How HealthTrackRx Revolutionized PCR Testing by Delivering Next-Morning Results at Scale

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Hello again, Stuart Gandalf here with another podcast.

Welcome everybody. Today we have another guest that has been recently introduced to me and I'm excited to have Martin join us.

Martin Price is CEO of HealthTrackRx, or sometimes known as HealthTrack, depending on who you're talking to. First of all, welcome, Martin.

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

Thank you for having me, Stewart.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Very good. I'm really pleased to have you today to move my notes over here really quickly. So, Martin, we've met recently, I'm really intrigued with your story, so I'd love to start by telling us little bit about your background and HealthTrackRx and let us just start there.

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

Sure, so personally, Martin Price, I've been on the provider side of healthcare for about a decade, both in the clinical diagnostics phase as well as emergency medicine, healthcare IT.

Prior to that, I was actually a practicing lawyer at a law firm here in Washington, D.C., for about a decade working with healthcare companies on complex regulatory transactional commercial work.

I've been with HealthTrackRx since 2020. What's HealthTrackRx? We are the nation's largest molecular testing lab, foreign fetch disease. So, what does that mean?

Each day, thousands of patients walk into urgent cares, clinics, pediatrics, women's health centers with symptoms of infection. And those physicians can swab their patients, send their samples to our lab, the next day we provide a PCR-based answer to what's causing the infection and whether and how they may choose to treat it.

Our business has existed since around 2010. We operate in all 48 states in the U.S. or 48 continental states.

Each day we service about five 5,000 unique facilities or rooftops and process anywhere between 10 and 15,000 patient samples, so think about two to three million patient samples a year.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Well, that's impressive. So, and there's a lot of stories to talk about here, particularly COVID, but we have some things that are even more interesting and current to talk about today.

So, one of reasons why we talked when we spoke last time, we dove down into this world of testing and infection treatment.

And so, help our listeners understand what's wrong with the traditional way we diagnose and treat infections.

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

So, it's a great question. It’s really sort of the basis of why we exist. So, historically diagnostic tools for infection have just been either too slow or ineffective.

Physicians had really kind of limited tools in the office. So, you've been to your physician offices and you have what may be a respiratory infection, they could give you a strep test, a flu test, what's called an antigen test.

But if that didn't identify what was wrong with you, they really had two choices. Send out to a large reference lab for a culture, literally culture that specimen, that sample, and grow it until they could identify what it was and how to treat it, and that can take 3-14 days.

Or simply write you a prescription for a powerful broad-section antibiotic logic being, let's just kill everything that may be potentially causing this patient's symptoms.

The problem is that for about a third of the time of those infections, the antibiotics aren't needed at all.

And because of the lack of tools, this overprescribing has resulted in so many of these common strains mutating to now be resistant to the common antibiotics you and I are familiar with, amoxicillin’s, the Bactrims.

So, you have all these strains now floating around in the community that have just developed resistance to them. So many times, the prescription is not needed, and even when one is now written, it's just not going to work.

And so, without better information around do I need a prescription? And if so, is what I'm being prescribed actually going to be effective for what's causing my symptoms?

Patients are still left to sort of, and physicians, left kind of guesswork as to how to treat this problem.

And you know, as we've all experienced what that, what does that lead to? It leads to patients having symptoms longer.

It leads to those symptoms becoming more severe and landing that patient in ER or back in their physician office.

So, it's really just though it's been the lack of timely enough tools to give a proper effective diagnosis.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

So, one of the things I want to pivot on that just for a moment and speak as a patient.

And I think a lot of our listeners will relate to this. So, my experience on this is, first of all, most providers we talked to will commiserate that, you know, I don't know what percent of patients understand the whole, you know, virus versus bacterium and antibiotics, but a whole bunch of people don't, right?

So that's the source of stress for the provider right there. “I want antibiotics.” “I don't know if you need antibiotics.” So that whole thing.

So that right there is not a patient experience, you know, builder. So, in my own experience, I have found that, for example, for whatever reason, every time I've been prescribed in amoxicillin, it hasn't worked for me.

So, I don't know if it's just bad luck, or maybe somehow I personally, it doesn't work with me, but it just hasn't worked, they always have to do something else.

