Making primary care more sustainable starts with giving physicians more time to care for patients.
In this episode, I speak with Gadi Shenhar, Co-Founder and CEO of Droxi, about using AI to reduce the administrative workload that overwhelms primary care teams. Gadi shares how a medication error involving his grandmother led him to investigate the deeper problem of clinician burnout. He explains how Droxi brings relevant patient information directly into the EHR workflow, helping physicians manage their clinical inboxes with fewer clicks. We also discuss how listening to providers helped improve product adoption and how supporting advanced primary care management can help practices generate recurring revenue while strengthening care between visits.
Tune in to learn how thoughtful AI design can reduce clinician burden and help build a more sustainable future for primary care!
Resources:
[00:00:03] Hello everyone and welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket straight from CHI 26 in Las Vegas. I'm excited to be here with Gadi Shenhar. He is the co-founder and CEO of Droxi. I'm excited to be talking to you about all the work they're doing in community health and how they're changing the game. So Gadi, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Of course, of course. To kick things off, tell me a little bit about you.
[00:00:32] What got you into healthcare and what keeps you in healthcare? A few years ago, my grandmother had a mild Alzheimer's disease and she was treated with some drugs that managed to hit her its progress. And one day her very exhausted physician, while working behind the scenes, made an error and switched her drugs. And when we found her Droxi, we thought about addressing medication errors as a problem.
[00:00:58] But we spoke with hundreds of clinicians and asked them about their, to rate their day-to-day pains. And almost all of them rated 10 out of 10. Not the exact pain of medication errors, but they saw it more as a symptom for like overburdened, overloaded, overwhelmed doctors in the work behind the scenes. And that's how we said, okay, that's not really the pain.
[00:01:21] If we can actually make their lives easier, we can also help patients and we can also make their lives better as a result. That's what got me to Droxi. Interesting. Okay. So it started off with your grandmother. It was a medication error. You dug in and said, wait, that's not the actual pain. The pain is actually, we're burned out and we need help there. Exactly. So tell me about Droxi. So this is exactly what we do.
[00:01:50] We identified that doctors spend a lot of the time on actions behind the scenes. Most of them are clinical in a way, but some of them are very administrative in their character. So our approach as a company is you do the medicine, we do the rest for the providers. So we tell them, okay, for every such action, we want to keep the medical gist of things and we can take care of the rest.
[00:02:17] Like AI can do the annoying parts of things. For example, we're talking about the clinical inbox, which is a major pain point for them that we started with. And then we said, okay, for every item in that clinical inbox, they spend like two to three hours every day on their clinical inbox, which is the inbox inside their EHRs. So we're saying instead that you'll need to go manually, some of the things can be done completely automatically, but some of the things do require your attention.
[00:02:47] So how about we just give you all the relevant context and you won't need to do 60 clicks per item, just like AI can put in front of you the most relevant information for you to just take an action. And then we started adding more stuff because we already have the context. We say, okay, we can use the time in between visits to generate more revenue for the practice to make it more. A lot of our clients, it actually came from our clients. They said, okay, it's great. Doctors like this.
[00:03:14] It has great engagement, 98%, but saving doctors time is not ROI for us. So the CFOs, the CEOs of the house said like, I also want to see ROI. And I said, great, we can already have all the context. Let's use that to help you create recurring revenue based on the work that you're already doing between the visits. So we help them with APCM. APCM is Advanced Primary Care Management.
[00:03:40] It's like CCM, it's like chronic care management, but a lot more lightweight. So we can help them operate that basically from stuff they're already doing. And we can help them provide that extra level of service for the patients. So that makes everybody happy. We reduce the operational workload and increased actually the revenue for the practice.
[00:04:02] My vision is that I see today primary care sometimes as like a referral path into a system and not as like something, sometimes like systems don't look at it as something that stands for its own. And we want primary care physicians to stay in the business, to not like drop out so quickly like they do today. There's such a shortage nationwide.
[00:04:24] We want to be in a day where primary care is actually sustainable for itself, actually is. And that's how we can get more providers into it, how we can make better results for the population. Yeah, for sure. Less delays, more access. Yeah, I like it. I like it. Yeah. And you call out a very important point. Well, actually, two points. Number one, your product development approach and your go to market approach.
[00:04:54] I want to spend a little time here on this because I love it. You started with a problem, peeled back the onion and realized that it was a different problem. Yes. What you saw was a symptom, but you dug deep to the problem. And then you run into a roadblock where the CFOs are asking you for ROI and you're like, no problem. We have data here. Let me get you ROI.
