Ever wondered how technology is reshaping the world of healthcare? Join us in this compelling episode as Henry Peck sits down with two visionary leaders, Owen Willis, founder and general partner of Opal Ventures, a health tech venture fund focused on companies that increase access to healthcare, and Stuart Solomon, co-founder and chief medical officer of Orchestra Health, a health tech company addressing the challenges of perioperative care through groundbreaking technology.
As a pioneer in the health tech space, Stuart's experiences and insights offer valuable lessons for entrepreneurs striving to build venture scale businesses in the dynamic healthcare ecosystem. Owen highlights the significance of investors being thought partners and aligning incentives among diverse stakeholders while building venture scale businesses. Together, they discuss Orchestra Health's mission to revolutionize care coordination and logistics, providing a glimpse into the future of healthcare delivery.
Topics include:
- Stuart's journey from anesthesiologist into healthcare entrepreneurship
- The complexity of perioperative care, and how, by leveraging technology, Orchestra Health makes the process more efficient
- The importance Opal Ventures and other health investors contributing not just financially, but also as thought partners with their expertise and network
- The concept of venture scale in healthcare and its relevance to Orchestra's mission
- The importance of customer discovery, especially for early-stage health tech founders
- Why aligning incentives of various stakeholders is crucial for the successful implementation of health tech solutions
- The future of Orchestra Health, Opal Ventures, and healthcare innovation
- Stuart and Owen’s upcoming participation at the LSI Europe ‘23 conference in September, where they will discuss these topics in greater detail
And more!
Key moments
- 00:47 - Stuart’s background and what led him to found Orchestra Health.
- 05:30 - Owen’s background, and the mission of Opal Ventures
- 11:00 - Stuart explains how Orchestra Health coordinates the pre-op care journey and addresses the unique challenges in surgical care.
- 19:00 - The challenges and opportunities in building venture scale businesses in healthcare.
- 24:34 - Owen highlights the challenges of building a company, and the important role investors can play
- 27:12 - The future of Orchestra and the evolving trends in the health tech space.
Guest links and resources:
- Connect with Stuart Solomon: LinkedIn
- Orchestra Health
- Connect with Owen Willis: LinkedIn | Twitter
- Opal Ventures
Connect with Henry: Twitter | LinkedIn
Connect with LSI:
Browse Episodes | Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram
Connect with Health Podcast Network:
Browse Shows | LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
[00:00:00] Henry Peck: Hey everyone, it's Henry. Welcome to Emerging Medtech Today by LSI. Today I'm joined by Stuart, co founder and CMO at Orchestra Health, and Owen, founder and general partner at Opal Ventures.
[00:00:15] Henry Peck: Together we discuss Stuart's founding story, what led Opal Ventures to invest in Orchestra Health, how Orchestra Health and emerging companies more broadly are aligning incentives across diverse stakeholders to build venture scale businesses, and how investors like Owen and Opal Ventures can add value to the growth of emerging companies like Orchestra Health. Enjoy.
[00:00:35] Henry Peck: Owen, Stu, thank you so much for joining me today. Stu, let's start with your background and what led you to founding and building orchestra in the market that you're building in today.
[00:00:47] Stuart Solomon: Thank you so much, Henry, and thanks for having me. So a little bit about my background and how I came into founding this company. So I am a still-practicing, board certified anesthesiologist. [00:01:00] So I'm a physician that takes care of patients going into surgery and basically follow the patient all the way from pre op until they are recovering from surgery.
[00:01:11] Stuart Solomon: And I've always had, uh, an interest in innovation in healthcare and technology. And I guess I've had somewhat of a non traditional background. I've always taken courses in business and entrepreneurship. In my younger years, I've had other businesses that I kind of experimented with, and I've always really been interested in the nuts and bolts of science and biology and also the business side, logistics and operations. But then there's also this really artistic side of medicine, like empathy and creativity.
