Bash Halow: Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast. My name is Bash Halow. I am Head of Marketing for ClinicianCore. I am really happy to be here to talk to you today about our communication app. I’m thrilled to have our guests on because they’re from your side of the world, the human side of medicine. But I actually come—when I’m not working for ClinicianCore—I come from the veterinary side.
And this may or may not surprise you, but a lot of the issues you have with communication —we have exactly the same issues, I think, you correct me if I’m wrong—on the veterinary side. And those come in two silos.
The first is that you guys, on a day-to-day basis, are down in the trenches, trying to take care of patients. Even on a perfect day, there are all kinds of curveballs that come with that job. And then you’ve got admin coming down with all of these things they want you to do. And that can be a big source of frustration because you don’t feel like they understand what you’re going through on a day-to-day basis. Or maybe you don’t feel like you’ve had a voice in what it is they’re telling you to do, or even the time to connect with them. The exact same thing happens in veterinary medicine, and it’s a huge source of frustration and burnout.
The second thing is that you are part… it’s not just up to you to deliver patient care. You’re part of a whole team of people that are trying to deliver patient care. And if we look at the individual efforts of all of those people, each and every one of them is doing a great job. But everybody’s job is predicated on how good the communication is with their partner, both the other paraprofessionals, the nurses, the other doctors, and admin.
Well, ClinicianCore is aimed to solve those two big silos of problems. It is invitation-only. It’s specific to physicians—so it’s really centered around physicians—because I think as Kevin and Neeraj will explain to you, doctors really are the beating heart of a practice. Everything has to flow through them, and we want to make communication as quick and as easy for them. So it aims to solve that. And it tries to engage everybody in the community to make the community of healthcare providers stronger.
With no further ado, I’d like to introduce the two guests that we have on today. The first is Kevin Halow. You’ll notice that we have similar last names. It’s because we’re not only brothers, but we’re twins. So throughout the webinar, you might want to look for similarities or dissimilarities regarding the way that we attack this idea of communication in healthcare. Kevin is a former Lieutenant Colonel in the military. He’s a surgeon of 27 years. And—I think if I’m not mistaken, you correct me if I’m wrong, Kevin—he started this project six years ago. He’s called upon his military experience, his experience as a surgeon, as an educator, and also as one of those mean, awful admin people we’re always willing to talk about, because he ran his own practice for many years. And he’s brought all of that into consideration, as well as his business education, to bear on trying to make ClinicianCore a real tool of efficiency at practices, and also a great way to bring teams together and make working in medicine fun again.
We also have Neeraj Jain. He’s the founding partner of ClinicianCore and the Chief Executive Officer. He’s a healthcare veteran and he’s the strategic force at taking this vision of Dr. Halow’s and turning it into something that’s scalable, that’s secure, and that is a unified technological communication platform.
So let’s bring these guys on for some questions and hear their thoughts on ClinicianCore. And Kevin, I want to start with you. ClinicianCore is straightforward enough, but it does have some components to it. Or I think that you would say are critical components. Do you want to describe what those are to the audience to begin with?
Dr. Kevin Halow: Yeah. So ClinicianCore is actually made up of four modules. And so what we did was we took as our base module, what we call the HCO [Healthcare Organization]. And what it does is the HCO takes the physician off of the hamster wheel—right, you’re running trying to keep up, trying to keep up, you eventually fall off, you burnout, you quit—it takes the physician off that hamster wheel and puts him at the center of—or the hub of—healthcare communication. So each HCO is a healthcare organization, but what we do is we change it so that now communication within that organization is now physician-centric.
And then what we did was we created the HCC, the Healthcare Collaboration. So what happens with an HCC is that basically it’s essentially the connection to all these HCOs. So you have all these different HCOs with physicians at the center, and then what we do is we connect those physicians in a collaboration—in a collaborative manner—to every other organization. Such that what’s happening is now the physicians are communicating with each other and, at the touch of a button, they have all of their support staff right there for them. They can connect to any of them because all the support staff are on this spoke on the wheel.
And then we have another section which is called the HCX, which is basically the Healthcare Exchange. But it’s a different type of exchange. It’s the non-compliant section of ClinicianCore. And what happens is that in the HCX, it allows physicians to be able to connect with vendors. And you think, why is that important? In these days, everything is connected and we as physicians are very dependent upon the device manufacturers to make sure that we are delivering the medications properly, that we are inserting the implants properly.
So for example, when I do one particular surgery where I fix an aortic aneurysm, that is a very technically challenging process that requires very specific tools and devices. And so we often will have those vendors, such as Cook Zenith, in the operating room. Same thing with spine surgeries, orthopedic surgeries, or neurosurgery. And so what we’ve done is we’ve created this platform called the HCX that allows the physicians to reach out in a private manner—because the vendors cannot contact the physicians, only the physicians can contact them. It’s a one-way street. But allows us to actually have these formal discussions, these interactive dialogues that help physicians be part of that business of healthcare decision making.
And then the last section is what we call the Doc Lounge. Originally the platform, before we called it ClinicianCore—one of our previous minimally viable products and our prototypes to get us to where we are—was called “Doctors Opinions Count.” And we called the app “Doc” for short. And so we kept as a holdover a Doc Lounge. It’s similar to a physician lounge in a hospital, except that it’s completely virtual. So we call it the Doc Lounge. It’s invite-only and it’s designed only for physicians where physicians can virtually go in and collaborate and connect to each other. So those are the four sections of ClinicianCore.
