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About the Guest:

Bobby Green, MD

Co-Founder, President, and Chief Medical Officer at Thyme Care

Bobby Green is a medical oncologist and Thyme Care’s Co-Founder, President, and Chief Medical Officer. Thyme Care is a patient and provider-integrated oncology solution that partners with health plans to facilitate whole-person care to their members. Prior to joining Thyme Care, Bobby was the Chief Medical Officer at Flatiron Health. He practiced medical oncology in West Palm Beach, FL at Palm Beach Cancer Institute (which became part of Florida Cancer Specialists) from 1999-2021.

Connect with Bobby Green, MD

About the Episode:

For this week’s episode of Entrepreneur Rx, John had the pleasure of interviewing Bobby Green, a medical oncologist and Thyme Care’s Co-Founder, President, and Chief Medical Officer. Thyme Care is a personalized care team providing support, resources, and high-value care to cancer patients so they can make confident choices and take action quickly.

In this episode, Dr. Green shares why oncologists are entrepreneurial, how he was introduced to the business side of medicine, and his experience in scaling a medical oncology practice. He talks about Thyme Care’s mission, the problems it addresses, how it drives down costs and increases care, possible partnership plans, and the company’s hybrid model. Tune in to this episode and find out how Thyme Care provides the best support for cancer patients!

 

Entrepreneur Rx Episode 36:

RX_Bobby Green: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

RX_Bobby Green: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

John Shufeldt:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another edition of Entrepreneur Rx, where we help healthcare professionals own their future.

John Shufeldt:
Hello everybody and welcome back to Entrepreneur Rx. I'm really excited to have on our podcast a gentleman named Bobby Green, who is an oncologist and he's, you're the first oncologist I've interviewed. And it's funny when I think of oncologists, you guys are all and women are all entrepreneurial. It's kind of, I didn't even know this about oncologists, but welcome to the podcast. I'm really excited to talk about it.

Bobby Green:
Great. Thanks, John. I'm thrilled to be here. Really appreciate you taking the time.

John Shufeldt:
Okay. So why aren't oncologists entrepreneurial now? I never would have thought that was an entrepreneurial crowd.

Bobby Green:
You know, I think it's a great question. I think part of the reason, especially in the community oncology space, which is where I come from, is building an oncology practice is in many ways like running a small business that becomes a big business pretty quickly because it's not only the delivery of care, you have to deal with the infusion side of it and building an infusion center and having to deal with inventory. Lots of ancillaries come in. So I think in a lot of ways, being a community oncologist, especially if you go back the past 20 to 25 years which is my career if you wanted to have a successful practice in that space, you had to be a little bit entrepreneurial. And that's really how I started and where I sort of got the bug.

John Shufeldt:
You mean if you want to be a successful oncologist these days, you have to have an infusion center for it to really make sense financially?

Bobby Green:
Yeah, I mean, I think you have to have it. It's important financially, but it's also from a clinical delivery standpoint, you know, infusion and taking care of patients are so intricately related to each other that whether you're an independent practice or an academic medical center or a hospital, those things really do need to be co-located. And it's critically important that I believe this very, very strongly that the oncology practice, regardless of the setting, does have really control over that, because at the end of the day, when you order someone to go in for an infusion, the person who ought to be responsible to make sure that that therapy is there and that that therapy is delivered successfully ought to be the oncologist.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, you've got to be bought in. It's got to be integrous, it sounds like.

Bobby Green:
Yeah.

John Shufeldt:
Sorry. So good. Now we've got that out of the way. So back up. When was the health care bug?

Bobby Green:
My dad's a physician, was an orthopedic surgeon. And so, you know, I was one of those kids who always sort of grew up thinking, I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a doctor. I got to college, was pre-med, and I spent about two or three years in college thinking, wow, do I really want to do this? I took a year off between college and med school, really thought about things a lot, wanted to make sure that I did it, but it ultimately came back to, you know, just really loving the science and the human interaction part of it, which I think are ultimately what drove me.

John Shufeldt:
Now it's funny, it seems like nowadays, so I end up mentoring a lot of pre-med kids and I always laugh and I said, A I can never compete with any of you, so I'm glad I did what I did and two most of them, take a gap year. So you were like setting the gap, your curve. Weren't doing gap years when you were doing this.

Bobby Green:
No, people thought I was crazy, especially my parents. But we got beyond that.

John Shufeldt:
Well, how did you spend your gap year? Does your trip backpack around the world sort of gap year?

Bobby Green:
No, it was definitely not that romantic. I worked on Capitol Hill for a US senator named Terry Sanford, who is a wonderful man who had been governor of North Carolina in the early 1960s, was one of the only Southern Democrats at the time who was anti-segregation, pro-integration, pro-civil rights,

John Shufeldt:
That's my next question.