[00:01:48] Stuart Solomon: And I guess I kind of have a broad set of interests that kind of drew me towards medicine. So I, you know, went through this, what most would consider a traditional route where I went through medical school, [00:02:00] decided I wanted to do anesthesiology because there's a, this combination of technology and science, and that was always really interesting to me, but never really lost my interest in, in innovation and entrepreneurship. And when I did residency in anesthesia, I honestly just got really lucky and landed at University of Washington in Seattle, had some amazing mentors and some incredible opportunities.
[00:02:26] Stuart Solomon: And that was really where I got introduced into entrepreneurship. And my first sort of experience with this was there was an engineering school program, like a capstone, where they needed a doctor to provide some sort of clinical problem for the engineering students to focus on. And, uh, nobody else seemed to want to volunteer for this. And I said, despite being so busy being a resident doctor, I was like, I'm going to throw my hat into this and see how it goes. And, uh, long story short, there was some cool stuff built, dabbled in a bunch of other projects, [00:03:00] we ended up having a platform that, that we worked on with one of my mentors, uh, license, and that was the first flavor that I thought that I might want to do something more in innovation and healthcare.
[00:03:12] Stuart Solomon: So that led me to Stanford where I did a postdoc fellowship in perioperative management. So basically all the business. logistics and operations that go into surgery, which you have to be careful because when you say operations for operations, it can get kind of confusing, but this is basically all the nuts and bolts that go into somebody having surgery.
[00:03:34] Stuart Solomon: And I started to follow and pursue that field in a more academic sense and a more traditional sense. But throughout my whole career and medical training, I always had this nagging feeling that the sort of dogmatic broken processes of health care don't really work so well. And I know this is a common theme throughout health care.
[00:03:58] Stuart Solomon: But this problem was always in the [00:04:00] back of my head. And it was really meeting my co founder, who has a background in software logistics and management, and all of his experience was in shipping logistics from companies like Amazon and another startup called Convoy. And over the course of about six months, we developed this very close relationship where I was sharing my frustrations and the problems that I was seeing as a clinician, but also as an operations manager at a large hospital. And he would tell me his past experiences of this sounds a lot like the shipping industry. And we were able to fix this by using, you know, this technology or that process improvement. And those were really the, uh, conversations of how orchestra health, uh, came to be.
[00:04:47] Henry Peck: Super interesting. And I love the parallels between the shipping and logistics industry and the broader health care space, as you said. I think it's really interesting in a space, especially, where technology often takes a [00:05:00] long time to penetrate and make the impact in the market that it can. You know, when I was in surgical robotics, for example, we saw a lot of talented individuals come over from self driving car companies and autonomous vehicle companies, very similar idea of motion controls and planning. So that idea of bringing in proven solutions from another space as a way to improve health care with technologies that solve similar problems, really, really exciting. Um, and thank you for sharing that, that story.
[00:05:30] Henry Peck: Owen, would love you to introduce yourself as well. Tell us a little bit about what you're building with Opal Ventures and how you met Stu.
[00:05:37] Owen Willis: Yeah, thank you, Henry. Thank you for having me on. So my name is Owen Willis. I'm the founder and general partner of Opal Ventures. It's a pre seed health tech venture fund based in New York.
[00:05:48] Owen Willis: We're really focused on companies that are increasing access to care. And we look at it through essentially three pillars. So one is companies that are making it easier to run healthcare organizations, right, they're handling [00:06:00] some of the operations of healthcare orgs. Companies that are addressing some of the underlying root causes that are preventing access to care for underserved populations.
[00:06:09] Owen Willis: And we are really interested in companies that are making clinicians lives more sustainable, right, and that's really focused on how do we, how do we get doctors back to doing the work that is most important to them and most impactful for their patients.
[00:06:22] Owen Willis: And, you know, in the case of Orchestra, Orchestra checks all three of those boxes. In terms of their approach and how they've thought about building in the space. I was really fortunate enough to meet Stu when I was at a company called On Deck. So prior to Opal, I was the founder of a group called On Deck Health, which is a community of early stage health tech founders, operators, and, and healthcare experts.
[00:06:49] Owen Willis: And the idea of this program was to help founders get access to those resources that are going to help them get to market faster. A lot of what I'm doing today with Opal Ventures is an extension [00:07:00] of that experience and that learning. But Stu was, was part of one of the cohorts of founders that came in.