Bash Halow: I want to make sure that I understand the setup that you just talked about. It sounds like that inside ClinicianCore, we’ve got the various organizations that are members of this platform. And then as a subset of that, we’ve got these hubs of connectivity where doctors can connect with one another. You’ve got the exchange where they can reach outside of this bubble that’s of HIPAA safety—I think it’s HIPAA compliant inside that bubble, is that correct or no?
Dr. Kevin Halow: Yes, that’s correct.
Bash Halow: And so they can reach outside of that bubble in to talk to vendors if they need to. But there’s also a Physicians Lounge. Is or is not HIPAA compliant?
Dr. Kevin Halow: It is. Yes, sure. So the only thing that’s not—the only thing is outside the compliance umbrella—is the HCX. Because we actually want to promote more of an open exchange of ideas, but we’re not going to have patient information data there, we’re not going to have any of that. So the HCX allows the physicians to get out there and really talk about issues in their specialties. And we don’t need it to be compliant. But everything else is in complete compliance.
So when you think about ClinicianCore, we’ve locked it down as much as you can possibly think of. So it’s invite-only. You can’t just download this and jump on. You have to be vetted and be invited. You have to be in healthcare to use it. And it is very private platform. It’s HIPAA compliant. So you don’t have to worry about patient data being exposed. Physicians not only are in charge of patient safety and quality care, we’re really in charge of patient protection, like protecting their health information. That’s our job.
And in addition to all those things, we’ve made ClinicianCore auto-delete. So there is no permanent record on ClinicianCore. If you want it to be a permanent record, you can get it in, you can submit it into the EMR, the electronic medical record or electronic health care record. But everything on ClinicianCore goes away. So very private platform. And then again, you have this Doc Lounge, this area that really is our kind of place where we want to really stop the burnout. Because we want physicians to be able to connect.
But you see a pattern here. It’s physician-centric. I make the rules about who I need to connect to. Because I have to. That’s how I’m going to get things done. Right now we don’t have that. And that’s what we’re trying to do with ClinicianCore.
Bash Halow: Excellent. That’s great, Kevin. I think I want to reiterate what I think you just told me. So I’m envisioning this world with all these different hospital buildings. And those are our HCOs. And you want—this platform is enabling—the members of each of those different hospitals to walk across the street, down the avenue, and walk into the other hospital and communicate to each other. Those avenues by which they travel and communicate with one another are your HCCs.
Then if the people in all of those hospital buildings get tired of staying inside of that HIPAA compliant umbrella network, they can step across the street where it’s the regular world where they can go to Panera or McDonald’s or Starbucks and interact with other medical professions outside the healthcare—but still inside human medicine—and that is non-HIPAA compliant. They can talk to vendors in the business and learn more about the tools and technology and services that are out there to support them and their work.
And finally, we got the Doctor’s Lounge. And that’s where doctors after walking across the street [to] hospitals or going to Panera or whatever, they could just hang out, relax. They can smoke a cigarette, they can enjoy themselves. And that’s also HIPAA compliant, is it not?
Dr. Kevin Halow: Yes, it’s HIPAA compliant. But yeah, again, the important aspect of this is that it’s a physician-centric network. Like that it is a network nationwide, worldwide that is going to center on the physicians and the importance of physician-centric communication. That’s how everything connects. But everything goes through the physician.
Bash Halow: And I think that maybe all of us on this call realize that’s important because medicine is such a global thing now. Nobody’s going to just one healthcare provider anymore. They’re going to many different healthcare providers. And it’s important that all of those entities are able to speak to one another efficiently. Is that correct?
Dr. Kevin Halow: Yes. Yeah, absolutely.
Bash Halow: So my next question, I think I may know the answer just based on the previous answer that you gave when you were talking about ClinicianCore. What motivated you to build this app? Can you talk to me about the stressors or the things that you were seeing on a day-to-day basis at your hospital that motivated you to do this? When was your “aha” moment? What was it saying to you?
Dr. Kevin Halow: So, it started after I finished my MBA when I was the Vice Chief of Staff at our hospital. And started with a simple question: like, how do you get a physician to go to meetings? Because they won’t go. And it doesn’t matter what you do. You can have the meeting early, serve breakfast, have it late, serve dinner, provide continuing medical education credits, you can make it mandatory. They won’t go.
And it’s not because they don’t care. It’s not because they don’t want to be involved. It’s not because they don’t want to have a say. It’s because they’re too busy taking care of patients. I had one ENT physician tell me one time, he says, “Why would I go to that Medicine Committee meeting? That’s an hour. I can see seven patients in an hour.”
And over time, what we found is that physicians have been systematically excluded from the business of healthcare decision-making. And it was interesting, the more people I talked to, the more my colleagues I talked to at different hospitals in different sections of the country, it was all the same comment. “Yeah, we don’t go to meetings. Yeah, we have no idea what’s going on.”
Bash Halow: So can I just ask you, why did you care? Wouldn’t it be better not to have those grumpy doctors in those meetings anyway?
