Dr. Muthu Alagappan, CMO at Notable chats with Puneet Singh, the CEO of Quartet Health on the opportunity for value-based care, how he is solving for staffing shortages in the digital health space, how to assess a technology partnership, and more.

Puneet Singh serves as the CEO of Quartet Health. Prior to Quartet, Puneet was the Chief Growth Officer of the Diversified Business Group at Anthem, and prior to that was the Chief Development Officer of Aspire Health. Quartet focuses on matching patients to mental healthcare professionals based on their preferences, needs, and insurance.

00:37 How did you get into healthcare, and what has led you to stay in it for this many years?

02:21 Why do you think there is that sort of dichotomy where on one side, people are drawn to it for the mission, and yet at the same time, many of them are also experiencing higher levels of burnout than other industries are?

05:24 Any thoughts on how that sort of marriage of different industries coming into healthcare has worked so far, and how do you think about it at Quartet when you're sort of building the team and the company?

07:24 Do you mind just giving everyone a brief introduction into what Quarter does and where the company's headed?

09:38 There's a certain avenue of sort of business building which argues you should maybe pick a few core competencies that you want to really specialize in and then partner with organizations in other areas. Did you subscribe to that type of philosophy? And if so, what are the one, two, or a few things that you think Quartet is really... That's the core competency that you're kind of dialing in on?

11:56 There's this new breed of company that is tech-enabled, service providers, and you're sort of in that middle ground as both a technology company and also sort of a care provider. How do you think... You could go and try to rebuild many sort of core technologies yourself, the EMR, the patient intake platform, much more. How do you think about where you'd like to partner on technology initiatives versus what technology pieces you wanna own in-house?

15:00 Quartet and Notable kicked off a partnership a few months ago and so we are honored to be part of assisting in such a great mission like you all have. When you think about partnership more broadly, whether it's on, kind of the piece of the puzzle that we work on or anything else, what have you learned in terms of picking a technology partner? What are the characteristics you look for? How do you vet technology partners and any advice for healthcare providers and systems out there that are going through this type of partner evaluation process?

17:48 Two of the big trends that I think a lot of people are quite worried about are the growing administrative burden and sort of the corresponding labor shortages or increases in labor cost. As a CEO of a company that opt in and delivers care, are these two of the bigger challenges you see in the industry or are there others that are out there that you find more pressing?

21:21 Another "lever" you mentioned is augmenting licensed staff with a team of folks around them that can allow them to operate at the top of their license. And then a third one was the use of technology. And so where can you kind of bring in technology to lever up existing workforces? We think about that a lot at Notable. We'd love if you have any other anecdotes or observations you've had on where technology can be a form of leverage for sort of the, not shrinking, but smaller workforce that we often have in there to deal with.

25:22 You mentioned also expecting to double the size of your care delivery organization in the next year. How do you think about technology in terms of growing the number of patients you can serve, maybe without proportionally growing the number of support staff and administrative work that you have to perform? Is automation on the roadmap for you all in that sense, the way many health systems are thinking about it?

29:07 Should traditional health systems be concerned that now it's not enough just to exist? You actually have to delight patients or they will go somewhere else. They will go to tech-enabled players. They will go to Amazon One Medical. How real is that threat that patient experience now actually does matter?

32:58 Where broadly do you think we are under-investing in technology or where would you like to see us? Where would you like to see technology kind of go over the next few years in healthcare? Where should we put more chips that we aren't putting them today?

36:35Through technology, you can enable a vast array of multilingual service offerings in a way that you can't replicate with people. Are there other examples at Quartet or just in general where you see technology is actually helping bridge the gap as opposed to widen it like many fear technology will do?

38:34 What gives you the most optimism for the next 10 years in healthcare in this country or worldwide? What are you most optimistic about?

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