Transforming Physician Recruitment with AI and Data - Dr. Jason Reminick, CEO & Founder, Thalamus

[00:00:01] This podcast is produced by Outcomes Rocket, your healthcare exclusive digital marketing agency. Outcomes Rocket exists to help healthcare organizations like yours to maximize their impact and accelerate growth. Visit outcomesrocket.com or text us at 312-224-9945.

[00:00:25] Hey everyone, welcome back to the Beat Podcast recorded live at Vive here in Nashville, Tennessee. Today I have the privilege of hosting Dr. Jason Reminick. He is the CEO and founder of Thalamus.

[00:00:51] He is really an incredible person focused on the premier interview management software specifically designed for application, graduate medical education training programs throughout the US. I'm excited to really talk about the exposure they've had now with over 8000 residency and fellowship programs nationally at over 800 institutions. Jason, welcome to the podcast. Saul, thanks for having me. Good to be here. It's such a pleasure. So look, let's kick things off. What is Thalamus and how did it get started?

[00:01:21] Sure. So I am a physician by training. I went to residency in pediatrics and anesthesiology when I was applying from medical school to residency. So you got stuck in New York City during Hurricane Sandy and all my interviews were canceled. And that was kind of the catalyst for the creation of Thalamus. My co-founder is a residency program director. And so we've built a software as a service that we sell to hospitals, be the individual programs like pediatrics and internal medicine are now more likely entire hospital systems at the enterprise level.

[00:01:49] It's a software that integrates with the application service, the electronic residency application service. The majority of hospitals use integrates that data. The applicants are able to then be invited to interview and they're able to sign up in real time, kind of like open table. But instead of booking a restaurant, they're booking a residency interview back on the hospital side. It's a process specific applicant tracking system that allows them to score candidates, write notes and everything they need to do to hire everyone through a process called the match. With COVID, we extended the platform to accommodate virtual interviewing.

[00:02:16] We have AI tools that aggregate data from applications and a data analytics platform that measures all of this data. And so this is kind of where we got started at Thalamus. Kind of why I wanted to start it was seeing too many doctors burn out through this process, which is very, very intensive to get into residency training. And solving the challenges of recruiting physicians beyond training. And that's kind of the next phase of where we're headed. That's fantastic. Yeah.

[00:02:43] And so you were at this fateful moment where all your interviews canceled and you're like, it gave you a moment to think. For sure. Right. World stops. Oh man. Yeah. It was cathartic in a lot of ways. And I still remember that like it was yesterday, but that was 11 years ago. So wild, man. Yeah. Wild. Well, thanks for sharing that story. For sure. And so talk to us about how the organization's helping to drive change in healthcare delivery. Yeah. And this is one of the main reasons we came to VIBE this year. It's our first time at the conference.

[00:03:13] We had always been in a very niche market in graduate medical education for residency and fellowship programs. But we see healthcare systems experiencing challenges now at that transition from training to practice or the early career physicians, their first job, their second job. And hospitals are struggling in particular with sourcing and retention of physicians, including those physicians that are in their residency and fellowship programs. And so physician recruitment is becoming more and more expensive. The average hospital spends $250,000 in direct costs recruiting a doctor.

[00:03:43] It can take them six months on average to fill that role. In those six months, they lose $2 million in clinical revenue. And on average, they do about 130 physician searches a year. So the average hospital or health system is spending a quarter of a billion dollars per year to hire their doctors. And there's not very good technology to help them do that right now. And a lot of it is done through Excel and Outlook, very manual processes. And so we think there is a much better way to do this.

[00:04:09] And the data that we've aggregated working with the health systems at the recruitment level for residency and fellowship, we know who the doctors are, where they're from, why they wanted to become doctors, why they interviewed at hospital A versus hospital B, how well they did in med school, and ultimately where they chose to match, which gives us a lot of predictive capabilities on the overall workforce. And so it's kind of like right now, hospitals have been recruiting to their major league teams, not knowing who they even have in their minor league systems.

[00:04:39] And we're helping to try and expose that data to better match doctor and hospital and ensure doctors find the jobs that they're looking for and hospitals find the doctors that they're looking for. And ultimately, that results in better healthcare outcomes for patients and society. I think that's great. We've been chatting a lot about transparency, visibility, having the right data at the right time. And this is what we're talking about.

[00:05:02] Yeah, no, it's a very interesting data set. And it has implications in how Medicare is allocating residency funding across the country, because that Medicare spends $16 billion a year to incentivize hospitals to train residents. And so they're being provided an incentive to train these doctors. And then it's in many ways more cost effective to keep those doctors and have to go out into the open market.

