Latest / Daxko Fitness Forward / A Doctor's Mission to Keep Kids Safe at Camp | Fitness Forward Ep. 03
Transcript
- Daxko: This is Fitness Forward, conversations shaping the future of fitness. chance to get to know each other a little bit. And ⁓ I I would love to start just with your story is fascinating, you know, how how you got into this business. It wasn't something that ⁓ I think you planned to get into, but do you mind just telling the audience a little bit about how Doc Network, you know, and I I think originally it was Camp Doc, ⁓ it the first product, you know, how how did you start on this journey? Yeah, great question. Good to see you again, Jeff. And thanks for for having me. So Yeah, I I grew up going to summer camp my entire life since I was in elementary school and the the story is pretty fascinating and I I enjoyed telling it. So I grew up going to camp and the summer after I graduated high school, I'd gone to camp every year. but life was starting to get a little more serious as I was going you know starting my my college career and I shadowed a family friend ⁓ who was a pediatrician at a local camp in southeastern Michigan. She was one of the camp doctors at this camp. ⁓ and I was supposed to only stay for a week and just kind of shadow her and get a little bit of experience, but I ended up staying all summer ⁓ because I had such a great time. And what I found at this camp, this was a pretty well-staffed camp. ⁓ they had a few doctors and a few nurses on staff, and they had a nice sized infirmary. ⁓ and this camp was not a special needs or a medical camp, ⁓ regular old camp. ran day programs and sleepover programs. ⁓ and this camp was making mistakes all the time. Little Timmy would get little Susie's medication by accident. Little Sarah might get her sleeping pills at breakfast. ⁓ you know, they were losing medical forms or health information, or if they could, if they did have it, it was chicken scratch handwriting that they couldn't decipher what that critical information was. And I had approached the camp staff and said, you know, hey guys, if if you're willing to, you know. Buy a few laptops for the camp clinic, I'll write some software to help make your jobs a whole lot easier. And more importantly, make sure you don't kill anybody and you you keep these kids healthier and and safe. They agreed, and I spent the first few years of undergrad kind of writing the prototype. ⁓ and it worked. I rolled it out, I think it was the summer after my junior year of college. and guess what? That year they had no more medication error because they weren't able to access. all of the medical information kind of with a click of a button. And I figured if it was gonna work at that camp, ⁓ it probably would work anywhere. Yeah. Yeah. So I love it. It's it's such the prototypical ⁓ founder story, right? There's a problem, I'm gonna solve it. ⁓ w with without really the intention, you know, from our conversations of it being a business to start. So so so then kind of fast forward, I I introduce you as doctor, ⁓ and ⁓ love for you to just talk about ⁓ your career. So your career progresses. This is like pre-college. You go to medical school, you become a doctor. Yeah, talk a little bit about that journey and one, just kind of how that maybe motivated you even more around this product and this service that you're offering. And then two, I'd love for you to talk about how the heck did you get through medical school and continue to write code for this platform. Great great question. So yeah, I ended up I was pre-med in in college and ⁓ went into medical school. So I've been in Ann Arbor, Michigan for last twenty-five years or so now. ⁓ I did undergrad and medical school and residency all at the University of Michigan. and I continued to kind of see the need and and my love for kind of camp ⁓ and kind of you know youth programming ⁓ continued to foster even more. So I became a pediatrician, ⁓ not surprisingly, with my my love of camp. Yeah. and you know, throughout medical school and into residency, I continued to foster and grow this camp dock product. ⁓ and for years it was just me. ⁓ it was a a guy with a laptop sitting on his kitchen table. And ⁓ you know, I was I was I was dev, I was product, I was sales and marketing and client success. ⁓ And it was working. There was nobody else out there doing this at the time. ⁓ this was around the time when kind of electronic medical records ⁓ were being mandated, you know, by the government and everybody was transitioning. and how did I do it? I I didn't sleep a lot. This is not an exaggeration. ⁓ there was a three year period where I slept about three hours a night ⁓ every day. I was working 80 hours a week in the hospital and you know, and would work. From 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the hospital, working shifts there, ⁓ and then you know, come home and code and sell and do all the things, you know, until about three, four in the morning, and then go back to the hospital the next day. And so I've continued my medical career still practicing. ⁓ I've cut it down a little bit. I like to tell people that clinical medicine is more of a hobby for me now. I still practice, although it's about one day a month. ⁓ I went in and did pediatric emergency medicine for quite a while and kind of saw kind of the nature of high acuity kind of emergencies that could happen. ⁓ And while I'm only doing a little bit clinically, I feel like I'm having an even greater impact with what I'm doing at DocNet Work, camp doc and school doc. Right, I can go work a shift, ⁓ you know, an eight, ten-hour shift in the ER, and I can save the lives of maybe 10 or 12 kids, which is amazing. but with the work that we're doing