Latest / Zero Friction / Why 105,000 Canadians Leave Canada for Surgery with Dave Lindsay | Zero Friction Podcast

Transcript

Why 105,000 Canadians Leave Canada for Surgery with Dave Lindsay | Zero Friction Podcast · Zero Friction

• speaker-0: In MedTech, the difference between a good quarter and a great one isn't always the product. It's the friction standing in the way. Broken sales cycles, misaligned teams, deals that stall at the finish line. Every leader feels it. And the best ones know how to remove it. Welcome to Zero Friction, the podcast where we go inside the minds of MedTech's top commercial leaders to uncover the real barriers they face, the decisions they make, and the systems they build to keep the revenue moving. I'm your host, Terry Cuculuchis. Let's remove some friction. Welcome Zero Friction podcast. Terry Kuchaluchis here and have another great day. Russ on another super episode with Dave Lindsay. He is the VP of Growth for Clearpoint Surgery Center. is a privately owned, corporately owned surgical center company up in Canada. Dave and I are going to have a couple of different interesting angles ⁓ our healthcare discussion regarding commercial penetration, commercial go-to-market and what it's like dealing with aggregated buyers and what that does to the buying complexity in today's environment. So Dave, welcome to the show. I appreciate it. Why don't you give us a little background on yourself because it's quite extensive and then we'll kind of go into what you do today. speaker-1: Thanks, Terry. Happy to be here and have a discussion today. I've had a long career in med device over 20 years. I started as a sales rep working the OR with Olympus Canada and then varying leadership roles within Integra Canada. And then most recently before my current role, I was with Baxter Canada. ran the commercial operations for advanced surgery in Canada. About eight months ago, kind of took a bit of a turn. In Canada, as you know, it's a public healthcare system. But there is through need and choice, a two tiered type system opening up. Patients again are getting a lot more options and looking to private healthcare. So I joined a company called ClearPoint and they run 11 different ambulatory surgical centers across Canada, do a ton of public work with the public system, but at the same time have a private component. working with insurers as well as individual patients in Canada. So running as the VP of growth, the ⁓ side of the business in Canada. ⁓ it comes a number of different challenges unique that I've come across in the last eight months. It's a bit different than medical device sales. So really excited to have a conversation with you today, Terry. speaker-0: Well, good. So let's get a little background on the surgery center business and how, you just kind of were leaning into that a second ago. So tell me a little bit about ClearPoint, what they do, like who their ideal customers are and, you know, what you're doing to sort of remove friction from providing healthcare to the Canadian marketplace. speaker-1: It's a great question. Clearpoint Surgical again, does about 70 % of what they do is publicly tendered work with the Canadian hospitals across Canada. Because Canada is a system that's delivered provincially. With that, again, it's public tender in association and partnership with hospitals. So we're a very, very large partner with the public system to the tune of about 50,000. surgical cases per year. Yeah, it's a big number and we're doing some amazing work. As the need is growing though, as I talked about, there is definitely a want for private surgery in Canada. Most recently Alberta has passed a bill around this where you now have a choice as a patient to either get private surgery or stay in the public system ⁓ well as Quebec. So it's definitely opening up and as a Canadian, ⁓ You can get private surgery as long as you just flip provinces, Terry. That is in compliance with the Health Canada Act. So what we found is 105,000 Canadians. This was a Fraser Institute report that was released in March of this year. Fraser Institute's a Canadian research organization. 105,000 Canadians left Canada, Terry, in 2025 for- for surgery. We want to capture that market. And a lot of that is just educating Canadians that they don't have to go to the US or Panama or Germany to get private surgery. They can stay in Canada. There are choices by just flipping provinces do so. Yeah, it's a big number. speaker-0: So they lose, what was it, 200,000 a year for some sort of hospital or 105,000 a year. speaker-1: $105,000. And if you work out the math on that, Terry, and look at that, that's everywhere from an ophthalmology to a orthopedic surgery to general, could be cosmetic. But if we take the average cost of surgery with the Canadian dollar at $20,000, that's $2.1 billion of Canadian money that's leaving Canada. So we provide an option at Clearpoint, having network of facilities for Canadians. speaker-0: That's amazing. you you're sort of providing other options other than healthcare tourism options, actually healthcare tourism within your right? Just gotta go from one province to the other, right? speaker-1: Absolutely. And that's exactly it. And a lot of Canadians feel more comfortable staying in Canada because should something go wrong, the system can catch them. You