Health Tech: Hari Prasad On How Yosi Health’s Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness
Know what’s coming next. Keep your eyes on the future. You don’t want to focus all your time on something that will not be useful in the next few years. Invest your time and energy in the ever-changing and evolving world of technology.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Hari Prasad.
Hari Prasad is the Founder & CEO of Yosi Health. Prasad is an experienced healthcare professional with a diverse payer, and provider background- a health transformer looking to reduce the cost of care for healthcare providers and improve the patient experience.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
I grew up in Madras, India — one of the largest cities in the country. It was a frenetic place with over 8 million people, packed with high energy and cultural diversity — similar to where I live now, in New York City. I grew up with my parents and an older brother and older sister. After high school, I studied engineering in India for two years and then transferred to a small town in West Virginia to finish my undergraduate degree when I was 19.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
One of my biggest regrets that ultimately turned out to be a blessing was the dislocation of my shoulder from a sports injury. Regretfully, that injury prevented me from being as active as I would have liked. However, that personal experience dealing with the administrative aspect of receiving care forced me to take a closer look at the patient experience which was the catalyst to starting Yosi Health. I knew it could be more humanized and significantly better. Consequently, I’m grateful I went through that experience.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I’m fortunate in that the people around me have always made me a better person. Growing up, I didn’t realize how much my parents and siblings were shaping, supporting, and giving me tools to navigate the challenges and complexities of being in fast-paced innovative environments. I never felt like I couldn’t be myself. I’m extremely grateful for that gift. I have never found the need to look elsewhere to be inspired. I’m also extremely fortunate to have the fondest memories of my many teachers and friends. Now I have my three nephews (Avi, Vikram, and Rohan) to thank, for inspiring me every day.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I’m re-reading Shoe Dog right now, the story of how Phil Knight created Nike. I just came across the part where he speaks on following your passion:
“I’d tell men and women in their mid-twenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.”
You can love what you do — but it’s a privilege to do what you love doing.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
1. Challenging the status quo: This has by far been the most foundational to our success. Questioning perennially accepted norms is what prompted us to start Yosi Health and to this day continues to push us to be the best tech platform in the space we operate in. Healthcare is generally a bit slower to adapt to new technologies/solutions. By us constantly questioning the status quo we made sure to break a lot of barriers preventing great human experiences. As an example, when we started Yosi Health, the predominate way people were checking-in for their doctor’s office visit was by filling forms on a clipboard or a kiosk — we disrupted that by asking why aren’t patients provided the convenience to do this at home instead of in the waiting rooms?
2. Willingness to adapt: As a fast-growing company in hypergrowth, we need to make decisions quickly after evaluating all the pros and cons. Before we make decisions, we consider the various factors. After the decision is made, we measure and monitor the results closely and quickly adapt if we need to pivot. This has been critical for us to ensure we are using capital efficiently and delivering the platform our customers need and deserve. A good example is when we first started Yosi health, we acknowledged that there are reasons why our customers use the existing forms that patients fill out. Instead of telling them our software cannot support it similar to those other solutions in the market, we invented a proprietary technology that allowed us to support their existing process.
3. Enabling others to thrive and succeed: Our biggest asset is our team. We take their success very seriously and constantly look to question our own status quo to remove any barriers so that they will be successful, achieve more and thrive. As we continue to grow, most of our longest-serving team continues to help shape Yosi. We are very proud of that. My advice to others would be to invest in your team because that is what shapes companies.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our wellness. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?
Yosi Health’s goal is to improve patient outcomes and reduce the cost of care by empowering healthcare providers front-office with state-of-the-art technology and related services. A patient’s journey begins well before they meet with their providers. This is especially true now with a lot of services being offered virtually/remotely.
We provide a wide range of tools for patients to fully manage their healthcare visits before, during, and after their visit. This includes scheduling an appointment, receiving vital information prior to their appointment, allowing them to complete their intake and make payments, etc.
How do you think your technology can address this?
Our technology is successfully embracing the much ignored but all-important part of the care continuum, everything administrative leading up to the moment a patient receives care. Patients are now informed consumers who demand more from their medical office, and Yosi is taking advantage of this paradigm shift to provide them with all the tools they expect. By engaging patients and getting them to do everything they need to prior to their appointment, we deliver significant improvements to the patient check-in process. Physicians can now spend more time with patients instead of spending time documenting patient data. As our healthcare system evolves, what Yosi Health does today will soon become the norm.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
The idea for Yosi Health came from my own experience, after dislocating my shoulder. I went to an ER and sat there filling out paperwork while waiting for my shoulder to get put back into place (filling out the forms with the same dominant arm that was dislocated). I did not have access to any of my medical or insurance information during this, which led me to think about the front office operation for medical offices. I intrinsically knew something had to be changed.
How do you think this might change the world?
We have changed the world one patient at a time -over ten million times and counting by providing a safe and convenient environment for patients to provide their critical health information easily and accurately before they arrive. Significantly shorter wait times mean more time with their caregiver as well as a much better engagement experience with their provider.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
Data privacy and security are of paramount importance at Yosi Health. All patients should know how their data is being securely stored and securely and privately utilized by third-party companies like Yosi Health. We frequently see patient data being shared with other entities, especially pharma companies which may not only ethically violate patients’ rights but is also annoying for patients to deal with. So, I urge third-party vendors to operate ethically and handle sensitive patient data with utmost care.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
- Know who you are trying to help. Make sure you know the types of people you are aiming to help (age, race, gender). For example, the type of practice you go to often depends on your age, so it’s important for businesses to know the types of people you are marketing your product to.
- Be aware of your competition. Know who your competitors are, how they rank compared to you, and how you differ from them. Know what will make your company stand out and run with it.
- Know the limits of technology. Know what your technology is capable of. You want to under promise and over-deliver, that way people are pleasantly surprised with how your brand performs.
- Less is more.Easier said than done, but you don’t want to have an application or website that is confusing to users. Keeping things simple and easy to navigate is always better than cramming too much information into one place, which ends up confusing people.
- Know what’s coming next. Keep your eyes on the future. You don’t want to focus all your time on something that will not be useful in the next few years. Invest your time and energy in the ever-changing and evolving world of technology.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
We only have one life, so use yours to make a change. Change things for the better- not just for you but for generations to come. If you have a good idea, don’t keep it to yourself. Share it with others and stop at nothing until the world hears it, because it may end up inspiring others to do the same.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
I would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with Dr. David Feinberg, CEO of Cerner Corporation. I have always admired how he makes time to interact with his more than 25k employees and more importantly, we share the same views on making the patient access and experience better in the waiting rooms. In a 2018 interview, when asked “If you could instantly solve one of healthcare’s problems, which would it be and why?” he shared the below thoughts:
“I would like to solve the waiting room. I think the waiting room is the worst thing in the world. It’s a concept of people having difficult access to care when they need it. No one’s gotten better in that waiting period. We have a system that’s so designed around the provider that you wait for them. We need to design the system around that patient or that family. When I say eliminate the waiting room, I’m talking about completely flipping healthcare on its side so it’s really all about the patient and the family. Every other industry has done it and it’s disrupted the incumbents. You can get a nice car to drive up in three minutes and meet you. With a Kindle, you can get a book in a second. Why aren’t we doing that in healthcare?”
How can our readers further follow your work online?
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hari-prasad-67191733/
Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/yosihealth
Blog: https://yosi.health/blog/
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
Health Tech: Hari Prasad On How Yosi Health’s Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.