here, right, we have hundreds of thousands, millions of kids that we are impacting with our product, and I I feel like I can can have an even larger impact. I still do ⁓ a ton of work and more kind of advocacy work. ⁓ I was I'm the lead author for the American Academy of Pediatrics, a national policy statement, health and safety at camp. ⁓ and this is really applicable, right? We use the word camp, ⁓ which is really a misnomer. right, if we think about maybe 10, 15, 20 years ago, kind of the traditional summer camp, go away into the woods, right, for for four or six weeks and then come on home. The world has changed quite a bit, and and camp, We we really now refer to them more as YSOs or youth serving organizations, right? That could be programs that are run by YMCAs, GCCs, rec clubs, parks and rec organizations, right? Your your local school might be running youth programs. And so ⁓ anytime a kid is away from home, there is this need, you know, to keep them healthy and safe when they are under the care of somebody else. And so I advise a lot with the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Camp Association, and various other organizations doing it and publishing a ton of research ⁓ and kind of helping with policy stuff. So wearing lots of hats, ⁓ but it's it's a blast. Yeah. Well congratulations. You've clearly come a long way from ⁓ you know, balancing med school and ⁓ just to be clear, as a doctor, sleeping three hours a night is not recommended. Is that correct? It is not recommended. I would never do it again. And I wouldn't recommend that anybody else do that. It's amazing what you can do in your twenties though, I'd have to say. ⁓ yeah, so so Michael, clearly you're an expert in this field and and I love that you brought up, you know, Camp Doc. ⁓ I think to your point, sometimes you hear that name and you think overnight camp, right? And if you could talk a little bit about, you know, just kind of where the company's at now. I know you have a lot of team members now, a lot of resources behind this product. You service, you know, thousands and hundreds of thousands of youth. you know, ⁓ thousands of customers, hundreds of thousands of youth. ⁓ talk a little bit about just the product, what it does ⁓ in some of your kind of targeted clients. Yeah. So at at its core, Camp Doc is an electronic health record system ⁓ for camps or youth related programs. So ⁓ depending on ⁓ you know where your your youth program is located, right? Different states, different counties ⁓ right, different locations have different rules and regulations, but they're all pretty much the same at its core. It doesn't matter if you are running a small program with 10 or 15 kids, or you are running a large program with tens of thousands of kids. ⁓ right, the Department of Health in your state, in your county, in your city, ⁓ or the American Camp Association or the Alliance for Camp Health says that there are certain things that you are required to do. ⁓ right. I can give you some easy examples, right? It would be right, it would be really bad if you were running a program for kids and you had a kid with a peanut allergy, and you were serving Snickers bars with peanuts, right, at that program. So it is critical and essential, and the law says that you have to have certain information about kids, allergies, medications, vaccines, right? All of their medical history in order to safely care for them. And so with our system, ⁓ it allows for parents to enter in ⁓ very easily all of that required information about the health and safety of their child, and then allows the youth program, the YMCA, the JCC, the Parks and Rec department, to essentially report on all of that data. So click a button, show me all the kids in week two, you know, that are doing ⁓ right ⁓ the the tennis camp and show me who has asthma. Show me who has allergies and show me who takes medications or who's a vegetarian, right? Anything and everything you can think about can be captured in the system. There are other rules and regulations. I won't bore you with all of them, but right, there are other rules about medications. When you administer or when you dispense a medication, ⁓ what you're tracking, how you're tracking it, right, in order to make sure you're giving the right medication to the right kid at the right time. right. And then there's lots of rules and regulations about incident reporting, right? Anytime a kid, it doesn't matter if they're coming in with a stubborn toe, ⁓ or a broken bone or an asthma attack, right? You have to record certain data points. That data has to be sort of tamper proof so that right, there's an audit trail that kind of tracks everything kind of in a HIPAA compliant, FERPA compliant format. Yeah, yeah, absolutely critical. And so ⁓ Michael, we we've had an amazing partnership. ⁓ so just want to say we love partnering with you and your team and ⁓ really believe in what you're doing. ⁓ and so ⁓ you know, we've built integrations with ⁓ Camp Doc to ⁓ come alongside our member management system CRMs to, you know, ⁓ be able to provide these types of services. Maybe talk a little bit about, you know, if if the audience is like I have different softwares and, you know, how do how how does this work with integrating with, you know, maybe another software. Platform that's a more of a system of record. Yeah, great question. So what we often find when somebody calls us or emails us for the very first time is that everything is quite disjointed, right? Some groups may not even be collecting information that they should that frankly they should be, and that makes me nervous whenever I hear those, hear those stories. Others that they're writing stuff, ⁓ writing stuff down on pen and paper or a