The Power of Educational Software In Revolutionizing MSK Care with Donovan Campbell, CEO of MedBridge

[00:00:02] Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket. So excited to have you all tuned back in. I'm excited to host an outstanding leader today. His name is Donovan Campbell. He has served as chief executive officer at MedBridge since June of 23.

[00:00:20] Prior to MedBridge, Donovan led SecondMD, an early innovator in the virtual specialty care space. In his five-year tenure, he took that company from small early stage to digital healthcare leader, serving 900 plus customers, 12 million covered members. He's an incredible leader.

[00:00:39] In short, a United States Marine Corps veteran and also a New York Times bestselling author of two books. And I'm excited to have him here as the CEO of MedBridge to talk about what they're up to in the area of MSK. So Donovan, thanks for joining.

[00:00:55] So thanks for having me. Thanks for that very kind introduction. I would just say I have my moments as a leader, both plus and minus. There's one thing I've learned. There's, there are so many ways in which I can get better, but you're very kind.

[00:01:06] So thanks for that. Of course. And funny story, when we were setting up this interview, I kept calling Donovan Dr. Campbell and he says he's neither one on TV nor in person. But, but your brother's a doctor, right?

[00:01:20] He's a doctor, but from here on out, I'm gonna tell him, Hey buddy, listen, I was on the Outcomes Rocket podcast and they told me I was a doctor. So I guess we're both doctors now. Take that. You're official. You've been deemed doctor here on the Outcomes Rocket.

[00:01:31] Dr. Campbell, thanks for being with us. Dr. Saul, it's a pleasure. Look, really pumped to touch on this topic of MSK because it's a big one, right? A lot of money is spent in the muscle skeletal space and we need solutions that are better.

[00:01:49] And so we're going to dive into that and why you guys are different in the market. But before we do that, I'd love to learn more about you and what inspired your work to work in healthcare. Yeah. Thanks Saul.

[00:01:59] So I came to healthcare in a somewhat non-traditional way after I graduated from college in 01, I signed up for the United States Marines and I went on active duty in November of 2001. So as you can imagine, that was an interesting time in our country's

[00:02:13] history to go on active duty. Became a ground intelligence officer and did two tours in Iraq early in our time there, one as an intel officer and one leading infantry platoon sort of from the front. And that was a challenging deployment as it was very casualty intense.

[00:02:30] Returned from that, got my business school degree because it turns out if you are highly skilled in putting machine gun emplacements in, it doesn't necessarily translate to the private sector. So getting a business degree was really helpful. I was recalled from that.

[00:02:45] I finished the program and did a third tour in Afghanistan supporting the US special forces. So didn't hit the civilian world, if you will, until nearly a decade after college and started actually at PepsiCo and consumer goods.

[00:02:58] And after three years realized that Pepsi is a great company, they're great to my family and I, but I missed that mission orientation that we had in the Marines. I missed the idea that if I gave it my all on any given day and deployed all of my

[00:03:14] energy and all of my skill and all of my training towards an end, there was a direct and tangible link between that end and the benefit of my fellow man. And that was just me.

[00:03:24] And so as I thought through, where can I go where I can know for sure that if I and my team do a really good job and we develop things of excellence, it will tangibly impact humanity in a way that I think is additive.

[00:03:41] And health care sort of is top of the list when you think about that area. So I had the opportunity in 2017 to leave a company where I was leading global technology and joined second D as our chief operating officer. And they're again, still very small.

[00:03:56] This is 2017 is before virtual care was let's call it thing at scale. And we're early innovators in the specialty care space. And that company blew up. We got bought in 2021. And that really opened my eyes to one, the incredible amount of challenge in our

[00:04:14] health care system, medical error, medical waste, but two, the incredible amount of impact you can have if you're thoughtful and innovative and you work in a way that's additive to the system in the lives of patients and in population health at scale.