So, there's that. The second thing that I noticed, though, is that depending on where you go, some people just pass out antibiotics like candy, others are really, really conservative, like, and

I, as a patient am rather conservative, so I had a PCP for a while there that I had a long infection for months.  He said, it'll just resolve. It's not like, okay, no, no, that's not really the right answer. The, you know, it's not super great for either side and certainly we don't want to contribute to the antibiotic resistance of various bugs, right?

That's a real problem. It's very scary anytime anybody's looked at this very seriously. It's a scary problem. So, I think the stakes are high, which is part of the reason why I was so intrigued when we first met. So, the, obviously you're here, you have some ideas. So how do you guys address these challenges?

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

Well, so in the situation you described is, of course, not uncommon. It's rooted in a lack of information. Physicians want to make smart choices.

They want to provide answers, clarity, and therapy for patients that are going to work. But when they don't have tools and when they don't have information.

And they're left to either prescribe blindly or not prescribe and sort of hope the patient gets better and doesn't come back. And those are too awful, from a patient outcome and health care perspective, those are two sort of awful outcomes. So, where do we come in?

Our solution is rooted in molecular diagnostics, PCR, transcription diagnostics. This advanced technology can help identify exactly whether a sample or a specimen is viral, bacterial, fungal, and whether that particular pathogen is resistant to common antibiotics, and if so, which ones is it most resistant to?

PCR has been around for a long time. Most folks weren't familiar with it prior to COVID. It's kind of venture common vernacular during COVID.

People recognized that PCR result was now sort of the gold standard of infection detection. Where we know. And that paradigm shift was not utilizing PCR testing for infectious disease testing.

It was building out a logistics and operational platform to deliver a comprehensive PCR result to any patient anywhere in the country by the next morning.

So, rather than waiting a week for test results or starting an antibiotic regimen, we can deliver an actual answer to your primary care doctor or to any physician who is confronted with a patient who's got real symptoms and wants answers and wants to know that when they start a prescription regimen, it's actually going to get them on the pathway to recovery.

So, it's really been for us taking, stitching together a technology that's been around for a while, leveraging the popularity and adoption of it as a gold standard for detection during COVID and then applying the logistics operational workflow to really deliver that at scale anywhere in the country the next morning.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

That's fantastic and then so how did you do that like you know to be able to turn it around that quickly and what are the and the scaling of when you're talking about national.

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

Yeah so there's a longer version of it because we, like most things, we kind of got there and fits and starts them but kind of ultimately to bring those capabilities everywhere we partnered with UPS Healthcare back in 2022. UPS Healthcare, UPS or UPS you everyone's familiar with UPS they touch every corner of the country and so we launched a pilot project with them in Louisville back in 2022 as part of a program they run with a select number of health care companies to help expedite the return of diagnostic results.

So back up one second. Backing up just a moment. We used UPS before and typically what that meant is UPS would pick up a package from a physician office, you're in New York, I think is that right, Stewart?

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

We're in California, but yeah.

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

I'm sorry. We'd pick up a package from California would fly it and deliver it to us in Texas where our lab was located, we'd there around nine o'clock the next morning.

The PCR process takes about seven hours to deliver that comprehensive result. That meant we really couldn't get a result back to you in California the next day.

You would get it after five p.m. probably gone home for the day. What their solution in Louisville offered was every UPS early morning package in the country runs through Louisville.

They operate a hub and spoke model the same way that FedEx does. FedEx does it in Memphis. So every plane whether you're going from Los Angeles to San Diego or San Francisco to to Los Angeles, that package is first going to Louisville and then back out to the West Coast.

So the solution they offered for us was we can actually pull those your bags off the plane, mid-route and delivered to you on the runway at about one o'clock in the morning.

So you can start running your samples at 1:30. That then allows you, even within those seven hours to have when a physician arrives the next morning at 9am, that result is waiting for them.

And that really changed the paradigm in terms of waiting to sometimes three days for result using PCR to now being able to have a result the next morning, you know, you walk into your clinic this afternoon, you know, whether it's in California or or Maine or Florida, Texas or a remote place like Fargo, you know, North Dakota, if a if UPS picks up, they will pick up pretty much anywhere, they can get it to us by one o’clock in the morning, we can deliver a result. And that's the logistics component of it. Of course, the workflow from our perspective is being able to operate an overnight lab at scale.

And that requires a lot of automated tools. So, if you visit to our lab, you'd see robotic arms moving, samples around at high velocity, so that no steps are missed along the way, and of course, being able to reducing our reliance on having to have people touch the samples to engage in the process throughout the course.

