it is. For it’s a service offered to patients where a pharmacist comes in and works individually with a patient and evaluates their medications their medication regime, et cetera, basically to help the patient get the most benefit from their medications.
Because as a pharmacist, you are the expert in medications in general. So you can pick apart all the medications within the disease states and figure out is this medication the most effective medication to treat this condition as well as potentially other co-morbid conditions, et cetera.
And pharmacists in this setting ideally have enough time to sit down with a patient and really go through what their problems are, what their concerns are, and work together to, to optimize that medication regimen on the doctor.
Mikaela Lefrak: Sorry, just to jump in there. So that’s something that a pharmacist would do not a doctor.
Keri LeCompte: Yeah. So yes and no.
A doctor of [00:20:00] course can do it, but what we find, especially in primary care is that there’s just not enough time. Yeah. For anybody who’s ever tried to get an appointment with a primary care physician you’re going in for one main concern. Maybe you meet with them once a year to go over in general, like a physical.
General physical, but you’re never, there’s never seems to be enough time to really get into the nitty gritty of the medications. And often you can see medication cascades where you’re prescribed a medication to fix a side effect of potentially another medication. Yeah. And it goes on and on.
So the pharmacist is most well equipped to unravel all of what’s going on and really optimize that medication regimen and streamline it in the best case scenario.
Mikaela Lefrak: So your background is in pharmacy, not tech or the startup world. What’s it been like to move into the tech sector [00:21:00] and learn about this, how this industry functions?
Keri LeCompte: It’s been really exciting. Not something I ever thought I would get into. I never really considered myself much of a tech savvy person, but I do have a, I have a strong passion for the clinical work and work working directly as a pharmacist with patients. And the tech piece has been quite a learning curve but again, really exciting and fun and terrific people to to be a part of this team with. So that really helps. But yeah it’s a whole new world and fun and exciting to get your feet wet into something that you’re, that you haven’t been exposed to in the past and didn’t really think that you would consider.
Mikaela Lefrak: Yeah. [00:22:00] Dave, with the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies are there supports available in our region for people who might be making that shift for maybe one specialty like pharmacy, for example and moving into a space that is more entrepreneurial, more business focused?
David Bradbury: Yeah, absolutely. I think today alone, there are three technology events going on, including this one, right? So there are more things happening for physical attendance. And I think our approach has been to let’s try to demystify things, make it very accessible, educate, and then maybe activate folks like Carey to want to get involved.
And when we look at young companies, we like to see three personalities amongst the founders, right? A hacker that builds it. That’s my cow. In this instance a hustler that can sell it. That’s Rob Squire in this in instance, and then a hipster that really is around product design [00:23:00] and real relevance and fit to the user of the beneficiary, in this case, the pharmacist.
And that’s Keri. So again, I think there’s a place at the table for companies with all sorts of different backgrounds, but again, you need to be undeniable in that you wanna make a difference, apply your skills, and it’s not for the faint of heart, right? It does take a number of years to get going, but I would think get involved with these events. Go to pitch competitions, if that’s your passion and take advantage of Vermont’s network. We’re all in the phone book.
Old School Tech and Co-Founder Connections
Mikaela Lefrak: Yeah. All right. I’m going old school tech man.
David Bradbury: It’s funny, the analog ways actually are more effective than reaching people nowadays.
True. Literally make a phone call on a Friday afternoon. You’ll get it.
Mikaela Lefrak: Oh, amen. Keri, how did you connect with your two co-founders? That relationship, as Dave was just saying, is so vital to the health of a startup, and I’m sure it can also be really tricky to find people who you gel with in the right way.[00:24:00]
Keri LeCompte: Yeah, that’s so true. And I don’t know if it was just serendipitous, but the first time I met Mike and Rob, we just bonded. And just had a really easy rapport to get along and have the same passion for pushing the business forward.
It was never challenging to get along with those guys. And I am very grateful for that. They are someone that I can sit and we can put our head to the paper and really focus on our work. Everybody is really receptive to new ideas new challenges, and are able to be self-reflective in what we could be do, what we could be doing better what we’re doing really well at.
And then there are also two guys that I’ll go have a fun chat at the local [00:25:00] pub and drink a beer together with. So it’s the best of all worlds, I think.