Dr. Kevin Halow: It’s interesting that you say that because that’s what happened. So what happened is that over time, the physicians wouldn’t show up to the meetings. And then each time they didn’t show up to a meeting, something else was put on their plate. You have to do this. You got to count this bean. You’ve got to do this extra quality point. You’ve got to reconcile these medications. It always came down to the physician. Oh, and oh by the way, you’re going to get another 5% Medicare cut this week because you didn’t go into the legislative session and talk to the Congressman about how important this is to keep your money.
And so what happened was over time we just kept getting excluded. And what happens when you get excluded? You get frustrated. What happens [when] you get frustrated? You burnout. You’re tired of it. So if we have all these great EMR systems and all these great communication systems, why is it that physician burnout is 48%? It’s because physicians are frustrated.
And what came on from that was this understanding that all of the communications are fragmented. We analogize it to the idea of the fog of war. The idea that you can’t communicate because the lines are down. And we call it in medicine “the fog of medicine” because we don’t have any idea what’s going on.
And for us, it was certainly for me—and it was this idea of saying, okay, how do we stop it? And what I found, the “aha” moment for me was: People would come up to me when I was in Medical Staff Leadership and they’d say, “What happened to the meeting?” And I’d say, “Why weren’t you there?” “I’m too busy.” Turns out [they’re] right. They were too busy.
And I realized that this platform was going to work because instead of them coming up and asking me what was happening at the meeting, they would come up to me and start commenting on what was going on at the meeting. And then something really weird changed. Because what happened was we started putting everything on the platform: the administrative updates, the Med Staff Leadership updates. People could chime in on anything they wanted to chime in on. And when we went to these medical meetings—like Medical Executive Committee meeting and Surgery meeting and Medicine meeting, Quality meetings—the initial thing on the agenda would say, “Any questions about what was placed on… at the time it was called Doctors Opinions Count… Any questions on what was posted on Doc this month for updates?” “Nope.” And then all of a sudden we spent an hour having these really productive meetings. “We’ve already covered everything else. Let’s talk about something important.”
Bash Halow: Wow.
Dr. Kevin Halow: And so really for us, we saw this instant realization that physicians do want to be involved. All we have to do is give them a private platform to use, and guess what? They’re going to use it. That’s where it all started.
Bash Halow: I just think it’s so smart because in my experience, you can really mitigate a lot of the frustration that team members have if they’re informed and they feel like they have a say. And it sounds like that’s what you’ve enabled your physicians to do with this platform in a way that’s efficient and a way that’s safe.
Dr. Kevin Halow: It goes back to this idea that says that, okay, we want to have this beautiful hospital. And we’re going to get all these awards. And we get the best CAT scanner and the best MRIs and our laboratory is better than anyone’s. And our operating rooms are amazing. But the reality of it is that every single one of those places grinds to a screeching halt without a physician signature. You can’t do anything. Because physicians control patient flow. So wouldn’t you want to have physicians at that table? Of course you do. Administrations want to know what we think. They just can’t communicate with us. It’s not their fault. It’s not our fault. It just is what it is. And we’re trying to solve that problem.
Bash Halow: Excellent. So, Neeraj, I want to give you an opportunity to chime in here. You’re the CEO steering this ship. As a businessman, you decided to team up with Kevin as you’re both looking, I am assuming, for a solution to lift this fog that Kevin talked about. So from a business and technological standpoint, what was the specific market gap that you saw that convinced you to build ClinicianCore?
Neeraj Jain: Yeah, great question, Bash. I found that there are three gaps we are addressing through ClinicianCore: the fragmentation gap, the connectivity gap, and the community gap.
To address the fragmentation gap, we have a tool called the Healthcare Organization [HCO] to tackle the data silos and app fatigue providers face on a day-to-day basis. We provide a single, unified platform with a compliance umbrella, so we optimize practice effectiveness and improve provider satisfaction because it’s very seamless.
And to address the connectivity gap, we have a tool called HCC (Healthcare Collaboration), which helps improve communication within the healthcare network, often hindered by outdated or non-compliant apps such as WhatsApp or other messaging apps. We are providing a compliance platform for them to communicate, and we will provide them with proper documentation, which may be a billable event for both parties. And this is how we are addressing the connectivity gap.
Regarding the community gap, we offer two tools. One is Doctor’s Opinion Count [Doc Lounge], a virtual space exclusively for physicians with compliance measures, allowing doctors to communicate freely outside the healthcare setting while sharing concerns and fatigue. This indirectly helps combat physician burnout by creating an open communication channel.
And then we have a Healthcare Exchange, which we call HCX, which is, of course, non-compliant. We provide a place where physicians and the healthcare community can share innovations and trend analysis in an open forum. We can also invite vendors to share their platforms or profiles for physicians and clinicians to see and appreciate the advancements in technology. So this is how we are addressing: fragmentation, connectivity, and community gaps.
Bash Halow: There are a couple of things that stick out when you talk about that community gap. I’ve seen several platforms emerge where they’re trying to connect an audience to all the possible sources of answers that might be out there for your questions, which is what this community section is doing for your medical team. They are providing them access to the best, most current innovation that’s out there that helps them improve their work at the hospital.
And I also have to say that I really perked up my ears when you talked about eliminating all those different channels of communication that those poor paraprofessionals have to go through to get the job done. Think about the redundancy. Think about the inefficiency that’s involved with trying to manage all those communication channels. And ClinicianCore does all of that—handles all of that, puts that under one umbrella. That alone is such a great selling point.