know, it's a Canadian surgeon. We have some of the world's best surgeons. A lot of them are US trained. really is safer for Canadians to make that choice to stay in Canada rather than going abroad. There's some real unfortunate stories of even going to Europe for surgery. ⁓ And if there's a complication or if there's a post-operative complication when they come back home, they don't have the same options. So a lot of our job is just to educate Canadians on what they, are the options they have available to them. speaker-0: And being close to home is, I'm sure, a lot better for recovery as well. speaker-1: 100%. Especially when you can drive across the provincial border for surgery and not even have to fly. speaker-0: Right. And your family's close by and all those things. So, so that's awesome. And we'll, we'll kick back on that one. think you and I earlier had some earlier dialogue, just kind of talking shop around how the, selling med tech into the environment today has also changed quite a bit, right? buyer complexity, you know, Canada has always been a real challenge for any U S based companies, just trying to, you know, different rules, different regulations, but it's also. It's a different tender system too. a different set of around how systems are acquiring. And now we have these large aggregators where they're building channels based upon aggregated models, which are designed to create complexity and drive the prices down. And we all know that that can be real challenge on the business side. especially in Canada where, you know, the rep scarcity is even worse than the US, where you don't, if you look at dollars per representative or technical representative, it's typically, you know, fractional of what is compared to in the US. And so we talked a little bit about the ability to support the business, the ability to penetrate the business. So tell us a little bit about your experience there. speaker-1: Yeah, it's, it's, it's hard in Canada because we have system that's a little bit different than the U S where we have very, very powerful group purchasing organizations in Canada and their mandate is to find savings for the hospital membership. And there's really just two across Canada. ⁓ at times it's really felt like a race to the bottom. What has happened and. Terry, I'm going to quote Brent Adamson. Brent Adamson is one of the founders of the Challenger, which is a great sales method. And Brent Adamson had identified a very, very key point of information. There was a study done. They interviewed 3000 business, business key stakeholders across the U S. So these would be economic buyers across. And what they found through this surveying is The decision, and this was post 2008 after the financial crisis, economic buyer no longer exists, Terry. What they found through their research is that it takes up to individuals now to make a decision, a buying decision with the company. To your point, it's a larger aggregate of very differentiating stakeholders. So it could be somewhere from legal. could be someone from clinical side. ⁓ could be someone from facilities now. It's not one economic buyer. I do feel that through the GPO and the kidney and healthcare system, this process has been greatly accelerated. It's funny because Brent Adamson also identified in 2016 as to a follow-up to that original 2008 study. It's now up to 6.8 individuals that it takes to make a decision. What's happened is, is deals have become very, very complicated and very, very structured. In a way, Terry, this is one thing that we talked about. It's not even that they're happening at the same time. It's almost like you have to go from the legal gate first and then into the clinical gate and then into maybe a logistics gate. it's, it's, it's become very, very complicated. So we found that, that our sales reps and our sales teams in Canada just really have to be educated on contract compliance and success is determined not about who you know sometimes at the clinical level anymore, it's identifying those key stakeholders. And it's literally, Terry, the difference between success and failure in a lot of cases. speaker-0: You know, and it's really interesting and dealing and working and I've run corporate accounts teams and enterprise accounts teams in the U S for large, large med tech companies. And, know, I know the Challenger series says 6.8. There are sometimes it feels like it's 10 to 15 when you're in a hospital system, depending on the platform that you're selling, especially if you're, then you get into software and then you get into IT and you get into IT security and you get into sort of all sorts of different, you know, clinical stakeholders, department stakeholders, financial, legal, risk, all these things start adding up, right? And everybody wants sort of ⁓ a piece of the game or the ball that you're playing with in terms of what value it brings them. this is where AI is changing the world and the landscape. This is gonna be a great discussion. I'm gonna throw something out here that is really interesting that I've been discovering is that hospital systems are actually creating complexity on purpose for ⁓ technology. processes, whether it's software, whether it's, you know, products being used in their system, they, there, there's a complex system that you can no longer take parallel pathways. They