[00:07:06] Owen Willis: And, you know, one of the things that really excited me about Stu and, and, you know, his approach to things was, you know, I'm interested in founders that are building out of a lived experience. Right. They have a unique earned insight in the market. They understand both what it takes to kind of build something, but then also what it's going to take to implement it and sell it into a system.
[00:07:27] Owen Willis: I think what's been really interesting for me is that there are many doctors out there who are absolutely kind of phenomenal world class physicians, but there's a difference between being a fantastic doctor and understanding the business of medicine. I think that's something that I was immediately impressed with Stu, and that's why I wanted him to be a part of that healthcare community.
[00:07:46] Owen Willis: And we've just been able to build that relationship since then, and he began working with Austin through kind of On Deck and kind of that broader community. But also, I've just been very lucky to have a front row seat in watching him build. [00:08:00] For me, when kind of the question came up of whether it made sense to participate and be an investor, it was, it was a no brainer for me.
[00:08:06] Owen Willis: Again, I think the, the thing that has been so amazing to see has been taking this lived experience, applying these lessons learned from other industries. And, and being able to use that to impact real change, both on the providers that they're working with, but also on the patient to who they're working with as well.
[00:08:26] Henry Peck: That's fantastic. Stu, in the founding story, you mentioned unique challenges that you encountered working in the space from that lived experience that Owen was referencing. Can you elaborate on some of these unique challenges in the perioperative space and how addressing them is going to deliver on that vision of impacting the lives of health care providers and patients?
[00:08:48] Stuart Solomon: Yes, absolutely. So I can spend just a minute explaining kind of where we operate as a company and as a service in Orchestra Health. And our main goal is to guide [00:09:00] patients into a surgical journey. And what this is basically is a care transition, right? So as a patient, you are in your normal state of health or you have a, maybe you have a chronic problem that's kind of developed over time and now it's reached a point where you need surgery.
[00:09:18] Stuart Solomon: And the main problem here and what I experienced as a physician and continue to do so in my part time anesthesia work is when a patient shows up for surgery, all of these logistical and clinical challenges that need to be processed and essentially resolved, often do not happen, and nobody is really tracking this. And from my point of view, it's actually very interesting because it's how surgery and maybe even healthcare as a whole has kind of evolved and developed over the last 20 or 30 years. And I can say specifically for surgery, you know, back in the 1980s or the [00:10:00] 1990s, having a surgery was this like marvelous, almost miraculous, occurence, and when you talk to surgeons or anesthesiologists who practice back then, you might do, you know, a couple of surgeries in a day, and operations around surgery was not a focus.
[00:10:21] Stuart Solomon: And there's a lot of macro trends, mostly around economics that are now putting downward pressure to basically increase the amount of volume that we're doing, increase the amount of surgeries, because this is how hospitals make a big chunk of their revenue. For many hospitals it's their only profit center. Over time, people have kind of realized, oh, we have these operating rooms, they need to be generating revenue all the time. We need to be having, you know, quick turnovers, which is when, you know, how quick we can get a patient out and get a new patient in, and get patients onto the bed, so to speak, onto the OR table.
[00:10:57] Stuart Solomon: The healthcare system was not [00:11:00] designed to support that level of efficiency. So, you know, you asked me about the challenges that I've seen, and this is coming from my sort of long term interest in efficiency and entrepreneurship, is it's very frustrating as a clinician when there's this pressure to perform and you want to do a good job for your patient, you want a strong and positive clinical outcome, but you're really limited by the system. And we can dig into that a little bit more, but there's really just this general lack of efficiency, lack of coordination, and just no source of truth for when a patient is going from a normal state of health into this new care journey or care transition.
[00:11:43] Stuart Solomon: With orchestra health, we take that ownership and we are sort of unbundling that pre op care journey coordination, and we will own every step of this process, coordinate between all of these different stakeholders that are involved in a, in a surgery. [00:12:00] This often includes the surgeon or the surgeon's office, the facility where the surgery is happening, the anesthesia group, the patient, and starting to involve the payers and other third party players that are all involved in this experience.
