Elevate Care

Innovation as a Mindset with Nick Schwartzrock

Episode Summary

Join Liz Cunningham in this episode of Elevate Care as she interviews with Nick Schwartzrock, founder and CEO of Advanced Recovery Specialists. Together, they explore the intersection of cutting-edge technology and compassionate care in the healthcare industry. This episode dives deep into telehealth and remote patient monitoring, showcasing how innovation, agility in leadership, and a patient-first mindset are transforming the way healthcare is delivered. Nick shares the lessons learned from his career, successful case studies of healthcare technology applications, and his vision for the future of telehealth in a post-COVID world.

Episode Notes

Join Liz Cunningham in this episode of Elevate Care as she interviews with Nick Schwartzrock, founder and CEO of Advanced Recovery Specialists. Together, they explore the intersection of cutting-edge technology and compassionate care in the healthcare industry.

This episode dives deep into telehealth and remote patient monitoring, showcasing how innovation, agility in leadership, and a patient-first mindset are transforming the way healthcare is delivered. Nick shares the lessons learned from his career, successful case studies of healthcare technology applications, and his vision for the future of telehealth in a post-COVID world.

 

00:00 – Introduction to Advanced Recovery Specialists
01:20 – The Evolution of Telehealth and Remote Patient Monitoring
04:12 – Integrating AI in Healthcare
06:07 – Innovation as a Mindset
10:21 – Learning from Failure in Healthcare
13:17 – Agility in Leadership and Product Development
15:36 – Humanizing Healthcare Products
21:17 – Telehealth Trends Post-COVID
26:06 – Future Innovations in Telehealth
28:25 – Success Stories in Patient Care

Episode Transcription

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Hello, welcome to Elevate Care. I'm your host, Liz Cunningham, and I'm joined by Nick Schwartzrock. He is the founder and CEO of Advanced Recovery Specialists. Excited to chat with you today, about integrating technology with compassion and innovation. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me, Liz. I'm very excited to be here. So I read a lot about your background and your history and...

 

medical devices and entrepreneurship. And I would love if you just gave the audience a little background on you and how you came to found your current company. Yeah, thank you. I guess first and foremost, I'm a proud husband and father. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I grew up in a household of people that were involved in health care and medicine. My mom was a registered nurse. My father went to medical school.

 

and decided not to practice as a physician and went into the medical device and pharmaceutical arena. That's sort of where I got my start. And I've certainly been fortunate. I've met a lot of great people during my career, learned a lot of things, had a lot of great times, and I think experienced more than my fair share of success. And I've got $2.4 billion worth of mergers, acquisitions, and layered integrations under my belt.

 

And now I find myself in the telehealth, remote care, durable medical equipment space that we're really excited about that has a tremendous amount of change going on with it right now. Just really excited about what we're doing. Awesome. And I would love to hear a little bit more about your product. mean, a lot of our listeners are in the health care industry, right? So thinking about the evolution of telehealth and telemedicine.

 

Also with that combination of remote patient monitoring, would love to just hear a little bit more about the product and how you found that niche or that opening for your new product. Yeah, so our ethos is really threefold. One being we look for devices that are currently in the marketplace that we think are good and could be great to steal from Jim Collins. So we're doing evolutionary work on things that are already there. Then the

 

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sometimes more exciting is the revolutionary technology where you're bringing something brand new to the marketplace. And then third, really we're focused on this, the patient care aspect, the continuum of care, and where that starts to touch on some of the technology that's available and artificial intelligence that's really been hitting the market and changing not just healthcare, but a number of industries. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

 

I know as we think about those three ways to think about your product, your product is embedded into people's phones, right? Or is it an actual separate product? Great question. So our products are typically medical devices that patients take home with them that are prescribed by their physician. We focus on the markets of acute injury, post-surgery, and then chronic care management.

 

And so we typically have a separate device that then has its own unique link to the cloud via a cellular connection typically that allows for real-time data feeds that are independent of your phone. But then we bridge back to the patient using a phone-based app where they have a direct line into our team of Continuum of Care.

