Interview with Joe White – 443
In today's podcast, Joe White shares his thoughts on how to restore physician autonomy. With an insider perspective on how hospital leaders think about physician coverage and what’s broken in the traditional locums model, he explains how physicians can take control of when and how they work.
After years of working in operations and staffing, Joe makes the case for a direct marketplace that would give physicians greater clarity, autonomy, and flexibility in their work.
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Locums from the Hospital Side
Joe White describes his journey from ER tech to COO and corporate VP, responsible for keeping emergency, hospitalist, and critical care services staffed and financially viable. That work exposed him to the realities behind coverage decisions: payer mix, cross-subsidized service lines, competition from ASCs, and the high costs that arise when hospitals rely on legacy locums agencies.
Understanding those pressures, he argues, helps physicians see why administrators make the choices they do and how much room really exists to negotiate rates, schedules, and contracts.
Building a New Gigs Model
Instead of adding another middleman, Joe designed SendIt as a marketplace where physicians create profiles, set their own hourly rates, and share their availability so hospitals can book them directly. The goal is to cut hidden margins, shorten credentialing cycles, remove long notice periods. That allows physicians to treat clinical shifts like flexible fractional gigs rather than all-or-nothing employment.
For physicians frustrated with opaque locums contracts or looking for more control over when and where they work, his model offers a different way to match their skills with real-time hospital needs.
Summary
For physicians considering locums or flexible work, Joe White offers a rare look at staffing from the hospital’s point of view. Then he explains why a transparent marketplace can serve both sides better than traditional agencies.
NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.
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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 443
Healthcare Startup Founder: How To Restore Physician Autonomy
- Interview with Joe White
John: Today's guest is a former hospital executive and then corporate management group VP that helped staff physicians for needy hospitals. And, but he's doing something completely different now. He's a founder of a startup that uses tech to better match physicians to healthcare organizations that need their services. So with that, Joe White, welcome to the PNC podcast.
Joe White: Thanks, John. It's great to be here. Very excited to speak with you. And I love what you're doing and how you're educating physicians about different alternatives out there on the market. So happy to be on.
John: This is going to be very good I'm always trying to get more information for my fellow physicians, how they can practice better, happier, more with satisfaction. And there's a few questions I have for you later that are going to get to that and how what you're doing might help them. But why don't you start by giving us sort of the thumbnail sketch of your past work history, what you started doing when you went into healthcare and what you're doing now.
Joe White: Thanks a lot. I've been in healthcare for a pretty long time and in multiple different roles, hence the bald head at a younger age. I lost my hair pretty early because I got started in healthcare very early, but I actually started as an ER tech, just cleaning beds, doing EKGs in the ER, and just kind of helping out, figuring out patient flow.
And I thought I wanted to do medicine, but then I started to learn about the business side of hospitals and operations. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. I never even thought about the business side of hospitals. And this was in Las Vegas where I was born and raised. And so then I started doing hospital operations. They figured out that I was good with Excel and PowerPoint.
I started working my way up the hospital operations chain, eventually becoming a VP and then COO of a few different hospitals across the country. After I'd been in that for a little bit, I was offered a position to go join a corporate management group that staffed mostly emergency medicine, hospital medicine, critical care doctors in hospitals. And that's kind of where I got exposure to this problem of, hey, when I need a doctor, how do I get a doctor quickly.
And occasionally I'd either have to try and go find some PRN doctors. And what does that look like? Then other times I was using these locums agencies and they're extremely expensive and they've got this high overhead and it was just extremely complex.
And so that's where I experienced this problem of like, well, I don't care about the agency. All I care about is the doctor. Why isn't there a simple marketplace that just connects me with the doctor as simply as possible? And when I couldn't find it, I decided to launch it myself. Hence the name SendIt. It's just kind of go for it, why not?
So SendIt gigs, we connect hospitals and doctors. You can think of us kind of like Uber, but for doctors. People are like, well, what's the difference between you and a locums agency? And I'm like, well, what's the difference between an Uber and a taxi. Both get you from point A to point B, but one does it with technology, transparent. Like once you use an Uber, you're never going to use a taxi again. It's much, much better experience. So that's what we're building with SendIt.
John: That is very cool. And maybe we'll have time to actually talk about that process, because I know there are some physician entrepreneurs out there that listen to me, but I want to just pick your brain first about, because of your background in working in hospitals and working with firms that help hospitals and physicians connect. What is it about the way hospitals make decisions that physicians don't seem to get, just from your perspective?
Because I know, I remember physicians just like, they're doing things that's all wrong and they don't care about the patients. And so, we'll start with that open-ended question.
Joe White: Yeah, certainly I've seen a lot of CMOs step into their roles and just kind of get blindsided by like, whoa, this is kind of completely different than what I've experienced in my medical career. And I'm sure you experienced that as a CMO. But I would say that most hospital executives, a majority of them are actually really good people who do want to do well.
They are just having to navigate macro economics that exists within the hospital healthcare space. I would say that some of the biggest things that doctors don't quite understand about that decision-making is that like, hospitals are, every service line is kind of cross-subsidized. So you've kind of got your service lines that make a lot of money and you've got your service lines that don't make so much money. And then you've got all these other dynamics too of like payer mix. So it's like, what is my payer mix in this outpatient setting versus this inpatient setting? And what does that look like.
Example of like a cross-subsidized would be like OBGYN. So having babies is actually not very profitable for hospitals, they lose a lot of money on that. However, they make good amount of money in the NICU.
And so they can do the having the babies because the NICU, that gets harder. That's why we see a lot of the rural places closing their OB-GYN programs because they don't have a NICU where they're able to kind of get that revenue from the OBGYN, from the deliveries. But then also mothers are the decision makers of the house usually where they get hair.
And so you kind of want to use that experience to engage a mother when you're having a baby. So there's all these different things that you're trying to take into consideration of like, okay, let's look at this service line in isolation but you can't look at it in isolation because it impacts everything else. And then you've got your orthopedics over here and your cardiology and your internal medicine and your critical care, and they all want something.
And what does that look like? And how are you able to kind of help them? So it gets very difficult when you're trying to manage through those dynamics.
We've heard it a lot in healthcare, no margin, no mission and hospital administrators are in there to make sure that we're able to retain a margin to be able to support the communities that we want to be able to support. And so that's kind of one of the hard things that I think physicians don't fully understand when a hospital executive is making a decision is what are all the different macroeconomics that they're having to deal with?
John: Yeah, I remember doing budgets and so forth as CMO. And one of the things too is that they didn't get hospital finances because they would look at the revenue, revenue, and this was obviously accrual based and it had nothing to do with what you got paid. And there would be, oh, you're making all this money off of me. It's like, and then they would say, well, I should get a percentage of that. And it's like, but you realize we have overhead. We can't produce that.
We cannot provide that unless we actually pay all these people and pay all this overhead. So what's left over is often barely breaking even. I mean, in Illinois, a third of the hospitals lose money every year.