So, it's really, as the stitching together, a couple of complex pieces to ultimately deliver a pretty simple thing, which is you go into your clinic, after this interview, go get swabbed, we'll get your physician result tomorrow morning.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

That's fascinating. By the way. Congratulations. I love when I talk to people that have thought of something truly big and innovative. That's a big idea. I'm sure it wasn't easy, but it's pretty impressive. Let's talk about the impact. What’s changed?

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

Well, how does it change? Let's think about how how does it change for providers? So, you know, that was the most important thing. We can move mountains, and we can do all this other. You know what we think of as really interesting stuff. But if ultimately, physicians are just writing a script, anyway.

When they when they see the patient, then we really aren't making an impact. So how we measure it and where it really has made an impact is about. We find today about 2/3 of our clinicians will withhold writing a prescription when the patient visits or give them just a single dose and say. I'm gonna reach out to you in the morning and let you know if you need a prescription. I'm gonna tell you what you have. And I'm gonna tell you why I'm not prescribing, or if I am prescribing, why, I'm prescribing what I am.

That is really the paradox that has really been the output change from this is having clinicians buy into a more thoughtful information based approach to therapy. And that's what the tool enables them to do, and for patients who now more and more are driving self-directed care like they want to know what they have. You know most folks now don't want to just go in and take Amoxicillin. You've had. Your experience was that you know it's not going to work. Bactrim, maybe it's a little bit better in some cases. Maybe not.

You want to know what's causing? Is this people? Is it strep? Is it? Is it pneumonia, is it? Is it something else? Is it? COVID could be a whole bunch of things.

I want to know what I have. I wanna feel confident that what my position is prescribing for me is actually gonna do do me some good.

So that's been the real impact for us from a from a patient and provider perspective. From a broader healthcare perspective. We've had a couple of papers published both by us and from external from 3rd parties, showing that that early intervention of rapid diagnostics really does change the cost curve, too, of healthcare, because you're having fewer those fewer of those repeat visits to physician offices. You're having. Fewer people show up in the ER you're having fewer medications prescribed. So, you're getting better outcomes at lower cost. For our business, it's been growth we've had, you know. Early adopters have become champions for us in the marketplace. You know, most many of the larger urgent care chains and operators today in the US. Now work with us. That's our that's been our primary call point and more and more we're seeing patients up, go into offices, or hearing about this, and saying, do you have PCR testing as opposed to? Hey, Doc? Tell me what's you know? Tell me how. Tell me what you'd recommend here, and that's that that you know that what really kind of, I think what has fueled our growth so far we'll continue to. We'll continue to drive it.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

That's great. So this is a healthcare podcast, and I always talk about it.

Part business, part marketing, but I have to come back to the marketing part. So I'd love to know, there's a little bit to unpack here from the B2B and the BCP perspective.

So let's, you know, take whichever order you like. Tell us little bit about the marketing, how marketing plays a role with your business's growth today.

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

Yeah, so marketing is essential really for, I mean, a couple of reasons. Formost is we are, we are approaching physicians who have been trained in practice in a particular way for years. And it's always a hard conversion to say, hey, there's a new technology, there's a better way without crossing that line into what you're practicing really isn't the standard of care today.

You're really not delivering great service for your patients. And so being able to develop a message around, here are some tools to enhance what you're doing.

Here are some tools that will actually improve your workflow, your patient satisfaction, the Yelp scores you're going to get online that's going to drive traffic to your clinic, ways in which we can get at driving adoption without the sort of stick approach of the guidelines, say the gold standard is to run a molecular test. And yet you're not. And we know you're not, and you know you're not. But that's not productive, that's not a healthy conversation.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Yeah, and that's going to go over great. Haha.

@19:03 - Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

So, it's all, so it's all the different ways you come in and you say, hey, you know, there's, your confronted with a whole lot of challenges operating an outpatient clinic, whether it's primary care or care, or pediatrics.

There's, there's, there's tools we can help you with. And helps both in the diagnostics, it helps in the therapy, it helps in managing your workflow, it helps in managing your workflow and it will help ultimately in the business of your clinic because patients are coming in, they're walking into an urgent care because they want access, they want speed, they want affordability.