 

associates that interface with that physician or interface with that patient as a bridge back to the physician. it. Got it. Makes sense. And you mentioned AI. How have you thought about or kind of using or embedding AI into your product to continue to innovate? So that's been a really exciting piece of what's going on right now with we're utilizing AI and people use that word and it covers such a gambit. Exactly.

 

Our specific integration of artificial intelligence is in the form of large data models. And so what we're doing is we're collecting data on thousands of patients and their continuum of care journey and what that patient's typical journey looks like. And then we're contrasting that against the patient that we're looking at. And what we're really trying to do is we're trying to find data points that might suggest elevated risk

 

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factors so that we can alleviate that risk before it happens. one of the ones I like to just that makes sense to people, and it's an easy example, after you have surgery, trying to not get an infection. And there's some data points that are very common that is like a common trajectory that patients who get infections have. And our device is one of the goals is to try and eliminate that infection so that

 

They can get ahead of it, get you on antibiotics, maybe get it cleaned out before it's got to go back to the operating room, get the implants taken out, then wait for the infection to clear, then put new implants in. It's a big drain on healthcare dollars and expense that is sort of part of the waste of what happens. So if we can avoid that infection, not only is the patient doing better, but the healthcare system as a whole has saved a bunch of money that it could apply to a different patient.

 

Absolutely. And you know, I love that use case because I think, you know, if you read about your company on the surface, right, you might hear, okay, it's a medical device or remote patient monitoring. But when you're talking about unlocking value with AI and value for the patient, you're leveraging the underlying data to then do more preventative care, which is, you know, a great kind of full circle and a way to continuously innovate and evolve your product. you know, I can tell just by talking to you, obviously you have that entrepreneurial spirit. So would love to hear about your concept and your thoughts on innovation as a mindset.

 

Wonderful question. is one of my sort of passion projects and it stems out of my perception that in the United States here, we have this aversion to failure and almost it's treated like it's like a paint that gets on your skin and you can never get it off if you, if you fail. And everyone that is in my orbit and that, you know, works in, in my organizations and comes into contact with me knows that

 

I have a totally different belief when it comes to failure. think failure is a critical part of innovation and it's a critical part of success. And without those failures, you can't have either of those. And to steal a line from Elon Musk, he's pretty famous for saying, if you're not failing, you're not innovating enough. And I tie that to that. I really try and foster this concept of failure is an acceptable part of the success track.

 

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and the innovation track and that this common, or this concept of innovation as a mindset and that you're not just innovating in product development, you're innovating in everything that you do. The processes, the systems that you're running in your business, the way you're approaching the marketplace, the way that you're approaching your customers and technology is an easy place to go when you're.

 

thinking about innovation because it's changing the way that we do everything. by sort of paying attention to other markets and consumer goods, medicine tends to be behind the eight ball or behind the curve when it comes to innovation, just because of the strong regulatory pathways that are timely and expensive. So when we're watching those other markets, we can a lot of times bring in new innovation and new technology that hasn't hit medicine yet because it's just

 

part of that slower curve. Right, right. you started to talk to hit on in and I started to immediately think about failure in a high risk environment like a healthcare organization or a healthcare staffing organization like ours. How do you embed that failure culture in a naturally risk averse, you know, a segment basically? It's a great question.

 

You know, really how that happens is if we're failing in here in the office rather than failing out in the marketplace where there's a patient's, you know, involved in a patient's health on the line, that's really the learning point. And we've built as part of this culture of innovation, one of the things that we've built is we're interacting with patients directly more frequently than our peers.

 

And we're also innovating or communicating with physicians and prescribers and doctors that on a much deeper level, early on in the product development phase during our testing processes, we're really hand in hand. We've got a philosophy that we call design by doctors where everything that we do as a clinician involved in what we're doing so that we're not getting caught in this designing in a vacuum, you know,

 

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in an office or in an R &D lab where we're completely devoid of the outside world and we get to a point where we don't want anyone to call our baby ugly. we're in really early and constantly. it helps us flush out those failure points here in the non-clinical environment so that when we get to the clinical environment, we're pretty bulletproof.