[00:05:15] So now through APCM, you're helping them get more concierge level service to patients, which ultimately drives utilization and gives it better outcomes and more revenue to the practice. Exactly. Okay. Fantastic. Love that. He said it better than me. I got to say the discipline to do that is hard because when you think you have something, you want to get after it. Where did you learn the process? Because I feel like more people need to know how to do this.
[00:05:43] I feel like it's the, in business, you have to balance between like, you always have the vision. You want to do two things at once. You have to play with the bricks that you have in your own hands. And then at the same time, you want to look at the grander vision and then try to build with the tools, but yet like always see that greater future that you can get to. So I feel like the greater future was like always imagining a better primary care. And then at the same time, we wanted to listen to the market.
[00:06:12] And what the market wanted from us. And I think it's a hard process balancing between these two and how to navigate in a way that does lead you to those places. Sometimes you design something for practices. And then, I don't know, doctors. When we just started, we had our product had a 37% engagement, meaning the doctors use it for one out of every three cases, applicable cases.
[00:06:40] And then we were like, oh, something here is off. Is it like, it was hard like to onboard stuff? Maybe our customer success isn't like working properly. But then we dag, like we sat down with providers. We actually flew to our clients across the nation. And we sat down like, okay, why is it? And they were like, okay, it's not like something about the design. Because like the design doesn't feel like it's embedded enough. Like it didn't feel like it's inside the HR, although it was inside.
[00:07:09] But the design didn't feel this way. So it was a purely design problem. And then we changed the design. And then we reached where we were today with 98%, meaning they use it for every 49 out of every 50 cases. Yeah, but it took some failing. Like you needed to have a bad version in front of them to get to the good version. Right. And you also have to ask the right questions. Now, I just, out of curiosity, like what was the design?
[00:07:36] Did you just make the background colors look more like Epic or e-clinical work or NextGen or like what match? Do you match? Tell me about that. Because that's really intriguing. Okay. So the approach that we had before, if we're talking again about the clinical inbox, the approach was like our bubble were context aware. So we are inside the HR. But before that, we were not context aware, meaning you could navigate inside us.
[00:08:03] Although we're inside the HR, the fact that you can navigate inside Droxi was the design problem. Now you're entering an item. Let's say you look at a hospital discharge. You click inside the HR and then the Droxi's bubble just like follows you. So you don't navigate inside Droxy anymore. Then now it feels like it's actually saving you time and helping you rather than another list to fish in. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. So it's a purely functionality design issue. Sure.
[00:08:33] But then that like... This was how you show up, right? Like where you show up. Exactly. Yeah. So and then suddenly onboarding was non-issue. Since we did this shift, every time like we start with a new practice and we always have one test user. So we put them live a week or two before and tell them don't touch until you're onboarding. And then since we did this change, every time they become a daily active user before the onboarding. Because they already start getting value.
[00:09:02] They go into that lab result and they see that if they look in Droxy, they need to do exactly zero clicks to gather all the... An abnormal lab result to gather all the context to go back and compare and they just have it all under their nose. So they didn't need to do a lot of clicks. So and then it makes sense for them. Yeah. That's awesome. How does something like this integrate with AI Scribe notes and all that? Okay. So it lives in parallel to that.
[00:09:31] We, we, it doesn't interfere, but it's also, it does another portion of the work, not the documentation. Great. So front, front of the, okay, got it. So essentially after the visit, but potentially during the visit, if the physicians and the EHR, right? And then after. So we are very directed towards the workflow of like in between visits, like stuff that happened, like we caught pajama time very dramatically.
[00:10:00] So it's like, we even have a doctor that told us she wakes up every day, 45 minutes later because of Droxy. She used to wake up, it's, she's in New Hampshire. I won't give too many details, but she told us she wakes every day between three to five AM to clear her clinical image. And then now she wakes up at three 45. And then beautiful. Yeah. And then at five, she does the rest. Like she starts her day.
[00:10:27] And I'm like, Ooh, that's like primary care docs work really hard. Like we don't get that. Like how exhausting and how like mission driven they are to continue doing this. I have a friend who's a primary care physician in Massachusetts is like already after a few years, that's hard. And he's like, I like the profession, but let's look on at the other, like, maybe I'll go to the hospital. Go into tech in some way. And maybe like, we need you.
[00:10:54] We need people to say like, we need, this is such an important mission as a system. We need to make their lives easier because otherwise we won't have primary care. And also the numbers show that they're just slowly disappearing. And I feel we're all, we all know, for example, in Massachusetts, it's really hard to get a primary care physician. You miss your appointment. You can sometimes wait a few months. It's super difficult. We needed to think about how we make it easier for community.