Google Forum or SurveyMonkey, right? And This is, you know, in in in my world, PHI, right, protected health information is really sensitive data and probably shouldn't just be in an Excel spreadsheet, ⁓ right, sitting on somebody's laptop. And so we often find these distributed systems. Some data's being filled out on a in a PDF, some's getting emailed, some's you know, ⁓ not being collected at all. And so with our system, and especially when we have you know fantastic integrations ⁓ with you know. DAXCO, right, everything kind of syncs together. So right. ⁓ In the example of kind of our integration, you know, with DAXCO operations, right, they can start in your system as the system of record, get registered for their programs, and the data can automatically be pushed over so that we know, right, as soon as Sally Smith gets registered for an after-school program at a YMCA, right, their data will automatically be transitioned over into Camp Doc. They will get an immediate notification that they have right that the parent has certain critical health information and certain data points that they need to fill out. And we make that process not just simple for right the organization, not just simple for the YMCA or GCC, right? Where the data, they don't have to do anything, the data just syncs over, but also super easy for the families, where right now they're not waiting or wondering what to do next or right. I gotta download this PDF and email it back to you or bring it on the first day, right? They can immediately go on in and ⁓ fill this information out. One of the things that that we've found, especially I'll say post-pandemic, right? Health and safety of kids is there there is nothing more important. If you ask anybody who runs youth programs, what's the most important thing that you do? ⁓ so right, if you're a school. The most important thing that a school does is not teach kids or engage learning. The most important thing that a camp does, right, is not help build friendships. The most important thing that a you know a karate dojo does is not teach new karate skills. Health and safety. If you can't keep my kid healthy and safe, I don't care if they're learning or making new friends or learning new skills. That is the most critical thing. And certainly post-pandemic, we have seen an even higher shift now, just in that level of expectation from the parents. There are so many options, right? And so many opportunities to send your kids to different programs, right? I I get inundated in Ann Arbor with soccer camps, ⁓ tennis camps, art camps, robotics camps, STEM programs. The the opp the options are endless. ⁓ And when I have those options available to me, I want to make sure that, hey, you're gonna you're up to to standards, right? Like if if I'm sending my kid to your program and you're not even asking about their allergies or medications, or you're asking a paper form in, ⁓ then I question kind of the credibility of your program a little bit. And so parents are sort of demanding this now, which I it's it makes sense. Yeah, you're very appropriate to your point. And ⁓ by the way, we have a lot of customers ⁓ in the Ann Arbor area. So hopefully you're ⁓ you're ⁓ frequenting ⁓ and supporting ⁓ some of the Daxco customers in in that area. For sure. ⁓ so so Michael, I wanna I'd love to make it ⁓ a little more tangible and real for people. And so I'm sure ⁓ that you guys ⁓ have stories over the years of the impact of this product on real people, kids. love if you just share maybe a a story or two of like, hey, a testimonial of like what happened at a youth program, a camp, an activity, ⁓ you know, that that I would say probably inspires your team to keep doing what you're doing. Yeah. I mean, w we hear we hear it from so many different angles, right? We hear just the efficiency piece, right? Of like, hey, the amount of time that I had to spend going through paper forms, ⁓ I couldn't be out there with the kids, right? And and interacting with the kids. And that's what I really should be doing. Was sitting in an office all day going through, you know, form by form. And so we hear that feedback all the time that hey, you you made us so much more efficient, right? That we could actually be out there with the kids observing, monitoring, right, interacting and helping to make their programming that much better. That feedback we get all the time. we hear stories all the time of, hey, I don't I've been running this camp or this program for 20 years. Every year we have a medication error. Some kid we forget to give him his medication. We gave him the wrong medication at the wrong time. First time in 20 years, that never happened. We hear stories. ⁓ there ⁓ was a JCC that we worked with, and this was a few years ago, that ⁓ they it was a program where they bust kids you know back and forth ⁓ you know from to to different locations, and ⁓ a child had a seizure on the bus. Right, and instantly right they could pull up on their phone and access that child's medical information to be able to contact the parents and provide that to EMS, right? And to ensure that there's nothing that they could safely take care of of that kid. So we hear these stories all all the time. ⁓ and that is what is is so inspiring. We we joke ⁓ at Doc Network that I'm not sure there's anybody on our team that's like, I'm really passionate about electronic medical records. I I'm sure there are. I'm not even necessarily somebody that's really passionate about electronic medical records, but everybody is is quite passionate, passionate about keeping kids healthy and safe. And so we hear these stories all the time. We often try to go do site visits. ⁓ we just had one of our client success managers ⁓ was visiting one