Maybe you can even give me an example of a decision that a hospital might make that just doesn't seem rational to the physician. And I guess you were talking about like OB, but are there other examples just so they maybe have a little more to think about?
Joe White: Yeah, certainly. I think the shift towards outpatient for ASCs and surgeries. Whether it's total hips, total knees, different things like that. I think from the outside, it makes complete sense. Better for the patient, more efficient, everything's great. But to your point of what you just said, hospitals have massive overhead. And that overhead is fixed. You've already got that OR room built. You've already got the staff there.
You've got your anesthesiologist. And then now you're going to move it to an outpatient setting. And oh, by the way, you get reimbursed less in an outpatient setting than you do in the inpatient setting from insurance.
Not only is the same procedure now going over there and making less of a margin, you're having to deal with all of these staff and internal people. I remember one time with my endoscopy team where it was like, okay, hey, the insurance is calling, trying to move these patients to the ASC. And I'm like, look, if we move everything over to the ASC, then I can't keep my endoscopy team busy enough to be able to keep them on the floors and then be able to have endoscopy call coverage, GI call coverage.
So what do I do if everything starts moving? I mean, 80% of endoscopy can be done in an outpatient, 90% probably. But the problem is all those inpatient cases, you want a nurse there to be able to care for it.
You need a tech there for when it happens. But if everything's in the outpatient setting, now you've got people sitting idle in the hospital just waiting for one inpatient procedure. So I think from the outside, we all want to say, yes, let's go ASCs.
And why are hospitals so slow to move towards the ASC? Well, it's like, well, because you're losing margin. And not only are you losing margin, you're also, your fixed costs are just staying the same.
You're not able to subsidize that as much anymore. And so from the outside, we might think like, well, why are hospitals against this? Now we do see that more of them are moving that way because they have to.
They have to adapt at this point. But that's also why you see a lot of health systems purchasing ASCs, going into joint ventures with doctors and different things like that, because they want to be able to capture that revenue. They recognize that it's going that way. So how do you keep that revenue now that it's moving that way naturally?
John: Yeah, yeah, they've got to figure it out. Unfortunately, it's not easy. And if you have a big group that just decides to open its own freestanding or something, it's going to hurt the hospital big time. Cooperation might be good, but they don't always make it legally and financially viable. The state doesn't, the government, the federal government. But all right, I want to switch though, back to what you're doing now and what you've been doing for a long time, because you deal a lot with locum, probably even with your first decade of work at a hospital, somehow getting involved in locums and trying to get ER and other services covered.
And it does seem kind of antiquated right now is the way it's done. I have a good friend that wrote a book on locums and he loved it, but it certainly was a very, very laborious process to find a job, to qualify for that job, all the paperwork. It's kind of a nightmare. Tell me about locums and why is it sort of very popular with physicians to some extent? Maybe why should it be more popular, if you have an opinion on that?
Joe White: Yeah, I would say in my early years as a hospital executive, I didn't deal with too many locums. I do see us moving a lot more towards that. I see the macroeconomics of physician employment.
We see more doctors that are employed versus having their own private practice or their private group. And so now that they're employed, they move from kind of this ownership to more of like a renter, to where it's like, hey, this is what I have to do. And this is my model and this is what I care about.
I want a steady income, I want a paycheck and that's what it's going to be. I think that's naturally going to lead to what I call more gig workers. And I think that locums, I try not to use locums too much.
That's why we are called like send it gigs. Is because locums, especially because it's tied to an agency can have a negative connotation. And really that doesn't have anything to do with the doctor, but more so from a hospital executive perspective, the cost that comes with the locums.
You don't want a locums. It's kind of like having a travel nurse. You're like, look, if at all possible, I want to replace locums. They call it a necessary evil sometimes to be able to keep a service line running and nobody wants to be a necessary evil. So how do we change that mentality to kind of understand that like, hey, in my space, in the startup space, we have fractional employees. I work with fractional CMOs all the time.
I work with fractional salespeople. That's what locums should really be more of, of like, hey, I do fractional work. I'm a cardiologist and maybe I work here, call it seven days a month. And maybe I work over here seven days a month and I'm able to help this hospital open up their cardiology line. And I go see two patients, which again, we kind of talked about how that's a profitable service line. That's good for that hospital.
It's good for the community. How do I be a fractional cardiologist in different settings? And so I think what's broken with locums and what physicians don't fully understand sometimes is that they are the value.
They're the ones providing the value. They're the ones doing the procedure. They're the ones going out there and getting the work done.
And they're what the hospital cares about. And then what the agencies don't understand is that the doctor doesn't care too much about the agency. The hospital is the value. How close is the hospital? How much are they willing to pay? What is the culture like?
What is the work-life balance like? How do I interact with the staff. And so when you've got this middleman who kind of acts as like a salesperson and obviously taking like 40% margin on top of you, they're going to say, oh, the hospital's great. And oh, they're going to sell the hospital. The doctor's amazing. And they want to provide all this work.
And then all of a sudden you get together and you're like, this is like dating and it's like a mismatch. And now the relationship doesn't last as long. Locums has always been very short-term. And I see we see more and more locums actually having longer stints at hospitals. And I think that that's going to exist. There's going to be a shortage of physicians and they're going to want to maintain a relationship.
And as a provider, you're going to want to be able to step in when volume changes or when the service line changes or when areas change, whatever happens. Capacity increases, COVID hit and all of a sudden we needed a lot more critical care. What does that look like? And how do we navigate that? We need a more flexible and fluid workforce. And I think that a lot of providers are going to start leaning towards that gig work.
John: Yeah, in my community now, we have two hospitals. One has always been the weaker and they were bought out by private equity firm. A physician owned private equity firm that has about 50 hospitals.
And everything went like crazy and they didn't want to employ any physicians anymore cause they had some. And my friend's a cardiologist. So he does locums just kind of to have something to fall back on when maybe his job falls apart.
And thing is he makes much more at the locums job but I'm sure the hospital that had to use his third party to find him and now pay him is through the nose or something. So if he had someplace he could just go and say, okay, I need this job for a few weeks to make or maybe even six months. Is that what you're providing now a quicker, easier way to make those connections?
Joe White: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think when we go on, we expect whenever we buy a house that we know how much the agent's making off of us. Why do we not do that when it comes to locums. Like locums providers should be asking the agency, how much are you making and how much am I making? Like, I'm the one who's the value but for some reason we're okay in this industry of like, oh, we don't know.
And so their incentive is to get you at the lowest point as a physician possible. And then to get a contract at the highest point. So they're kind of controlling the market and that's not really how we operate.
We're here to say, hey, look, here's the opportunity. Here's everything we know about the opportunity. We also want to have a reputation management system where you get to rate and review the hospital.
But then the other great thing is that the doctor uploads their availability and then that way the hospital can kind of know like, hey, all right, this doctor is willing to work five to six shifts per month and I can see the next availability for the next six months about what shifts they have available and I can book those shifts. And now we're all on the same page as to when you're going to work and how things are going to go. And to your point, it provides a safety security net for some providers.
