Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Honest conversations with the engineering leaders, CTOs, founders, and engineers building real software with real teams. No fluff, no hype — just the messy, human side of getting great products out the door.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (00:06)
Hello and thank you for joining this episode of Build by Humans. We record this for technology leaders, for people involved with technology delivery, but we don't talk about tech. We talk about the other side of building great products and that's the human side. We all know that it takes technology, it takes the latest and greatest tools, but it also takes people.
And in this world where we now have people joining from all over the world, everybody joins, everybody sort of got different backgrounds, we wanna talk about what it really takes. And today's guest is Katie. I'll invite you to introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about you, who you are, what you're working on, and we'll talk about interesting things.
Katie Saindon (00:49)
Yeah, thanks. Good to be here. Like you said, my name is Katie Sandin. I'm the director of product for our inpatient solution at a company called Qventus. We're a health tech company, automated using various AI assistants to automate various parts of the health care operation process. So you think about if you're admitted to the hospital, you have to know when you're going to discharge, where you'll discharge to, what are all the various things that have to happen in order for you to discharge. And our company
predicts what some of those elements are, when you'll discharge, you'll discharge to. We help orchestrate the aspects of your care so ultimately patients can go home to their families more quickly. And so that health systems can save money and improve care and care for more patients. That's one of our solutions at Kuventis. We also have a perioperative solution and a perioperative care coordination solution. So all AI. ⁓
And it's been great to be a part of. I've been at the company now for four and a half years. Prior to that, I was with GE Healthcare. So I've been in healthcare and in product my full career.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (01:49)
So before we jump about your team and before we jump about how it works and what it takes, I at some point made a decision to talk as little as possible about AI in this podcast because everybody talks about AI. But, but I cannot not ask you something about AI. You mentioned a few keywords, right? Healthcare.
Katie Saindon (02:05)
I'm gonna it.
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (02:14)
which is regulated, controlled, life dependent, right? I it's so, so critical. You mentioned AI.
Katie Saindon (02:16)
Even.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (02:23)
And then you mentioned something else, which I'll keep for my next question, but let's talk a little bit about it. So AI, it's still early in its development. We've seen huge progress over the last couple of years. I think everybody's using it. I use it for my business. I've replaced several processes that were done by people before, now done by AI. None of them are life dependent. And the message that I send to my employees, guys,
If AI is gonna make a mistake, it's okay. That's fine, nothing's gonna happen. Nobody's gonna die. Literally, that's what I say. Not true in your business. Tell me about it. Just tell me how you guys do this. How much trust do you have in AI versus how much people look at it? seriously, I'm just very curious.
Katie Saindon (03:04)
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think we've positioned ourselves well as a company because to your point, the more the regulation, the longer it takes to develop these products, get them approved, get them to market. So on the scale of clinical to pure operational, we've put ourselves somewhere in the middle. So we don't have products that read imaging studies, that read cardiac stress tests and tell the provider what's wrong with that patient.
What our solution does and what we aim to do is basically allow care providers to operate at the top of license. Think about how you and I use these AI tools today, right? It's all about streamlining our work. We try to do the same thing for our healthcare leaders. So as an example, case managers, a big part of their job is helping track what needs to be done for the patient before they can discharge. They're responsible for that discharge plan. Something that leaders oftentimes ask them to do is to document
What are those milestones that a patient needs to accomplish before they can discharge? Now that's super annoying, right? Cause they know all of those things in their heads, but it's the other care team members, the nurses, the ancillary leaders, the physicians that can benefit from knowing what those milestones are. This is just one super small example. We automate that. So we can read both structured and unstructured data and pull out, Hey, the consultant, cardiology consultant has signed off on this patient. Close that milestone. Hey, this patient needs a wound vac.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (04:01)
Absolutely.
Katie Saindon (04:28)
based on what we're seeing in the notes, you're gonna have to get authorization for that. We can pull out some of these data elements and just make it easier to see what needs to be done and track that, but we're not changing the actual clinical decision-making, because to your point, that is life or death, and that's not the place we wanna be right now.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (04:34)
Absolutely.
Right, right. And interestingly, you said something, it's funny.
