The Disruptor Podcast
"The Disruptor Series," your blueprint for groundbreaking innovation, started as a periodic segment of the Apex Podcast. This is not your standard conversation around Design Thinking or Product Market Fit—this is the series that dares to go beyond conventional wisdom, confronting the status quo and exposing the raw power of disruptive thinking.
Our journey begins with intensely provocative dialogues that set the stage for the unexpected. With a focus on Experience Disruptors, Product Market Fit, and a host of other captivating topics, we bring you face-to-face with the ideas that are flipping the script on traditional buying and selling experiences.
But we don't stop at ideas; we dive into their real-world applications. "The Disruptor" brings you an unfiltered look into the lives and minds of those who are either being disrupted, creating disruption, or strategically navigating through disruption.
Our guests range from industry veterans to daring newcomers, all willing to share their experiences in shifting the paradigms that define their stakeholders' experiences.
If you're tired of business as usual and eager to question the preconceived notions that hold back innovation, "The Disruptor Series" is your ticket to a transformative journey. Tune in, disrupt yourself, and become an agent of change in an ever-evolving landscape.
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The Disruptor Podcast
Disrupting the Status Quo and Overcoming Healthcare Supply Chain Challenges
In this episode of The Disruptor Podcast, host John Kundtz interviews Luká Yancopoulos, CEO and founder of Grapevine, a groundbreaking startup revolutionizing the healthcare supply chain landscape.
They explore the pressing challenges and inefficiencies plaguing the healthcare sector, including high costs, tech lags, and dependency on single suppliers.
Luká shares insights on the benefits of digital transformation in healthcare procurement and management and outlines the common pitfalls organizations face in this journey.
Episode Highlights:
- Luká shares his journey from studying renewable energy to tackling healthcare supply chain issues during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The shocking reality of outdated systems used by major healthcare suppliers and the ripple effects on patient care.
- How digital transformation in healthcare supply chains can lead to significant cost savings - up to 60% on medical supplies and drugs.
- The potential to reduce patient costs by 25% through efficient supply chain management.
- Common pitfalls organizations face when addressing critical issues in the healthcare supply chain.
- The importance of user experience in successful technology adoption.
Key Insights:
- Improved supply chain management could potentially save the healthcare industry $350 billion in the next five years.
- Successful digital transformation requires benefiting all stakeholders, from procurement personnel to clinicians.
- Start with improving the shopping experience before changing suppliers or products.
- The concept of "11:59" - preserving what works while coaxing stakeholders into beneficial changes.
- Implementing change in small, digestible increments is crucial for successful adoption.
Deep Dive Opportunities:
Ready to revolutionize your healthcare supply chain and potentially save millions?
To learn more about Grapevine and how it can benefit your organization, visit www.go-grapevine.com. Join for free.
Connect directly with Luká Yancopoulos by email: luka@go-grapevine.com
Comments or Questions? Send us a text
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disrupting the status quo and overcoming healthcare supply chain challenges. Hi everybody, I'm your host, john Kunz, and welcome to another edition of the Disruptor Podcast. For those that are new to our show, the Disruptor Series is your blueprint for groundbreaking innovation. We started the podcast back in December of 2022 as a periodic segment of the Apex podcast. Our vision was to go beyond conventional wisdom by confronting the status quo and exposing the raw power of disruptive thinking. Today, we will talk to a visionary entrepreneur who is the driving force behind Grapevine, a groundbreaking startup transforming the healthcare supply chain landscape. Our guests will share valuable advice for those attempting to address critical issues in healthcare supply chain, such as skyrocketing healthcare costs, tech lag, single supplier dependence, backorder frustration and manual inventory management. In addition, we'll talk about some of the pitfalls and the mistakes many organizations can make before they even get started. I'd like to welcome to the show Luca, ceo and founder of Grapevine. Luca, how you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm doing pretty great, John. Thanks for having me on. I'm very excited to pick your mind.