And I see that happening more and more, especially as we have a lot of mergers and acquisitions and to your point, hospitals getting bought out and doctors not knowing what to do. I mean, put your name out there, hopefully like on a marketplace like SendIt where you're like, hey, I'm putting my name out there just to kind of test the waters to see what I could potentially do because there's a chance that the hospital doesn't take my contract and says, no, we don't want you. And I want to make sure that I have an option if that comes to that case.
John: How sophisticated is that connection? I'll tell you why, because there's different ways a locum can be paid. Like if you're doing procedures, I mean, this is I just, again, for my cardiologist friend, they could give him a stipend, just a cover call.
Then he charges for the services he provides when he does come in and do something or they pay him just a big chunk of money to be there physically for that 12 hours. And he doesn't have to do any billing. And I can imagine there's different scenarios that people are looking for. Is that all kind of figured out before this connection is made?
Joe White: One thing that we're big on that doesn't exist in this space, which I didn't fully understand because the most important part, many at times, one of the big parts is compensation. Like what are you willing to pay ahead of time? And physicians don't figure that out until all of a sudden it's like, well, no, this isn't worth it.
I've been having a conversation and this isn't worth it. So compensation is always communicated ahead of time. Whatever the hospital is willing to pay, the doctor signs up, they join, they put their rate. They say, hey, this is how much I want to make. I know the market, I know what my worth is. This is how much I want to make.
Now that doesn't stop a hospital from negotiating it down and saying, hey, look, we're willing to pay you this much. That's okay. But kind of put a stake in the ground and say, this is what I think my worth is and I've done my research and I know it.
And so that way we don't bother the physicians if they're like, well, no, like I would never consider that rate. Like don't even bother me with an opportunity. And we do go based solely off of hourly work because many at times the physicians don't have control over how many patients are coming through the door and what procedures are being done.
That should be communicated. Hey, you can expect to see this many surgical cases per day, this many casts, whatever it might be. However, we are going to pay you for your 12 hours of work, X amount of dollars per hour.
And then that's set up front and that's good. Because I've seen that more and more as a frustration, especially with doctors, but even some more with locums, you don't have control over that patient flow. You don't have control over whether that hospital can get you enough surgical volume or not.
It's their job to make sure that they fill your plate and that they don't overfill it. That they communicate as to like, hey, here's the expectation. But if you go in there and they're like, oh yeah, we'll pay you $500 per case that you do.
And then you get there and they do two cases. You're like, well, how's that my fault? You know, like it doesn't mean anything. And it's like, it's your job to make sure that my plate is full. So we just do strictly hourly based. There's a night rate, there's a call rate, there's a day rate, and then there's a 24 hour coverage rate.
So if you're like a trauma surgeon onsite for 24 hours, hey, we just need you here, perfect. Here's your 24 hour onsite rate. There's your call rate and there's your day and night rate. And the doctor sets all of those and they determine whether they're willing to work those types of shifts or not.
John: When I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and the website itself, I kind of got the feeling that, well, maybe the majority of this is like ER and hospitalists. I mean, those are really often just paid based on an hourly rate or a shift rate. So it makes it a little easier than when you're throwing in procedures, I guess. So is that true? Or are you pretty much expanding to every type of specialty?
Joe White: Yeah, we get every kind of doctor who signs up. I mean, I had like a transplant surgeon signed up the other day that I was like, unfortunately, I don't have anybody who needs a transplant surgeon in New York, though I would love to have that density someday. I mean, that's the challenge of a marketplace is that you're not always, you had to chicken and egg problem.
You need the doctors to get the hospitals and the hospitals get the doctors. So we're still early, we're growing, we've got quite a few hospitals. But to your point, most of our service lines are emergency medicine, family medicine, ER, anesthesia, critical care, ones that can kind of clock in and clock out.
I think the challenge with hyper-specialized physicians is that there's a lot of other dynamics of like, do you use Philips or do you use GE? And what kind of equipment do you have? And can you get me the supplies I need?
Anesthesia, you can intubate one person here or there. The meds are about the same, same thing for ER and HM. But we do see that, especially now with like EMRs and there's like a consolidation of EMRs, like most doctors can go in and pick up an EMR pretty easily.
They can get oriented quicker and easier than it has been in the past. They're like, yeah, no, I can do surgery in any location, right, just give me the tools. And you find more doctors that are just kind of like, I can do this in any setting so long as I have these basic things.
And that's what we make sure with the hospital that they have. So I do expect us to expand into all specialties, but to your point, we do have a majority in kind of those hospital-based service lines.
John: Now let's take a look at this from a slightly different angle, since again, locums and whatever you call it, we'll try and stay away from that term. But how can that be, or why should it be considered as a temporary gap, a stop gap for someone who's like burnt out and they're thinking of leaving medicine altogether? And I mean, it sounds like you have a lot more control, but then again, it's going to take some work. But is there something about locums, some positives that we haven't really thought about as physicians at times if we've never done it?
Joe White: Yeah, it's really the control, the autonomy and the freedom. I mean, we have one doctor on our platform who lives in an RV with his wife and seven kids and travels to a place, picks up seven shifts a month, makes great money working seven shifts a month, and then spends 21 days with his kids in wherever they're working. And so when there's such a need for the doctors, and again, there's not a need for the agency, there's a need for the doctor.
When there's such a need for a doctor and you find a good fit in a location where you can work, you're a solid physician, they love working with you, then you'll be able to go to a community, you'll be able to find somebody who needs you in that community. And then you'll be able to pick up some shifts and then you'll have the autonomy. You can leave at any point, there's no 90, 120 day out.
The other thing, we don't have any buyouts. Which is very interesting that most agencies have like a $20,000 buyout and doctors don't understand that. And it's like, and you also don't understand as a doctor, like that $20,000 is coming from somewhere and it's probably coming from your sign on bonus.
Like they're not going to be like, oh, sure, like $20,000, it's coming from somewhere. But I think about like dating platforms, like you don't pay a dating platform when you find your spouse, like, oh, congrats, you found your wife, you now owe us $5,000. And so that doesn't exist, but for some reason in this space, we think, oh, if the provider wants to be somewhere long-term and they actually have a good relationship, then we're going to make the hospital pay for that. I'm like, why? Like, I already made my money. We charge 9% on top of the doctor, no matter what. I've been making my money. I'm glad you guys are a good fit. Go ahead and join the community full time. That's great for me.
Now, I can't say that's going to be the thing for every doctor who's working locums because they might be more restricted by their agency. But I do think that this will become a thing in the future, like that there will be a marketplace, hopefully it's send it, but there's going to be a way for them to truly experience freedom and flexibility and autonomy, without having to worry too much about which agency they're working with and how those relationships look.
John: Okay, a couple other things pop into my mind. When I've talked to my friends that do locums and they talking about their startup, one of the things that is a big deal is that credentialing issue and keeping track. Does this, does your company help with that? How does that work? Because that can be overwhelming, especially if you're going into multiple states.