[00:04:26] So a long answer to a short question, but that's how I ended up. It's really great to learn that about you, Donovan. And man, thank you for your service, first of all. One of many, but you're welcome on behalf of everyone. Thank you for that.

[00:04:38] And yeah, it's a different route, right? Like you finished college and then you did it. A lot of folks go the ROTC route and make it part of their journey or do college after, but you did it after. What is it that called you to do that?

[00:04:54] So I'd say a couple things. One, I went to Princeton for undergrad and I was on the rowing team and I watched the guys come back who graduated ahead of me. Many of them had gone to investment banking or consulting, and they universally said

[00:05:05] things like this is the best you'll ever have it. It only gets worse from here. And I thought, well, that's not a very hopeful view of the future. And I had a mentor in high school who was a U.S.

[00:05:16] Marine captain. He had done time in Somalia and he was sort of 27, 28 when I started to be with him. So I juxtaposed that man and his character against those who are coming back from civilian careers that grew up for Princeton.

[00:05:29] Gosh, I more like the guy, this guy Shane than these guys. And they were by no means bad guys. Just it was a clear juxtaposition. So that was one. Two, I had become, I was becoming more and more thoughtful about the

[00:05:41] fact that I just had a lot of opportunities afforded me growing up that many in America didn't have. So I had a great family, a great undergrad, high school education, had the opportunity to go to Princeton, which I worked hard, but no one could say I fully

[00:05:53] deserved it. You just have this opportunity that's given to you. And I thought, gosh, if it's if I've been given so much, then if America wins, I'm going to win disproportionately to many of the rest of its citizens.

[00:06:05] So it feels like if there's anyone who should spend some time putting on the uniform and trying to ensure that others have those same opportunities, it should be someone like me, someone who's who will disproportionately benefit if the country wins.

[00:06:16] And then third, in college, I really started taking my Christian faith seriously. And that's a belief system that says servant leadership is the way to go. The explicit dedication of one's life to the benefit of one's fellow man is a good thing.

[00:06:31] And you should be really thoughtful and teach about how are you serving at every stage of the journey? I thought, well, there's this thing it's called the service. And I can do it after I get out of college and I want to be a leader.

[00:06:43] I want to have some level of venture, but I really do want to serve. And I think that's a good way to put my faith in action. And so all of those things combined to allow me to take the oath of office the day that I

[00:06:53] graduated, which is pretty cool. That's fantastic. I appreciate you going a little deeper on that. Obviously not part of the interview here. But I was curious and I respect your decisions and admire them very much. So appreciate you sharing that. So thanks. Yeah, of course.

[00:07:08] And let's shift gears to to the company Medbridge. Talk to us a little bit about what you guys do and how you're adding value to the health care ecosystem. So I'm going to answer those questions in two parts. The first question is, what have we done historically?

[00:07:25] What have we been known for? And the second question, the second part is, how are we adding to what we've done historically to make a bigger impact on people's health? So in bucket one, we make high quality educational software for therapists, physical

[00:07:40] therapists, occupational therapists, athletic trainers, et cetera, so that they can, one, stay on the cutting edge of their practice to keep up their CEUs and three, have an enjoyable experience while they're learning the things to keep them on the cutting edge of practice.

[00:07:54] We also make really high quality patient engagement software. Think of that as video based home exercise programs that one can consume via app. And in general, we have 10 plus million people a year go through that.

[00:08:09] I think last year we were just under 15 million total people consumed home exercise programs from us. So pretty decent scale. In fact, there's a high probability if you get physical therapy this year to there's a

[00:08:22] two and three chance that you're going to be working with a PT who's used our software either to give you home exercise programs or to do their education. So that's cool. It's a smaller company, but it's got a lot of scale and a lot of reach.