Impact of Changing Pharmacy Landscape
Mikaela Lefrak: Keri on Vermont edition, we have done shows in the past about the shrinking of certain sectors in our region, including local pharmacies.
Many local pharmacies in Vermont have closed over the last 20 or so years which many folks see as a loss. There’s also some streamlining and benefits that can come from that. But I wonder if the changing landscape of of the pharmacy business, does that impact your work? At all.
Keri LeCompte: Yeah. It is unfortunate for that changing climate, I think. I always think of the old saying the only thing constant is change and we all need to adapt to that. I think that services like medication therapy management are really well suited for those independent pharmacies and [00:26:00] pharmacists.
Whether it, maybe it’s not in the independent pharmacy realm that we’ve seen in the past where you’re also dispensing the medications because big companies like CVS and Walgreens have eaten that up. But there is a lot of opportunity for pharmacists still in that medication therapy management space because it doesn’t necessarily have to be done in person or anything.
In that consult consultative. Clinical space, working with a patient, if you’re able to connect with people and develop a good rapport and trust, you can have those those meaningful conversations in in telehealth or even via phone. So I think adapting to the change and to the new environment while still seeing opportunities, they do exist.
We just have to, we have to be able to be agile.
Mikaela Lefrak: Yeah.
Future Plans for Medicare and Medicaid
Mikaela Lefrak: And where do you hope Aprexis is heading in the future? Are there plans to work with like [00:27:00] Medicare, Medicaid?
Keri LeCompte: Yeah, so we have been pretty successful this past year in the, in bringing on a few big key Medicare clients. So we’re really excited to be diving more deeply into the Medicare space.
There’s a lot of regulations over Medicare and Medicaid because of CMS’s oversight on it. So navigating all of that has been something that is a learning curve for us as a team. But it’s been exciting and fun as well. And so definitely in the Medicare space is our, I would say, our bread and butter right now.
But we also are looking to dive more into the Medicaid space. I think there’s a ton of opportunity in the Medicaid space for medication therapy management services to be offered. And then even in the commercial space, in the PBM space, which is short for pharmacy benefit managers.
Utilizing medication, therapy, management, software and services. So really [00:28:00] the doors are wide open. It is just how much we’re able to take on it and what, where our passions are and where the most opportunities lie.
Growth and Expansion of the Company
Mikaela Lefrak: And I asked our previous guest, Aaron Stein about this. I’m curious to hear your answer to when you think about growth.
First can you tell us a little bit about how the company has grown since its founding and how you hope it grows in the future in terms of like employees, things like that. And then also how might it grow in Vermont and expand outside the borders of this state?
Keri LeCompte: Aprexis this when I came on board, it was, we are considered Aprexis kind of 2.0, which means that Aprexis had, has been around for around a decade. And then went quiet for a little bit and then Mike and Rob decided, Hey, I think there’s a huge need here. Let’s revamp the software and the [00:29:00] team and try to get this off the ground again. And that’s where I came in about a little over a year ago.
And our team is about we have a relatively small team internally for Vermont based but we partner and network with pharmacists all over the country either remote or in independent pharmacies, depending on where our client base is. So they’re, I want, I know and I believe that there is a huge opportunity for growth.
I think pharmacists, there’s no shortage of pharmacists that would love to get into this space. So it’s, it is just a matter of being able to have the work to provide that to the pharmacist to perform these services. But I think that the there’s a bright horizon there and we can grow both internally within the state of Vermont and also span out, because there’s limited Medicare and Medicaid in Vermont, obviously, but there’s [00:30:00] a plethora of Medicare and Medicaid plans throughout the country lots of room for growth for sure.
Federal Policies and Their Impact
Mikaela Lefrak: And just briefly Keri I have seen in the headlines that Republicans in Congress have floated these cuts to Medicaid to fund elements of President Donald Trump’s agenda. I’m curious if you’re keeping an eye on what the new presidential administration is doing, or is it it’s still too soon to make any big decisions based off of that?
Keri LeCompte: I think I’m gonna say it’s a little too soon to make any hard and fast comments on that. But certainly keeping an eye and again the only thing constant is change. So we will have to see and roll with the punches, but but I think our team is pretty agile and we’ll get through it whether whatever comes our way.