We have a family calendar where, know, mostly my wife puts stuff on it. And it's sort of, I don't need to be there, but I need to know about it. Okay, don't schedule something because you know, have something, whatever. And then I my own calendar. And I always ask my wife, hey, if I need to be there, put on my calendar. Just, you know, so it's blocked time on my calendar. And I know I need to
Katie Saindon (04:54)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (05:12)
And every once in a while, she'll forget. So jokingly, yesterday, I wrote an SOP, standard operating procedure, for my wife. Like, this is the rule, right? If it's here, goes here, it goes there. And so I gave it to her. She works in health care, actually, on the business side of it, but in health care. And so she is very familiar with SOPs, and they follow them all the time. So it was a complete joke. But you can say, honey, here it is for you to follow. And I did this in ChatGPT.
Katie Saindon (05:38)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (05:38)
And it
created this one page long document, really well written SOP on how to schedule stuff with me on the calendar. And she was like, my gosh, you have nothing to do. You did this. I'm like, you're not going to believe it. And I read her the prompt and the prompt was, generate standard operating procedure that instructs people to use two calendars. Family calendar, if my involvement is not needed, but I need to know about it. My personal calendar, if I need to be there.
That was literally the prompt. And Charge GPT generated a full, well-written, formatted SOP for this. Like, wow. Even I was impressed. Like, that was pretty impressive. So now it definitely, definitely helps with, as you said, operating at the top of your license, right? Meaning it helps.
Katie Saindon (06:24)
Yeah, I mean, you just think about how crazy these EHR systems are that healthcare leaders are needing to operate in. And because it's becoming more and more regulatory complex, payers are changing their processes and policies all the time. You have to document everything. And so the EHR has become such a nightmare to navigate and you have to...
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (06:37)
Yep.
Katie Saindon (06:46)
Dot your I's, cross your T's a bazillion times over. it's, you know, we're hearing a lot. My husband's actually a doctor. And I hear a lot about how much dissatisfaction is growing in that space because so much of your job is becoming about documentation and not about taking care of patients, which is why nurses, physicians got into this field in the first place. And so I think to your point, this is such a cool time to be able to use these tools in a way that can both accomplish the regulatory needs, but allow people to spend more time.
on the care, which is what we want, what we need if we're a patient and what they want to do.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (07:20)
And you're so right. I used to have a startup actually in the same space, medical billing, reporting, data, right? All of that. So it was healthcare, not like we didn't touch patients, but we work with doctors and all the data. And they were getting really upset how much time they're spending on documenting things. Like it's how much nodes did you write? And based on that, how much you can bill and based on that, you know,
Katie Saindon (07:39)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (07:47)
And then you go through audits and everything. I get it. I know it. And it's great that you guys are doing this. Let's talk about people. You guys are somewhat of a distributed team, even though you have a majority of operation in the US, obviously. How does that work for you? Let's talk a little bit about hiring. How do you find people in locations other than US?
that have familiarity or able to learn what they need to know about US healthcare, which is very unique and very different from the rest of the world. Tell me about
Katie Saindon (08:19)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah. So we are fully remote, which I think is not necessarily unique a couple years ago, but we've made the decision to continue to stay fully remote as folks have gone back to the workplace post-COVID. So to your point, we've had to find ways to stay connected, to ensure that we're all on the same page, which is hard enough as it is, but you emphasize like startup moving fast.
Not a lot of great documentation, and I think it does make it challenging. You mentioned the locations of our work. Yes, we are predominantly in the US. As of, gosh, probably two to three years ago, we started to hire outside of the US. So we have employees now in Latin America, in India, and then we have always had a Canadian presence.
for those other countries because we were learning how to hire there. We did work with some third party vendors to help us find talent, obviously set up insurance and all the different things that we need to have employees in those countries. And I think that's had its ups and downs. We've had more success in some regions than others. There's one thing I won't forget. We were hiring in India and that
was fantastic, but what we were finding is that we were making offers to these individuals, they were accepting, and then literally a day before they were set to start, they would tell us that they got another offer and they'd leave. And that kept happening over and over and over to us. And what we learned is that that's relatively common in India is to kind of continue to look even once you've locked in an offer, particularly for smaller companies. Like when I worked at GE Healthcare, that never happened to me.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (09:42)
Hmm.