[00:08:33] So that's what we're known for. Where we are going is we are going into what I call we call the care category, meaning we have built and are scaling a platform for therapists by which therapists can practice

[00:08:48] their craft so by which they can extend treatment options to patients outside of their office. So it's called a pathways platform. And because we come from an education background, we're passionate believers that education is care and it combines thoughtful, let's call it nano content delivery about

[00:09:06] the conditions that our patients are facing, along with really thoughtful care protocols or care pathways that generally are four to six phases that take place over a number of weeks that progress them through a series of home exercises combined with education

[00:09:21] to help them improve basically as well as to their original injury, their original diagnosis. So that's where we're moving. We're early in the journey. The platform is built. We've got some really wonderful beta clients on at large hospital systems and we're seeing really promising improvements.

[00:09:36] And maybe most importantly, we're finding that the platform makes the lives of our clinicians easier. I think that's really important. And we're finding that patients enjoy engaging with it, which is also really important. And I'd say finally, we're finding that patients trust our platform because they're

[00:09:55] treating clinician as the one who recommends them to it or their treating system is one who recommends them to it. So that's a bit of a different approach than some others have taken in the past.

[00:10:03] Totally. Yeah, yeah. It is all about how you get in the front door and ultimately so this so totally get where you've been and where you're going. A couple of clarifying questions on where you're going.

[00:10:14] So then is does the platform become a place where one on one or one to many care can happen? Or is it still all on demand and asynchronous? It can be one on one. It can be one to many. It can be synchronous. It can be asynchronous.

[00:10:32] So it's a way of saying yes to everything, but perhaps I could be more specific. So we basically built this under the philosophy that the best way to impact population health is to work with the existing clinical ecosystem.

[00:10:44] So those people who are on the ground that have brick and mortar clinics, that have brick and mortar facilities, they can treat patients. And in part, that came out of my own experience in 2ndMD where it was a virtual only solution by definition of category.

[00:10:57] It did not work with the existing treating provider because they're getting a second opinion. And we were passionate about trying to get to the 10 percent of people that every year needed something like this. Like any given year, about 10 percent of the population could really benefit from a

[00:11:11] second opinion. If we are lucky, we got to 1 percent. If we were lucky. And I came to believe that that was because fundamentally we are doing a bit of an end run around the on the ground treating ecosystem with our pathways platform.

[00:11:25] We are all about enabling the existing clinical ecosystem. So what that means is they have asynchronous options to provide care, specifically a patient can go through a clinician issued medbridge pathway. So, for example, for lower lumbar pain, they can engage in that pathway at home using

[00:11:47] computer vision of the front end to triage them, assess them, put them into low, medium or high categories and then down the appropriate pathway for them. There's also surveys up front and so forth that help us determine which ones or help

[00:12:01] the system asynchronously determine what's the best pathway for them. They can do their exercises again asynchronously with the machine, if you will, or the computer vision watching them, coaching them in real time. And they're gathering a whole bunch of data that it then pre-populates a dashboard for

[00:12:15] their treating clinician to use. They can consume content asynchronously. Let us tell you about how to manage your pain. Let us tell you about why moving is medicine. Well, let's tell you a little bit about the biomechanics of the spine.

[00:12:26] They can also conduct a real time video visit with their treating clinician if they wish synchronously or if the clinician wants them to engage in the pathway that wants to have a video visit. So it's got that capability set as well.

[00:12:37] There's also the ability to engage patients via text, via email, via in-app messaging in the platform itself. So there's so that again, a treating clinician can engage or activate a patient asynchronously. And then finally, there's the asynchronous ability for a clinician to

[00:12:54] look at their entire roster of patients that are going through this pathway. Again, whether they triage into it right up front and never need to come to the office or whether they came into the office, did their first session and their treating

[00:13:07] clinician said, hey, you need to do these things in the interim or I don't really need to see you again. Keep doing this and I'm going to monitor you or I'll see you in six weeks. Do this in between.

[00:13:16] Do this pathway in between. Let's see if that helps you in those six weeks or oh my goodness, your self-reported pain scores have gone up as you've done this asynchronous thing. The dashboard shows me that. Let me get you in the office stat.