Joe White: Yeah, I would say that we make it more, we make it appear more overwhelming than it actually is. So we assign every doctor a credentialing specialist. The good news is we get your documents once and we have what we call a credentialing wallet.
And we upload all those documents into a wallet. 90% of the documents you need for every single hospital are the same. Everybody, and that's the frustration for the doctor.
They ask for the same documents every single time. So what we do is we just get it once and we put it in your vault and we say, hey, perfect, when you're ready for the next place, we'll share this 90%. They're going to give us, hey, here's the hospital specific packet.
The credentialer is going to fill it out the best that they can and then they're going to send it on to the doctor to complete. Now in the future, and it's already starting to come there, AI is going to start filling it out. We're going to be able to have AI integrate into the doctor's 90% to be able to fill out all the questions that they can already find by just reviewing all the documents that exist.
Having those things will make it easier for doctors, but I wouldn't let the credentialing or the professional liability insurance and a lot of those things that doctors get nervous about, that shouldn't be as much of a friction. That does not justify a 40% overhead for those things. I can tell you that a credentialing, a good credentialer can get your packet done in five to 10 hours with a few text messages.
You give them all their documents and you get going. We can make this much more seamless after you get it done once or twice and it just becomes automatic. So it shouldn't be a friction point when joining or when thinking about doing gig work.
John: Interesting, that brings me back to a question about your being an entrepreneur and creating this company cause I can't help myself. But it's how much of this now is just technology, computers, whatever, it's software that is doing the behind the scenes work and how much do you still have to staff? I'm just curious whether what you're doing is a lot less in terms of people handling things.
Joe White: No doubt, my goal is to keep our overhead as low as possible because I know every dollar of overhead is one less in the doctor's pocket or in the health system's pocket. So like when we think about using Airbnb to book a vacation spot, we're okay paying the 10%, 11% overhead because of the safety and security that comes with using the Airbnb, the payment processing, everything, the social proof, all those things. That's what's going to be for SendIt to where you're like, you're not going to go outside of SendIt because it's so easy.
Our overhead is going to be so low that it's fine. But yeah, there are some human aspects and components of it right now. I mean, every doctor does get assigned a provider coordinator and they help coordinate their schedule and communicate with the hospital.
The hospital's reaching out saying, hey, can Dr. Smith pick up five shifts in October or whatever? They're communicating with our person to make it more seamless but we have a technology in the background that makes it much, much quicker to where our provider coordinators can manage, call it 50 doctors or maybe a typical provider coordinator is only managing five to 10. Same thing from a credentialing standpoint.
Having a credentialing wallet allows us to manage more packets and get more packets complete but it doesn't take the human aspect out of it. There's always going to be some human aspect of what we do but we want to automate 95% of that process. And by automating it, that saves the doctor and the health systems money. Again, just cuts out layers and it cuts out friction. So I think it's a good mission to be able to do that.
John: Yeah, yeah. That's kind of the impression that I got and I've interviewed several other physicians and non-physicians who have taken some process that's very labor intensive, that involves a lot of people and they've automated part of it using AI or whatever and they still have people obviously but they can do it for such a lower cost now that they can make the outcome and the product cheaper, whatever it is.
Joe White: Yeah, we just automated one part which is really cool. You think about like Calendly or your ability to share your calendar. Like we use that now as healthcare or as professionals all the time where you're like, hey, you want to book a meeting with me? Here's my link, go book it when you want to work with me. But we have that same thing for doctors. Where they can share their link of their calendar and their availability.
Hey, if you want to work with me, here's my calendar. That saves so much back and forth before there used to have to be a scheduler on the hospital side, coordinating with a coordinator, coordinating with the doctor and by the time everybody got their calendars and everything aligned and they got back to the scheduler, that same scheduler had already blasted out to 10 other doctors. Now this doctor missed out on an opportunity and they could have gotten more shifts or whatever it might have been. It's just by having so many middle people, we're struggling. And instead what we need to do is just take out as much as possible. Hey, the doctor has updated their availability. Here's their link. Click on it if you want it, submit it now, good to go.
John: Yeah, sounds good. When the efficiency is there then it's going to be smoother and it's going to just be less costly for everybody. And that means more to the bottom line, whether you're the doctor or the hospital or the group.
All right, well, let's see. We need to know for sure how we want to, if you want to look at your website. So it's, go ahead, tell me what the physicians should look for if they're looking to learn more about what you're doing in your company.
Joe White: Yeah, it's SendItgigs.com. And then we do have a dash PNC podcast for anybody who's listening today. It'll go over some of the things that we've discussed and also kind of give some more details and some more, you can sign up for our newsletter.
You can create a profile, takes about four or five minutes to create a profile on our platform. Once you do, if there's a match, then we'll send it to you that day and you'll know about it. If not, then when you get matches, they'll come.
There's no commitment, no nothing. It's just, you can withdraw at any point, but it allows you to kind of start seeing things and start seeing what opportunities we're getting and different things that are out there. A lot of people kind of sometimes ask like, well, is it like a job board?
I didn't see any of the jobs. Well, we're trying to match you with the right opportunity. And at the same time, we're leveraging the health systems and they have to put in their opportunities to match.
So it's more of a like a, hey, ping, you got a match. You're not scrolling, looking through, swiping left or swiping right. You're getting a ping once you get those matches to kind of review those details.
John: Yeah, that makes sense. So you're not going in and looking at a list of the last 50 posts and it's like, none of those are for me. Your service is going to make those connections based on what each party has entered in terms of if they're a physician or if they're a clinic or a hospital. All right, SendItgigs.com. And then we're going to have this other special link from you guys. And we'll put that in the show notes as well. Is it okay if someone goes to your LinkedIn profile and just sends you a question or something? That's usually pretty benign.
Joe White: I love it, I love it. I love talking to physicians. If they have any suggestions, I will take any meeting I can get to discuss, hey, what do you think? Where can we improve? Where can we be better? That's the beautiful part of being part of a startup.
And if there's physicians on the podcast that want to be part of a startup, I mean, we're always taking physician advisors to kind of say, hey, perfect. Let's sit down, let's review. What do you think is an opportunity where we can improve in how we operate? So happy to do that.
John: Well, there's a lot we could have talked about today more than what we did, but we hit a lot of good things. Is there anything else before we go that you want physicians to know about either your company or about locums or about where you see healthcare going in terms of how it's going to impact physicians in the next few years?
Joe White: I would say I would just end with, in Dune, it says he who controls the spice, control of the universe. Physicians are the spice in healthcare. And I think that they're starting to figure out that their value is so much more than they fully understand.
And so I would say, know your worth, know your value. On our website, we have a compensation checker for any doctor who's working locums to see what you could make working locums versus what you make with SendIt, because that's transparent. Like we want to be part of that.