Katie Saindon (09:58)
Well, GE is a huge brand, a huge name, and you didn't have as much of that happening. Whereas, you know, at the time we started this, we were Series C, we're now Series D. Folks were still looking. So we had to change our hiring practices and start to hire two people in a seat for a single role. And if they both came great, we'd make space, but we just sort of had to go into it to cut our losses because we were having to basically start over. And you know that this process takes weeks.
to get someone actually in the company. So it really disrupted us, honestly. It was a time when we were dedicating most of our India workforce to some new analytics that we were building. It was a huge strategic initiative for most of the company, both on the perioperative and inpatient space. And they just kept not coming. So we had to change strategies.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (10:27)
Interesting. Of course, no, I do.
Yeah.
It's one of them, I do want to talk a little bit about differences between different regions, like what's better in each one. And I think each one has its advantages and disadvantages, but you touched on something very interesting. I've seen this firsthand. I've worked in my career with teams, Literally on every continent, except Antarctica. And I do know some of the difficulties in Asia, in India versus Latin America, Europe, et cetera.
Although I haven't had experience where so many people just refuse, but I can tell you that between Europe and Latam, where we work mostly, in 11 years that I've been doing this, over 11 years, we had one person that did not start the job. and even that was, I it was bad.
Katie Saindon (11:31)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (11:31)
But
it was almost understandable. He was waiting for an offer from a very large company that was taking months and months and months. We made an offer and right when we made an offer, they came back and said yes. And it was Facebook. So do you really say no to Facebook? Right. So I didn't like it, but it was understandable. And literally that was only one time in all the years. So different regions do have their own different things. But
Katie Saindon (11:46)
Right.
Yeah, when I think,
mean, especially when we were just building up our office, we do have an office in India. That's actually one of the few places that has a physical location. But at that time, we didn't have that. Like a lot of the things that we came to find was important to having a strong presence in India. We didn't have at that time. So to your point, in hindsight, it makes sense that folks were like, I got a different offer. I'm going to go here or there.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (12:04)
Mmm.
Katie Saindon (12:20)
And we just had to learn those things. And that's all part of the process as you expand and grow.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (12:24)
You're touching on so many important things, right? You've got to learn about the culture, the people, the work ethics of people you work with. You can't just take what we do here and bring it over to a completely different team and say, this is how we do this. And therefore, starting tomorrow, you've got to follow the same process. I can tell you.
certain things we in California are different than what we do in New York. And I've had teams in New York and California, and it's like, it's not the same. Your meetings don't run the same, right? People, like, it's just different. So imagine when you're dealing with a completely different culture. So let's talk a little bit about differences. You have, you're in multiple regions, obviously US, India, Latin America, possibly some others, Canada.
Katie Saindon (12:49)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (13:11)
Do you see the difference? Do you see sort of things that work better or could be improved in each one, et cetera?
Katie Saindon (13:18)
It's a good question. I think there's definitely just some differences in US work culture, right? Hours, level of a pace, intensity. And then I think you compound that with it's startup, right? Like we're hustling and everyone's working a lot. We have a mission, we have a vision and we see a path to get there, but it does take a lot of work. So think there's always that element of onboarding folks
onto a culture like that, irrespective of whether it's a new region or not. So then you introduce a new culture to that, and it's extra fun to go through that adjustment. To be honest, aside from the hiring challenge that I mentioned, it went...
much smoother than I thought originally, particularly in Latin America. I found it pretty easy to work. whatever company we worked with to bring on those folks was great. Like a lot of the folks that we brought on have been awesome, have stayed with us since the beginning now. And that, I think, speaks volumes to that process and the type of folks we got. I think...
working with folks in India and I've worked with folks in India my whole career having worked at GE, which has such a big presence in India. And I think the biggest thing that I found there, again, in general, everyone is different as an individual is more.
I find that there's more of reluctance to be as blunt and to tell you when they don't understand something or when they're not going to get something done. So I think having had that experience at GE, I was used to that. And I have learned how to ask those questions and to follow up and to really make sure something makes sense and that it's going to be done by the time that we talked about so that they feel comfortable sharing that. ⁓
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (14:55)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Saindon (14:56)
and trying to create that safe space, right? Like, hey, yes, we've got a vision. Yes, we've got to get it done. We're going to hold us collectively accountable. But I understand that things happen. And I'd much rather know about that ahead of time or know about the risk than have it bite us in the butt the day before we were supposed to release something to our customers. So that is definitely an experience that I've had throughout my career in working with that region.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (15:13)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Saindon (15:19)
And it's also well intended. But again, I just would rather know about it in advance. Whereas I feel like in Latin America, I have not had that issue. If anything, sometimes it's a bit more of a hesitancy to commit to something, like a little more like, they're not sure, they're going to tell you that. And in some cases, it's pushing them, OK, like,
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (15:33)
Bye.