Bobby Green:
And then went on became president of Duke University, which is where I went to college, which was where I had my first interaction with him and then ran for U.S. Senate and was US Senator from I think 86 to 92. And I worked up in his office for the year I took off.

John Shufeldt:
Wow. That's very cool. So he was he's anti the right stuff. That's awesome.

Bobby Green:
Exactly. Exactly.

John Shufeldt:
It was a hard time to do that.

Bobby Green:
It was a very, very hard time and a very courageous guy. He was also I mean, I think most people now have heard about the Research Triangle Park, that is Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh. And when he was governor, he really kicked that off.

John Shufeldt:
So, wow, what a progressive guy. That's pretty awesome. Okay, so you did that for a year. You went to Duke Medical School then and then why oncology? Did your dad say like, dude, are you kidding? Orthopedics is the way to go!

Bobby Green:
Well, he did say that. And then I did an ortho rotation. And, you know, I thought in the list of the sort of 100 things I'd like to do, ortho was very low on the list, including some non-medicine, things that were above it. You know, I say that with some of my best friends from medical school who are orthopedic surgeons at this time. So, but yeah, it just wasn't, it wasn't for me. And I didn't have the technical skills to do it either. You know, I sort of when I thought about oncology and it's interesting because sort of the three things that I highlighted and you know, you never know what's going to turn out to to be the right decision. But I liked the human interaction part. Like I sort of knew I wanted to develop relationships with patients and I thought oncology was a good place to do that. I thought that it would be a good profession. The treatments were likely to change over time, and that was sort of the cusp of lots of advancements in oncology. So I thought, well, this is something where I'm going to be treating people differently in three years or five years than I am today. And then lastly, there's something very concrete about cancer and especially solid tumor oncology. You most of the time have cancer or you don't. You can treat cancer. You can watch it shrink. You can watch it go away. There's something that I think is very concrete and tangible, which I liked as well. And those three things really panned out for me. I mean, I think all oncologists have this, lots of physicians have this. But, you know, the drawer of letters that I kept in my office when I was a full-time clinician for a year, one of them would have been enough to, like, make my career from an emotional standpoint. And it was filled with those letters. So amazing relationships with people with cancer. In oncology, if you practice like you did six months before, you're probably committing malpractice. It's constantly evolving and constantly changing. So that really came through and I did like the concreteness of it. And that was also proven, as you know, especially in the community space most people do both oncology and hematology, specifically benign hematology. Benign hematology is much more abstract, I would say it's much intellectually harder and more difficult. And I always didn't like it. So the sort of concrete part of oncology really always continued to resonate with me.

John Shufeldt:
So this is probably a naive question, particularly considering the fact that I'm in medicine. You do a heme on fellowship or is it heme or ach?

Bobby Green:
So most places it's combined. A lot of places give you the option to do one or the other. And at most academic centers you are either doing some form of solid tumor oncology, some form of malignant hematology so the leukemias or the lymphomas or benign hematology, coagulation defects, things like that, platelet defects, those kinds of things. In the community, I would say anecdotally, but based on my experience, most people do both. You know, there are some people who specialize, but for the most part, people do both so well.

John Shufeldt:
It's interesting. So how long were you in internal medicine residency before you said oncologist is my thing? Or did you know that going in?

Bobby Green:
No. Sort of like I finished med school, not sure what I wanted to do. And so the default was to go into internal medicine often. And if you're not sure what you want to do because you have some more flexibility, you can do internal medicine or you can do one of the internal medicine subspecialties. I think I probably figured out by the end of my second year that I wanted to do it. Again, I think my experience with I don't have the technical skills to be an orthopedic surgeon also translated into I don't have the technical skills to be an interventional cardiologist or a gastroenterologist. I just was not procedure-oriented. So I had my sort of book of the non-interventional internal medicine subspecialties and oncology was when I really gravitated.

John Shufeldt:
Wery cool. So post-residency. Give us a timeline between post-residency and Thyme, no pun intended, but between your and your current venture.

Bobby Green:
Yeah. So so one of the interesting things I found when I went into practice is I love taking care of patients, but I also sort of knew early on that I wanted to try to do something different and I didn't actually know that going in. I thought, I'll start practicing and I'll do what my dad did, which was be a clinician for 35 years, and I'll do that full time. And I just sort of early on decided that there were other things that I wanted to do alongside that, and I didn't really know what that was. We were part of a hospital practice when I joined in 1999 that was owned by a not-for-profit hospital system. Very shortly after I arrived, that hospital got bought by a for-profit hospital system.

John Shufeldt:
HCA.

Bobby Green:
The other big hospital system.