Speaker 1:This should be some fun. A little background on my end. I used to manage the healthcare business for IBM in Northeast Ohio, and amongst them were a number of large healthcare organizations. We did a supply chain project probably 10 years, maybe 20 years ago by now and I tell you what it was eye-opening, and so I think what you're trying to do will probably be very relevant. Before we get started, just give me a little bit about your background, your education, your experiences, sort of how did you get from wherever you started to this grapevine and start anywhere you want? Sure.
Speaker 2:I always thought of myself as a creative since I was a little kid, but I hope to apply my creative skills and entrepreneurial dreams to the world of renewable energy, bioengineering, environmental science. When COVID hit, my reaction to COVID was not just fear for myself or fear for what the world might become, but more importantly to me at the time was a fear I had for my parents' well-being. My parents are both in the medical space they're both medical providers. My dad's a doctor, my mom's a nurse practitioner and I was scared about the exposure they were facing due to supply chain disruption, and I wasn't one who had any experience in supply chains, let alone healthcare supply chains, at the time. But that was my reason for getting involved.
Speaker 1:Wow, fascinating. We also sometimes get into these businesses serendipitously, by mistake. As I mentioned earlier, I spent some time doing a healthcare supply chain implementation consulting project a while ago and I learned a lot about the healthcare supply chain. I'm sure it's changed, but knowing healthcare maybe hasn't changed that much. What are some of the significant benefits that you started to see as you dove into the healthcare supply chain, and what would leaders who are trying to embrace this digital overhaul of the supply chain potentially see?
Speaker 2:As we started getting involved in the healthcare supply chain space, I was personally shocked by the systems being used in doctor's offices to procure medical supplies from some of the biggest companies in the United States companies like McKesson or Cardinal Health or AmerisourceBurgeon, doing hundreds of billions of dollars of sales revenue each year. Right, and what felt like ancient system before my time systems. It blew my mind. I think of supply chains like Amazon and a customer experience where you order something, it comes the next day. Right, I can order from anyone in the world, right From the palm of my hand and in my iPhone, and then you look at the systems that are being used the hundreds, if not thousands, of employees in a hospital that are managing what's called procurement right Everything from negotiating contracts to managing inventory, to using those inventory depletions to send out orders and then distribute their products and check the products throughout the hospital. It was a crazy different system and something that I didn't expect. I couldn't have imagined until we got involved. Part of that's a B2B sort of world and different needs, but part of it's just a very outdated technology and information systems that haven't changed much, and I think one of the big reasons they haven't changed much is that doctors, medical practices. Their focus is on patient care and providing the highest quality of patient care. That's where their expertise is. It's where their training is, and even a lot of the leadership in larger medical practices have a clinical background right being a doctor, being a nurse that's worked their way up and became a leader. They aren't the types of people that have an expertise in supply chain. That's not their background. So you got these systems that are sort of tangential to the priorities of a medical practice or falling to the wayside for decades and they work for people's needs for the last 25, 30 years. So if it works, don't fix it. Not worth shaking things up, potentially causing major problems that could lead to loss of patient life or disrupting patient care.
Speaker 2:So I think that's a lot of healthcare leadership's mentality going into the COVID disruption event. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And it ain't broke, so we're good. But then you get an event like COVID, a supply chain disruption event at the scale that we'd never seen really in my lifetime, and people's perspectives change. System weaknesses are brought to light and turn into entire system failures. A huge new wave of interest in both engineering and inventing solutions to these problems comes out from people like me, but also a motivation to adopt those changes. From healthcare, leadership is born. That's where my company, grapevine, really found its spot and its opportunity in a move crisis as an opportunity to respond and make things better for future.
Speaker 1:So if an organization goes forward and does a digital overhaul of their supply chain, what kind of benefits might they directly see?
Speaker 2:By the numbers. We've had oncology institutes with hundreds of locations to small practices saving over 60% on their budget for medical supplies and drugs. For some larger hospitals that's literally billions of dollars, right, Billions of dollars. That is often either reinvested into direct patient care improvements right, they have more budget to improve the quality of care, experiment and research, new clinical trials and advance the quality of patient care directly, or it's a cost that can be cut and passed forward right, that cut, or those savings can be passed forward directly to the patient.