[00:05:24] And as more and more health systems are consolidating, we're seeing coming down from the C-suite or coming in from medical school, these kind of overall mandates saying we need physicians. How can we use our internal physician workforce and retain them throughout their careers as a way to build our physician workforce for our system in the future? That's fantastic. And that's a great way to think about it. We saw that Falmus just raised its Series B. Congratulations. Thank you. What prompted the raise?

[00:05:51] Yeah, it's really been so we formed a strategic collaboration with the Association of American Medical Colleges in April of 2023. And they run the electronic residency application service. And we've been working with them to try and streamline these processes for medical students applying to residency, residents applying to fellowship, and all of the programs that are running these processes on the hospital side.

[00:06:11] And we've continued to see great synergy there. That's kind of where we saw significant growth over the last 18 months. We grew from 2,500 to 4,000 to now the 8,000 residency and fellowship programs, which is essentially 80 to 90% market share. That's awesome.

[00:06:25] And we were very mission aligned with the AAMC in a way that our mission at Thalamus is to ensure the right doctor ends up at the right hospital to treat the right patients. And that can mean a lot of things. But to me, it's three o'clock in the morning, someone's rolling up to an emergency room, having their worst healthcare event of their life. What are we doing upstream at Thalamus to ensure that that doctor that they need is there for them at that time?

[00:06:47] And so that's kind of the mission that's driving us. And given the traction and essentially the population level data that we've been able to achieve through this collaboration with the AAMC, we see a big opportunity to solve that physician workforce problem. And understanding how geography drives where people match. And we've written papers on how same state, if someone grows up in a state or goes to a medical school in that state, they have the highest likelihood of matching in that state, which isn't overall surprising.

[00:07:16] What is surprising is how likely that overall matches within that state. And then it moves away from the neighboring states and the neighbor's neighbors and so on and so forth.

[00:07:25] And so hospitals are trying to figure out ways to source and find people who have geographic connections. And so this raise in partnership with the AAMC and our prior investors is to propel us into that broader physician recruitment space and solve those significant challenges with the relationships that we've built to date and that distribution that we have with the hospital systems to help the hospitals find those doctors who have geographic connection or otherwise mission alignment, whatever else the hospital's trying to achieve with their physician workforce.

[00:07:53] And this capital raise was to accelerate those efforts. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. Get downstream, help them figure out their recruitment and it starts where you guys are at. Right. At the base level. It's all the same pathway, same pipeline, same journey. And so our slogan is connecting the docs. And so how do you connect those docs? I love that. I love that. Connect the docs. Yeah. And so what was the pain point that really helped you guys grow to 90% market share?

[00:08:20] There was a lot of manual work done in this process. And I think given COVID and interviews moving virtually and just needing a unified, centralized platform, this was a very nuanced, very specific market. And our team collectively has over 220 years of experience running or being a part of GME recruitment for the residency of the fellowship programs.

[00:08:43] And so that expertise, we call it our secret sauce at Thalamus, really set us up to understand these very complicated processes and build a recruitment tool that really solved a very complicated recruitment problem. But in finding that efficiency and finding those workflows, we found great product market fit. We found great customer satisfaction. We've developed a real just brand and just allegiance working very closely with our customers.

[00:09:09] There's an upcoming conference in Nashville this week, the ACGME conference, which is kind of, I call it the Super Bowl of Graduate Medical Education Conferences. Oh, cool. In our very niche kind of world within graduate medical education. But building those relationships with the community helped us navigate these initial challenges and aggregate the data set, which I think overall is going to help us solve the downstream problems. That's beautiful. Thanks for that. I was curious. And so we have all these different technologies, new trends.

[00:09:38] What do you think the biggest trends are tech? What are they? What are the ones that are going to change healthcare for the next five years? Yeah, it's probably no surprise, but I would say artificial intelligence and machine learning. I'd say where my answer may differ than others is I think there is significant value in AI's ability to aggregate data and particularly on the recruitment side. As you can imagine, understanding who a person is and where they eventually want to live and where they want to practice and what their life goals are.

[00:10:05] And so we've taken AI and employed it into our products using, as a first feature that we've released over the summer, a way to standardize and normalize medical school grades. So medical schools provide all different types of grades and grading scales, not only within the same school across different courses and clerkships, but across the schools as well. And you need essentially a Rosetta Stone to aggregate that and understand what it means.

