Calavista CMO, Sloan Foster interviews Jeanne Teshler, CEO, Wellsmith on the vision of Wellsmith, the amazing things they are doing through managing chronic disease lifestyles to increase activity and reduce diabetes. Jeanne discusses her plan to outsource the development of the platform, allowing her to focus on starting and building her company. We delve into how Wellsmith was able to get to market faster with a product that worked in highly critical environments such as hospitals.
Full Podcast Transcript:
Sloan Foster:
Hello everybody. Welcome to the first edition of Calavista Conversations. I'm Sloan Foster, CMO at Calavista and today we have a friend of mine, Jeanne Teshler in our studio, who has a young tech company focused on healthcare. We've known each other for quite a while and [I’m] excited to hear what her new adventure is today. So, Jeanne, welcome and why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself?
Jeanne Teshler:
Well, thanks, Sloan. It's good to see you again and be in the studio with you. I sure appreciate this time. My name is Jeanne Teshler, I’m the CEO of a young tech company called Wellsmith. Just for a little bit of a background before we get into what we're doing here. My husband and I are the founding partners of Wellsmith, and he and I have been in business together for as long as we've been married, so a good quarter of a century now. We have worked in a variety of different businesses, always entrepreneurial in how we do things. But we've run many companies, starting with, you know, production and catalog design, we've gone into creative services. We've done a lot of work in consulting. And over the course of the last 25 years or so, we've worked in a lot of fields including consumer product goods, technology, and healthcare.
Jeanne Teshler:
So our lifespan is working through the intersection of those and how to actually create great consumer experiences for all of our customers and all of our clients. And over time we've looked at problems and we've tried to figure out the most creative and the most consumer-centric way to solve them. So that's kind of the impetus for where we sit today. And what's interesting about what we're doing now is, Wellsith, sits at this interesting intersection of consumer behavior, technology and healthcare in such a way that it's bringing new light into how we solve what we see as personally as a problem in this country. And that is the growing amount of unhealthy people there are, if you look around, the statistics at the CDC saying that within the next 10 years, we're going to hit about a 50 percent obesity rate in the United States and we're going to see a lot more chronic conditions like diabetes, like heart failure and heart disease like COPD, which you know, is from smoking generally, but also has a lot of, a lot of basis in unhealthy behaviors in addition to smoking. So what we looked at is, as you know, personally, my family is full of, of bad health behaviors. There's nothing but heart disease and diabetes in my family, no matter how far I look.
Sloan Foster:
I think all of us probably have a little bit of that.
Jeanne Teshler:
That's true. And as we start looking at this, what fascinated me from a personal standpoint is having worked in all these different industries and the consumer product side, I'm in the technology side and in the healthcare side, we started to see over the last 10 years, in particular, all these little interesting bits and pieces of people trying to move the needle on health and what was missing is a way to bring all those pieces together. So that became a standing passion of ours is to figure out how to solve healthcare problems in new and interesting ways, and that’s where we came up with the idea of Wellsmith.
Sloan Foster:
The intersection of all those different elements and saw the intersection coming together at this point in time where it's needed and not any one company was solving the problem effectively, I'm sure.
Jeanne Teshler:
Correct. Correct.
Sloan Foster:
Well great, so where are you, what led you, I assume this is what led you to this idea is seen and what made you decide that now was the time to start a company? And time was of the essence?
Jeanne Teshler:
Well, we had prototype the idea of Wellsmith in our spare time during, you know, in between consulting gigs with our other company. And we started to realize that what was necessary was a brand new, basically a platform for solving this problem that, you know, if you look at the technology side, there are things like FitBits and different things that help people monitor their activity to be more active in healthcare. There are programs that you can join, for example, to help manage your diabetes or your weight loss. And on the consumer side, there's nothing but people trying to sell you on good healthy behavior, along with an equal number or greater number of people trying to get you not to eat healthy, etcetera. And all that. And so what we decided was there needed to be a platform way to solve this. And how do we bring all of those pieces together and make it work? And so our mission became a way, and we knew it was possible because the technology is now caught up in such a way to do so, the mission is to help reverse the trend of chronic conditions and bad health in the United States by giving people the right tools in a simple and memorable and actionable way to manage their own health. And that's what we've done with Wellsmith. We've created this platform by which consumers have an easy way to manage their health and healthcare has an easy way to help monitor and intervene as necessary in that care. And that's the Wellsmith platform in a nutshell.