Mikaela Lefrak: Dave, thoughts there?
Importance of Medication Therapy Management
David Bradbury: Yeah, I think it’s really [00:31:00] important to just cover the why is this medication therapy management important? It’s really around adherence. Take the pills that are prescribed fully, otherwise you risk the infection coming back or side effects and that happens far too often.
It’s over 50% of people don’t take their full regimen of prescriptions either because of cost or side effects, or they forget, or it’s just not convenient. And that really has a cost to the population health. So again, if you’re running a health system in a state or in a jurisdiction of some sort.
This is a way to really control it using a lot of smart software AI but yet pharmacy-specific expertise because they’re the ones that see people at the counter. And there’s very few counters that we individually walk up to anymore. And pharmacy happens to be one of ’em. So really exciting. And this moment for Aprexis 2.0 is at the right time, the right place. [00:32:00]
We believe we’re big fans.
Mikaela Lefrak: Keri LeCompte is the co-founder and chief pharmacy officer for Aprexis. Thanks so much for joining us today, Keri.
Support for Startups in the Northeast Kingdom
Mikaela Lefrak: We just got an email from John, a listener who writes, it would be great to have startup companies in the Northeast Kingdom, which needs an economic revival.
Is there federal money that would help get a business going? It would be great to see new housing and high paying jobs in some deprived areas. They have the interstate and that’s a big advantage. Any help for the NEK out there?
David Bradbury: Absolutely. Yes, there are new resources. There are three or four new venture capital funds that are supported by the state of Vermont and Vita today that are looking for investments anywhere from a hundred thousand to half a million per investment which is important. There are depending, and it really depends on the sector, right? Yeah. There’s a forestry accelerator up there that might be able to help forest product [00:33:00] businesses, for example. Certainly V set. We’ve got two Evergreen venture funds. We’ve been investing since 2010, actually, a health tech company outta Dartmouth.
Sound Innovations was our first investment and a new brand new $9 million fund that we’re actively investing. Just, but before you ask for money let’s just approach folks in your network or come to groups like ours or the Regional Development Corporation in your area. Just have a conversation and just prepare.
Right? And I love what we did a couple years ago of Visa. We’re just like, let’s just get rid of the pretense, right? You’re not ever gonna hear only come to us with a venture scale idea. It’s just limiting and we changed our site to say, come as you are with what you got, we don’t care. And it opened our world to the possibility of meeting these undeniable people with a specific insight.
We like technology in there somewhere and an inevitable market. And I believe they’re in the Northeast Kingdom. We [00:34:00] see them, we work with them. We worked with almost 400 people last year and a lot of ’em are in all the parts of rural Vermont too. This isn’t just a Chittenden County sector. Yeah.
Mikaela Lefrak: I’m curious if there are other parts of the region that you can see technology startups taking root, would. At St. Alban’s with its proximity to Montreal be a place or Brattleboro within, connected to Massachusetts within Health tech? Yeah. Or more broadly just with Yeah. It’s happening.
David Bradbury: It’s where Highways Cross, right? Yeah. It’s, there’s some reason for that. Populations are White River Junction and Hanover and Dartmouth is a good bet. The Bennington area really crosses over into Albany and some of the technical areas as well. At St. Alban’s, my impression has been fewer startups up in Franklin County, but they do benefit from larger global companies or Canadian companies that are setting up there.
Yeah. I think overall [00:35:00] there’s more venture money going into startups. But also the companies that have been going and and growing for a number of years their revenue levels are at record amount. So we’re instead of using an investor’s money, using your customer’s money now to build, the third thing we’ve come off ever since Covid this unprecedented wave of public dollars being invested through the NIH National Institutes of Health or the Small Business Innovation Research Programs. And these are grants that, again, have put hundreds of billions of dollars to work across our state, across sectors.
Okay. I think that those funds are more at risk than anything with new administration changes and new sort of looks at discretionary spending. Yeah, so we’ve got our eye on that one ’cause that’s a protein source for startups that may be under some duress here in the next couple years.
Mikaela Lefrak: And we’re hearing from a handful of leaders of health focused tech companies this hour.