stack legal, financial, department, procurement along the way. So you can't take parallel path for processing. The other interesting thing is AI is probably The healthcare sector is the third fastest adopting sector of AI, at least in the US. I can't speak for the other markets. I can't imagine Canada being much different, but the healthcare system is throwing AI just about at everything. you know, I think med tech is sort of lagging behind. And when we talk about deal complexity, we talk about stakeholder mapping with know, buyer groups, AI. There are tools in AI today that allow us to do it faster, more intelligently and more consistently than ever. And I just see a lot of companies struggling to bring that to fruition. You know, you have AI packages that will actually framework an entire healthcare system leaders who they are, what's important to them. It allows you to take whatever framework you're using from a sales methodology perspective, whether it's, you know, challenger, whether it's GAP, whether it's medic, whether it's spin selling, you know, you can. program your AI tools to actually follow the methodology, do the stakeholder mapping, make sure that the stakeholder value and the pain points are being addressed stakeholder by stakeholder. And now your sales professionals can actually have an organized methodology of mapping that whole deal structure. you know, it's time to start fighting, you know, guns with guns. if, you know, I promise you, when you walk into procurement and large healthcare aggregators, I promise you they've already done the analysis on your product line versus all your competitors. I promise you they already understand what they're purchasing across the system and who has the highest market share and who has the lowest market share. I promise you that they've already done the surveys with the positions on who likes what. And then you're walking in kind of just trying to guess your way through that. And we as sales professionals in the medical device space or med tech space have to come better prepared. if our, you know, before we were taking a knife to a gunfight now, now we're taking a knife to an artillery battle. you know, I just wrote an article on LinkedIn the other day, just about this, because, you know, we've been, we were, we've been hurting all, all along with the complexity of the the buying cycle and then you throw on the fact that they're using AI and we're not. mean, it's just, it's a, it is a recipe for punishment for sure. speaker-1: You've raised a number of amazing points there. I think the first one, ⁓ I could touch on, I just expand the conversation a little bit. you talked point around the timing of it. By the time the rep is involved with the sales organization is contacted, ⁓ the structured. I couldn't agree more. We would always say with a rep or territory manager, if... If we are finding out about the request for proposal, the RFP, through the email system of announcement, it is not a very good close ratio from that point onward. You have to get involved to your point with the deal because the deals, the RFP and structure of the deal and the contract has already been structured at that point. They've already identified all the key stakeholders to your point. They've already identified all the different vendors that they're going to contact. The deal's been put in place, you have no influence over said deal. So it's about getting, number one is getting involved early before the deal's worked so that you do have influence identifying those stakeholders who are going to shape the deal. You have influence on how the deal's structured. So it's structured in the way that's fair, but also one that not, you never want to be favored, but it also will disqualify your company at the same time. So there's education that needs to happen early on. The second thing around AI is, the tools now, I'll tell you what we used to do, this is before AI, and this as close, Terry, as two years ago in med tech is if there was a large GPO deal that was happening, we would have Excel dashboards and spreadsheets or we would use even the blue sheet if you remember that. speaker-0: Blue sheets, gold sheets for sure. speaker-1: Absolutely. And blue sheets, nothing wrong with them. But AI now, to your point, the right tools to be developed can do all those things and then find the interconnections in there instead of looking at a blue sheet or gold sheet, if we're just going to use that as an example, looking at an Excel dashboard that's been put together manually by a team to understand it very, big and complex deal, AI tools to your point is going to provide those insights, align them, and even align the different buying motives and strategies around a sales methodology that the company's using as well, which I think is key for two reasons. One is that's the common language in the organization, whatever that sales methodology that they've subscribed to, whether it be spin or challenger. But number two. It's consistent in the messaging and the application so that you can take the best practices from one deal and apply the learnings to the next one. So it keeps things structured at the same time. So AI I think is definitely going to be able to fill this need to your point with AI. We're no longer taking a knife to an artillery battle. one step ahead