John Shufeldt:
Okay, I got it. I knew I was it was a 50% shot.

Bobby Green:
But we got bought in about a year later. We went out on our own. And it was actually very fortuitous for me because I'd only been out about two years, but I had the opportunity with two of my other colleagues to run this 13-person medical oncology practice, and that was sort of one of the outlets and entrepreneurial things going back to how do you build an oncology practice that I was lucky enough to be able to do. And over the course of the next, that was about 2000 to 2003. Over the course of the next decade, we built a radiation center. We built an imaging center. We grew the practice. We brought in some subspecialists to the practice, and that was really exciting and interesting to me. And in addition to that, we were part of a network of about 20 oncology practices that were just starting to think about how to do interesting things with data and it was when EHRs were becoming a thing. And how do you pull together data from different sources and make it useful for measuring quality, for enrolling patients on clinical trials, those types of things. And I spent a lot of time working with that network and started to think, I like this space a lot. Still didn't know what to do with it, but I knew at this point I was ready to do something. I was still mostly a full-time clinician and I'd been doing that now for like 12 or 13 years. And at this point, I knew I wanted to do something different. Didn't know what exactly that was. And through some work I was doing, I met Thyme Care's co-founder, my co-founder Robin Shaw, who was an early employee at this company called Flatiron Health. I met him along with Flatiron's co-founders, and I haven't had that many light bulb moments in my life. But I remember that first conversation I had with them is I had been thinking about what I wanted to do and I thought, that's what I want to do. I want to go there. And the story I tell most people is they recruited me really hard for a year and a half. The true story is I told them, I want to come work with you guys and then started working at this company, Flatiron Health, which was a health care technology company based in New York City in the summer of 2014. So for the seven-year period that I was at Flatiron, I still lived here in South Florida. I saw patients one day a week, but I commuted to New York almost every week, you know, asterisk. I have an incredibly supportive and understanding wife and children to allow me to do that, but I did that for seven years leading up until Thyme Care.

John Shufeldt:
And then, okay, so what was your role at Flatiron?

Bobby Green:
So it varied. The last about two years I was there, I was Chief Medical Officer.

John Shufeldt:
And then before that what did you do? How did you get into that role?

Bobby Green:
So I was, for the bulk of my time, mostly focused on the clinician, the provider facing side of the organization, a lot of which was around our building, our electronic medical record and building and leading the medical team that supported that, as well as a lot of the work that we were doing in clinical trials. The job, when I joined Flatiron there were 30 something people there. The job started out very much as an individual contributor and sitting with engineers, looking at data that we were trying to put together, talking to docs about the electronic health record, doing a fair amount of sales of the electronic health record. Basically anything they needed me to do, I both did and was willing to do.

John Shufeldt:
Very good. So then you're going back and forth in New York, the pandemic catch, which seems like the timing was about dead-on, is that when you decided to do Thyme?

Bobby Green:
Yeah. So the pandemic hit. I was working from home for about of year, about a year. And you know, Robin, who had been at Flatiron with me, he'd left a couple of years before, but especially in a lot of the early days, we had thought a lot about value-based care and about a lot of the things that sort of weren't addressed in cancer clinics. And it wasn't something that ever really made sense in what we were doing at Flatiron to focus on. But it was, you know, the sort of unfinished business you feel at certain parts of your career where you've done things and you feel like, no, we really wanted to do that. So we'd always had these conversations. We want to do something in this space. And then what's interesting, we both had this sort of parallel experience of and this still it's happened to me my whole career pretty much, and it still happens to me, at least on a weekly basis, where you get these phone calls or texts or emails from sometimes people I know well, sometimes people who are friends of friends and sometimes people who have like a connection that I'm not even sure of. But they've either been diagnosed with a new cancer or they have a CAT scan that showed a lung mass or something has happened in the cancer space and they're in this limbo period. They haven't seen an oncologist yet. They're not sure how to deal with it. The appointment might not be for two weeks to have the biopsy that they were told they needed. They don't know, do I have cancer? If I have cancer, is it a small, curable cancer? Is it cancer that's likely to be life-threatening? And it's not the, you know, the answers can sometimes be scary, but the scariest thing is when you don't know anything. And so you're left with all of this uncertainty. And, you know, I can pick up the phone or send someone an email and spend a couple of minutes of time explaining something or helping someone understand, oh, you need to see a medical oncologist. And I've been doing this a long time. I know medical oncologists in lots of places in the country. And so most of the time I can either connect directly with someone or someone else to get someone in for an appointment quickly. I can answer that question. Oh, if you have this thing in your lung, it might be cancer. It might not. If it's cancer, here's what will happen. And the amount of gratitude you get from these sort of few minutes that you spend with someone is enormous, and I actually love doing it. At the same time, you shouldn't have to know me or know someone who's connected or who's an insider in order to get that kind of care. So that was sort of the core idea that led to Thyme Care. And then you can sort of extrapolate that what I just sort of described was what you could call the Perry Diagnostic period. If someone right at the beginning of a cancer diagnosis or a concern for cancer, there are multiple other places along the cancer journey where things break down, despite the fact that people are getting cared for in really good practices by really good doctors and receiving the right care, things break down. And that's what we were trying to address with this navigation platform.