Introduction to OhMD and Its Mission
Mikaela Lefrak: Joining us next is [00:36:00] Ethan Bechtel. He’s the co-founder and CEO of OhMD. That’s O-H-M-D a texting and patient engagement platform for patients and their providers. Ethan, welcome.
Ethan Bechtel: Thanks Mikaela for having me.
Mikaela Lefrak: Tell us a little bit more about what exactly OhMD does.
Ethan Bechtel: Sure. I think the best way to start is it with an experience that we all have, which is picking up the phone as a patient to call a medical practice. Whether that is for scheduling an appointment or refilling a medication or asking about a bill.
And then having trouble with making that conversation happen because everyone’s so busy. So either I’m leaving a voicemail or I’m playing phone tag or whatever. But it’s not easy and we make that easy at OhMD. And the way that we do that is by taking those kind of synchronous telephone calls and making them asynchronous by leveraging text messaging [00:37:00] and a bunch of tools that we’ve built around that to address that pain point, which I think is felt on both, certainly the patient side but on the practice side as well for both staff and providers.
Mikaela Lefrak: You were born and raised in Vermont. Your mom worked in the medical field. Can you tell us a little bit about your own personal journey and how you got into this line of work?
Ethan Bechtel: Yeah, for sure. I was thinking about this question. Vermont is near and dear to me.
I grew up here. My mother was an entrepreneur an orthopedic nurse practitioner and x-ray tech. She actually founded the first orthopedic clinic at Killington when I was a kid. And so I just grew up in this entrepreneurial environment where I learned about healthcare.
And then I worked for her company as a kid. Doing odd jobs in [00:38:00] the company that she started to help physician practices and then actually provide some value more than just vacuuming the floors later in life. So that was the story. And went to University of Vermont Business School.
Graduated and joined that other company, MBA health group that she founded to help them grow. And I ended up focusing on the electronic medical record in the mid two thousands. And that is what led to OhMD ultimately.
Mikaela Lefrak: So let’s talk a little bit about privacy. There’s some really strict federal laws regarding patient privacy.
What exactly did OhMD have to do to become HIPAA compliant and protect the privacy of patients if they’re pinging information back and forth with their providers?
Ethan Bechtel: Yeah, it’s a really important part of what we do. And HIPAA compliance falls into two categories. There’s the technology piece of [00:39:00] it, which is where you encrypt data on the backend and there’s a lot of policies and procedures you have to maintain within an organization like ours.
And then there’s the patient side of things. And so as a patient, you get to choose how you want to communicate with your care. And if your preference is to pick up the phone and call the practice or use a patient portal, you can do that. And you also can consent to communicating in other ways. And SMS is a conduit to allow for better patient access.
But it also allows you to, leverage that channel to have encrypted chats, for example. So we could send you a practice could send you a link to an encrypted chat. You verify who you are and then you have that conversation there if it’s more sensitive than say an appointment scheduling conversation.
So there’s a lot that goes into it. And privacy and security are certainly the most important piece of this outta the [00:40:00] gate.
Balancing AI and Human Interaction in Healthcare
Mikaela Lefrak: I think a lot of us have had the experience of being offered the opportunity, if you will, to chat with the employee of a company that you’re trying to get, like tech support from.
If you’re having an issue, say you’re trying to make a return. And then you find out pretty quickly that you are not in fact chatting with an employee, but some sort of bot. I’m wondering if this comes up in your work at all? Are patients maybe concerned that it seems like they’re texting with their provider, but it turns out it’s just AI.
Ethan Bechtel: That’s a really good question.
When we, let me I’ll start from the beginning and our vision, which was originally making it easier for patients to have conversations with their practices, whatever that looks like. So whether that’s communicating with the front office about an appointment or if the practice wants to use it this [00:41:00] way, communicating with a care team and our entire mission, to date, has been make those connections as easy as possible. As technology evolves, what we realize is that compassion and empathy in healthcare is more important than anything else when it comes to this patient relationship. However, you can’t deliver the type of patient care. You can’t deliver it with compassion as a healthcare provider or staff at a practice.