 

Yeah, it's a safe space for incubation, but maybe a rigor with rollout. Maybe that's a thing we could add to thinking about our spaces. Would love to hear or hear maybe an anecdote or a story from you about, it doesn't have to be a colossal failure, but a failure that maybe you or your team went through and how you pushed through it to then get to that next level of innovation. Good question. you know, the funny thing is that a lot of times you're

 

successes, you'd love to be those, things that you remember the most. But I think that people tend to remember their failures when they got kicked in the teeth and you know, sort of had to, had to start over. We've had a number of those speed bumps along the way as we've, as we've moved along. You know, I think when you're innovating really rapidly and pushing the envelope, it opens yourself up to the ability to, or the opportunity to fail more often.

 

And one of those examples is just, sometimes you have to take chances with people. had some engineers that we were working with that we were really excited about early on. It ended up not working out and it delayed one of our projects by probably double the time that it should have to bring something to market. And it had sort of a cascading effect through a lot of times with the production facilities that we utilize that got to be.

 

certified with the FDA and they're heavily regulated. So those slots that you have for your production windows, they're kind of planned out in advance. And when you miss your slot, a lot of times that can artificially move your production timeline back a significant bit. So we had this sort of cascading effect where we ended up having to make a change on engineering and then...

 

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You kind of go backwards to start over, not completely, you, end up everybody's there's a lot of art in this versus, you know, math where it's, this is the way that it is. And there's only one answer. There's a lot of ways to get to where you want to go. And then when that fell out, our production window fell out too, and it, ended up significantly delaying project. And we ended up making some movements and some changes in the device that ended up in a better product at the end.

 

But it was, it's really hard when you're planning, you know, your entire business, your supply chain, your, your revenue models, your, you know, ability to take care of patients is all contingent on this new product coming out. And then instead of six to 12 months, it's 18 to 24. It just, it's, it's tough to swallow and it can be, you you got to sort of put the pride at the doorstep and roll up your sleeves and make do with where life has brought you.

 

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like, you know, with most mistakes or failure points, the lesson learned helps accelerate in the future, which it sounds like in your case. I always find it fascinating hearing stories about releasing technology or products in healthcare because I think as entrepreneurs or technologists, we all operate in this agile mindset, right? But then there's such structure around how you actually have to release and all of the approvals you have to go through. would love to just hear, you know,

 

as a leader, a founder, as a CEO of a company, how do you continue to be an agile leader in your environment? And what are some of the principles you push to your teams as that agile leader? Yeah. So that innovation as a mindset is one of my core beliefs. I tend to take mantras and over-communicate them to anyone who's worked with me for a long time. like, yeah, we know what your mantras are. But we've got a commitment to excellence wherever

 

I'm involved in a dedication to urgency and accountability. And that urgency one is something that's really relevant. They're all relevant, but urgency is specifically relevant in healthcare because you've got a patient who needs something. They're in a particular continuum of their evolution of recovery. an inhibition during that period of something critical can set them back.

 

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you know, weeks or, you know, potentially forever. So that urgency becomes a really big thing. So I'd say those are my primary kind of mantras that I, that I practice and sort of preach to my team. Yeah. I love the sense of urgency. It really tying it with the mission. I feel like can be an energizer for a team. Definitely. So as we think about, you know, continuing to innovate building products, how do you think about

 

humanizing your products, or how do you think about your end users, the patients, and how you build with them in mind? I know you mentioned you're pairing the doctor with some of your product people, which I love that thought, but how do you humanize your products and continue to think about that patient at the end of it? So I think part of this comes down to core values, and I think that sometimes entrepreneurs, when they've got a business idea or they're starting something, these core values, mission vision type things can seem a little abstract.

 

and disconnected from the revenue line. But I'm a big believer in setting core values and really everything that you do is related back to those. And one of them that we've tried to, or that I've made a mission of implementing in this business and several that I've been involved in in healthcare is this concept of putting the patient first.

 

That can sound super basic and obvious to people outside the industry, even some inside the industry. But if I think if you're being honest and you really look at it, there's competition that happens in healthcare in the United States here, which I think is unfortunate in that I've got multiple customers. I've got the prescriber who's writing the prescription for my product for that patient. I've got the patient.