Sloan Foster:
Great. And you've already had your first deployment. You've had been in the market for a brief period of time, but you actually launched the first part of 2018. So talk to me a little bit about where you are in the deployment of the platform and what you expected.
Jeanne Teshler:
Sure. So we're rolling out live. We've been in trial for the last year, year and a half, doing some testing with one of our customers on how this actually behaves in the wild, as we call it, in live action. So we start rolling out fully in, starting in January, so a couple of weeks from now, we start the new year with a turning this baby onto a live audience. And what we'll do is, we'll probably by the end of 2018, I have anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of users on the platform and none of the gate within about that year, we should be the largest population risk management platform in the country. It's just, there are few doing things like what we're doing, but no one to the scale and to the breadth of what we are doing.
Sloan Foster:
Obviously, time to market was very important and a product that works. So, what made you decide to partner with Calavista and trust a partner instead of doing it internally?
Jeanne Teshler:
Well, that was fairly simple on our part. We had brushed up against Calavista to during a couple of our other consulting agreements and consulting gigs over the years and had always been looking for an opportunity to work with Calavista in Lawrence and Sandeep. And so when we were, when we got the funding, when we got the go-ahead to actually build this product, we knew that we had to do it fast and all of my husband and I are great brilliant business, etcetera. Patting myself on the back of that. But we're not engineers. And the last thing we needed to do was trying to solve engineering at the same time we were trying to build a product. We had clearly the vision, we clearly had the prototypes. What we needed to do was get to market fast and we knew the team at Calavista could get us there.
Jeanne Teshler:
I mean, think about this Sloan. We went from nothing in October of 20, 2015 to a product in beta testing and in a clinical trial by January of 2017. Three and a half months to build actually was March. So six months we went from zero to a prototype in the market being used in a hospital system, compliance issues. Exactly. And so being able to jump through the hoops of not only designing a product but also designing it to those really rigid privacy standards and HIPAA standards for security, Calavista and didn't miss a beat. And anytime we needed to throw something at them that looked kind of odd, they would analyze it, they would, they would look at it and go, OK, I think we can do this. And they would. And that was one of the best things about is we did not have to worry about the engineering while we were trying to figure out the rest of the business.
Sloan Foster:
Sounds like that is a good partnership. I was going to ask how that impacted your time to market, but it actually accelerated your testing and opportunities, which I'm sure major investors happy again. I mean a lot of you don't have a whole lot of time to please or displease people. Our goal, of course, was not displeased them, but if we could bring it to market before they had a chance to think twice and go had, you know, you get rid of a lot of doubt when you can put something in the market and they can see it working. And the amazing part was our theories were right about customer engagement. If we could make it simple enough for people to follow simple plans and manage their own health, they would get better and it worked. And that was the most amazing thing to us. We knew internally and deepen our hearts. That was the problem that people are active in their own health and they're spending time on their health every day that they will get better and they will stay healthy.
Jeanne Teshler:
Convincing healthcare that's the case is a different problem than engineering. So I had Calavista and their teams building and managing this product. I was going out and reassuring the customers that this would work. And so I didn't have to do two jobs. I had one. And that was critical to me because getting them to understand the importance of what we were doing was harder than actually building the product. And that's the product. And you tested it. You've had quite an impact even though as only being piloted right now. So do you mind sharing some of those numbers? I know it hasn't scaled where you want it to go and have an officially launched, but I'm going to share some of the impacts you've had. Um, yes. And so during trial. So the philosophy that we've had from the beginning, and again this is our deep down in our souls understanding of how consumers behave is that people want to be healthy and if you make it easier for them, they'll do it.