[00:13:28] So there's a couple of different examples of how this provides both synchronous and asynchronous care. But really what we're trying to do is open up more capacity in the overall treatment ecosystem of MSK to allow us to treat more people. With better access, with high quality care.

[00:13:48] Given that we're going to we are in a capacity constrained environment and given that capacity is only going to become more constrained in the future. Got it. I really appreciate that clarification. Definitely helps us understand how the platform works. And the lessons are clear, right?

[00:14:03] From Second MD, rather than try to capture that 10 percent, you're enabling the existing provider base to to capture it for themselves. And you're the intelligence and the bridge, to use the metaphor. Yeah. We're an extension as well. We're an extension of capability.

[00:14:20] And we think it's really important not only that we work that existing clinical ecosystem, people do like to see their doctors, as it turns out. We also think it's really important that the data that we collect on any given patient is

[00:14:33] fully manifest within the broader ecosystem, data ecosystem that they're treating clinician has. That's why we're integrated into EHRs. We also believe that it's really important that we make the lives of the clinician easier

[00:14:45] when they're using our tools so they don't have to do yet one more set of clicks that administration is pushing down upon them. Rather, they can just use the system that they're accustomed to using in their day.

[00:14:57] To work with our new platform, if you will, so that's a little bit more on our approach, if you appreciate that, Donovan makes a lot of sense, seems very versatile and seamless. One question we like to ask is a differentiation question, but really the angle I'd

[00:15:11] like to take this one on with you is before and after. Tell us a story of what things look like before a health system adopts your technology and how things work after. It's interesting to see the various use cases health systems are approaching us for our

[00:15:27] technology. So I'll explain a couple. One before is health systems are trying to think through what is our digital strategy sort of overarchingly and more specifically, what is our digital strategy with literally the thing we do most often and the largest care category, which is musculoskeletal?

[00:15:46] And this is almost without exception. Every hospital we've talked to is thinking about doing digital things. Most of them do not have a well-formed digital approach and almost all of them don't have a well-formed digital approach as it relates to how are we going to handle

[00:16:02] musculoskeletal. So at the call, it's total strategy level before it can look like we're thinking through an approach. We don't say have an approach and I have a well-defined strategy after it can look

[00:16:13] like we have a very well-defined approach as relates to how are we going to integrate digital care into musculoskeletal treatment. Specifically, we are going to take a hybrid approach, meaning we as a system are going

[00:16:28] to enable virtual care and we're going to have that virtual care work seamlessly or in some cases just be complementary to in-person care. So we enable an after that is a very clearly well-defined sort of strategic approach to treating musculoskeletal care, leveraging the existing clinical ecosystem that our

[00:16:49] hospitals have. So that's one use case, if you will. Another is hospitals know or health providers know that particularly in their integrated system, there's an opportunity to create really interesting new services because digital point solutions have created interesting new services that have done in rounds or run

[00:17:08] or in runs around the existing hospitals. Right. And in many cases, their associated health plan is taking advantage of that digital point solution to provide a differentiated innovative service to their end clients. So think this large employers in the state as an example of those national

[00:17:28] employers and an opportunity to use virtual innovation to drive cost savings across a care category. Hospitals are saying, why don't we do that? We could be you own us or we're integrated with you. We could be your solution. And the health systems or health plans are saying, terrific.

[00:17:48] Just show us how you do this virtually. Show us how you take your clinical capability and leverage that digitally. We are the platform that allows them to create their own new and innovative service. And then finally, a really interesting use case before and after is before someone shows

[00:18:05] up to what's called the front door, often it's a digital front door request an appointment of a hospital system with some sort of musculoskeletal pain. My back hurts, my elbows hurt. Before, oftentimes they end up in a primary care physician's office who doesn't really know

[00:18:25] exactly what to do. Primary care physicians don't love treating MSK conditions as we know. That's why some of our clients have actually embedded physical therapists in primary care offices. So often that human being will one clog up the primary care system, which is also

[00:18:41] capacity constrained, only to then be referred to a specialist who has a much higher probability of putting them into imaging and then putting them into surgery because there's no option to do something else right up front.