[00:12:15] Henry Peck: Thank you. That's great. And you talk a little bit about the challenges for physicians and that pressure to perform and, and how that fits into the broader healthcare experience, I think something that strikes me about this space is, it's really complicated. There's a lot more that goes into the experience of getting a surgery and of having that care team and that transition wrapped around you than I think people realize.
[00:12:42] Henry Peck: And so, when you think about a business with stakeholders of this level of breadth and diversity, I'm curious, how do you go about aligning incentives in a company like this? And maybe Owen, hearing your perspective on why that's important, not just for Orchestra and how they're achieving that today, but for health tech [00:13:00] and medtech startups at large, how they can think about aligning incentives with complex nuanced businesses that fit into very fragmented ecosystems often.
[00:13:10] Owen Willis: Yeah, that's a great question, Henry. And I think part of why I'm such a fan of founders that are building out of that lived experience is because they understand the complexity of the problems that they're solving. When it comes to health care, really, the person who is using your product or benefiting from your product is often not the person who's paying for your product, and maybe not always the person who's accessing the data, right?
[00:13:32] Owen Willis: So you oftentimes have two or three different stakeholders that are all in the room. When it comes to Orchestra, the thing that I've been really impressed by is that understanding of the alignment of incentives. And, you know, part of it is, is with the individual surgeons, right, the surgeons want to be spending their time working on cases, they don't want to be spending their time handling a lot of these operations and logistics, right? And so for them, using a tool like this is a no brainer. [00:14:00]
[00:14:00] Owen Willis: On the provider side, as Stu mentioned, surgeries are a large driver of revenue for these providers. And, you know, to be clear, when we're talking about these types of procedures, these are real quality of life things for patients as well, right, this is about getting a hip replacement or a knee replacement. This is about a lot of the procedures in, in women's health, right? I think there's sometimes when you hear the word elective procedure, it kind of sounds like a little bit of a dirty word, but these are things that enable people to live happy, full, healthy lives.
[00:14:31] Owen Willis: And, you know, on the other side of the equation, for the patients, navigating this process is incredibly difficult and complex, and there's nothing more frustrating than even kind of getting to the day of the procedure and realizing that it might not happen, right, and you might have to wait another six months for that hip replacement because some form was missed somewhere and something wasn't signed off on.
[00:14:50] Owen Willis: And so, you know, I think that alignment is incredibly powerful. And when you think about the patients that are most impacted by this, these are people who might have language or [00:15:00] cultural barriers. These are folks who work multiple jobs. These are maybe senior citizens with limited access to technology, right?
[00:15:07] Owen Willis: These are the most vulnerable patients that we have in our, in our population. And so for me, it's that ability to align those incentives between kind of patients, providers and payers is what makes Orchestra successful. And I think it's a really good blueprint for other companies that are building in the space as well.
[00:15:24] Henry Peck: Talk to me a little bit more about that blueprint. How would somebody take these learnings from Orchestra, take a look at what they're doing across those different stakeholders and apply that to their own company with their own vision.
[00:15:37] Owen Willis: Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, I think not everyone has the privilege and luxury of Stu's experience of actually doing this work day in and day out, right, and understanding kind of that problem that needs to be solved. And I think one of the things that is incredibly important for early stage founders is to be thinking about that customer discovery. And be spending time embedded with the folks who are going to be using, benefiting, and [00:16:00] accessing the product that you are wanting to implement.
[00:16:02] Owen Willis: You know, one of the big lessons in health care that I've learned from my time, both at at Osmosis, where I was running our B2B go to market, but then also at On Deck, is the best product doesn't always win. It's really about having a product that solves a very, very real problem, uh, for the folks that are kind of involved in that workflow. But also it's about understanding the change management that needs to happen in order to implement this.
[00:16:29] Owen Willis: And, you know, there are solutions out there that are best in class pieces of software that are never going to work actually in the healthcare system because it requires the sign off of 10 or 15 different people in order for it to operate, all of whom have different incentives.