You should know your value whenever you go into a situation, and you should be able to stand firm on that as I'm a good provider, I do this, I provide that value. That's going to give you more autonomy. That's going to give you maybe more satisfaction in your job if you're feeling burnt out.
And so just know that everything in our healthcare ecosystem goes through a physician. They are the prescribers, they're the orders, they're the revenue generators. And so they should have confidence as they approach any healthcare executive, any opportunity to say, hey, I bring value to you.
I know that my services are a value to this community, to the patients, and also to your bottom line. So let's just talk transparently about what that value looks like so we can all get on the same page.
John: Sounds good. Sounds like you're very physician-friendly. That always helps. This has been great. I appreciate you spending the time with us today. And with that, Joe, I guess I'll have to just say goodbye for now.
Joe White: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me on this podcast and really enjoyed it.
John: Bye-bye.
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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 443
Healthcare Startup Founder: How To Restore Physician Autonomy
- Interview with Joe White
John: Today's guest is a former hospital executive and then corporate management group VP that helped staff physicians for needy hospitals. And, but he's doing something completely different now. He's a founder of a startup that uses tech to better match physicians to healthcare organizations that need their services. So with that, Joe White, welcome to the PNC podcast.
Joe White: Thanks, John. It's great to be here. Very excited to speak with you. And I love what you're doing and how you're educating physicians about different alternatives out there on the market. So happy to be on.
John: This is going to be very good I'm always trying to get more information for my fellow physicians, how they can practice better, happier, more with satisfaction. And there's a few questions I have for you later that are going to get to that and how what you're doing might help them. But why don't you start by giving us sort of the thumbnail sketch of your past work history, what you started doing when you went into healthcare and what you're doing now.
Joe White: Thanks a lot. I've been in healthcare for a pretty long time and in multiple different roles, hence the bald head at a younger age. I lost my hair pretty early because I got started in healthcare very early, but I actually started as an ER tech, just cleaning beds, doing EKGs in the ER, and just kind of helping out, figuring out patient flow.
And I thought I wanted to do medicine, but then I started to learn about the business side of hospitals and operations. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. I never even thought about the business side of hospitals. And this was in Las Vegas where I was born and raised. And so then I started doing hospital operations. They figured out that I was good with Excel and PowerPoint.
I started working my way up the hospital operations chain, eventually becoming a VP and then COO of a few different hospitals across the country. After I'd been in that for a little bit, I was offered a position to go join a corporate management group that staffed mostly emergency medicine, hospital medicine, critical care doctors in hospitals. And that's kind of where I got exposure to this problem of, hey, when I need a doctor, how do I get a doctor quickly.
And occasionally I'd either have to try and go find some PRN doctors. And what does that look like? Then other times I was using these locums agencies and they're extremely expensive and they've got this high overhead and it was just extremely complex.
And so that's where I experienced this problem of like, well, I don't care about the agency. All I care about is the doctor. Why isn't there a simple marketplace that just connects me with the doctor as simply as possible? And when I couldn't find it, I decided to launch it myself. Hence the name SendIt. It's just kind of go for it, why not?
So SendIt gigs, we connect hospitals and doctors. You can think of us kind of like Uber, but for doctors. People are like, well, what's the difference between you and a locums agency? And I'm like, well, what's the difference between an Uber and a taxi. Both get you from point A to point B, but one does it with technology, transparent. Like once you use an Uber, you're never going to use a taxi again. It's much, much better experience. So that's what we're building with SendIt.
John: That is very cool. And maybe we'll have time to actually talk about that process, because I know there are some physician entrepreneurs out there that listen to me, but I want to just pick your brain first about, because of your background in working in hospitals and working with firms that help hospitals and physicians connect. What is it about the way hospitals make decisions that physicians don't seem to get, just from your perspective?
Because I know, I remember physicians just like, they're doing things that's all wrong and they don't care about the patients. And so, we'll start with that open-ended question.
Joe White: Yeah, certainly I've seen a lot of CMOs step into their roles and just kind of get blindsided by like, whoa, this is kind of completely different than what I've experienced in my medical career. And I'm sure you experienced that as a CMO. But I would say that most hospital executives, a majority of them are actually really good people who do want to do well.
They are just having to navigate macro economics that exists within the hospital healthcare space. I would say that some of the biggest things that doctors don't quite understand about that decision-making is that like, hospitals are, every service line is kind of cross-subsidized. So you've kind of got your service lines that make a lot of money and you've got your service lines that don't make so much money. And then you've got all these other dynamics too of like payer mix. So it's like, what is my payer mix in this outpatient setting versus this inpatient setting? And what does that look like.
Example of like a cross-subsidized would be like OBGYN. So having babies is actually not very profitable for hospitals, they lose a lot of money on that. However, they make good amount of money in the NICU.
And so they can do the having the babies because the NICU, that gets harder. That's why we see a lot of the rural places closing their OB-GYN programs because they don't have a NICU where they're able to kind of get that revenue from the OBGYN, from the deliveries. But then also mothers are the decision makers of the house usually where they get hair.
And so you kind of want to use that experience to engage a mother when you're having a baby. So there's all these different things that you're trying to take into consideration of like, okay, let's look at this service line in isolation but you can't look at it in isolation because it impacts everything else. And then you've got your orthopedics over here and your cardiology and your internal medicine and your critical care, and they all want something.
And what does that look like? And how are you able to kind of help them? So it gets very difficult when you're trying to manage through those dynamics.
We've heard it a lot in healthcare, no margin, no mission and hospital administrators are in there to make sure that we're able to retain a margin to be able to support the communities that we want to be able to support. And so that's kind of one of the hard things that I think physicians don't fully understand when a hospital executive is making a decision is what are all the different macroeconomics that they're having to deal with?
John: Yeah, I remember doing budgets and so forth as CMO. And one of the things too is that they didn't get hospital finances because they would look at the revenue, revenue, and this was obviously accrual based and it had nothing to do with what you got paid. And there would be, oh, you're making all this money off of me. It's like, and then they would say, well, I should get a percentage of that. And it's like, but you realize we have overhead. We can't produce that.
We cannot provide that unless we actually pay all these people and pay all this overhead. So what's left over is often barely breaking even. I mean, in Illinois, a third of the hospitals lose money every year.
Maybe you can even give me an example of a decision that a hospital might make that just doesn't seem rational to the physician. And I guess you were talking about like OB, but are there other examples just so they maybe have a little more to think about?
Joe White: Yeah, certainly. I think the shift towards outpatient for ASCs and surgeries. Whether it's total hips, total knees, different things like that. I think from the outside, it makes complete sense. Better for the patient, more efficient, everything's great. But to your point of what you just said, hospitals have massive overhead. And that overhead is fixed. You've already got that OR room built. You've already got the staff there.
You've got your anesthesiologist. And then now you're going to move it to an outpatient setting. And oh, by the way, you get reimbursed less in an outpatient setting than you do in the inpatient setting from insurance.