Speaker 2:We've had medical practices that are able to cut their patient costs by close to 25% because they're saving so much money. They maintain their same profit margin and their goal is to deliver the highest quality service at the best price to their customers their customers being patients and they're given now an opportunity to lower their costs. So at Grapevine we're talking about saving the entire healthcare industry more than 50% in the next five years. So right now in the US we're spending almost $700 billion on medical supplies. We believe we can cut that to $350 billion, hopefully cut down the cost of patient care for everyone. I think we are everyone's solution, not directly, but indirectly. I think we can cut down the average cost of medical bill that I receive as a random Joe walking into an urgent care clinic. I think that we can cut our costs by about 25% by cutting these supply costs by more than 50%.
Speaker 1:Wow, so we're really talking real money. A billion here, a billionaire starts to add up right, it's huge, we're only talking real money. A billion here, a billion there, it all starts to add up right. It's huge, yeah. So that's sort of the incentive. Now. I've worked on a lot of digital transformation projects and talked to a lot of people in this space, but there's always a couple of mistakes or pitfalls. What common mistakes or pitfalls might organizations make when attempting to address these critical issues in the healthcare supply chain?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that, looking at it by the numbers, creating a financial incentive for savings is not enough. It is the tip of the iceberg in implementing a real solution. There is a real way to save a huge amount of money for any medical practice, but how do we actually seamlessly fold that into the day-to-day practices of real people clinicians, doctors, the people that sit behind a screen and place orders on four different websites? How do we bring that all together and make things not just easy for the CFO but for every single person involved in supply chain, from the person who opens the cabinet to use a syringe with a patient to the procurement personnel placing these orders? I think that most disruptors make right. They create change, they create something of value, but they don't account for all of the people that are going to need to sort of buy in or engage with that innovation. They leave some people complaining right. They're balancing a cost against the benefit as opposed to just giving everyone benefits.
Speaker 2:And at GreatBuy we are trying to give everyone benefits, and by that I mean we've created an entire sort of procurement solution right that allows medical practices, current personnel, office managers to link their various suppliers. So maybe they work with five contracted suppliers, maybe 10, bring all those shopping experiences under one screen where you can click and buy from any of the suppliers you're choosing. As you shop, your usual suppliers on their contracted prices will redirect you to new sources, not just your own sources, but new suppliers that you could sort of unlock manufacturers, cut out the middleman and work directly with the manufacturer. Where you can save 20% here, save 20% there. So the shopping experience itself is equally important to the savings that are received. It needs to be easier to shop, while it's more cost effective to shop using grapevine. That's really only the beginning of what we're trying to do, beyond just the shopping experience.
Speaker 2:We believe there's a day in the near future where nobody at a medical practice will need to place an order or shop online at all.
Speaker 2:They don't even need to look at a screen. They simply pull something out of their cabinet, right, and once those cabinets get low, orders will be immediately shot out to any of their linked suppliers or the best of their linked suppliers in an instant right, creating a harmonious relationship between the supply cabinet all the way through to the thousands of different sources from which you can buy or restock that supply cabinet, making the best choice and restocking for your needs and for your patients, so you're always prepared. The idea of not including everyone or benefiting everyone that touches a solution or an innovation or a piece of technology is an often shortcoming right, and it's not just in healthcare or software, it's across the board. If you are trying to pitch your family on a brand new type of car, it better be comfortable for the kids, it better have a good safety rating. It better check all the boxes. It can't just look cool, even if that's your priority.