 

I've got the healthcare institution that that physician is tied to, and then I've got the insurance company, which is ultimately paying the bill. And I think unfortunately it's become all too frequent that in that list of three or four potential customers, the patient a lot of times gets prioritized to the last. And I've sort of made it core philosophy that that's just unacceptable in my view.

 

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And so we've really put the patient first and we've developed a couple of groups here in our company that are patient first advocates that are interfacing with the patient and educating them on how to utilize the technology and products and being their sort of first entrance point to our company. And then our continuum of care team, which is following up with them in our technology centers and really interfacing with those customers after that, or those patients after that.

 

a different way to approach it and it's add significant cost to our company and the way that we deliver care. But when we define these first, this sort of core principle of this patient first mentality, it became obvious very quickly to me that the only way to achieve that goal is if I prioritize that goal ahead of the revenue line and ahead of the profitability line. So we need to, we regularly make decisions that

 

aren't in the best interest of our revenue or profitability, but are in the best interest of our patients. And to go back to one of your questions earlier about mistakes and failures, we've sort of embraced this patient first mentality. And when we do make a mistake, we're always making a mistake that we're trying to do what we think is best for the patient. And so when we do have those failures and those mistakes, to me, they're explainable.

 

and understandable because we were doing it in what we thought was the best interest of the patient, even when we screw up and things don't go the way that we had hoped they would. Right. The outcome was correct, right? So the product will follow to find that outcome. You know, I think it's, there are a lot of organizations that say, you know, they're patient first, they're customer first, and it's easy to say it, but like in practice, I mean, how do you make sure everyone from your engineer to your QA person to your

 

you know, your frontline customer support person knows that mantra and feels it and knows how to look at your product and your company with that lens. So I think it starts with leadership, but for it to be effective, it's got to be top down, bottom up, right? And I think it's rewarding, you know, continually embracing that message and then rewarding it when it happens. we've empowered everyone at every level to make decisions about

 

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that can be contradictory to our business interests but are in the best interest of the patient. And we reward that. Anytime this happens, even if it's not the exact decision I would have made or I don't agree with the decision, once I understand that the decision was in their attempt at the best interest of the patient, it doesn't matter what outcome happened or how much it cost. It's about, we made the best decision that we could at the time. And when you empower your people to do that and

 

You sort of have that ethos and those core values that emanate up and down the organization. It starts to be just natural response and it takes care of itself. It takes a lot of discipline and it takes some courage and it takes the ability to be willing to some days cost you money and be okay with that for it to work. So I think you gotta sometimes say to the accountants, hey, sorry, we lost money on this, but we thought it was the right thing to do and we stand by it.

 

That's kind of how we achieve that. And it just requires discipline to your core value. Well, it's an interesting, I'm trying to kind of tie it to your failure mantra, because it's almost like it gives your team members this safety net of the failure by knowing they're doing it with the patient in mind, right? It's like, hey, I know I had the best intent. So that's the failure is with the intent of making the patient experience better.

 

nicely ties together to allow people to feel in a safe space to make those mistakes. So good job. like your mantra. I might steal it. I might steal it for my team. You're welcome to. I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and speak to a lot of people. These ideas are welcome for anybody to take and improve upon because I'm no Oracle. Well, and they're just so transferable.

 

no matter what product you're building, right? Inside healthcare, outside healthcare, et cetera. It's just, good kind of innovation, product management mindset. Would love to chat with you a little bit, because you have been in the medical device kind of field for what, 25 plus years, and would love to get your take on what's going on in kind of the telehealth space and the integrated care space, specifically with, you know, some of the things you're doing with your current company, but just in general, what are the...

 

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telehealth trends you find interesting and that you think are things that our listeners should keep an eye out for? Or an ear, because we're on a podcast. This is a great question, super relevant. And I think you'll hear me say something that you usually don't hear much. is a good thing to come out of COVID, is this adoption and usage of telehealth. And if you think about when we were in COVID and in these lockdowns,

 

Healthcare used to be considered this, like it was in a bubble where it was recession proof. was no matter what was going on in the world, everybody needed healthcare and they were insulated and fairly bulletproof. Well, COVID changed that and it became very difficult to administer care safely while trying to mitigate the spread of COVID and people were

 

You know, in their homes, they didn't want to go into large buildings and large areas where there are a lot of people, particularly sick people. And so it really pushed this, you know, this zoom technology into healthcare where it was there, but nobody really used it. It was sort of this like, pariah of the medical, arena and.