Katie Saindon (15:40)
Yes, we're going to go into a certain amount of risk and a certain amount of ambiguity, and that's OK. Let's just all know that, understand that risk, and move forward. So it is funny to your point how there are very much differences and how you help navigate those.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (15:52)
absolutely. And we work Europe and Latin America. And I can tell you that we see the same differences where so sort of where you talked about Indian, Latin America, Europe, you're taking that even to higher extreme where they're a lot more outspoken, a lot more doubtful and a lot more critical critical thinking, right?
Katie Saindon (16:07)
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (16:12)
you tell them, hey, this is what needs to be done. And they come back with 25 reasons how it can be done better or what the potential problems will be. The good news most of the time, there's some sort of solution that they're suggesting. it's never, hey, can you do this? Yes, it's just that never happens.
Katie Saindon (16:26)
Right, right,
right. A hundred percent. Yes. Yeah. I worked with folks in Europe a lot at GE, know, just global company and had the exact same experience. Abrasive at some times, but you figured out, you learned that it's not personal, that it's just how they work and you come to expect it. you're like, okay. Like, and I, it's funny how you start to learn the different spectrum of like, all right.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (16:38)
Yeah.
Katie Saindon (16:48)
very, very against this, like that's going to mean one thing versus just like some light line of questioning can mean another.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (16:55)
I, before I started Mirigas, I worked for a company running a very large engineering team and we build an offshore team in Ukraine. And it started really, it did really well. But I remember when we started just in the beginning, we would have this guys and we had them fly over here and we would fly there just to build that relationship. It a large team, over 50 people. was still in same office. This is before COVID and everything. And I remember.
Like in the early days, we have a meeting, right? Everybody comes in, hey, how are you? What did you do yesterday? How is this? And especially, you I would come with some people from US and their first time in Ukraine, they're talking about stuff. And then the feedback. We wasted 15 minutes of our meeting time. Why did we talk about nothing? We came in to talk about specific things. like, just stop. And you had to learn that and adopt both ways. We had to adopt.
Katie Saindon (17:43)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (17:48)
And we had to teach them, like, this
Katie Saindon (17:50)
Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (17:50)
is how things are done. Like, you know, just get used to it.
Katie Saindon (17:53)
Yeah.
Yeah. 100%. Yeah, I there's definitely one.
think it's just funny too, because there's general, um, region, country-specific cultures, but each company has its own culture too. And having been at Qventus for four and a half years, it's just second nature to me. And I don't think about it too much, but as, as I've hired more on my team, supported other teams, hirings, um, I talked to talent acquisition a lot about our unique culture and.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (18:02)
Mm-hmm. Absolutely.
Mm-hmm.
Katie Saindon (18:18)
how it's very fast paced. We work really hard and it can be challenging because we're resource constrained to onboard effectively onto our culture. And that's something that we're working on and trying to improve. And so yeah, it's just funny that each place, one of my friend and former colleague of mine just joined the company and it's been funny talking to him about.
joining the team and the culture difference from where he came from. And I was like, yeah, I felt those same things as I started, but it's been so long now, it's just second nature. So I think culture, my macro point, it's a beast, an animal of its own that you've got to tame, you got to ride, you got to figure out. But that makes it fun.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (18:57)
And you also gotta be very conscious about it, right? That's one thing that I run into a lot and we work with different size companies, some are really early startups, mid-size, have some enterprise, large level companies. And I always come across some people that come in and go, hey, here's our job description. And you have a whole bunch of technical skills. And you start asking questions, what type of person are you looking for?
Katie Saindon (19:01)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (19:24)
Well, it's the person that has the skills. Like, no, no, no, no. What kind of person are you looking for? We need somebody to do this work.
Katie Saindon (19:28)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (19:30)
And you go through this process and, I always tell people technical skills are relatively easily acquirable. Personality is not changeable. You got to make sure you find the right people and you get the right people on your team.