Speaker 1:No, you're spot on. In my opinion, you can have a great value prop, but if you don't take into account the user experience, especially on high-end practitioners like doctors and nurses and other healthcare providers, they're just not going to do it. Their time is very valuable and if they don't have a good experience, it's going to fail. I see this all the time. The other thing I see we're all used to our shopping experience today, right? So it's with the Amazon experience that we want. The reason we do that is because of the experience. We may not even save money sometimes, but we use those services because we know they have what we need and we get what we want fast. We have a great experience. So I think that's great advice. A little more advice from you would be what would someone considering embarking on a full scale digital transformation that can bring long-term efficiency and resilience to the healthcare supply chain? How would they start? What would they do?
Speaker 2:Right, if we're talking about a digital transformation, supply chain is a great area to start in. Why? Because it's not the core focus of a business. It's not putting directly your patients at risk or the day-to-day operations of all of your clinicians, right your doctors and nurses at risk. It's something that feeds into those systems but isn't going to, you know, affect the loudest voices in the room and the most important people. So healthcare supply chain is a great place to start with. A digital transformation, as far as how do you start on that journey, is the easiest thing to change.
Speaker 2:There are people whose day is based around shopping. They call them either office managers or German personnel, and these people are going to spend hours bopping around different websites trying to make sure that the price on this website is better than that website. Don't change the products, don't change the sources from which you buy, but make that shopping experience for the people that are stuck shopping. Anyway, make that simpler. Bring together those suppliers into a single place so people don't need to compare by logging in and logging out and opening up different windows, but they get exactly what they usually buy now on one screen and the system, being great, compares those things for you right. When something's on backwater from your usual supplier, we redirect you to a new source right With the click of a button as you add to cart, we're swapping in the thing that makes more sense for your preferences. In case I think changing how you shop is a great first step, I would fold in changing from whom you shop or changing up your suppliers.
Speaker 2:I don't think most people realize this, but of those hundreds of billions of dollars of medical supply being purchased in the United States, they're running through mostly distributors Medline, henry Schein, mckesson, cargill. Most of their catalog is coming from third-party manufacturers, like brands that people know, like Becton, dickinson, bd, the list goes on and on. Pfizer, right Drugs, whatever it may be. They're not the only people with these drugs or these medical devices right. You can actually get the same exact product from any one of them. So consider different options. We talk about this as if it's like a kayak or an Expedia of medical supplies. Bring those options together so you can see them all in one place. Look at the different sources from which you can buy the same exact supplies. Again, the experience for the clinician isn't going to change. They're getting the same product, the same syringe with the same little tip cap they're going to inject into the patient. We haven't changed anything for clinicians or patient care yet, but we're already able to avoid backwaters, save the procurement people a lot of time and cut costs by shifting spend to more sensible suppliers.
Speaker 2:Finally, the last step of implementing major changes in the supply chain would be looking at brand substitutes. Right, you might buy the Ferrari of syringes or needle. Do you need the Ferrari of syringes or needle for this particular office, for this type of patient care? Maybe not Consider different FDA approved substitutes to the same exact item, and that might be a clinical change. Now you might have a doctor saying wait a minute, how do I unscrew this thing or how do I change this in, and that has an actual burden, sort of all the way through the company. Which is why I'd say that's a sort of last step and a step that most of our customers don't even end up taking, because they're saving 30, 40, 50% without even changing the products they buy. It's just from where they buy and how they buy.
Speaker 1:Great advice. It seems to make a lot of sense. Well, I want to start wrapping this up. One of the last things I usually ask people is if there's anything I should have asked you, but I didn't, or something else additionally you'd like to share you, but I didn't? Or something else additionally you'd like to share.
Speaker 2:I think that when you're trying to disrupt an industry or create change in a space, it's important to meet the customer where they're at. It's something that I didn't really understand the meaning of, but the way that me and my team now understand it is a concept called 1159. Everyone's comfortable with where they're at today. If I ask you where you're sitting today, john, you'll say oh, I'm in my office chair. You know, I got this on the wall. You know exactly where you are and people are comfortable knowing where they are.