 

providers didn't really have an incentive to do it. didn't really know how to do it. They didn't know how to integrate it into a practice flow. Some of the technology wasn't there and COVID really changed that. And I think it was like the jumping off point of the future of medicine and anyone who hasn't done a telehealth visit, I strongly encourage it. You can go to your health insurance company's website and look and they are available. And there's all of these different doctor on demand type of

 

services that are available. And I would tell you that if you're thinking of going to the urgent care and obviously asterisk, this is a life threatening situation, but if you aren't feeling well and you kind of want to go into urgent care, but you don't want to sit there for two hours around sick people, try this out. It's incredible. You usually are on with somebody in less than five or 10 minutes, including the signup process. You also get billed a whole lot less. Your insurance company pays less.

 

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And so it's, been this sort of amazing thing of the patient. It takes less time and they can get access to care faster. costs the insurance company less money and the provider can do more, more episodes of care in a given period of time. So it's this unique confluence of everybody winning. And it's incredible. It's not good for all things. Like obviously if you're having a heart attack, don't try and jump on a telehealth visit.

 

But for these like sort of, I've got a sore throat or I've got a fever or, you know, these sort of more manageable situations where you need care expedited, but you don't necessarily need it in an emergent critical nature. This is incredible. And when you pair that with sort of where I am in this home-based medical equipment, durable medical equipment, stuff that you're taking home, because

 

billion people or a couple billion people are carrying around these cell phones that are equivalent to, you know, fairly powerful computers. The cost of all the technology that's in there, the components has just dropped tremendously. And then when you bring in artificial intelligence, which we talked about a little bit earlier, the availability of highly customized data systems for, you know, even, even small businesses and entrepreneurial environments.

 

You've just got this recipe of some tremendous change that's going on in this, what people call health or telehealth space. And there's a huge opportunity for economies of scale saving money on healthcare dollars and providing higher end quality of care. it's, it's a really exciting place to be in healthcare. it's, it's, it's sort of this decades transition in, my opinion of what's happening in medicine is this telehealth and health space.

 

And specifically on the more like kind of primary care use case, right, like the preventative care, do you see any kind of future integrations in that space, maybe with like wearables or like what sort of innovations do you see maybe coming in that space that could look and feel a little bit different than it is today? So I think anything with real time data where, you know, a provider can have some type of AI algorithm

 

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evaluating your data in real time, and then basically flagging them for the yellow and red situations that they want a real clinician to look at. Huge growth segment there. And then really this concept of expedited care, minimizing of expenses, and then offloading of some of these more administrative aspects of healthcare that can be automated with real time data and sensors.

 

You know, running it into large data models where you can actually against tens of thousands or millions of patients data to sort of make evaluations about where you're at. think all of that stuff's going to tremendously, you know, are poised for huge opportunities for better care. And, you know, just this concept of through that, the app models on your phone, you know, with, with, for example, with our stuff, you're able to.

 

mess send messages that directly go to your care team and your care providers, like you would send a text message. And I think that that's something that's been missing in medicine since the days of the house call. Obviously they didn't have text messages back then, but your doctor was coming to your house and they were much more approachable and you know, there was more time and you, they knew more about you. think that just that communication back and forth is a tremendous leap forward in.

 

the delivery of healthcare here in the United States. That's an interesting take that I hadn't thought of before around, I think sometimes people view technology as disintermediating the personal connection. But to your point, yeah, I can message my doctor right now. He'll probably respond to me in an hour. And, you know, that's not something that was easy to do a couple years ago. So I think that's a really interesting, it kind of like brings

 

back faith from the patients in the personalization of health care. So great use case. All right, Nick. So I would love to hear about a story or some sort of use case where your technology at Advanced Recovery really played a role in either a patient outcome or a health system outcome. I would just love to hear about some success stories from you. Yeah, this is a great question. love talking about our patients obviously ignoring.