with drone warfare. speaker-0: Yeah, and, we've got to get there. And, and, know, what I'm finding is, is at least in the U S adoption from, for AI and the commercial workflow in our systems. I'm not saying that health tech and med tech companies aren't adopting AI, but it's typically in finance or it's typically in, you know, IT or data. ⁓ not really enhancing or augmenting their sales and workflow processes with AI. And that's where, you know, The value could really be driven with intelligence, more consistent approaches, like you can actually build workflow models and have greater consistency. can use AI for lead follow-up or proposal follow-ups and educating in a consistent manner where you're ⁓ upon your sales reps to remember to call somebody to follow up. Now there's all sorts of intuitive ways with AI to engage that process all inside your CRM system. So I just think there's just a lot of interesting ways to be more effective that we seen yet. So that's a ⁓ topic. you know, especially when we, kind of came through with the whole aggregated model and selling to aggregators is always hard. mean, it's like, you know, that's a very tough battle when you got somebody that's, that has basically one mission and that whole process is to lower your price. that's it, right? speaker-1: Absolutely. It gets more more complicated to do two things to show value, to justify price, but also what your unique value proposition is for your company versus the market because no two companies are the same. Before we move on, I just wanted to touch, think Terry on that last comment. Medtech has been slow to adapt. think pharma is ahead. Medtech has been slow to adapt AI in commercial models for sure. I think the reluctance started, and I can only speak from past experience, but I think the reluctance was just based ⁓ the hesitation with AI because again, with Medtech, we have a lot of proprietary information in our systems. And to open that up, it was a reluctance because of security. Now, since AI has been shown again, that it could work behind firewalls, you're not going to have company information leak out. And again, the proprietary information clinically in the spaces we work in, I think that's starting to change. And I'm seeing it, but they are behind and catch up needs to happen to be able to stay ahead of the and these large organizations. speaker-0: Because I promise you, they're using everything. Of course they are. They're using data. They've been using data for years. And now they have intelligence to go along with that data to not only gather the data, but to actually make sense of lots of complex data. That's what AI does. It makes very complex things come out very simple. But that's good. Let's pivot a bit. I'm to go back to, I'm sorry to get us derailed a little bit, but I'm really interested in this whole aspect of 100,000 patients leaving Canada to go to other countries for medical tourism. And what you doing to sort of capture that patient and what is patient acquisition strategy? How are you doing it? How are you sort of, not just informing Canadian community, but more than information. actually to inform and then actually connect and acquire them. How do you do that? speaker-1: It's a number of different ways. So when I joined the primary driver of, of, I'm going to say leads, because these are inquiries that were coming in was through organic, ⁓ internet search, AI optimization, search engine optimization, and pay per click, ⁓ through Google. And I mean, that, that, that, that's worked for a while. It's, it's a great system, but, but there's two challenges with that. Number one is you're putting an awful lot of eggs in a basket. with pay-per-click ads and what have you, and one referral or lead source out of that. The second is you're now subject to macroeconomic trends. If there's a recession, if there's a war in Iran, any number of things, you're subject to that. Your conversion to surgical is going to ebb and flow much like other large purchases, like a car, a home, a second cottage or cabin, whatever it may be. So we needed to diversify that. because it was going to be, there's too many pressures that were going to be able to that. So we looked at different referral channels, like where we can acquire leads. So we looked at a number of ways. First of all, looking at different platforms like Meta, LinkedIn, and what have you. The second way was going out to find partners that can provide leads and referrals through education. Again, Terry, a lot of Canadians don't know the options to them. We do not have the platform to be able to tell all Canadians and educate them. But if we work with partners, meaning different people along the patient journey. So follow me for a second here, Terry. If we're getting an internet lead, it might be my back hurts or I've been having a lot of pain. I'm undiagnosed at this point. So that person is beginning the patient journey. We want to find people that are at the point of the patient journey where they say, I really need to have surgery. I don't necessarily want to wait four to six months. I want to know what other options are available. I'm looking at Mexico and the U S Canada also an option to stay in Canada? So what we did is we went out to find partners farther along the journey. So we went after rehab, the high end rehabilitation