We can plug, we can play into that, we our value prop is the same, we can support what you're doing, but it's a careful message and our marketing team has developed our community and marketing communications team has developed talk tracks that go directly to providers.

that our sales personnel go out and walk through, that our clinical, our clinical team, we have a team of EHD folks in-house that will go and talk to folks, because most of them, many of them were schooled in how molecular diagnostics can work, and so they need help in unpacking a test result from HealthTrack, as opposed to a culture that maybe was that they were used to before.

So we really come at it from a whole variety of different ways, and I'll share one other example of the marketing of it, and we started, when we launched this initially, and this was actually before we moved to Louisville, the first place we threw down our flag was in Atlanta to try this next morning model.

We had a heavy concentration of customers in the Atlanta market, so we built a small lab in Atlanta, and each night we would run curriers from those offices to our lab and doing overnight and deliver a next morning result kind of our own our own little pilot project of how would this work?

Within several months the two largest urgent care urgent care chains in Georgia, You could drive down I-75 and you would see on their billboard featuring next morning PCR testing, Like they they then saw this was a this was a differentiator for us that could actually drive traffic And drive better patient service to them. So, there's lot of aspects of how the marketing piece has been really critical for us.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

That's fantastic. So, I'm going to unpack a couple different things there. So, the you you going on the B2C side first. You were talking about and I was wondering about that because we didn't talk about that last time in the prep call. The satisfaction scores will go up. That's kind of an intangible, you can look at some reviews, sort of spot check at see before overall satisfied. You can get some feedback from that. And there are different tools for reputation management. You can probably look for so that probably was, that alone is helpful, right?

Right where, especially in the areas like urgent care where reviews and online searches are so important.But the other thing that I thought was really interesting that you just said there is. I wonder how many of these chains have figured out how to promote that as a benefit to patients as a differentiating factor, and it sounds like they did, which was really fast. And it's great. The you know, patients, you know. You're right. The public has certainly learned a lot more about testing since Covid, and the idea that wait. I didn't think you could do that overnight. How did they do that? So it's you know you're now think abouthow far we've come from not not even knowing something exists to understanding the feature of it. Then to understand, wait, that's different. And then the benefit that's a lot. So that's happened very fast. So that's an exciting ride. Do you find other of your client? Institutions are doing that because it is compelling like if I had a choice between urgent cares. And I knew that was a difference, and I was feeling sick and like I said, I'm sure everybody has their story when it comes to this stuff right? LikeI could just really do remember being sick for months when you know, took finally coughed up pun intended script, and then the antibiotics worked. But we I waited for 2, 3 months before, and I get it. But like that's a long time. So, you know, are you seeing that as a trend is, do you feel like that's an important issue for the clinics that are acquiring or no? Is it just sort of an adjunct?

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)
No, I mean, I think these are the urgent care markets, obviously a huge, a huge area of growth in healthcare delivery. The you know folks are that that has spawned from virtually nonexistent to now there's something like 15,000 urgent care clinics around the country, and even urgent care is turning into kind of urgent care and primary care. I mean, folks want access. So that model is growing. But where do? Where? Where do? Where do folks find urgent care. Where do they decide when to go? They hop into and they have. They're not feeling well.

And they get on Google, get on Yahoo! And they go, who's near me and what are the ratings? It's a place I'm going to feel confident going to.

So they live and die by their Yelp ratings. You talked to any urgent care operator, and that NPS, that NPS or Yelp score is the only thing they really care about.

Yes, of course, there's a whole bunch of quality safety outcome data points that sort of drive the reimbursement on the insurance side.

But in terms of actually scaling their business, getting repeat customers, drawing more customers into their clinics, it is what does their online profile look like.

And what they don't want is I went to a doc and I just got a prescription, I ended up in the ER, or I went to a doc and I waited three weeks for, I waited three weeks for a lab result.

And I got a big bill from my laboratory. They want to have a positive, they want a, you know, want that end to end positive experience from their patient.

I went in, I got diagnosed quickly, I knew it was going to cost me, I got a result the next morning.

As a lab, as a reference, I was sent out lab for these clinics, 98% of the patient, probably 99 have no idea who HealthtrackRx is.

And that's okay, that's okay, that's okay with us. We have some marketing and we have some marketing in a lot of our clinic offices.

And the only time they ever tend to hear from us is when we send their claim through an insurance company and there's a patient responsibility.