Not only is the same procedure now going over there and making less of a margin, you're having to deal with all of these staff and internal people. I remember one time with my endoscopy team where it was like, okay, hey, the insurance is calling, trying to move these patients to the ASC. And I'm like, look, if we move everything over to the ASC, then I can't keep my endoscopy team busy enough to be able to keep them on the floors and then be able to have endoscopy call coverage, GI call coverage.
So what do I do if everything starts moving? I mean, 80% of endoscopy can be done in an outpatient, 90% probably. But the problem is all those inpatient cases, you want a nurse there to be able to care for it.
You need a tech there for when it happens. But if everything's in the outpatient setting, now you've got people sitting idle in the hospital just waiting for one inpatient procedure. So I think from the outside, we all want to say, yes, let's go ASCs.
And why are hospitals so slow to move towards the ASC? Well, it's like, well, because you're losing margin. And not only are you losing margin, you're also, your fixed costs are just staying the same.
You're not able to subsidize that as much anymore. And so from the outside, we might think like, well, why are hospitals against this? Now we do see that more of them are moving that way because they have to.
They have to adapt at this point. But that's also why you see a lot of health systems purchasing ASCs, going into joint ventures with doctors and different things like that, because they want to be able to capture that revenue. They recognize that it's going that way. So how do you keep that revenue now that it's moving that way naturally?
John: Yeah, yeah, they've got to figure it out. Unfortunately, it's not easy. And if you have a big group that just decides to open its own freestanding or something, it's going to hurt the hospital big time. Cooperation might be good, but they don't always make it legally and financially viable. The state doesn't, the government, the federal government. But all right, I want to switch though, back to what you're doing now and what you've been doing for a long time, because you deal a lot with locum, probably even with your first decade of work at a hospital, somehow getting involved in locums and trying to get ER and other services covered.
And it does seem kind of antiquated right now is the way it's done. I have a good friend that wrote a book on locums and he loved it, but it certainly was a very, very laborious process to find a job, to qualify for that job, all the paperwork. It's kind of a nightmare. Tell me about locums and why is it sort of very popular with physicians to some extent? Maybe why should it be more popular, if you have an opinion on that?
Joe White: Yeah, I would say in my early years as a hospital executive, I didn't deal with too many locums. I do see us moving a lot more towards that. I see the macroeconomics of physician employment.
We see more doctors that are employed versus having their own private practice or their private group. And so now that they're employed, they move from kind of this ownership to more of like a renter, to where it's like, hey, this is what I have to do. And this is my model and this is what I care about.
I want a steady income, I want a paycheck and that's what it's going to be. I think that's naturally going to lead to what I call more gig workers. And I think that locums, I try not to use locums too much.
That's why we are called like send it gigs. Is because locums, especially because it's tied to an agency can have a negative connotation. And really that doesn't have anything to do with the doctor, but more so from a hospital executive perspective, the cost that comes with the locums.
You don't want a locums. It's kind of like having a travel nurse. You're like, look, if at all possible, I want to replace locums. They call it a necessary evil sometimes to be able to keep a service line running and nobody wants to be a necessary evil. So how do we change that mentality to kind of understand that like, hey, in my space, in the startup space, we have fractional employees. I work with fractional CMOs all the time.
I work with fractional salespeople. That's what locums should really be more of, of like, hey, I do fractional work. I'm a cardiologist and maybe I work here, call it seven days a month. And maybe I work over here seven days a month and I'm able to help this hospital open up their cardiology line. And I go see two patients, which again, we kind of talked about how that's a profitable service line. That's good for that hospital.
It's good for the community. How do I be a fractional cardiologist in different settings? And so I think what's broken with locums and what physicians don't fully understand sometimes is that they are the value.
They're the ones providing the value. They're the ones doing the procedure. They're the ones going out there and getting the work done.
And they're what the hospital cares about. And then what the agencies don't understand is that the doctor doesn't care too much about the agency. The hospital is the value. How close is the hospital? How much are they willing to pay? What is the culture like?
What is the work-life balance like? How do I interact with the staff. And so when you've got this middleman who kind of acts as like a salesperson and obviously taking like 40% margin on top of you, they're going to say, oh, the hospital's great. And oh, they're going to sell the hospital. The doctor's amazing. And they want to provide all this work.
And then all of a sudden you get together and you're like, this is like dating and it's like a mismatch. And now the relationship doesn't last as long. Locums has always been very short-term. And I see we see more and more locums actually having longer stints at hospitals. And I think that that's going to exist. There's going to be a shortage of physicians and they're going to want to maintain a relationship.
And as a provider, you're going to want to be able to step in when volume changes or when the service line changes or when areas change, whatever happens. Capacity increases, COVID hit and all of a sudden we needed a lot more critical care. What does that look like? And how do we navigate that? We need a more flexible and fluid workforce. And I think that a lot of providers are going to start leaning towards that gig work.
John: Yeah, in my community now, we have two hospitals. One has always been the weaker and they were bought out by private equity firm. A physician owned private equity firm that has about 50 hospitals.
And everything went like crazy and they didn't want to employ any physicians anymore cause they had some. And my friend's a cardiologist. So he does locums just kind of to have something to fall back on when maybe his job falls apart.
And thing is he makes much more at the locums job but I'm sure the hospital that had to use his third party to find him and now pay him is through the nose or something. So if he had someplace he could just go and say, okay, I need this job for a few weeks to make or maybe even six months. Is that what you're providing now a quicker, easier way to make those connections?
Joe White: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think when we go on, we expect whenever we buy a house that we know how much the agent's making off of us. Why do we not do that when it comes to locums. Like locums providers should be asking the agency, how much are you making and how much am I making? Like, I'm the one who's the value but for some reason we're okay in this industry of like, oh, we don't know.
And so their incentive is to get you at the lowest point as a physician possible. And then to get a contract at the highest point. So they're kind of controlling the market and that's not really how we operate.
We're here to say, hey, look, here's the opportunity. Here's everything we know about the opportunity. We also want to have a reputation management system where you get to rate and review the hospital.
But then the other great thing is that the doctor uploads their availability and then that way the hospital can kind of know like, hey, all right, this doctor is willing to work five to six shifts per month and I can see the next availability for the next six months about what shifts they have available and I can book those shifts. And now we're all on the same page as to when you're going to work and how things are going to go. And to your point, it provides a safety security net for some providers.
And I see that happening more and more, especially as we have a lot of mergers and acquisitions and to your point, hospitals getting bought out and doctors not knowing what to do. I mean, put your name out there, hopefully like on a marketplace like SendIt where you're like, hey, I'm putting my name out there just to kind of test the waters to see what I could potentially do because there's a chance that the hospital doesn't take my contract and says, no, we don't want you. And I want to make sure that I have an option if that comes to that case.
John: How sophisticated is that connection? I'll tell you why, because there's different ways a locum can be paid. Like if you're doing procedures, I mean, this is I just, again, for my cardiologist friend, they could give him a stipend, just a cover call.