Neeraj Jain: Have you ever used Reddit, Bash?
Bash Halow: Yes.
Neeraj Jain: The Healthcare Exchange is essentially like a Reddit-style forum but within a restricted setting. Unlike Reddit, where anonymity allows free discussion without revealing identities, our platform promotes open and unrestricted conversations. We aim to create a space where people can freely discuss their progress and share any necessary information within this community.
Bash Halow: What an excellent analogy. Yeah, go ahead, Kevin.
Dr. Kevin Halow: I’d like to add something to that. If you think about healthcare communication, right? It’s like this bad patchwork quilt. Right? It’s if you’ve ever gone to maybe a third world country where you see all the telephone wires where people just added telephone wires and telephone wires so it becomes this big mess. And what they do to do it is they say, “Oh, it’s all about patient care.”
And so what they do is they just add another layer on the patchwork quilt. They put another wire in. They put in Vocera, they put in this, they put in that. But what we’re doing is we’re saying, no, we’re getting rid of all of that. And we’re going to go back and build a network from the ground up that is physician-centric. Why? Because that’s what we do is we take care of patients. What else? I wasn’t trained to do anything else. That’s my job.
Bash Halow: I want to add that you’re building a platform that’s plug and play.
Dr. Kevin Halow: It’s plug and play. It is physician-centric because guess what? When I can talk to another physician without being put on hold. When I can talk to a nurse without being on hold or trying to find the nurse. When I can tell people what I need in the operating room, what I need to be in that tray to do that chest surgery. All of a sudden, patient care gets better. It’s automatic. It’s automatic.
Bash Halow: One thing, I think this speaks to what both of you are saying, that I’ve noticed is that we spend so much time training our team members on the system of patient care, that there’s no time to train them on patient care—which is the whole reason why we’re here. And you’re eliminating all of that time spent in training on all these different systems and all that money on all those systems and all the money spent on the training, and really focusing on what matters, which is patient care, and making that patient care more efficient.
Dr. Kevin Halow: I think about, in any given day—besides me actually doing a surgery on a patient or seeing patients in the office—if a physician contacts me, they just want some information. Quick. “What do I do with this? How do I handle that?” What we’re doing at ClinicianCore is we’re making that billable. We’re making those billable events.
So instead of me having to just give away all the knowledge that I’ve spent over the last 30 years accumulating, that knowledge is worth something. So when you connect with me through the HCC, that becomes a billable event. You’re not just calling me on the phone. We’re actually going to make that into a situation where I just did a consult. And not only did the patient get better care, I got reimbursed, the physician that’s asking the question got reimbursed, everyone got something out of it. And we made healthcare more efficient and more effective. We didn’t drive up the cost price, we dropped the price. That’s what we’re going to do.
Bash Halow: Boy, this is great. Although you’re both in healthcare, it seems to me that you come from two very different perspectives. I know Kevin as an owner of a surgical business, your life in the military. Neeraj, your experience in healthcare, but also from a strictly business point of view. Talk to me about your collaborative efforts in building what turned out to be a very complex and robust communication system.
Dr. Kevin Halow: So from my perspective, when I first met Neeraj… he’s heard this before… but he said, if we’re going to partner, he said, “I want to be the CEO.” And I said, “You can be the CEO all day, pal. I have no interest.” And because I was wearing all the hats originally. And so I got to become the CMO.
I think it reflects well on our app. The way Neeraj and I work together reflects well to the app. Because physicians don’t want to run hospitals. They just want a say. We have CEOs and CFOs and CIOs that can run hospitals. I just want my opinion out there, right? And that’s how Neeraj and I work together, at least the way I see it. I stay in my lane. I’m the Chief Medical Officer. I’m the idea guy. I understand what the problems are and what physicians need. He understands how to get us there.
It’s my hope that’s what this app eventually does is that gives physicians a voice to be able to say, “No, I don’t really like the direction of where you’re going Mr. or Mrs. CEO of whatever hospital. I really think that maybe you might want to consider this.” Ultimately it’s their decision, they’re running the business, but at least I have a say. That’s how I see it. But for me, it’s been phenomenal because ever since Neeraj jumped on board, we’ve been so much more productive in terms of getting where we want to be. But it speaks to this idea of this symbiotic relationship that physicians can have with administrators.
Neeraj Jain: Yes, great, Dr. Halow. When the doctor mentioned his work with Doctor Opinion Count, the previous app, I realized we could significantly expand his vision. I was looking for a place where I could use my experience to create something larger and more effective that addresses specific gaps in our healthcare community.
This partnership was a great way for me to understand and support his vision. Thanks to his background and positive energy, it aligns perfectly with my experience in technology. Combining our ideas, we seem to complement each other very well, continuously fueling each other’s passion. Both of us share the same enthusiasm, and I try to match his energy. Although we both come from healthcare, our skills complement each other in this project.
Bash Halow: It feels as though that you do. And I would agree that I think both of you radiate an infectious enthusiasm over the app. And it’s well placed because what it does is really amazing.
Neeraj Jain: And now we need you to get on board as well.