[00:16:44] Owen Willis: And so I think, you know, a big part of it for those early stage founders is identifying what is that wedge? What is that problem we can solve today? And how do we line up those incentives with those stakeholders? And then how do we scale from there? How do we build out the tech? How do we do all [00:17:00] of those pieces? Versus showing up with a ready to go solution from day one.
[00:17:05] Henry Peck: Makes sense. Thank you for clarifying that. Stu, you're obviously building an incredible business and you have those earned insights, that lived experience that you and Owen are emphasizing so much, which really provides the unique ability to build something special like this. And in taking on venture investors for this business. You're obviously working tirelessly to build a venture scale business. You know, through our events on the investors that we work with at LSI, we hear that term a lot, "venture scale businesses", and how it can sometimes be challenging in medtech and health tech to find venture scale businesses that meet certain theses and to build a company from day one properly to be positioned to be a venture scale business. First, Owen, I'd love to just get a sober barometer of what does a venture scale business mean to you?
[00:17:56] Owen Willis: So, just on the venture scale business side of [00:18:00] things, I mean, I think the thing that we hear a lot from investors is a large majority of businesses in healthcare are not quote unquote venture scale.
[00:18:07] Owen Willis: And I think that's accurate, right? There are certain things that are able to be kind of replicable and scalable that take advantage of economies of scale over time. And not every business in healthcare is able to do that. So when I'm thinking about venture scale opportunities, um, I'm looking for businesses that are going to require some kind of large amount of upfront capital to build out kind of that initial offering and that initial product, but once they kind of have that wedge figured out and they are able to demonstrate that they're able to bring value into the market, they are then able to replicate that with multiple customers and, you know, potentially multiple groups of patients using a sales process that is scalable.
[00:18:52] Owen Willis: That means being able to bring on a sales team. That means the founder is not having to show up every single time to sell a product. [00:19:00] And it means something that is going to be able to expand beyond a wedge over time. You know, when you think about kind of selling software and those sorts of subscriptions, the power of that comes from the compounding gains of renewals, of selling into a customer, being able to expand the breadth of how you support them and the size of that contract.
[00:19:20] Owen Willis: And then those contracts stacking up on top of each other year over year over year. When it comes to how I'm investing, the majority of our investments are on the software side, but that is not necessarily the only way to achieve venture scale when it comes to health tech.
[00:19:35] Henry Peck: That definition makes a lot of sense. Stu, when you told me about Orchestra, you said that tech unlocks venture scale for you in this space. And I want to hear more about that, how the technology is unlocking venture scale for you and your vision.
[00:19:51] Stuart Solomon: From the perspective of a physician who is now trying to build a venture scale business and solve what anyone in the [00:20:00] space knows to be a huge problem. I mentioned earlier on this call that there's a lot of downward pressure on physicians and really all clinicians to perform. And there's this desire for everyone to produce high quality care, to do it quick, to do it efficiently.
[00:20:18] Stuart Solomon: But the big problem that we all feel and, you know, not, not to get into this whole burnout issue, which could be a whole nother podcast topic, but there's a lot of frustration from all clinicians really that we want to do this awesome job and deliver high quality care, but there are so few tools in order to deliver that high quality care. And there's a lot of issues right now with electronic medical records and how we share data, how we communicate with patients, there's a lot of regulatory hurdles. And I think when we talk about a venture scale healthcare business, it's how can you solve those types of infrastructure problems that can scale across an entire industry.
[00:20:58] Stuart Solomon: And I've always thought [00:21:00] that there's a dichotomy in venture scale healthcare businesses. And there's been these oscillations where people get really excited about it, and then it kind of goes down. And if you followed public and private healthcare markets for a long time, you see these kind of cycles where it kind of goes up and down.
[00:21:16] Stuart Solomon: On the one hand, it can be difficult to build lightweight, high margin, repeatable processes in healthcare for some of the reasons that I mentioned. But on the other hand, the market is so large and there are so many, uh, big pervasive problems that you don't necessarily have to solve everything in order to become a very large business.