And now they're getting a bill from HealthTrackRx. But what's helpful is, you know, we'll engage, and this is going a little bit beyond your question.

than is, that's oftentimes off of a bad experience for patients. You go in, you see a doctor, go into the ER, then months later, you're getting a whole bunch of bills from a variety of organizations and entities.

You had no idea touched your visit. So, what we do is when you go into an urgent care, we will really reach out to you, we'll text you, we'll send you an email saying, we're HealthTrackRx, we have your sample, we're gonna deliver a result to your physician the next morning. If you have insurance, you may never hear from us again.

Or once you have, if there's a patient responsibility, we may reach out, you may get a bill from us at some point.

So, that's sort of the extent to which we engage with the patient, but it's letting them know we have their sample.

Most probably just regard that, they just want to hear from the physician. But we want to sort of build some of that connected tissue because...the way healthcare works, we may have to be back in front of them in 30 days and say, you always have $75, you have a $15 copay, whatever it might be.

And we want them to associate that with the positive experience they had with getting a result that was actionable the next day.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Right. And on the B2B, we talked prior to the call, and it's interesting because, as you may know, we discussed, you know, our agency works with multi-location providers, and one of our largest is a multi-location, one of the big ones, for urgent care.

And so we know that business very, very well. And the, I think it made a lot of sense for you guys to go after to the big ones first, right?

You're all about scaling. You know, I joke about this and some of our webinars we've talked about, the idea of going around knocking on doc doors one by one is sort of a blow your brains out thought, right?

It's very, very hard to scale that, and it's harder and harder to scale that today. So going to where larger chains, you're solving two different problems from a strategy standpoint, it's more likely to give you a lot of business, it's easier to make the sale once than to make it a hundred times or a thousand times.

And also, you alluded to this a little bit, you know, getting the educational part done is important, right? You know, you're educating, you've got the backing of a large institution to go convince each doctor for one at a time, this is a good idea.

It becomes an operational sort of process thing, which makes sense. I think that's brilliant. I'm curious, without giving away anything too confidential, are you guys using, know, a field source to you guys to have a ground team that goes out there?

Are you using digital marketing? Like, how are you reaching out to new business? Again, nothing too confidential, but just broadly.

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

Yeah, no. We have a sort of a variety of tools, but the largest is we have a sales force about 150 people, and they are targeting, they are segmenting the market to target at different levels.

We have a certain group that is specifically focused on what you describe, is these large multi-state operators. You may know this from your work in the space.

It was a stunning statistic for me that 72% of the urgent care clinics in the country are single shop businesses.

So, it is unfortunately for us. There is the, you know, sort of the high class work of going to the sophisticated professional multi-site that have strong infrastructure to deliver a clinical message to engage operationally to ensure there are proper supplies in all locations and good feedback around what a patient outcome has been.

How can we provide better service? But the bulk of it still in healthcare in the U.S. is that door-to-door, single door swing, “Hey Doc.”

You know, during, you know, we know you probably see a lot of patients who have symptoms, you thought you're familiar with the technology and the service that we offer, etc.

We do a lot, we do a lot of... direct online marketing, online communications around ‘Hey, it’s respiratory season’, PCR testing is a differentiated tool for respiratory disease infection.

So we do some of them on social media directly to providers. do, you know, reaching consumers is tough for us.

And so most of that has conference, AAPM, Pediatric Medicine has conferences. And we join some of those, you know, some of the groups within that and try to mark and try to market and communicate through there.

We try to get some of our clinicians on speaking panels at these things and put out webinars around, you know, what are some of the new developments in infectious disease testing, whether it's

It's really about for us educating the market and once folks figure out, once folks learn a little bit about what we do, they see that it's not a fly by night or a new sort of a new gizmo that's trying to sell them on something, but that this is being widely adopted today.

Most of the major urgent care chains, tens of thousands of patients are seeing this every week, lots of providers, Infectious Disease Society of America, heavily engaged in how do we drive faster diagnostics.

This isn't kind of new, this isn't stuff that we're just trying on for size. This is a really, it's actually you're missing out, you're the one, you're sort of falling behind where your peers are going and we try to hit that through as many different channels as we can.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

So a couple of thoughts there, you know... Exactly you describe knocking on individual doors is hard labor intensive difficult You know wait for if you could wait in a lobby for an hour or two trying to reach the doctor that's in charge So there's that whole dynamic.

The other thing is that you alluded to that, you know, if you haven't been trained on this It's like you know primary care doctors and urgent care More specifically like it's an impossible job.