clinics that were doing injections PRP. We were looking at pain clinics that dealt specifically in spine. So we were identifying other players that had patients that were farther along the journey that probably had imaging done. They have a diagnosis. They have a surgical need. Now it's they're deciding how that surgery is going to be delivered. And this is the part where I believe that, and we did this very, very, very manually and through a lot of hard work developing those channels with an agent force and a number of different ways. But this is where I feel Terri, AI can play a big role in helping identify those channels. We also went after corporate health programs and concierge healthcare, because we have a number of providers like Cleveland Clinic Canada operates in Canada as well. So we have a number of different companies like that, operate in Canada offering executive health options for private healthcare. speaker-0: You know, it's amazing that you talk about the, love how you just even use the word patient journey, because I think that's a really interesting aspect to even think about. And where do you come into that journey? Where do you, where does your surgery center sort of come into play? You don't want to come in too early because they might forget about you. You sort of have to come in at the right time, at the right place when they're actually going through that selection process, right? And so picking those partners is probably a really very signaling element. Like you get signals along the way where it's this is the time, this is the time, and now they're looking and you're finding, right? That's a really unique kudos to you for using AI to go do this and trying to figure out how to do that acquisition. And then the other part is, is how do you use AI to make sure that once they've decided it's you, that it's been a really good experience after that too, right? the other part is once they've selected you and now how do you make sure that that experience is. excellent because they go back and they tell their friends and they tell their family, what a great experience I had having this happen to me. So that's a pretty cool thing in that you found a way inside the Canadian healthcare system. Otherwise, what would be a typical way for like, let's just say, what's the highest volume procedure you do in your surgery centers or what's one of the highest ones that you do? speaker-1: We do a lot of orthopedics on the private. It varies from province to province. Terry be anywhere from the lowest is 10 weeks. That would be the Ontario. And this is all based on Fraser Institute research, but you could have as high as 30 to 40 weeks in some of the other provinces ⁓ for that's an awful long time that a patient's waiting for surgery, you know, and. Rehabilitation's gonna take you so long, there's pain management, and it's a return to life is what people want. They wanna return a golf, they wanna play pickleball, they wanna hike, they wanna do all these things, and they don't necessarily wanna wait. The nice thing is, when we do provide private surgery for someone, it opens up a space in the public healthcare to help those wait times at the same time. speaker-0: the way, I think you know, especially if you're in pain and you just can't move, right? Then you don't want to wait 30 or 40 weeks to get out of your wheelchair. And I'm sure that like spending 30 or 40 weeks in a wheelchair is not good for your overall health either. speaker-1: No, the acuity the patient when waiting for surgery ⁓ increase to your point. They're not active, they're not moving around, there can be some atrophy. Again, I'm by no means a healthcare practitioner or provider at all, but we have seen that the longer you wait, ⁓ higher that acuity increases. So ⁓ want to get people into surgery. You want to get the backup on their feet as soon as possible. It's just, it's... return to life is the most important thing for patients. speaker-0: Right. You know, and we talked earlier too, just on how not just having surgeons like in the U S with the ambulatory. And again, I think the one interesting thing on both markets is like healthcare is being delivered closer, closer to home more than ever. Right. So it's leaving the hospital and it's going into ambulatory surgery centers. It's going to urgent care centers. It's going into telemedicine. I mean, let's face it, people are, you know, the access to healthcare has changed totally differently in the last 20 or 30 years. And so in the U S you know, typically a surgeon will come to an ambulatory surgery center and they bring that referral pathway. Doesn't sound like that's how the model works in Canada. Like the doctor comes and you know, is that, is that the same situation where the referrals come with the doctor or the, you know, like, you know, build it and they will come and is that, is that how it works or. Yeah. speaker-1: Absolutely. really wish that we could just have a doctor couple board bring their book of business with them and the surgeons, but that's not how it works because again, their book of business is in the, in the public healthcare system. They, they can opt in or out and in some provinces they could do both. So that the surgeons that we work with are all part of our system. have a book of business. They cannot self-refer. So, so we have