[00:11:21] Also, I just had a super interesting session here during this conference where a CEO of one of the community health centers here told how the hospitals in their area offer like really high salaries to their doctors. So it's really hard to retain their doctors even. So even the few docs that you do have, you're fighting with them and community health centers sometimes are struggling to offer competitive salaries to these places. And yeah.
[00:11:50] So why not give them a great environment to work in where they have technology to assist them in the delivery? Exactly. Yeah. This is exactly what we aspire to do. And also for the patients to feel like they're getting better service and make them happy. That's great. And then you take a look at what's happened in the past. Companies like Walmart have gotten it out of the primary care game because they've seen primary care as a standalone is not quite profitable.
[00:12:18] In large health systems, primary care practices become the feeder, as you said, as part of the larger ecosystem that goes to specialty care and then chronic care and then procedures, right? Surgeries. It's a game of how much you're making versus how much does your operation cost. So if your operation is very costly, which is like, and I think that if you peel the onion, why is it so there's so much administrative burden in primary care?
[00:12:48] Why is the operation so complex? Why is everything like a million clicks in everything that you do? So if you think about this, nothing of the systems that they use is built for primary care. They have typically the focus of everyone is like the way all the systems essentially, like even when you look at a large health system, right? It's all focused around the areas, around the specialties, around the surgery rooms. Hi, Marvin. Yeah.
[00:13:18] Nobody optimizes for primary care and it's the chicken and the egg. The more you don't optimize for it, the more it becomes like really high operational costs. The more it becomes less of a business and more like something that we have to do to get referrals in. And then it feeds itself. If we have enough people that do focus, do like envision like, okay, this can actually work. And now with AI, we can actually do that.
[00:13:45] We can actually like, we don't need so much manual work. We can, and I feel like it's the most important part of healthcare because this is the most community-based healthcare is what we meet the most. If we do it well, we need less hospitalizations. We need to spend less time in patients and less surgeries. Mostly today, we don't do a lot of preventative stuff. What we do is like dealing with crisis when it already exists.
[00:14:14] So how about we go a few steps? And also there are some things that we can change and there are some things that we cannot. Like the fact that we replace a lot of like healthcare insurance, it doesn't give the insurance a lot of interest to take care of you long term. So a lot of things are like here and now versus like problems of 10 or 20 or 30 years from now. Oh, that's not me.
[00:14:36] The system needs to find a better way to incentivize the plans, the insurance to take care of you as a human being also after like you've left them. Yeah, it's the fact that the employer dictates the insurance, but. No, but I get what you're saying, right? And look, we spend too much time on sick care. Let's spend more time on healthcare. And primary care is healthcare. Exactly. It helps you get ahead of the game before problems get in. Exactly.
[00:15:04] We want doctors to have the time to actually think about each patient. So that's what we do when we clear out the noise, the non-relevant stuff. When we see, in fact, that when the doctor does one click versus 60 clicks, they'll give better care. Oh, yeah. They will actually focus and they spend like fifth of the time sometimes on like the entire case. But then five. But then they multiply by five the actual time that they think they do like medical thought.
[00:15:34] You can actually measure that. How much time went to a medical decision making, reviewing the data versus like collecting the data, just reviewing it and saying, oh, my judgment says that this is more likely to be ABC. That just saves patients' lives. Totally. Totally. So what brings you to CHI? We work closely with FQHCs and we've seen great success with FQHCs.
[00:15:58] And sometimes it can really, those changes in the doctors' satisfaction can make huge impact on these systems. Also, the fact that we can drive a new revenue in can really move the needle in such a substantial way. So we are now working with NAX very closely to help more FQHCs and more CTAs in the country. And that's why we're here. This is my first try. Same. Same.
[00:16:28] It's my first one too. So it's a beautiful community, passionate, mission oriented, doing all the right things. So I think it's awesome to be here with you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Of course. It's a pleasure. Before we conclude, I'd love if you could just tell us where our viewers and listeners could get in touch with you and the company. Thank you. Yeah. Our website is droxy.com. D-R-O-X-I. Yes. You can find us there.
[00:16:55] You can also find us on LinkedIn and all the social media, Facebook, Instagram. That's where we can find you. Yeah. Thank you so much. Of course. Of course. There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for tuning in. Today we spent time with Gadi Shenhar. He is the co-founder and CEO of Droxy here at CHI 26. In the show notes, you're going to find all the ways to get in touch with him and his team. There's an opportunity to do more health care and less sick care.
[00:17:24] And that is by supporting primary care. Droxy is doing a beautiful job of it. Check out what they're up to. Reach out to him and his team. Thank you all for tuning in. And Gadi, thanks for spending time with us. Thank you so much.