You're supposed to know everything about everything And people or any group of humans are habitual everybody's you know doctors too So if they've got a habit it's hard to break it and so already even think about it, right?

It's just the way you do things. So I think that's an interesting challenge Um a couple more questions, uh, first of all just curious.

It's funny. We're just talking about the Urgent Care Association So we're participating in this this year. just literally on the call before this.

It's all just running with me We're talking about our conference schedules. So maybe I'll see you in Dallas this year. I'm assuming you'll be there .

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

We will be, we will. We will be in Dallas, and then they have. You know, they have the Northeast Regional Urgent Care Association, NERUCA. They got NERUCA. I mean, it's a lot that they do.It is really hard to practice medicine these days. It is hard for these providers, they're reimbursement is being hit. Their hours are getting longer. pressures on them are really difficult. And the second band to keep up with every new technology that's coming down the road and be able to distill from which ones are going to be impactful and which ones are not.

That's a hard, that's hard. And so I, you know, my sort of tongue and cheek comments before earlier around, you know, practicing the gold standard of medicine today.

That's not a knock on these guys. That's, you know, that's our opportunity to go and educate them because they, and to make it, and to do so effectively because they have every pharma company, every device company, every diagnostic company is knocking on their door with something new an d novel, saying, Hey, I got a better mouse trap for you.

Our challenge is to distinguish ourselves from that group and deliver a message that they can connect to and go, okay, I'm willing to learn, I'm willing to listen.

But that's a hard first gate to get through when you're dealing with someone who's probably overworked as patients sitting in the waiting room, and I'm one of our sales reps is probably the last person I want to talk to.

So we've got to be really effective at delivering a message right out of the gate, connecting with them in a couple of different ways, so they'll take that initial meeting.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

So fun fact, we have a webinar about digital marketing to HCPs and other doctors or doctors and HCPs, and the first slide is essentially reaching doctors as hard, and they're protected by the best keykeepers on the planet, everyone wants a piece them, not just you guys, but the pharmaceuticals, other practices, real estate sales people, insurance sales people, jewelry sales.

Every salesperson on the planet, you know, then you've got billing issues and, you know, and I was talking to interviewed a leading oncologist recently who said, you know, one minute I've just told somebody they were dying, the next minute I'm worried about their MRI, now you pop in. It's really difficult, right, to be able to wade though that clutter. And so, and you got, you alluded to it, we could talk about this more another day.

So we often talk about using digital marketing as air war to help support the ground troops so that they're not just hearing first time, which can be a really good combination, but you need those ground trips because the air won’t work by itself.

But if you have the ground troops, the air war paid social, programmatic, you know, all those things can really help build that.

And these issues, by the way, Martin, every one of our, we work in probably about two thirds B2C, a third B2B, and every single B2B, these are the issues we talk about all the time, you know, how do I've got something great? How do I have my doctors know about this? And, you know, how do I get them to think about this?

It's a, it's a really common thing. Two last questions. One that you alluded to earlier, another thing that we do a lot of internal trainings and we're always getting new people coming in.

And so I was just working through, we call it Healthcare Success University, talking about value-based care and ACO and capitation and all these things where it's not really key for service, it's more about keeping people healthy.

And so you kind of alluded to that, the overall cost savings. And I can see how, well, if you get an infection early, don't end up in the hospital overall, it's going to be a pretty good thing.

So, do you guys get, are you feeling the love from health plans or anybody else? Because there's that side of the story too.

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

I'm not sure anyone feels a lot of love from health plans, but...

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Good answer, good answer.

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

But, you know, our whole business is around how do we reduce the cost of this service? Getting good care shouldn't be a $500, it shouldn't be a $500 episode, whether it's for a healthcare plan or whether it's for an individual.

This should be... a $50, $150 test period. An at scale we can continue to drive the costs down.

So, you know, we both show the benefits, the economic benefits of early intervention. And part of that is being able to properly educate clinicians on when to utilize a test like this.

Not every patient needs to send out molecular tests. And if you're using this as a screening test, screening tool, when you have other tests available in the office, strep or flu, then you're kind of going to lose that economic advantage or benefit of send out.

So, the onus is on us to really drive good education and tools to help clinicians know when to send it out, to deliver it at a, know, a cost-effective way.

We go into health plans and say, I want to be your low-cost provider for send out disease infectious disease testing.