to, Terry, find the patients. And then we have to do that. So it's very different than the US system that way. why, ⁓ know, using AI and finding these different lead channels has been so important because we unfortunately don't have that luxury in Canada. speaker-0: And it everything in the marketplace today, especially in US. they're doing more and more things in surgery centers today than I ever thought that they ever would. They're replacing joints, they're fixing hearts, they're actually doing ablations in ambulatory surgery centers now, which isn't even, you know, like. speaker-1: And in the US system, we're seeing that happen and we're watching very, very closely. We do a lot of orthopedics right now, but we are looking to expand as the need because ambulatory surgical centers are just such a natural. And as the technology gets better and then it can be day surgery and there's not an overnight stay required. We're really seeing that shift internationally to private and ambulatory surgical centers. The US is really just leading the charge. I don't know what the last count was and how you measure it, but you measure it in thousands in the U.S. terms of how many ASCs I think that you have. speaker-0: It's, they're everywhere. Like they, they're booming and they're, it's, there are more and more procedures being done every day. Every major specialty, cardiovascular orthopedics, you know, they've already been taking, you know, the GI work and the colonoscopies and all those types of things. But, you know, basically what you get is you get a full scale functional treatment like you would in the hospital, but you do it in a very light fashion that. gives you a much better experience than leaving and going home the same day. Like, you know, just very, very, you know, simple things and, know, who wants to go to hospital? I mean, seriously, like, nobody really wants to do that. That's not a great experience. But going to, you know, a surgery center and having a spa-like experience for your procedure and, you know, getting to drive home and go home that evening and be in your own home the next day and, you know, recovering faster and better with people surrounding you 24-7 that love you. What be better than that? You know? speaker-1: Absolutely. it keeps the hospitals, Terry, and the acute centers open for exactly that. Acute cases, the big cardiac, the big spine, the big neuro, the big cancer cases, they need to be done at the teaching hospitals, the big acute centers. We need to take these smaller procedures. We need to push them to ambulatory surgical centers because ⁓ Technology's allowed for it now. done laparoscopic. Another one in the US that we've been watching carefully is the endospine and that movement too. The endoscopic spinal procedures into the ambulatory surgical centers. And there's a lot of Canadians now, snowbirds that ⁓ in Florida and that's where they're getting endospine procedures done. speaker-0: You know, there is, and there's been a lot of that lately. spine surgery is huge and pain surgery is huge and it's big problem in the U.S. Well, what else do you want to kind of finish up here with today, like in terms of, you know, your personal perspective on the med tech space? I love what you're doing, you know, from an ASE perspective and you really are groundbreaking, you know, in terms of how you're thinking about patient acquisition. You know, people are fighting over those things every day, know, clear point is clearly trying to go figure out a new way to go galvanize that patient to figure out so they don't leave and go to Mexico or the U S or any other healthcare destination that they're today and, providing great care. mean, that's, that's the big point of it. speaker-1: I think the, in closing, I think the one thing that's important with all this, because, and your background very similar, you leading sales forces and commercial operations and commercial businesses the US and your background, this is one thing that we had talked about earlier, Terry, was ⁓ understanding the acquisition costs is very, important as well. Understanding the sales acquisition costs, whether you're a med tech company that are talking to surgeons. and having to go through processes of evaluations to bring on a surgeon and what that sales process looks like. It's also understanding what is the cost of acquisition of a customer, whether it's a patient like in an ASC, Canadian ASC, or a surgeon is understanding those costs. We did a big cost analysis of what it takes in this telephone to table, even though they're not coming from the telephone, this is what I called it. And what was the cost of that acquisition of the client? through the pay-per-click, the Google, whatever lead channel it came through, ⁓ type of ⁓ managers needed, the patient advisors, what is the time spent with that patient collecting the different imaging, prep for surgery, all that. We needed understand what those acquisition costs were because then, Terry, we could then look at different channels to look at, okay? ⁓ And then could look at, how can we bring in AI to help fill some of these gaps and how do we find the right tools to speed up that acquisition and maybe help certain areas where we could find efficiencies and speed up that telephone to table. think there's a lot of promise in med device and the