Then he charges for the services he provides when he does come in and do something or they pay him just a big chunk of money to be there physically for that 12 hours. And he doesn't have to do any billing. And I can imagine there's different scenarios that people are looking for. Is that all kind of figured out before this connection is made?
Joe White: One thing that we're big on that doesn't exist in this space, which I didn't fully understand because the most important part, many at times, one of the big parts is compensation. Like what are you willing to pay ahead of time? And physicians don't figure that out until all of a sudden it's like, well, no, this isn't worth it.
I've been having a conversation and this isn't worth it. So compensation is always communicated ahead of time. Whatever the hospital is willing to pay, the doctor signs up, they join, they put their rate. They say, hey, this is how much I want to make. I know the market, I know what my worth is. This is how much I want to make.
Now that doesn't stop a hospital from negotiating it down and saying, hey, look, we're willing to pay you this much. That's okay. But kind of put a stake in the ground and say, this is what I think my worth is and I've done my research and I know it.
And so that way we don't bother the physicians if they're like, well, no, like I would never consider that rate. Like don't even bother me with an opportunity. And we do go based solely off of hourly work because many at times the physicians don't have control over how many patients are coming through the door and what procedures are being done.
That should be communicated. Hey, you can expect to see this many surgical cases per day, this many casts, whatever it might be. However, we are going to pay you for your 12 hours of work, X amount of dollars per hour.
And then that's set up front and that's good. Because I've seen that more and more as a frustration, especially with doctors, but even some more with locums, you don't have control over that patient flow. You don't have control over whether that hospital can get you enough surgical volume or not.
It's their job to make sure that they fill your plate and that they don't overfill it. That they communicate as to like, hey, here's the expectation. But if you go in there and they're like, oh yeah, we'll pay you $500 per case that you do.
And then you get there and they do two cases. You're like, well, how's that my fault? You know, like it doesn't mean anything. And it's like, it's your job to make sure that my plate is full. So we just do strictly hourly based. There's a night rate, there's a call rate, there's a day rate, and then there's a 24 hour coverage rate.
So if you're like a trauma surgeon onsite for 24 hours, hey, we just need you here, perfect. Here's your 24 hour onsite rate. There's your call rate and there's your day and night rate. And the doctor sets all of those and they determine whether they're willing to work those types of shifts or not.
John: When I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and the website itself, I kind of got the feeling that, well, maybe the majority of this is like ER and hospitalists. I mean, those are really often just paid based on an hourly rate or a shift rate. So it makes it a little easier than when you're throwing in procedures, I guess. So is that true? Or are you pretty much expanding to every type of specialty?
Joe White: Yeah, we get every kind of doctor who signs up. I mean, I had like a transplant surgeon signed up the other day that I was like, unfortunately, I don't have anybody who needs a transplant surgeon in New York, though I would love to have that density someday. I mean, that's the challenge of a marketplace is that you're not always, you had to chicken and egg problem.
You need the doctors to get the hospitals and the hospitals get the doctors. So we're still early, we're growing, we've got quite a few hospitals. But to your point, most of our service lines are emergency medicine, family medicine, ER, anesthesia, critical care, ones that can kind of clock in and clock out.
I think the challenge with hyper-specialized physicians is that there's a lot of other dynamics of like, do you use Philips or do you use GE? And what kind of equipment do you have? And can you get me the supplies I need?
Anesthesia, you can intubate one person here or there. The meds are about the same, same thing for ER and HM. But we do see that, especially now with like EMRs and there's like a consolidation of EMRs, like most doctors can go in and pick up an EMR pretty easily.
They can get oriented quicker and easier than it has been in the past. They're like, yeah, no, I can do surgery in any location, right, just give me the tools. And you find more doctors that are just kind of like, I can do this in any setting so long as I have these basic things.
And that's what we make sure with the hospital that they have. So I do expect us to expand into all specialties, but to your point, we do have a majority in kind of those hospital-based service lines.
John: Now let's take a look at this from a slightly different angle, since again, locums and whatever you call it, we'll try and stay away from that term. But how can that be, or why should it be considered as a temporary gap, a stop gap for someone who's like burnt out and they're thinking of leaving medicine altogether? And I mean, it sounds like you have a lot more control, but then again, it's going to take some work. But is there something about locums, some positives that we haven't really thought about as physicians at times if we've never done it?
Joe White: Yeah, it's really the control, the autonomy and the freedom. I mean, we have one doctor on our platform who lives in an RV with his wife and seven kids and travels to a place, picks up seven shifts a month, makes great money working seven shifts a month, and then spends 21 days with his kids in wherever they're working. And so when there's such a need for the doctors, and again, there's not a need for the agency, there's a need for the doctor.
When there's such a need for a doctor and you find a good fit in a location where you can work, you're a solid physician, they love working with you, then you'll be able to go to a community, you'll be able to find somebody who needs you in that community. And then you'll be able to pick up some shifts and then you'll have the autonomy. You can leave at any point, there's no 90, 120 day out.
The other thing, we don't have any buyouts. Which is very interesting that most agencies have like a $20,000 buyout and doctors don't understand that. And it's like, and you also don't understand as a doctor, like that $20,000 is coming from somewhere and it's probably coming from your sign on bonus.
Like they're not going to be like, oh, sure, like $20,000, it's coming from somewhere. But I think about like dating platforms, like you don't pay a dating platform when you find your spouse, like, oh, congrats, you found your wife, you now owe us $5,000. And so that doesn't exist, but for some reason in this space, we think, oh, if the provider wants to be somewhere long-term and they actually have a good relationship, then we're going to make the hospital pay for that. I'm like, why? Like, I already made my money. We charge 9% on top of the doctor, no matter what. I've been making my money. I'm glad you guys are a good fit. Go ahead and join the community full time. That's great for me.
Now, I can't say that's going to be the thing for every doctor who's working locums because they might be more restricted by their agency. But I do think that this will become a thing in the future, like that there will be a marketplace, hopefully it's send it, but there's going to be a way for them to truly experience freedom and flexibility and autonomy, without having to worry too much about which agency they're working with and how those relationships look.
John: Okay, a couple other things pop into my mind. When I've talked to my friends that do locums and they talking about their startup, one of the things that is a big deal is that credentialing issue and keeping track. Does this, does your company help with that? How does that work? Because that can be overwhelming, especially if you're going into multiple states.
Joe White: Yeah, I would say that we make it more, we make it appear more overwhelming than it actually is. So we assign every doctor a credentialing specialist. The good news is we get your documents once and we have what we call a credentialing wallet.
And we upload all those documents into a wallet. 90% of the documents you need for every single hospital are the same. Everybody, and that's the frustration for the doctor.
They ask for the same documents every single time. So what we do is we just get it once and we put it in your vault and we say, hey, perfect, when you're ready for the next place, we'll share this 90%. They're going to give us, hey, here's the hospital specific packet.