of the local camps here in Michigan, ⁓ who was running the event last weekend. So We're constantly interacting with these groups and kinda getting real time feedback, ⁓ which is amazing. Yeah, that's great. So a a little bit of advice I I I would ask, you know, ⁓ for our audience, you know, ⁓ talked about, you know, this product is not just for summer camps, ⁓ and and it's for programming and everything. ⁓ but we are we're gearing up towards ⁓ summer camp registration, right? And ⁓ Yeah, and that's a that's a big part of, you know, for us, not just our our YMCA JCC nonprofit business, but also, you know, the large multipurpose clubs we serve in other sectors. ⁓ what piece of advice would you have ⁓ for this group as they're thinking about child safety and preparation right now? Like when do you need to start on this journey to be ready? Yeah. One of the things I I one of the things I often tell people is right, I'll I'm often out there kind of with my Dr. Michael had. giving talks about kind of risk management and health and safety. And you're never gonna do it all in one day or even one season. And so right, it can take some baby steps before right you get there to where you have a a fully compliant program that you're running and right you've you've done your best to mitigate as much of the risk as possible. And so starting early is helpful. ⁓ we typically get busiest with right, you know, again New clients and and current clients re-onboarding right January, February, because it takes a little bit of time and parents, you know, things are are kind of rolling after the start of the year. We have certain programs that have already sold out right for for summer of 2026. There's a lot of competitive programs that are out there. ⁓ but I I think it's it's really important to start putting a plan together. Even if it's not a fully formed plan, and it's right, it's ⁓ it's kind of a something that that grows with you, starting to take those baby steps. Hey, we're a program and we've never captured any medical information about kids in the past, but this year we're gonna capture allergies, vaccine information, and medications, and maybe take that baby step to just start collecting some of them. ⁓ one of the things that we really pride ourselves on as sort of the as the leader in this space. Is that right, we really try to act as partners with the groups and the organizations that we're serving. So we have some groups that come on in and they've got a medical director at their program and they've got a a nurse on staff, you know, seven days a week. And we work with others that right that they've never thought about this before. And so right, we have understood, you know, having been in been around for almost 16 years now, right, where we're constantly advising on, hey, you really should think about. This, right? And you really sort of act as that trusted partner to s help them take kind of those steps towards risk mitigation and and honestly best practices. Yeah, no, that's great. And you know, like I said when it when we opened, ⁓ you guys have been a great partner. ⁓ it it's an area that ⁓ we feel the same about child safety. And you know, as we look at what we develop on our own platform and then who we partner with, it's been a great fit. So I would encourage you know, our customers ⁓ to look at how this could, you know, be a positive ⁓ impact to the safety and operations of their ⁓ youth programming. ⁓ and again the beauty of it is the integration that that we've built together so it makes it a ⁓ a more seamless experience for the operator. Yeah. One of the things that we've found and I think why the the partnership and the integration has been so successful. ⁓ right, we're starting to see so many programs, right, Ys and J's and other groups. Not just running summer programs, but other year-round events as well. And the beauty with our platform, and one of the biggest headaches that we hear, right, from from you know youth serving organizations is right, I'm filling this form out for a day camp. And then I'm also right, you might right, you might have a YMCA that runs a day camp, a residential camp, a mother-daughter weekend, a spring break event, right? And now I'm filling these forms out. And how do I get them to the correct place. And the beauty with the Camp Doc platform is right, they can fill that form out once and our system will automatically disseminate it right to the correct programs at the correct time. So right the headache of internally having to manage the different forms and making sure they're ending up in the right spot, as well as the frustrations that the parents have said, I just filled this darn form out. Why are you asking me to fill it out again? ⁓ right, is is one of the reasons I think it's it's worked so well. Yeah. Well great. Well, Michael, thank you so much for joining us today. ⁓ and again, congratulations on ⁓ your visit to a summer camp all the way to ⁓ very successful and impactful ⁓ software company. It's ⁓ an an impressive ⁓ accomplishment and ⁓ I'm hoping you're sleeping more at night. ⁓ and being from Chicago and I'm looking out your back window, winter is right around the corner for us. So it looks like ⁓ Your weather's already starting to change. Yeah, you got it. You got it. We're we're staying warm. Definitely getting more sleep. I have ⁓ I have three kids and a six month old at home. So not quite as much sleep as as I'd like, but hopefully in in the next few months, ⁓ I shall she'll be sleeping even more. But yeah, enjoyed it so much. We've really enjoyed the partnership ⁓ as well. And we we love working with y'all and excited to continue to grow it. Yeah, same. Well, have a great day. Thanks again for joining. Thanks, Jeff.