Bash Halow: [Laughs] So I want to go back to this notion because it’s one I think about all the time, of burnout. And I’m going to direct this to you, Kevin. So what do you think about burnout? Do you think that the primary driver is workload? Here people talk all the time about work-life balance. Is it about the work or is it the friction that’s caused by all this disjointed communication? The friction of the system that we have to work in to deliver healthcare?
Dr. Kevin Halow: I would definitely think it’s the latter of the two. Burnout doesn’t happen because we are working too hard. That’s not it. Physicians want to work hard. We work hard to get into medical school. We work hard to get through our internships and residencies and fellowships. We work tirelessly. That’s not the problem.
The reason we’re burning out is because we’re tired of not having that say. That every time we miss a meeting, things get put more on our plate, more and more. And instead of the system designing things with us involved, they design things for us.
So I’ll give you an example. So let’s say we have a patient in the ICU that needs a simple procedure called a tracheostomy to come off a breathing machine. That’s a 15, 20 minute surgery for me. But when I’m done with that surgery, I have to reconcile all those patients’ medications from the ICU. Why would I be doing that? And I can’t do anything with the patient until I reconcile those medications. That’s one of a million examples of where physicians were not connected.
And so all of this disconnect, this fragmented communication, makes it so difficult for us to do our jobs that it’s just frustrating. And physicians are quitting in droves. They quit, they retire. They say I’ve had enough. There are physicians that won’t—people now that… where residency seats are going vacant because people don’t want to go to medical school.
And I think that if we’re going to fix the problem, we’ve got to realize that it’s a much bigger thing than individuals. For example, if I’m a physician and I’m burning out because I’m frustrated. I’m like, okay, I am so tired of being put on hold just trying to get caught up and just trying to give a nurse a Tylenol order, right? I myself feel that symptom. But if you’re looking at 48% of physicians who are burning out, that’s a sign that there’s something wrong in the system. It’s not an individual problem. It’s not my issue. It’s not my resilience problem. It’s not the fact that I can’t cope properly. It’s a system issue. And we have to fix the system.
Bash Halow: I absolutely agree. I always say that you can finish a day physically exhausted, but you can still be invigorated by the experience because if you were successful, especially in human medicine and medicine in general, you saved lives. You made lives better. It can feel tiring, but it’s an invigorating job. But if the very system in which you’re trying to do that is constantly preventing you from doing that, man, that is a big old source of frustration. And to your point, burnout.
Neeraj, I don’t know if you want to add to this, but Kevin talks about friction in the hospital. Your job is to try to somehow translate the solution to that into software. Has it been difficult for you to build a system that is secure enough for HIPAA, but fast enough to bypass all this friction that he’s talking about?
Neeraj: Building a system that is both HIPAA-compliant and seamless is technically challenging because security protocols often introduce latency. It involves a multi-tenant design and encryption, making it a complex task. However, I believe this complexity is where the real innovation lies, setting us apart from many generic apps. The core joy of developing this technology and product is in addressing a real need and filling a gap.
We are developing this encryption without the doctor’s knowledge, calling it “invisible encryption.” It includes all the necessary security measures, ensuring military-grade protection. This isn’t just advertising; it’s invitation-only. We’re using AWS as our platform for all the top-tier encryption, ensuring a seamless experience. As Bash mentioned earlier, it’s designed to be a ready-to-use app—no extensive configuration or training required for users with proper credentials.
We’re simplifying the process with a unified workflow that saves surgeons time by eliminating the need to switch between insecure texts, pagers, and EMRs. This platform, which we call “switching taxes,” integrates non-linear video, voice, and text all in one place, eliminating the need for multiple switches. It enables quick, secure consultations that naturally document decision-making without the surgeon or doctor having to pause and record separately. That’s the goal we’re working toward.
Bash Halow: It’s interesting you talk about saving time, and I think we’re talking about that in the context of how less frustrating that is to save time. But maybe you want to talk about the money aspect of saving time, which I’m sure you’re just can’t wait to talk about because I have a sense that you’re really excited about the dollar savings that this app can bring.
I’ll just want to tell you that from my perspective, what I see a lot, and I’ll go back to: you got a team of seven people that are talking to each other, but they’re trying to deliver care to one patient. And the amount of time that we have to take for those seven people to talk efficiently with one another is like unbelievable. Like the time that it takes in the background to share an understanding of this case and the money involved. And if there’s a way to improve the efficiency of that from a cost perspective, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
Neeraj Jain: Yeah. So when we were building and discussing and understanding the gap or the productivity loss for the physician, we were surprised to see with all the calculations we put it together, it was around 35% improvement possible by providing a seamless, easy app, communication app. So it’s a proper calculation based on a lot of historical data that on an average we can increase up to 35%.
If you put it in a perspective, this could be half a million to million dollar if you add it all this together, whether we call it a burnout cost or we call it a switching tax, all together it comes down to… for two doctor practice, they can add up to half a million dollars, the extra dollar for that 35% productivity improvement.
Bash Halow: So I want to make sure I understand. You’re telling me that for every dollar I’m currently spending in patient care and communication of that patient care, I could be saving 35 cents?
Neeraj Jain: 35 cents you are wasting right now is what I’m saying. So how much can we get out of this app is the question how well you adopt, right? So 35 cents you are spending by not looking—that same time you can use to add one more or two more patients. So that’s extra money for you, right?