Unless you eliminate the routine stuff that patients actually would prefer to do without having to pick up the phone. And so that’s what we’ve become as a company, is we rely on AI where it actually improves the patient experience. An example of that might be, I need to refill my medication. [00:42:00] I want the fastest path to refilling my medication.
I don’t need to talk to someone 99% of the time. And in that 1% of the time, I want a human in the loop that I can connect with as quickly as possible, right? And so that’s what OhMD has done, which is combine AI for the most routine things with human-in-the-loop technology for all of the more sensitive, human-driven interactions that need to happen in healthcare and find that balance. And so I think that that’s the direction that things are gonna continue to go. And just one data point that I find really fascinating is that in America there are 60 million patient phone calls made into healthcare practices and hospitals every single day.
60 million. Of those, you have to assume that, I would say if it’s, if you kind of correlate this to dollars spent in [00:43:00] healthcare, let’s assume that 40 to 50% of those kind of minimally are administrative tasks that are mostly routine. We have to address those things as in, in the most automated fashion as we can to free up people to deal with the human interactions.
That’s where I think this needs to go because there’s just staffing shortages that are not gonna go away.
Mikaela Lefrak: Hearing you talk, Ethan reminds me of something that, that Dave and I were just talking about in the break about opportunity and business ideas that are born out of frustration Dave?
David Bradbury: Yeah. You look for where to find businesses or it’s either free and fabulous, like a heart rate tracker on your watch, right? Or there’s friction in the enterprise, like the medical center, the physician practice, and that’s what Ethan describes with OhMD, right? How do I take really unproductive, high touch hours with my customers and automate that responsibly so I can [00:44:00] repurpose those hours and minutes toward higher levels of care, right? That more intimate conversation that you wanna have in this context so that friction, hopefully it goes away, or frustration. As consumers of healthcare we’re frustrated and what doesn’t make sense?
The same paper form is filled out every other time I’m there. Why? Let’s make that easier. And I think if you encounter friction frustration and you have a team and insights like Ethan does with OhMD you’re gonna solve it in a better way. And I think AI’s a little scary now, but so was using a credit card versus cash.
But now we’ve gone from using credit cards to touchless. So again, we’ll get there and I think companies that do it responsibly and start from a domain expertise. Okay. And then introduce the new technologies will be trusted, more authentic as we go forward. [00:45:00]
Ethan Bechtel: And to add to that, if please, if you don’t mind, Dave I totally agree with everything you said, and I wanna double down on it and say AI is here to assist, not replace. And I think in healthcare that’s it’s paramount to delivering patient care to, to leverage the technology available to us both on the clinical side and on the administrative side to truly assist to get the job done and not replace. Because ultimately I think that the human component of healthcare is is the most important.
We don’t need this level of human care in any other industry. We just don’t.
Mikaela Lefrak: Public radio, of course. I just don’t wanna edit into my job, please. Yes, of course. Ethan Bechtel is the co-founder and CEO of OhMD, a texting and patient engagement platform for patients and their providers.
Ethan, thanks so much for telling us about your business. It’s been really fascinating to learn about. [00:46:00]
Ethan Bechtel: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.
Mikaela Lefrak: Dave it’s been so fun hearing about all these different tech companies.
Exciting Health Tech Innovations
Mikaela Lefrak: It’s exciting there. There’s many more. You had, you told us about all these different companies before we put together today’s show, and there are many more that we weren’t even able to include today.
David Bradbury: Yeah again health tech companies are generally more considered digital. Kinds of companies. Yeah, med tech are divisive. We’ve blended those together. But physicians, PCC, physicians Computing and Winooski, right? They have a health record system for pediatrics, so they built it for a specific style of office and they dominate the space.
I love what Katie McCurdy has been building these years with PIC Health, right? So try to visualize, she visualizes your health story. I think that is just a way to repeat it, make it special, and get the care you need. And then Core Map is another one that really is around treating heart arrhythmias and rather than a blunt force ablation, get more precise through spatial mapping.
So [00:47:00] Keep an eye on that one. Peter Specter, Sarah Cohill.
Mikaela Lefrak: Oh it’s an exciting sector to learn about. We thank you so much for being our guide today. David Bradbury is the President of the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies, VCET. Dave, thanks so much. Thank you.