Jeanne Teshler:
And the problem in healthcare is that you only really interact with your healthcare professional, your doctor or your nurse or whatever, 15 minutes at a time, four times a year. But health occurs every single day of your life. And it's the decisions you make that cause you to either have good health or bad health. It's a decision you make for what you're going to have for breakfast. It's the decision you make for what you're going to have for lunch. So decision you make, whether you're going to get off the couch and, and, and walk a little bit or sit down and watch Game of Thrones again. Right? And so those are the things that we can activate. And so our theory was if we could get people to move more every day and we could get people to be more interested in what happens to them when they eat poorly and what those results are, that they would make better decisions and over time they did.
Jeanne Teshler:
So the first thing we solved and can see and trial unbelievable scale is that people will actually do what doctors tell them to do. And when they do ask the doctors, they'll tell you the patients we tell. I told them, I told Sloan she needs to walk 30 minutes a day and I don't know if she's doing it or not. Right? And so we're taking that away from them and saying we believe consumers are well equipped to do what we asked them to do and when they do amazing things happen. So our trial, because this is the long story short, our trial was on people with type two diabetes, which is a lifestyle created disease, and we were able to get people to walk 50 percent more than they would otherwise because we had them on a digital step tracker and we gave them goals of steps to walk.
Jeanne Teshler:
We were able to get them to weigh themselves once a week and help them manage their weight. We were able to get them to log their food and try and keep their carb intakes, which is important for diabetes below a certain level. And we're able to get them to actually take their medicine on time. When you combine those four elements like we did, we saw that on average people lost about a pound a week using our platform. They are, their medication compliance went up dramatically. Did you know by the way that half of the people in the United States who are on medicine take their medication half the time, I'm not surprise, and so medication compliance across the board is no more than 50 percent part-time taking my vitamins on it exactly, but in prayer for people with chronic conditions, it's important that you do helps you manage it.
Jeanne Teshler:
We got medication compliance up to 75 percent, unheard of in that area. And on the A1C, which is a test for diabetes, we were able to drop everybody by a full point to a point and a half. So we're moving the needle, not just keeping people where they are, but helping them reverse conditions that can be reversed. Not all conditions can be reversed but were able to give people hope for the first time that there's a way to manage this. In fact, one of the best compliments we got was from one of our trial participants who ended the trial saying, I finally realize that diabetes is something I can live with, not something that I will die from. That to me was amazing thought from them.
Sloan Foster
Absolutely. I'm sure that made you get very passionate about waking up every day and going and being CEO of this amazing company that does save lives. That's a very important thing. So what advice would you have for other founders who have an idea on a vision much like yours are putting components together and they want to go to market? What do you think? You're a number one, number two, idea would be for them or advice I guess I should say.
Jeanne Teshler:
Right? Well, so I would say that, you know, think about who you are as a founder in what your core competencies are. Clearly, as I stated earlier, I'm not an engineer, never have been. I'm more about operations. I'm more about the business side of things and more about making things work. And so I didn't fancy myself an engineer. And so what you want to do is find the people who compliment what you can't do. And that's why, again, Calavista made perfect sense for us. We needed to focus on the business reasons for this. We needed to go after the funding we needed to understand and keep in contact with our customers, get them conditioned to the idea of this platform because it's new to them as it was even to a consumer. And so focus on what you're good at and what you're not good at.
Jeanne Teshler:
Find the right people and spend the money on finding the right people to, to fill out your team. So that's the number one thing that I would say. And again, obviously if you're an engineer, maybe you don't need a Calavista, although I'd even say even then, don't spend your time and your money on things that you don't need to do right now. The second thing is, you know, having Calavista by our side doing that engineering has allowed us to focus on building the culture we wanted. We were able to prototype and get to market fast and do rapid iterations with them over the last year. And we spent that time working with our investors, working with our customers, building the business plan the way we needed it to. And really just focusing on what kind of culture did we want to build for us and for our team as we bring them in because you trusted it would work and beyond time was critical to the success.
Sloan Foster
Especially in a hospital.
Jeanne Teshler:
Absolutely. The last thing you want to do is not have a product deliver on time.