Katie Saindon (19:44)
Yeah, I do like the individual who's leading our talent acquisition right now. He's great. And I do like to what you talked about, he's been setting up, we have QVENTUS values, like a lot of companies, and he's been setting up a way to assess talent against those values. Because I think that is, it's the intangibles that really help determine whether you're going to be successful doing that job, happy doing that job long term.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (20:08)
Absolutely.
Katie Saindon (20:10)
Because to your point, mean, a job description will look pretty consistent company to company, but it can feel and end up being so different. And so that's where I've found that that core value assessment is a great way to determine mutual fit and save everyone pain if it weren't to work out both for them and for us.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (20:15)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Absolutely.
Absolutely. No, that's so true.
I I'm gonna ask one more question that I'm just again very curious and this is more about...
How easy do you find to train people that are not living in the United States on the specific of US health care? And I'm asking this because we get a lot of concerns. do X, and Z, right? The clients, we do X, and Z. We're not going to find people that are able to understand this because they don't work with this day in, day out. Like some technologists are, it doesn't matter where you are, and some are very specific.
and healthcare being uniquely specific in each country and US, one of them. So how do you do that? Just curious, how do you help people understand this, feel it and being involved and engaged?
Katie Saindon (21:15)
Yeah, we try to get as many of our employees on site as possible because it's really the only way that you can understand it. And it's funny because even having lived in the US, you know, a lot of our employees are
younger and haven't spent a lot of time in hospitals personally. And so I find it interesting that even for folks that join us from the US don't have the necessary, I didn't when I first started, like very, very detailed understanding of how the insurance landscape works. How does it work between a hospitalist and all the various consultants that are also seeing you? And what's the difference between a case manager and a social worker? And what's a nurse do? what's a utilization
management nurse and what's a CDI nurse. Like there's all these different roles that I didn't know of even when I first started and I came from GE Healthcare but it was a manufacturing device company so that the type of context that I needed was very different. So honestly I don't think it has been like it's a challenge in general I'll say to get all of our employees
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (22:00)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Saindon (22:16)
onboarded to the healthcare landscape to be able to have the context needed to do their job well. But I haven't found it to vary too much region to region because the US health system is so complex and even the folks that live in the US haven't had to experience the bellies of it, the depths of it. mean, honestly, I feel like working for QFentus has helped me in my personal life know what the heck is happening when I'm getting these various bills and all these different things are happening.
You know, my mom had a surgery recently and I know all these things that are going on. And it helps me make better decisions for myself, for my family that I wouldn't have otherwise. So all that to say, the healthcare US system is crazy. It's very complex and it's hard for anyone to learn. But we do a lot of onsights to see it, to feel it. And that's what I found is make the biggest difference.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (23:05)
Yeah, US, this can be a completely different conversation that'll last for hours and hours, US healthcare system with all the HMOs, groups, et cetera. Like I said, my wife's been in this business for 30 years and I had a tech company in the same space, so we have really good understanding of how this works.
Katie Saindon (23:08)
Yes.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (23:25)
funny, my wife acts as the consultant to all of our friends that come in with EOBs and this and this. How do you understand this? Can you help me? So she does this for everybody. And it absolutely helps us navigate our own health care because we understand how this works. And she does most of the time. But it's not easy. It is absolutely not easy.
Katie Saindon (23:32)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
It's getting more more complex because of the increase in specialization in the US health system, which is good in a lot of ways, but it does mean that there's more handoffs between groups and really hence why our company exists. How do we help connect all these different disparate pieces that need to all work together, but it can be challenging to have everything work as seamlessly as it's intended to.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (23:53)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Absolutely. Great. Well, thank you so much. It was a very interesting conversation, very different. I'm glad to hear that it's working for you in a unique and controlled space. A lot of people say, health care, we can't do this, we can't do that. But yes, you can. You can do everything that everybody else is doing.
Katie Saindon (24:29)
Yeah, no, it's been fun. And it's been fun to be at the forefront of taking AI, like you mentioned, bringing it into a highly regulated, slow moving traditional space. It's been a fun challenge, I'll say. But no, thank you for having me. It was a fun conversation and hopefully your listeners enjoyed as much as I enjoyed talking about it.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (24:41)
Right.
Thank you.