 

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those and our core value being centered around those patients. it is always nice to be able to talk about those success stories. it certainly is uplifting for me as part of why I do what I do. And obviously respecting patient privacy, this is going to be a little vague just to protect those privacy concerns. we primarily treat, we have several verticals that we're really focused in. And we work with a lot of patients who are hurt on the job.

 

So they're working in some type of a job where they sustained an injury and they're trying to get back to their life, get back to their job. We also work with patients who are involved in car accidents, who are injured, unfortunately, frequently, very severely. And then we work with the VA health center. So we're working with our veterans.

 

which is a group of people that we absolutely, you we don't pick favorites, but we love our veterans. We've got a lot of gratitude for the service that they've put themselves in. And a lot of the patients we're treating are people who are injured in that line of work. And we also work with active duty military, but my story focuses around this VA population and one patient in particular where that patient had, from the VA had had a

 

an injury to their leg and it was a severe injury that had several different components of trauma and some, some, crushing syndrome, in their, their lower leg. And it had resulted in this, pain that was so severe. it basically crippled the rest of this patient's life and they, they could not function in any aspect of their life.

 

And the doctors were really struggling. They had tried everything. some of the mysteries of pain still confound even our top researchers and clinicians. And they really couldn't understand what portion of this pain was what sort of is like a phantom pain where it's

 

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It's not really being happening acutely, but the body is interpreting it acutely and it's just as real and it's the same as if something was happening right then, but it's much more difficult to treat and much more difficult to diagnose and sort of solve. this patient, to give you the sort of a concept of the severity of this patient's pain, they were at the point where they wanted the

 

surgeons to amputate from knee down to try and eliminate this pain, even though they had function of their leg and could walk and do things that a normal person would do. But this pain was just, they couldn't live their life. that was sort of the, they thought maybe this would solve the pain. And one of our sales reps happened to be in that VA and talking to one of this patient's doctors,

 

about one of our treatment modalities. And we had seen really good results with other patients inside the VA with chronic pain. And they said, you know what, let's just give it a shot. Like, what do we have to lose? And the clinician and sales rep ended up pulling in our team, you know, at the corporate level. And we kind of got, you know, almost too close to this at an emotional and personal level, which

 

I think a lot of times it's a good thing to get that close to your patients on occasion, but we really got engaged in it and the patient ended up utilizing our product. It made a profound difference in their pain to the point where they abandoned this amputation surgery. It was to the point where it was already on the books for the OR. They ended up canceling the surgery and this patient still has their leg and is now able to live their life in a...

 

significantly less painful way and they're able to keep their legs. So now they can, you know, they don't have a, a, a, you know, a prosthetic and they, don't have to deal with any of that stuff. you know, one of those situations where it really is uplifting from why do I do what I do? And, know, the long hours when you're working late nights or weekends, and instead of being with your family, those are the things that I remember. I go, what I'm doing,

 

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has an impact on real people's lives and it's important what we're doing. And so in that respect, it's extremely rewarding and rewarding for that patient too. I'm glad that they still have their land. Thank you for sharing that story. I feel like it's a culmination of how you lead and create and think about a product that brings that sort of problem solving to your patient. And then you made a comment of like, maybe we got too involved with this patient in the story, but

 

I look at it as you did and that's your mantra, right? So getting involved intimately with that patient and wanting to solve that problem and partnering with so many different people across the VA, like that speaks to your ethos, right? And it's a real life example of exactly what you've been talking about. So I appreciate you so much for sharing all of your wisdom on innovation of a mindset, of thinking of your end user, your customer, your patient when you're building a product, your wealth of knowledge and...

 

telehealth, telemedicine, remote patient monitoring. I really hope everyone enjoyed this podcast and it was great talking to you, Nick. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I've enjoyed the time. Thank you for joining us today on Elevate Care. If you found this episode valuable, please consider sharing it with a colleague and subscribing to our show on your favorite podcast platform. You can learn more about this episode and our show on our website at amnhelfcare.com.

 

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