[00:10:31] And so we've used AI and an LLM to aggregate those grades and then present the distribution of those grades in a standardized way within and across medical schools. But the same can be done with the essays of why someone wants to be a doctor, their letters of recommendation, how they describe why they want to be a doctor, the words that they use, particularly how they describe underserved populations or rural health care is very predictive overall of the overall person and what they're trying to achieve.

[00:10:57] And then how do you guide them, whether they're in middle school, high school, college, medical school, residency, or thereafter, and help them find that career pathway that allows them to be that orthopedic surgeon in rural Arkansas or that pediatrician in inner city Boston. And how do you figure out how do you get those people to those patient populations and vice versa?

[00:11:18] And that's where I think AI can really help, not necessarily selecting the people, but helping the people select where they want to go and have that human intervention augment through technology to build that next physician workforce that we need, especially given the shortages that we're seeing. Yeah, that's fantastic. Great use of the technology for sure. What would you say are the biggest pain points your organization is helping to solve?

[00:11:44] I think it's a data aggregation problem, especially as we see consolidation of health care systems and the growth of these consolidated health care systems and those health care systems opening up their own medical schools and growing their residency and fellowship programs and the number of GME programs and taking a intentional strategy across the organization to use and grow their workforce internally within these medical schools and residency programs.

[00:12:12] It's great, and it helps them understand and plan their physician workforce into the future. But how do you aggregate that data across all of those disparate processes and across entire health systems that span multiple hospitals and multiple institutions and aggregate that data so you can make decisions at the C-suite that then cascade down to the rest of the health care system or start at the grassroots level and then build up towards the top.

[00:12:39] And at the end of the end of the day, have that data so they can understand who are the doctors that we're recruiting, who are the doctors that are in our health system right now. If we're in Florida, in Southern Florida, who there may be a doctor in Oregon or Idaho that actually has ties to Southern Florida that we may not know about.

[00:12:58] Or there may be an amazing surgical resident who's going to be a leading surgeon who's actually in our health care system that we haven't really paid enough attention to that we probably should try to retain and attempt to retain with whatever means necessary. And so helping hospitals and doctors understand these nuances and the breadth of this data so that they can actually analyze and make strategic decisions, that's where I think it's going to be Thalamus' sweet spot now and well into the future. That's great. Yeah.

[00:13:24] And, you know, we talk about and a lot of the conversations we've been having have been focused on how do I get the most value out of what I already invested in? Yeah. You know? Absolutely. And this is like a human resource example of just that. Yeah. You sometimes have these great, great doctors that are in your hospital and it's important to know who they are and what they're trying to achieve in their careers.

[00:13:47] And then hospitals can work and health systems can set up to work those physicians up for success and help them build those careers with them. That's beautiful, man. Well, look, it's evident that you guys know what you're doing. We try. Yeah. And it is your sweet spot to connect the docs. So certainly want to thank you for sharing it. If there's a healthcare provider organization wanting to learn more or maybe doctors wanting to learn more about what you guys do, how can they connect with you?

[00:14:16] And what closing thought would you leave them with? Yeah. They can find me on LinkedIn at Jason Remenich. And they can find us on LinkedIn or other social media at Thalamus GME or on our website, thalamusgme.com. We're launching our brand new brand and our new marketing website over the next few days. So we're excited about that.

[00:14:32] But the parting wisdom I would leave them with is I think there's a better way for us as physicians to approach our entire careers from the time we, before we start thinking about becoming a doctor in middle school, up through medical school, and using data to help us better understand what we want our medical careers to be. And for the hospitals, who we want our doctors to be. And at the end of the day, to help our patients. So I really think technology is going to play a major role in that and helping us make better decisions. And in the end, give people better health care.

[00:15:02] That's fantastic. Really appreciate that, Jason. Folks, check out the show notes for the ways to get in touch with Dr. Jason Remenich. He is the CEO and founder of Thalamus. So take advantage now. I mean, you've got to start working on these things today. That number that he shared, $250 million, is the average spend on recruitment. Per health system. Per health system. Yeah. This is an opportunity. So I invite you all to reach out to him.

[00:15:30] And again, Dr. Remenich, thanks for being with us. Yeah. Thanks so much, Saul. Really appreciate it. And look forward to partnering with more health systems as we move downstream now. So thanks so much for having me. Our pleasure. This podcast is produced by Outcomes Rocket, your healthcare exclusive digital marketing agency.

[00:16:01] Outcomes Rocket exists to help healthcare organizations like yours to maximize their impact and accelerate growth. Visit OutcomesRocket.com or text us at 312-224-9945.