[00:21:39] Stuart Solomon: Speaking about orchestra, you know, surgery, obviously is a big market. It's potentially a trillion dollar market. And just focusing on one piece of surgery could turn out to be quite a large business. So I think for us, there's actually a lot of macro trends on why fixing this problem and helping [00:22:00] patients achieve success in surgery is kind of win win for everybody.
[00:22:04] Stuart Solomon: The last thing I would say, and this is becoming just much more popular today than it was you know, when I started in medical training 10, almost 15 years ago, is people actually getting into innovation, getting their hands dirty and starting companies and trying innovative things. I would encourage other physicians to kind of go into this and try it because there's been this continued trend of physicians just, and when I say physicians, I actually mean all clinicians, you know, physicians, mid level providers, nurses, where we kind of get stuck in the system, but we really are in a good position to change that system.
[00:22:42] Stuart Solomon: And there's just not a lot of, of resources to kind of learn how to do that, but it is changing. You know, when I started in medicine, people would think that you were crazy to kind of step out the box and do something else. Uh, and now one of the most common questions I get from medical students and even [00:23:00] residents who are just finishing training, you know, are asking me how do I, how do I break into health tech or, uh, venture capital or something else?
[00:23:07] Stuart Solomon: And, um, I think there's sort of some parallels there, but there are, there are ways where you can do good work as a physician, but also bring your knowledge and, and your creativity to the table to have process improvement in healthcare.
[00:23:23] Henry Peck: Stu, you mentioned physicians, clinicians of all level getting involved in innovation and obviously, the grassroots of innovation, those that truly understand the space, it's very close to our heart at LSI, it's the, it's the community that we serve, but another very important part of our community are the investors, the ones that finance these businesses.
[00:23:42] Henry Peck: And I think a lot of times there's a perspective that investors are small banks and check writers, but that's just a small piece of the equation as to what an investor does in the process of building and scaling a company. Owen, as you're building Opal Ventures, I'd love to hear your [00:24:00] perspective on that misunderstanding, your perspective on where investors can add value during the growth and development of a health tech company like Orchestra, beyond the check
[00:24:10] Owen Willis: One of the privileges of being an investor is you get to talk to a lot of companies, right? You talk to a lot of founders, you talk to a lot of executives, you talk to folks who have a, a tremendous amount of expertise in this space. And you know, I, I think, you know, when you're, uh, a founder or an operator when you're building a company, you have blinders on, right, you have to. You are, you're very, very laser focused on what you are solving.
[00:24:34] Owen Willis: And, you know, the best founders have an understanding of that company and how it fits into the broader context of the space. But I would say the first thing that investors can bring to the table is perspective. And being able to just be a thought partner and share some of the broader lessons and learnings and trends that they're seeing as they are navigating the broader health tech space and kind of getting to sit, you know, 30, 000 feet in the air there.
[00:24:59] Owen Willis: [00:25:00] The other thing though is, you know, the early stages of building a company, and, and, you know, I'm saying this as a very early stage investor, are tumultuous. There's a lot happening. There's, um, you know, fires going every moment of the day that you're, you're trying to put out. And, and, you know, it's not even about firefighting, it's about figuring out which fire is small enough to not worry about and which fire is so big that you have to do it or the company will fail.
[00:25:24] Owen Willis: So I think that the second place where investors can be really helpful, um, is as that combination of just kind of thought partner and therapist as an investor, if you are not on their list of people that they're calling when it hits the fan, you need to do a better job of building your relationship with the founder, right? You know, you need to be the person that is going to be there to help them.
[00:25:44] Owen Willis: And it's, you know, not just because, you know, you want to make that investment successful, but, uh, you know, if, if you're running a fund and you're doing follow on investment, you really need to demonstrate and earn that opportunity to continue investing in that company in the future. [00:26:00] And you want that to be a win win proposition for you and the founder.
[00:26:03] Owen Willis: The third thing is around some of kind of the early parts of company building, which are hiring, number one, and being a thought partner around hiring and hopefully making some introductions as they are looking for early teammates.