I will take, well, whatever you're paying somebody else, I will take a dollar less than that. Because we want you to view us as someone who's actually trying to help solve the broader problem, not trying to be, you know, yet another sort of parasite on the system of where do I get my piece of this?

And that's, you know, we have had really good clinical conversations and aired research conversations and outcomes with health plans because they will say, we'll go at risk.

We actually think that our product, if properly used, will drive down your cost and we will take risks on that.

So we will give it to you for less than, well, less than cost as health plan. In exchange for the value-based care operators, in exchange for some contribution when we demonstrate the value.

Um, and that's been a, that's, that's been pretty unique in diagnostics that has come up in a lot of the different other areas of healthcare, but they tend to be pretty surprised when the diagnostics, particularly a reference lab comes in with that conversation, but it's absolutely critical.

I mean, we have, we, we have got to, if we're not viewed favorably by health plans as being accretive to what they're trying to do. They can be a a real barrier to growth., I'll share one stat that's been really helpful for us to scale, which is 80% of time a patient with insurance gets a sample with us, they do not get a bill from their insurance provider because it is a fully covered service. And that kind of speaks to our ability to both engage clinically with the value of the service we're offering and also keep the costs at a point, keep the costs low enough that the health plans are willing to pay for.

for it. And that's been sort of the validation of that messaging to the health plans and that partnership with the health plans is, you know, as you know, for in many areas of health care, you have a lot of, you have a lot of different customers, but you know, say B2C, who is our, who is our customer?

We got a, we got a patient, we have a clinic, but the person who actually pays us is sitting in Minnesota that United Healthcare or, you know, in, you know, in Louisville at Humana or somewhere else, that's who pays our bills.

And we have to be demonstrating to them every day that we are driving, we're delivering a quality product that's changing behavior, that's changing outcomes and that our cost is not, you know, that our cost is reasonable.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

That's great. All right, so last question, know, forward looking, what's next for you guys?

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

I'm gonna, you know, at the moment we are, well, today we are really heads down and growing within our base.

You know, today, we have what I think of as a big operation. We have hit only a small number of physicians today.

We probably have 10 to 15% of the urgent care market. There's really no one else delivering this kind of this service today out there.

So we really, it's kind of guerilla tactics to go out to the Urgent Care Association Conference, identify those large groups we're not working with today, and continue to scale so that this does become the standard of care. Today, in an academic or medical journal, we'll say rapid molecular diagnostics is a standard of care, but you walk into two-thirds of your Urgent Care or health clinics today and not get that.

So, it's really a push to drive adoption, smart, and through education, so, smart adoption. The other interesting thing we're doing is UPS.

UPS in an effort to drive their healthcare, I don’t know if you saw this week in the paper or maybe it was, I think was earlier this week, CEO of UPS talked about weaning off of Amazon and focusing more on healthcare.

And one of the elements of that is they've actually built a lab campus in Louisville adjacent to the airport as part of their broader facility.

So we are the flagship tenants of that what they call lab port and that facility will open in May of this year and we will move all of our operations to the lab port facility and sort of further build our connective tissue with UPS and for us what that means is obviously UPS has a footprint not only in the US but they have planes flying into Louisville from almost every country in the world every night.

They also have somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 UPS stores or facilities and drop-off locations around the country. And so, through that partnership, there are lots of other ways in which we can reach patients, whether that's directly to the patient or whether those are patients that are outside the U.S.

So a lot of kind of interesting things in the pipeline as we build a sort of deeper relationship with UPS.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Fantastic. Very exciting. I'm glad we spent some time together today. It's funny, because I usually send my team to the conferences.

I may come to Dallas just to say hi to you. Get cup coffee with a glass of water with you or something.

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

I'm really excited. That would be great. hosting a welcome dinner for a lot of folks on the first night, 30s.

Dallas has been our home base for a long time. So the UCA conference has been in Las Vegas the last four or five years, just for a year somewhere else is in our backyard in Dallas. So I'd love to have you.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Yeah, it's fun. It's the, yeah, I just, this is so bizarre that we're just talking about this. So great, Martin. Enjoy talk to you. Hope to see you in the near future, face to face. That would be fun. Great job. That was a really compelling interview. Thank you.

Martin Price (HealthTrackRx)

Well, stay in touch. Thanks for the time. Enjoy talking to you. All right, take care.