Sloan Foster:
That is the death of any company, right? At the end of the day.
Jeanne Teshler:
And finally, I think it is really understand who it is you're trying to serve and really spend your effort on making sure that market is right and ready. And like I said, that's half the battle we're fighting and let Calavista to fight the engineering battle and keep that and ours is going out to market and making that happen.
Sloan Foster:
So speaking of when you get to the market and you said a launch is early January, how can people use this platform and find out more about your company?
Jeanne Teshler:
Right now it's a, it's a prescription only platform. So a doctor actually prescribes it. So you'd have to be one of our customers or your health system would have to be one of our customers. We don't have any in central Texas right now. Our focus right now is on an underserved market in the east coast, so, but you can learn more about us at www.wellsmith.com and you'll hear more about us as this year goes by as we add more systems to our roster of customers and as we continue to build out this platform.
Sloan Foster:
And how are the hospital system's going to adopt this or the health insurance companies, who actually is going to be adopting it and prescribe it? Obviously, the doctors prescribe it. But what do you expect that scale and roll out to look like?
Jeanne Teshler:
We should have by the end of 2018, five customers in the health system. And health again is one of those behemoth industries that's near the lagging edge of technology and innovation. Kind of like education is as well is one of the last unknown territories. And they're grappling for solutions like ours. And so I feel that in the next year we should get five new customers and then from there it should cascade. It's going to be an amazing experience to watch as it catches fire. So using a medical term, this is a viral product that once the first one or two customers that we already have adopted, everybody else will jump on.
Sloan Foster:
So I think that's an interesting model because we talked about the start-up, you know, for a founder, you are serving the consumer market, but your customer is not the consumer at the end of the day. So how do you balance those two customers, if you will, technically, between the needs of the consumer, which are the people using the platform and your actual customer, which is an insurance company or a healthcare system. Technically, what it that?
Jeanne Teshler:
It's going to be a risk provider. And the way healthcare is shaking out right now is that insurance and providers are combining because in. I'm not sure how I made a lot of people that are sophisticated about who the economic buyer of the product is. The economic buyer of healthcare right now is the insurance company, but the user is the consumer. That's the on the insurance and health provider's side. That's all coalescing into one so that the economic buyer is going to actually be the consumer and the way the affordable care act has been set up and the way insurance is now turning out, people are getting onto these really high deductible plans. So, they're taking on a tremendous burden on these out of pocket costs, so while it appears now that the buyers are the insurance companies, the real buyers are the consumers because they're shelling out more money. We're losing that line before between insurance and provider. Those are going to coalesce, so we will have a more balanced view and both sides of that picture both want the same thing. Both want consumers to be healthier, but they have different reasons for looking at that from a provider slash insurance point. It's to control costs, right? And from the user side, it's to simplify that journey towards better health. And so our platform, again, incentivize them to do it.
Sloan Foster:
Exactly. It solves both problems.
Jeanne Teshler:
We're going to see a complete change in how money is, is changing hands right now in healthcare because it's not going to be fixed you, I get paid for it if you're a doctor now, it's a value-based system, so all of that payment's going to change anyway, and we've designed our platform for that future state. How does money exchange, how does value exchange between a consumer and this new payer slash provider realm in a new way and it has to be on a platform that has never existed before and that's what we're building. It doesn't work in the old model, but it works perfectly in the new model.
Sloan Foster:
Well, that's exciting times.
Jeanne Teshler:
Yes, we are thrilled. I am again, this is a personal passion of ours, as business partners and husband and wife, you know, we expect our kids to grow up in an environment where health is promoted in new and interesting ways and better ways for them. So yeah, I'm just enjoying every minute of what I do every day.
Sloan Foster:
Well good, thank you. Thank you for being here and thank you for revolutionizing healthcare in an interesting way. I'm excited to see what happens. I hope for my sake I don't have to use the platform, but I certainly appreciate that it's out there and not. It is doing the important work of saving people's lives, so I appreciate it.
Jeanne Teshler:
Well, thanks, Sloan. I appreciate the time. Thank you.