[00:26:16] Owen Willis: But number two, it's about helping them kind of figure out how to get early customers, right? The number one kind of point of traction and validation that enables you to raise subsequent rounds of funding is go to market success. And as an investor, the number one best thing you can do for a founder is introduce them to a potential customer or introduce them to somebody who is going to help them close a key deal, right?
[00:26:40] Owen Willis: And if you are able to do that, you are going to meaningfully derisk your investment, as an investor, but also you are going to make it much easier for that company to keep building and to raise follow on capital. And so, you know, I think again, it's really about being a thought partner, [00:27:00] being that kind of extra bit of perspective and helping the founder kind of where you can. And it's mostly going to be through introductions, do some of that early team building and potentially get one of those early sales.
[00:27:12] Henry Peck: Stu, to wrap us up here, give us a little bit of a glimpse of what you're most enthusiastic about in the upcoming months, years with Orchestra, what you're seeing evolving in the space and in your business more broadly, and what you envision leaders like yourselves discussing about the state of the industry at our event in Barcelona, Spain, this September.
[00:27:33] Stuart Solomon: Yeah, absolutely. When focusing on Orchestra and in our business in the immediate future, we are really excited about the macro trends for care transitions in health care. One thing I didn't have a chance to mention yet is there's actually this big trend of surgeries moving from big hospitals into outpatient surgery centers, or ambulatory surgery centers, usually referred to as ASCs. And there's this [00:28:00] problem of poor care coordination and patients not being prepared for surgery because the healthcare system doesn't support it, is made worse when these surgeries are happening at smaller providers and smaller centers that don't have any infrastructure.
[00:28:17] Stuart Solomon: So our, our big focus lately and going into the immediate future has been really leveraging that problem. And our main goal is to provide best in class perioperative care and logistics and support to facilities and surgeons offices and smaller providers that really just don't have the logistical awareness or the resources to provide that.
[00:28:42] Stuart Solomon: What that looks like functionally is we really want the patient to not have to do this logistical management on their own. What fascinates me most about the future in this space is, obviously I'm biased as an anesthesiologist and somebody [00:29:00] that did this day to day and kind of continues to do this work, but it's not just surgery where this is a big problem.
[00:29:08] Stuart Solomon: When you talk to patients or when you read about healthcare, there is a long list of examples where hairy, messy care coordination and care logistics is really just put on the patient at the end of the day when the healthcare system breaks down. And I would love to be part of a future where that problem is not put on the patient and it's supported by technology. And we have the resources and the technology to be able to take that off of the patient and for us to bear a lot of that burden and that's really been our mission and our goal at Orchestra and going into the future.
[00:29:49] Stuart Solomon: And then, you know, as a physician, I think what motivates me to do this, it's the same things that got me first interested in medicine, which is that empathy and helping people and [00:30:00] integrating the science, the biology, the technology.
[00:30:03] Stuart Solomon: And if we can figure out a way to fix that problem using venture capital and using resources out in industry and in the macro environment, my dream is to leverage that to have an impact on lots of people, not just the one I'm caring for patients one at a time. So I think those are kind of the take home points as we think about, you know, why are we doing this, what's the impact that we can have, and where do we see orchestra fitting into this.
[00:30:31] Henry Peck: Well, I look forward to the world that you want to build with Orchestra, the, the future state of how we experience and deliver care as you paint it with your unique background, with the vision that you have for this venture and the opportunity that's in front of you is incredibly exciting.
[00:30:48] Henry Peck: And I think one thing that you said that, that I have heard frequently from clinicians that found companies is that you're seeing an opportunity now from your lived experience to [00:31:00] have a one to many impact, to be able to take something that comes from the deepest level of intelligence, working with individual patients, individual stakeholders, and use technology to scale that impact across the entire system. And so I look forward to seeing how the system continues to change for the better as you're able to scale that impact.
[00:31:23] Stuart Solomon: Awesome. Thanks so much, Henry. It was great to be here and we'll stay in touch as this continues to move forward.
[00:31:28] Henry Peck: Absolutely.
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