The credentialer is going to fill it out the best that they can and then they're going to send it on to the doctor to complete. Now in the future, and it's already starting to come there, AI is going to start filling it out. We're going to be able to have AI integrate into the doctor's 90% to be able to fill out all the questions that they can already find by just reviewing all the documents that exist.
Having those things will make it easier for doctors, but I wouldn't let the credentialing or the professional liability insurance and a lot of those things that doctors get nervous about, that shouldn't be as much of a friction. That does not justify a 40% overhead for those things. I can tell you that a credentialing, a good credentialer can get your packet done in five to 10 hours with a few text messages.
You give them all their documents and you get going. We can make this much more seamless after you get it done once or twice and it just becomes automatic. So it shouldn't be a friction point when joining or when thinking about doing gig work.
John: Interesting, that brings me back to a question about your being an entrepreneur and creating this company cause I can't help myself. But it's how much of this now is just technology, computers, whatever, it's software that is doing the behind the scenes work and how much do you still have to staff? I'm just curious whether what you're doing is a lot less in terms of people handling things.
Joe White: No doubt, my goal is to keep our overhead as low as possible because I know every dollar of overhead is one less in the doctor's pocket or in the health system's pocket. So like when we think about using Airbnb to book a vacation spot, we're okay paying the 10%, 11% overhead because of the safety and security that comes with using the Airbnb, the payment processing, everything, the social proof, all those things. That's what's going to be for SendIt to where you're like, you're not going to go outside of SendIt because it's so easy.
Our overhead is going to be so low that it's fine. But yeah, there are some human aspects and components of it right now. I mean, every doctor does get assigned a provider coordinator and they help coordinate their schedule and communicate with the hospital.
The hospital's reaching out saying, hey, can Dr. Smith pick up five shifts in October or whatever? They're communicating with our person to make it more seamless but we have a technology in the background that makes it much, much quicker to where our provider coordinators can manage, call it 50 doctors or maybe a typical provider coordinator is only managing five to 10. Same thing from a credentialing standpoint.
Having a credentialing wallet allows us to manage more packets and get more packets complete but it doesn't take the human aspect out of it. There's always going to be some human aspect of what we do but we want to automate 95% of that process. And by automating it, that saves the doctor and the health systems money. Again, just cuts out layers and it cuts out friction. So I think it's a good mission to be able to do that.
John: Yeah, yeah. That's kind of the impression that I got and I've interviewed several other physicians and non-physicians who have taken some process that's very labor intensive, that involves a lot of people and they've automated part of it using AI or whatever and they still have people obviously but they can do it for such a lower cost now that they can make the outcome and the product cheaper, whatever it is.
Joe White: Yeah, we just automated one part which is really cool. You think about like Calendly or your ability to share your calendar. Like we use that now as healthcare or as professionals all the time where you're like, hey, you want to book a meeting with me? Here's my link, go book it when you want to work with me. But we have that same thing for doctors. Where they can share their link of their calendar and their availability.
Hey, if you want to work with me, here's my calendar. That saves so much back and forth before there used to have to be a scheduler on the hospital side, coordinating with a coordinator, coordinating with the doctor and by the time everybody got their calendars and everything aligned and they got back to the scheduler, that same scheduler had already blasted out to 10 other doctors. Now this doctor missed out on an opportunity and they could have gotten more shifts or whatever it might have been. It's just by having so many middle people, we're struggling. And instead what we need to do is just take out as much as possible. Hey, the doctor has updated their availability. Here's their link. Click on it if you want it, submit it now, good to go.
John: Yeah, sounds good. When the efficiency is there then it's going to be smoother and it's going to just be less costly for everybody. And that means more to the bottom line, whether you're the doctor or the hospital or the group.
All right, well, let's see. We need to know for sure how we want to, if you want to look at your website. So it's, go ahead, tell me what the physicians should look for if they're looking to learn more about what you're doing in your company.
Joe White: Yeah, it's SendItgigs.com. And then we do have a dash PNC podcast for anybody who's listening today. It'll go over some of the things that we've discussed and also kind of give some more details and some more, you can sign up for our newsletter.
You can create a profile, takes about four or five minutes to create a profile on our platform. Once you do, if there's a match, then we'll send it to you that day and you'll know about it. If not, then when you get matches, they'll come.
There's no commitment, no nothing. It's just, you can withdraw at any point, but it allows you to kind of start seeing things and start seeing what opportunities we're getting and different things that are out there. A lot of people kind of sometimes ask like, well, is it like a job board?
I didn't see any of the jobs. Well, we're trying to match you with the right opportunity. And at the same time, we're leveraging the health systems and they have to put in their opportunities to match.
So it's more of a like a, hey, ping, you got a match. You're not scrolling, looking through, swiping left or swiping right. You're getting a ping once you get those matches to kind of review those details.
John: Yeah, that makes sense. So you're not going in and looking at a list of the last 50 posts and it's like, none of those are for me. Your service is going to make those connections based on what each party has entered in terms of if they're a physician or if they're a clinic or a hospital. All right, SendItgigs.com. And then we're going to have this other special link from you guys. And we'll put that in the show notes as well. Is it okay if someone goes to your LinkedIn profile and just sends you a question or something? That's usually pretty benign.
Joe White: I love it, I love it. I love talking to physicians. If they have any suggestions, I will take any meeting I can get to discuss, hey, what do you think? Where can we improve? Where can we be better? That's the beautiful part of being part of a startup.
And if there's physicians on the podcast that want to be part of a startup, I mean, we're always taking physician advisors to kind of say, hey, perfect. Let's sit down, let's review. What do you think is an opportunity where we can improve in how we operate? So happy to do that.
John: Well, there's a lot we could have talked about today more than what we did, but we hit a lot of good things. Is there anything else before we go that you want physicians to know about either your company or about locums or about where you see healthcare going in terms of how it's going to impact physicians in the next few years?
Joe White: I would say I would just end with, in Dune, it says he who controls the spice, control of the universe. Physicians are the spice in healthcare. And I think that they're starting to figure out that their value is so much more than they fully understand.
And so I would say, know your worth, know your value. On our website, we have a compensation checker for any doctor who's working locums to see what you could make working locums versus what you make with SendIt, because that's transparent. Like we want to be part of that.
You should know your value whenever you go into a situation, and you should be able to stand firm on that as I'm a good provider, I do this, I provide that value. That's going to give you more autonomy. That's going to give you maybe more satisfaction in your job if you're feeling burnt out.
And so just know that everything in our healthcare ecosystem goes through a physician. They are the prescribers, they're the orders, they're the revenue generators. And so they should have confidence as they approach any healthcare executive, any opportunity to say, hey, I bring value to you.
I know that my services are a value to this community, to the patients, and also to your bottom line. So let's just talk transparently about what that value looks like so we can all get on the same page.
John: Sounds good. Sounds like you're very physician-friendly. That always helps. This has been great. I appreciate you spending the time with us today. And with that, Joe, I guess I'll have to just say goodbye for now.
Joe White: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me on this podcast and really enjoyed it.
John: Bye-bye.
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