So I’m saying that this documentation gap or when they finish the surgery, they need to make sure they put together all the medication or the documentation. Or sometimes a doctor needs a nurse practitioner to get a specific tool, and that nurse is not available. So that gap of doctor switching tax, we call it, where doctor could not get what needed, someone has to pay for that time, right? Because now that surgery may have to be postponed. So stuff like that, there is a gap, there is a cost of that gap. And we are hoping that with this app, with ClinicianCore, we can improve or we can minimize that 35% gap or what bleeding—the revenue leakage—they have at the current system.
Doctor, would you like to add if I’m making sense of what we are really addressing here in terms of extra dollar to the physician practice pocket?
Dr. Kevin Halow: Yeah. It’s funny, when my kids were young, you’d ask them to do something and they do that nose goes or whatever, remember? Because they didn’t want to do it. And you can imagine that you go to these meetings where there’s no physicians present and someone says, “We’re going to cut the marketing budget or we’re going to cut the laboratory budget.” Nose goes! Not cutting my budget. “Oh, I know. Let’s cut the physician’s budget.”
So what happens is we have this tremendous waste of resource utilization in medicine. Some people think estimated at $900 billion a year. An incredible amount of money. And so what happens is that they say, “I guess we gotta figure out how to make up that money.” So they’re just going to cut physicians another 5%.
What this app does is that it allows us to make things so efficient, so effective that we cut that resource utilization. So imagine this: We make healthcare more efficient, more effective, less expensive, and guess what? I get a pay raise. I get a pay raise for once. Isn’t that amazing? Like I actually get paid for a consult. I actually get paid to do things in the office now. That’s what the app is actually going to do is that it’s going to make… and simply because we put physicians at the center of communication again.
So that’s how we see this moving forward, this app is going to be beneficial financially to a lot of people, including physicians. But it’s going to make… it’s going to give the people that use… the organizations that use this app is going to give them a differential advantage in the marketplace because they’re going to be able to do things faster, more effective and cheaper. And they’re not going to have to cut the physician’s salary to do it.
Bash Halow: Kevin, I want to go back for a second. I want to go back to the doctor smoking in the Doctor’s Lounge [Laughs]. Doctors Opinions [Count]… because I love me a good cigarette or a good cigar every now and then. Why was it so important for you to create a virtual lounge that strictly excludes administrators?
Dr. Kevin Halow: [Laughs] Funny thing about the smoking. I actually… I’m old enough to grow up in an era when I remember one of the attending physicians coming in into the operating room with a cigarette behind his back. But we won’t go down that road. And I did have a Chairman, Dr. Von Rell [phonetic], who when I was in my fellowship, he would say, “Boy, come in here, let’s talk about the cases next week.” And he’d fire up a Virginia Slim. Now this is a cardiothoracic surgeon! He’d fire up a Virginia Slim. So things have definitely changed over the years. It’s too bad.
I remember one of my attendings Bob Harner, Dr. Harner. He’d say, “Yeah, remember back in the day, we’d have a patient with a bad liver injury. We’d pack it, we’d go into the doctor’s lounge, have a smoke, we go back into the operating room and fix it.” So I do remember those days, but we don’t condone that anymore.
Having said that, in the original Doctors Opinions Count… so originally we built this platform on a shoestring budget and the hospital that I was in was helping fund some of that. And it was really interesting because there were a number of physicians who would not use it simply because “Big Brother” was watching. If they felt that the administration had a say—and the administration did make it clear early on in the program that if we’re helping fund this, we need to make sure that you’re not saying anything bad about the administration.
The next iteration, we got away from the hospital completely and built our own app to make it completely private for physicians. And what we found was that it was much better accepted because it was private. And so we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. And as we moved to ClinicianCore, we said, no, this has to be a physician-centric private app that, to Neeraj’s point, this is encryption in the background. You don’t have to worry about whether or not your conversation is safe.
So I wouldn’t say we necessarily excluded the administration. What we did was we said, you know what? We want a private place where only physicians can be. No one else. And physicians can be there and physicians can have any conversation that they want about anything that they want and feel confident that they’re doing it in complete privacy. And only then are they going to feel comfortable to be able to complain about the things that are bothering them to help drive solutions to issues that are preventing them from doing their job.
And when you attach that to the rest of a platform that’s now physician-centric that allows physicians to have a voice and a say, now these complaints in the Doctor’s Lounge aren’t going to go unheard. They will be heard in the appropriate forum in another section of ClinicianCore.
Bash Halow: And Neeraj, on the flip side of that, you’ve created the Healthcare Exchange, which is not HIPAA compliant. And so talk to me a little bit about why you felt it was important to go in that direction? That’s a big step, isn’t it? To make that part of the app non-compliant?
Neeraj Jain: Yeah. So this is where Dr. Halow’s vision grew bigger when we were discussing how to go beyond the physician practice improvement with unified communication. So, creating HCX, the core idea of non-compliance space was a deliberate move to prioritize innovation over isolation. While HIPAA is essential for patient care, and strict regulation can be unintentionally chilling broad professional disclosure, it is a little bit scary, and all. So we tried to remove that compliance fear so that in a highly regulated environment, clinicians often feel censored.
So in HCX, we are providing a sanctuary of innovation where providers can have candid debates on healthcare trends, policies, and systematic reform without the burden of PHI oversight. So that was the first important thing we needed to make sure there is no compliance fear here.
