Improving Health System Access and Capacity w/ DexCare CEO Derek Streat

Health systems are constantly struggling with capacity constraints.

But what if they already had all the capacity they needed and just needed to tap into it?

In this episode of HealthBiz Briefs, Derek Streat, Co-Founder and CEO of DexCare, shares how health leaders can unlock hidden capacity by using data from patients, providers, and health systems to deliver care more efficiently.

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at https://betterhelp.com/caretalk and get on your way to being your best self.

As a BetterHelp affiliate, we may receive compensation from BetterHelp if you purchase products or services through the links provided.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT CARETALK
CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT DEREK STREAT
Derek Streat is the Founder, CEO, and Chairman of DexCare, a venture-backed Platform-as-a-Service company that intelligently orchestrates health system capacity and digital demand across all care lines. A seasoned healthcare technology entrepreneur, Derek has co-founded and led six venture-backed companies, including C-SATS (acquired by Johnson & Johnson), where he later served as Vice President of Digital Solutions. In that role, he transformed surgeon training into a digital program that improved patient outcomes and provider efficiency worldwide. Prior to commercializing DexCare as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Providence, Derek co-founded and served on the boards of national healthcare data transparency organizations like PEDSnet and IROC, advancing efforts to improve patient care through data sharing.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT DEXCARE
DexCare is a leading care orchestration platform that simplifies digital care logistics, enabling healthcare systems to manage care delivery more efficiently. By unifying complex datasets, DexCare enhances patient access, optimizes resource utilization, and forecasts demand to reduce operational costs. Since its spin-out from Providence in 2021, DexCare has partnered with top U.S. health systems, reaching over 57 million patients and significantly boosting new patient bookings and downstream revenue. Supported by $146 million in funding, including a $75 million Series C investment led by ICONIQ Growth, DexCare continues to transform healthcare access through innovative solutions like digital discovery, care navigation, and smart scheduling.

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Transcript

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Health systems always seem to be straining against capacity constraints with no end in sight. But what if they actually have all the capacity they need and they just have to figure out how to tap it? For some people, wrapping up in a blanket with a mug of hot chocolate or luxuriating in a hot tub with their family is the best way to spend the month of December. But for others, it's making a list for Santa Claus or dreaming up New Year's predictions. Now, speaking of comfort, therapy is a great way to bring yourself peace that never goes away, even when the season changes. While BetterHelp offers entirely online therapy, it's designed to be convenient, flexible, and tailored to fit your schedule. You just fill out a brief questionnaire and get matched with a licensed therapist and you can switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. It's really helpful for learning positive coping skills and how to set boundaries and it empowers you to be the very best version of yourself. So whether you're dealing with stress, anxiety, or just seeking personal growth, BetterHelp connects you with a licensed therapist who can support you on your mental health journey. Make it a great season with BetterHelp. and visit betterhelp.com slash caretalk to get 10 % off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P, dot com slash caretalk. Welcome to Health Biz Briefs. I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group here with Derek Street, co-founder and CEO of DexCare, a platform that orchestrates capacity and demand for health systems. Welcome, Derek. Thanks for having me, David. What is... a simple action that health system leaders can take immediately if they want to start unlocking untapped capacity? The first thing they can do is they can understand the basic underlying data of their patients, providers, and their goals of the health system. And that can go very deep, but there are some simple things you could do. With patients, you can understand what they're searching for on your website. You can understand the case history and the EMRs. These things are increasingly gettable through using existing technologies. For providers, they can understand things like real-time availability, licensure, again, pretty basic things that can have a dramatic impact on how you match and route patients. And then for your health system, just understanding what your goals are and your objectives are for various clinics and provider groups that you have are a handful of data that, when put together, can actually help you understand how you can better match and route patients to those resources in a way that frees up capacity. So virtual care is something that's been talked about since the dawn of the internet moved increased very slowly until the pandemic when it really shot up and now it's kind of settled back down. If we look ahead three or five years how would you describe the role of virtual care in health systems at that point? I think it'll be a key element of what I call sort of a virtual a kind of care stack that will go across modalities. So. We've got about 20 % of care that's sort of synchronous virtual care today, sometimes bigger in certain specialty areas than others, but that 20 % is 10X what it was pre-pandemic. That's pretty healthy. You still got though a lot of people that need to go in and see somebody physically. And then you've got a lot of things in between, whether it's asynchronous care, AI driven care, self care, things like that. They all can open up capacity. It's another way you can open up capacity to your earlier question as well. So I think if you think broadly about digitally enabled care, I think that will increase over time as a share. I synchronous virtual is probably where it's going to be. But what matters more is that there are just more care options and modalities that are relevant for people and matched to the right stage in their care journey in order to get the maximum amount of capacity you can out of the system. Yeah, we talked earlier about you're going to theme that you followed a through line in terms of taking data, applying compute power, then generating insights. And if there's people on the other side that are willing to pay for that, then you've got a business. So you've got some things that you sort of set out, but you really never know how it's going to go until you see people actually using whatever you've created. It's sometimes a little bit different. So I'm wondering if you could share maybe the most surprising result you've seen from a health system that's used Dextcare. Yeah, so I will say that the most surprising result, and this is going to be good for both patients and for business, is that it's work we did. So we've done this with a lot of health systems, but one in Indiana in particular, CHN. We've worked with them to help them make their care more discoverable and match capacity up to care. Started in a low acuity kind of setting, so primary care, urgent care, et cetera. And we still do that work. What we found though is that a fairly large percentage of people that were coming in through these clinics or through these experiences that were powering for them needed additional follow on care. And Indiana as a state, as you may imagine, you get kind of outside of Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, you've got a lot of rural counties, of care deserts. And so there's a lot of care, preventative care, surveillance care that should be happening that's not. And we found that About half the people that should be getting breast colon or lung cancer screenings are actually getting them, that people coming into those low-acuity clinics, about 42 % of the contribution margins associated with those clinics are actually going to oncology referrals and things like that. it kind of makes sense, common sense when you think about it, that these low-acuity entry points can actually be ways to provide surveillance that actually helps people live healthier lives by getting on top of things before it becomes too late. Makes sense, you know, in retrospect that, but it was just kind of remarkable to see that, wow, this person came in for a cough, but actually it turned out to identify something that was more important to get on earlier. And thank God, because it is the real thing that you're talking about at the end of the day. And it turns out that it's pretty good for business as well, because taking care of somebody, you know, in these higher acuity cares tends to be better business than low acuity as well. So everybody wins. That's a great insight. Well, that's it for the latest Health Biz Brief. If you like what you hear, check out my Health Biz Podcast for a full-length interview with Derek about his life and career. Derek Street, co-founder and CEO of DexCare, thanks for joining me today on Health Biz Briefs. Thanks, David.