medical industry as a whole, again, of taking these big ideas with AI that they are using currently in finance and logistics and inventory management or whatever it may be ⁓ really applying them to the the commercial operations as well, sales and marketing. And I think there's a need and think there's a ⁓ lot of companies that can really help bringing solutions to big companies. ⁓ speaker-0: It is, and you know, my experience with AI actually came, you know, from owning a small business, a roofing company actually, is where I developed my expertise on lead acquisition and lead conversion. used to spend $40,000, $50,000 a month for leads in a small company. Right. It's not just getting the leads, it's what you do with the leads once you get them. So it's about, you you talked about getting into the... the table, right? So it's, it's going through your multiple lead channels, whether it's meta or TikTok or Google PPC or Google mapping or the new one's going to be, it's going to be AEO, answer engine. Like it's going to be an AI driven sort of, have this going on with me today. Where do I go have this procedure? And so you're going to have these lead flows come in and multiple channels, seven, eight, nine channels, right? And then they come in and what do you do with them? And so AI helps to qualify, to score, to triage, inform, entertain, build authority, you know, all those things in a very, what I'm not saying is you don't remove the human out of process. So it's really how do you combine people with processes and existing, what I'm going to call platforms and automations, because I don't really, I don't put AI automation in the same bucket. They're different. They're similar, but they're different. And so then you bring AI in, which actually brings a little bit more of authenticity from a platform between a human. And now you can have AI start to educate, answer, calendar. You can, know, from a patient intake perspective on an ambulatory surgery center where you could have an or an outbound telephone AI assistant that would actually go through the entire, you know, patient journey of putting your information in and. doing it consistently and accurately and it goes right into the system and nobody's writing anything down. There's just a lot of great ways where, but the human still needs to be there. We all know that there's inertia with the acceptance of AI for whatever reason or another, and people have their own sort of reasons for it. But when you combine AI with a human element, I mean, the power turns into extraordinary effectiveness. I think, you you're on the beginning of what can be a really successful journey. you know, bike and bonding, all those things. So, you know, kudos to you and your innovation and, and clear point for, for taking that. stuff. speaker-1: Absolutely, Terry. Thank you very much for the time today. And again, the great conversations we've had. They've been really, really good. You're doing amazing things using AI to enhance outcomes. speaker-0: Well, one more question for you before you go and I know that you're and then we'll close her up but like so What would current day Dave? as advice to 22 year old Dave What is the ⁓ piece of advice personal or professional that would you would give your 22 year old self? speaker-1: think, I think it would be to, to strategy before execution and to develop a framework and methodology and stick to that plan rather than, rather than thinking that action and steps in a day can, determine outcomes. I, when I was 22. I measured my success and how many hours a day and how many surgeons I talked to or how many cases I attended in the OR, what have you. I think as got older, I realized a methodology a structure with clear end goals and a dashboard was a better way of doing that. ⁓ I think 22 old Dave would probably do bad with all these different tools like AI and what have you and CRM, but. I'm 50 years old, so Terry, those didn't exist. So there was some wheels spinning. don't know if that's your question, but I think that's from a- ⁓ speaker-0: I think it was awesome we degrade ourselves on how many people we talk to every day. I remember filling out call sheets on a daily basis. It was all activity and activity is important. There's no doubt about that. But I think what you just said is be strategic in that activity pays bigger dividends. so thank you for that. I appreciate it. Look forward to discussion. And then, know, Dave, you're, you're a great guest. I'd love to have you back again. And you've got lots of wisdom that I'm sure we can share to the audience as well. speaker-1: Thank you, Terry. was, it was great to touch base and have a great discussion today. Go U S by the way. Soccer win. Yeah. Let's go North America. speaker-0: Go America. Go North America. What about that? That's a wrap on Zero Friction. The show built around one simple idea. Remove the barriers and the revenue will follow. If today's conversation was valuable, please subscribe and share it with somebody who needs to hear it. That's how we will grow this community. I'm Terry Kuchaluchis, revenue architect powered by AI. Come find me at my website, myrevrx.com. speaker-1: Absolutely. speaker-0: And let's talk about what friction is costing you and your organization. Until next time, keep removing the barriers and keep the revenue flowing.