Second was that we wanted to accelerate the exchange of ideas by operating outside those specific restrictions. We can effectively utilize AI for intelligent trend analysis, expert matching, personalized content, and so on. So, making sure that we can accelerate the exchange of ideas. We even thought of calling the vendors to provide their innovation, provide their products, so that the doctor can see what vendors are offering. And in a way, it’s a discrete where vendors can’t reach to the physician and bother them all the time. But the doctor can see what their offerings are. So we are making sure that, in exchange, we provide a discrete vendor profile available, specialty-specific to the doctors. So this is a way to provide more advancements in the healthcare vendor side to the physician directly.
And then finally, the focus is on the macro, not the micro. HCX is designed for discussing the business and science of medicine rather than individual patient transaction. So that’s the core idea of exchange. We are mitigating the risk through the transparency. That’s the idea.
Bash Halow: I’m just zooming out and I’m thinking about the entire platform. You’ve both discussed I think two unique sections of a commun—that maybe, I don’t know, you tell me whether or not they’re unique to the EHR messaging apps that are out there in general. But are there other unique features of the app that you think distinguish you from your competitors?
Neeraj Jain: There are, you’re right. The epic messaging app is quite popular, and pretty much all the EHRs are providing the messaging app. But it’s very specific to that community or that particular practice. And for the doctor to communicate there, he needs to log in to that particular EMR or message me—it’s a very limited scope. Whereas HCO, by architecture, is as seamless as any of the messaging apps available on the phone right now. It’s an app where a physician can communicate with any other physician, even if they are not on the same EHR.
So if you have Athena as a EMR and if other doctor has eClinicalWorks (eCW), right now it’s not possible within compliance. So this is what we are addressing so to make sure doctor can communicate as freely as possible. And that’s what their demand, right? That’s what their constant pressure to the point of everyday burnout is asking us technology guys to provide something so seamless that it improve their day-to-day life. So this is one thing we are trying to address and provide that distinction in a normal business practice, medical practice.
Second is that we are providing multimodal communication, right? Where it’s not only just the texting because there are many messaging apps available to the physician practice. But we are making it video also possible, audio also possible, and text also possible in a linear and non-linear fashion. And that’s another uniqueness of our offering in a within HCO or HCC or even Doc Lounge.
And then operational unification is what we are calling it. We are saying that EHR messaging is siloed within patient chart. If doctor need to talk something, a discussion on the outside of a specific patient, I believe based on my experience, doctor can add, is a little bit hard within EHR. So we are making it a little bit more unified operating system like where doctor to doctor or within the organization you can talk freely within compliance. So that’s we are making it operational unification within our app.
And third and final is the speed and the burden. Where EHR systems are notoriously very administrative, very clunky. You can talk to any doctor. He will tell you with 20 different EHR I have worked with. It’s doctors constantly complain that it’s so cumbersome, so clunky that it’s hard. So we engineered HCO to provide high speed with the consumer-grade experience where it reduces the switching tax—you don’t need to switch the apps and all—and it can communicate seamlessly whether it’s audio or video.
Bash Halow: Kevin, I want to go back to something just stuck out in my mind about the fog of war. I can’t remember, how old were you when you got accepted to the Air Force Academy?
Dr. Kevin Halow: 17, I think.
Bash Halow: 17. And how long were you in the military? From 17 or 18 till when?
Dr. Kevin Halow: I got out when I was 41.
Bash Halow: And now you’re 43. No, I’m kidding [Laughs]. You’ll take it. No. But that’s a long time. And you were saying that in many ways the architecture in some ways of this app was shaped by training or—I don’t know how you would describe it—shaped by your training or education that you had in the military. Do you want to expand upon that a little bit?
Dr. Kevin Halow: Yeah, I think that it was a combination of all of it. I think that in the military, I think one of the things that makes our military amazing is this idea of centralized command, decentralized execution. It’s the idea that says that, okay, if you’re a commander in the field, you’re going to get orders from your central command about what objective you have. But it’s really up to you as to making sure that you execute those orders properly.
And I think that’s what we went for with this app. The idea that says that how do you get out of the fog of war? You’re going to have to be able to give physicians the tools to be able to communicate. So yeah, we know what the standard of care is. We know what the objective is. We know what we want to be able to do. But if we can’t communicate to get that done, then it doesn’t matter how well we’re educated. We have to be able to connect to each other.
And so that’s what it’s all about. It’s why we took the base module, that HCO, and we connected all those HCOs with this idea of an HCC, these roads that go to all these places. And it’s the physicians that know how to travel these roads. The physicians have the key, they have the ability to make inroads to any physician they need to.
I think I mentioned this in one of my podcasts: A patient comes into the hospital and has a heart attack and gets a couple stents in their heart. And all of a sudden they’ve been in the hospital for four days and now they go home. Their medications have been changed, everything’s changed with the patient. But now the patient shows up in their primary physician’s office a month later and now the primary physician has no idea what happened. Physicians aren’t communicating.
So the idea being that we lift the fog of medicine, the fog of war, by making physician-centric communication. We allow physicians to be able to connect and communicate and collaborate.