Speaker 2:But everyone has a bit of hesitation about change, the unknown. What's coming. Will the things I'm doing now be relevant to my future? Am I spending my time and energy in the right ways? Change can be scary. So understanding what people appreciate about their present, about the moment they're in right now, understanding what they wish could be different, preserving what they appreciate about their present and then coaxing them into a tomorrow that has the change they want while respecting the changes they don't want, that's a really important thing for creating change. You can't disrupt everything at once. No one wants that. No one wants a whole new world with a snap of the fingers. But if you play your cards right and you know your customer well enough to know what they like, about what they do and what they don't, then you can bring them to that moment that we call 1159 pm, the edge of today.
Speaker 1:Then you can bring them to that moment that we call 11 59 pm, the edge of today and help them step through into tomorrow. The edge of today, yeah, in the start of tomorrow. That's great, because that's actually something I preach a lot, uh, in my work is you got to empathize with the personas that are involved in your world and if you do that, if you really understand what they do and how they feel, what they say, you can dress them in small, bite-sized pieces right. Most digital transformations, or any transformations, fail when they try to do the big bang.
Speaker 1:People are hesitant to change we all are but if I take it in small increments and I make sure I'm walking in those people's shoes, then there's going to be buy-in and they're going to see value more quickly. The days of us implementing systems that took 18 to 20 months are over. Got to be able to do something quickly, show small incremental change and then pivot. Continue to do what's working well, but pivot on the stuff that needs to be changed or improved, because a lot of times you just don't know what you don't know.
Speaker 2:Exactly and the whole idea of like. I would never say to my customer we're going to overhaul anything. I like to say you're not going to notice a single change, but you're going to save a lot of money. Or you're not going to notice a single change for the doctors, the nurses, but this person's day is going to get easier. Just one person, one job title, one little gap and piece by piece you can create the overhaul. But making it into small, digestible chunks that people can really chew, swallow and digest is important.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Well, let's wrap it up. I want to thank you, luca, for a great interview. Before we ask one more question how can people learn more about you, your company Grapevine? Where do they go?
Speaker 2:Our platform is totally free to use. If you're interested in checking it out, you could do so at go-grapevinecom that's go like hyphen symbol, grapevinecom and if you sign up, you'll hear from us shortly and start saving a ton of money. If you need to reach out to me directly, you could shoot me an email. My email is luka L-U-K-A at the same website.
Speaker 1:I know you're on LinkedIn, so we'll include your LinkedIn profile if people want to reach out to you that way as well. So I got one last question. You really already alluded to it, but we'll summarize it as we wrap up. Why is Grapevine an excellent option for organizations looking to save on medical supply?
Speaker 2:costs. I think exactly like you put it, John. We'll summarize here. It shouldn't cost money to save money. It does not cost money to start using Grapevine. You don't have to pay $10,000, $50,000 to implement a solution that now you're stuck with some cost that maybe we just need to get it across the finish line. You're 20 months deep and you're still waiting to see the benefit. There's no cost associated with it. There's very minimal change.
Speaker 2:If you just want your shoppers to save money, that can be the change we start with. Then nothing else happens other than one person's day is better and you're getting time back. If you want to take all the different steps going through this process, it's a few weeks of implementation to make a dozen changes that'll drive up to 60% savings on your medical supply spend. To me, it's not just a great choice or an option. I consider it an obligation as a patient, as a child of two healthcare workers, it's an obligation to lower the costs of healthcare where we can. Healthcare costs are crazy high in this country. A few small changes can be the difference between people getting treatment they need and people being left out to dry. We're excited to be part of that future.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much, luca, for sharing your visionary, groundbreaking startup that's trying to transform the healthcare supply chain. I'm John Kuntz. Thanks for listening to this edition of the Disruptor Podcast. Don't forget to check out Grapevine's website and connect with Luca via email or LinkedIn. We'll put those in the show notes, and so here's just a few final points to remember. If you want to save 50% on your medical supply costs, reduce order times by 90% and seamlessly work with multiple vendors, you don't have to do it by yourself. You've got a partner like Grapevine that can help you. Have a great day all, and thanks for listening.