[00:18:54] So the after is, and we're discussing some of our clients about this or we do this actually in the home exercise program. And now we're going to do this with our more robust pathways program is insert us right up

[00:19:03] front so people with lower medium acuity who may have to wait to see a physical therapist or may have to wait to see a primary care physician or may not even need to see a primary care

[00:19:12] physician at all can be given the option as soon as they request an appointment for their lower back pain, for example, to instead be triaged into an asynchronous high quality digital care pathway that can be monitored by a treating physician that in many cases has

[00:19:28] the opportunity to resolve their issue and resolves their issue with them never clogging up the primary care office and maybe as importantly, never making it into a much more expensive and potentially medically not only costly but medically ruinous course of action for them.

[00:19:47] So before no high quality digital options up front to triage low acuity patients after high quality options up front to triage low acuity or medium acuity patients to open up capacity in the system and ultimately lower downstream costs. Love it. A lot of really great use cases.

[00:20:02] Some very clear before and after. Definitely an optimization throughput play, additional revenue play. But at the end of the day, outcomes play for patients. It's all about outcomes at the end of the day.

[00:20:16] And we have developed this in part because we we have a passionate belief that something has to happen if we are going to get continue to provide quality care as America ages and as fewer and fewer people go into physical therapy.

[00:20:29] We know for a fact, it's virtually undisputed. If you can insert high quality, low intensity interventions upstream in someone's musculoskeletal care journey, you have a very high probability of getting them better without A, surgery,

[00:20:44] B, expensive diagnostic imaging, C, a whole ton of time from that poor patient as they go through the journey. And you open up capacity on the other end for the patients who really

[00:20:56] do need all of those interventions to be treated by a system that may or may not be able to fit them in at a time that is commensurate with treating their injury. So we're really passionate about doing this now because we see the silver tsunami coming.

[00:21:09] We know that people are leaving the field across the board and we want to do our part to help make sure that our citizens have high quality care options available to them. Appreciate that, Donovan. Yeah, the promise is big.

[00:21:22] And for everybody listening, thinking about, hey, maybe this is something for my health system or A, you know what? Maybe I'm already using this. I'm already using the technology that MedBridge provides, but they have new things. Now is the time to take action on new capabilities.

[00:21:38] Donovan, this has been super interesting for everybody listening today. I want to leave them with a call to action from you and a closing thought. What would you leave them with? I'll leave them with this.

[00:21:49] Whether it's with us or with someone else, the time is now to really think through how are you going to treat an aging America? So sort of overarchingly, more specifically, how are you going to treat the increased volume of people who come in with musculoskeletal injuries?

[00:22:05] It's not as catastrophic as say cancer or cardiac, but it's something that's going to happen to literally everyone. And it's something that materially impacts quality of life. So the time is now, the time is now to come up with how are you going to work now today

[00:22:25] to craft a strategy and a plan to create additional capacity to keep up with the most commonly diagnosed, most commonly treated care category as America ages. Love that. Great close there, Donovan.

[00:22:38] And where, if people want to take you up on this action, can they reach out to you and the team at MedBridge? Yeah, the best bet is to go to our website. Believe me, we are very prominent in saying we've got this new thing, request a demo,

[00:22:52] contact us. It's not going to be hard to navigate to it. Thank you, marketing team for making that happen. So that's probably the best way to do it. MedBridge.com everyone. And in the show notes, we'll leave links to MedBridge as well as a summary of today's

[00:23:08] discussion with Donovan Campbell, CEO of MedBridge. Thank you all for tuning in. And Donovan, thanks for being with us. Saul, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Even if I'm not a doctor, as it turns out. Love it, man. Really appreciate your time. Likewise.

[00:23:24] Thanks for making the time to have me on.