But along that line too, medicine’s changed a lot because now we don’t really see a lot of the primary physicians go to the hospital anymore. Used to be the primary physicians would round on their own patients in the hospital. Used to be that they would go into the doctors lounge and they would have some breakfast or a cup of coffee or have some lunch and they’d run into one of their colleagues and [say], “Hey, I sent you this patient” or whatever. Now we get patients from all over the place. Most of the people don’t even know who I am or what I look like.
So what we did was we tried to make this app personal. Extremely personal. Because medicine is personal. Medicine is one-on-one. When I go into an exam room, it’s the patient and me. Maybe a family member. I don’t bring a whole entourage in there and say, “Okay, it’s time for your rectal exam, Mr. Jones.” It’s a very personal experience. And when physicians talk about patients, it’s a very personal experience. We talk about patients and we only talk about what we need to talk about.
And so we tried to make the app that too. And the idea being that—just like Neeraj mentioned—it’s video, it’s audio, it’s text, it’s data delivered in a way that is a personal connection. It’s that hallway conversation that’s one-on-one. It’s that conversation in the physician’s lounge that’s one-on-one. Or maybe you have a couple, three or four physicians that are all chiming in on a particular issue. That’s what this app is all about. It’s a personal app, personal private app for physicians and anybody who works with us.
Bash Halow: What you just said—and I’m saying this because I know you and I’m related to you—it’s really inspirational. I have to really applaud you both for what you’ve worked on and what you’re trying to accomplish. It’s so clear to me that you really are trying to make patient care better and make the lives of healthcare professionals better. If you succeed—and I think you will—your app is going to reduce the frustrations that happen day-to-day. You’re going to, because of that, you’re going to reduce burnout. You’re going to save practices a lot of money, which is so needed nowadays. And most importantly, you’re going to allow people enough time and enough bandwidth to enjoy their jobs and bring the joy of healthcare back to professionals.
So I really applaud you for that. You guys are ready for launch. What are you guys excited about that’s coming up in the next couple of months?
Neeraj Jain: ClinicianCore 2026 launch will mark a shift away from a slow, fragmented, clunky tech. And we will provide this real speed, seamless workflow for physician.
What we are really building here, Bash, is basically four pillars of our app which will address a different kind of gaps we find on a day-to-day physician’s patient. First one is a reclaimed community with Doctor’s Opinion Count, where we are providing this virtual launch for doctor. It’s a verified physician-only space where doctor can debate and have a peer-to-peer communication.
The second pillar is seamless collaboration with HCC, we call it Healthcare Collaboration, which dissolve the organization silos, enabling cross-network consultation and easy as an in-office conversation, with automatically capturing the decision trail into billable documentation.
The third one is a zero friction operation with HCO, Healthcare Organization, where we are providing linear and non-linear unified secure voice, video, and text into one HIPAA compliant interface. And eliminating the switching tax created by different apps physicians are using currently.
And finally, most important is the Healthcare Exchange, where we are providing this non-HIPAA restricted forum for exploring healthcare trends and engaging with industry thinkers.
In essence, 2026 launch deliver the infrastructure for a more connected, efficient, and physician-centered medical profession: the app called ClinicianCore.
Bash Halow: I would add to that by saying this, Bash. You’ve been there. I spent a couple of years at the business school going to these “biz meetings” once a month and just talking about when I was working on the project. And one of the entrepreneur professors asked me one time, he said, “What is this thing you’re building?” And I said, “It’s a time bridge. It’s a physician time universe.” He said, “What’s that?”
And for the people that are non-physicians listening to this, it might seem a little squirrely, but for physicians, I think they’ll understand it. Physicians live in a different time universe. We live in a time universe of minutes and hours. And businesses don’t because businesses don’t die in minutes and hours, but patients can. And we don’t have that time to leave our patient care universe and go to the synchronous world where you have these meetings that last an hour or you have these events that you have to go to in order to be heard. Physicians have time, but we just have little packets of time.
What this app does is it packages up that time and it allows physicians to have a voice on their time, in their time universe. And what that means is that means that you’re going to have all of these people, all of these physicians who have been 12, 18 years to train a physician, and all of a sudden they’re going to have a voice again and they’re going to be able to tell you what they think.
And I think that the people that are using this app, as I’ve said before, are going to have a differential advantage in the marketplace. They are going to put themselves in a situation where their utilization is more effective, the care they deliver is more efficient, more effective, it’s better. They’re using all of their resources to include their most valuable assets, which are the physicians. They’re going to practice healthcare as a team again. And that’s what this app is going to do. And we’re excited about the launch because we think that providing physician-centric communication is how we stop the burnout, it’s how we make healthcare better, more efficient, more effective, less expensive. That’s what I think.
Bash Halow: Well, I think it’s very well said. I want to thank you both for engaging with me in this discussion today. I want to encourage everybody that’s listening, if you’d like more information about the platform, which will be launching in April 2026, go to cliniciancore.com. Sign up for updates. Go ahead and secure your place on the waitlist. I just want to thank you again, Neeraj and Kevin, for taking all of the time and energy and heart that you have to put in this app, which as you said Kevin, is going to allow doctors, despite the rigorous schedule that they have, still to have a voice to admin and the rest of the team about their concerns. It’s going to definitely mitigate a lot of the frustrations they’re experiencing and consequently a lot of the frustrations that the entire hospital team is experiencing. So thank you very much. And to everybody out there, thank you so much for listening.