John Shufeldt:
That's really cool, you know, and I think all physicians listening to this have the same experience that I do and clearly you do. Cause I get calls all the time from people in this your phraseology was perfect this perry diagnostic time where you're like I'm lost and I don't know where to go. I can't get into my PCP and I can't go to an oncologist or whoever without a PCP referral. What do I do? And so you're right for us, it takes us a few minutes, a few phone calls, and it's like, Yeah, we've got you. And then you point them in the right direction. And it's like behind the wizard. It's like the wizard behind the curtain. But for them it's like, Oh, my God, you saved my life. No I just made a few phone calls to people like Dr. Green here who I know one gets it fixed up because he's a rock star. So this is really cool because, you know, I the people I see in the emergency department, I always this is always the same scenario. 55 years old, driving their car down the street and they have a first-time seizure. You drink a lot? No, I hardly ever drink? Taking like benzodiazepines, like valium and you quit? No. Crap. I bet you've got glioblastoma and almost always have glioblastoma. And so then you go in and have to talk to them about this. What you know, because, you know, the MRIs are hard to miss and it looks it's just as awful looking tumor as you all know. And you said, well, you know, it could be this and it could be this, and but we've got to do some other stuff, too. And I'm going to send you somebody a lot smarter than I am. I work in a place as rock star neurosurgeons. But in the back of my mind, I'm going, Crap, you've got a glioblastoma and this is not going to be a good outcome. And so these poor folks are left in, like in the nature you just describe, like I'm terrified.

Bobby Green:
And so scary and yeah. And you know, as you know, I mean, even in that scenario, like how many times do people get admitted to the hospital just because you're worried if you don't admit them, the workup is going to take forever and they're not going to get care like that. Makes no sense. Right?

John Shufeldt:
So or they have no insurance. And then I'm like, well, you probably don't need to be admitted, but I know if you're not admitted, you're going to fall through the cracks for six months and that little fluid in your belly and that weird thing on your ovary. And I hate ovarian cancer. That's maybe ovarian cancer. I'm going to admit you because screw the money. We're going to we'll figure this out. So now it's tough. All right. Why did you pick the name Thyme? Because I instantly go to, you know, Crosby, you know, Simon and Garfunkel. And I love that album in song. So why Thyme?

Bobby Green:
Yeah, my daughter has taken to playing Scarborough Fair on the guitar now and throws in the word care after time when she sings it. So not to confuse people about the spelling. So Thyme has sort of many meanings and one of them is courage. That was sort of what we thought was we thought it was appropriate and a nice sort of symbol. I will tell you what's interesting, and I wish I could tell you this was intentional, but it really wasn't. In the navigation work that we've done. There are so many circumstances where you realize one of the core things that we're able to offer people is: t i m e time.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah.

Bobby Green:
And, you know, everyone's busy practices are crazy, you know, taking care of patients. And sometimes, you know, what people just need is a little bit of time that they might not be getting anywhere. So that sort of play on words has been really, really impactful and nice. And then, you know, we have all sorts of internal jokes where people use the word time both ways.

John Shufeldt:
So, oh, yeah, yeah, I'd be that'd be constantly doing it. Okay, so is Thyme practice agnostic? Like can I sign up for Thyme in Phoenix, Arizona? Even though my oncologist is out here.

Bobby Green:
It is. So Thyme Care right now we are practice agnostic, but the way we're working is managing populations starting with health plans so we can track with health plans, managing their member population. And I would just say at no cost to the person with cancer, with also plans in the probably near future to be having conversations with employers. We think there's a really nice opportunity where we can help there as well as with risk-taking providers. As you know, that's a bigger and bigger thing where we also think we can add value. So it's through health plan partnerships, at least. At least right now.

John Shufeldt:
So right now you don't do any at-risk contracting, correct? But that's in the future?

Bobby Green:
It is. And we're hopefully within the next or I would say likely within the next 3 to 4 months, we'll have a couple of risk-based contracts in place. I think across the board, the value prop from a health plan perspective is, you know, the patient experience I think is important and that's clearly there in helping people get better care. But there's also sort of a strong belief and this is really starting to bear out in our first partnership, that you can actually drive down costs and drive higher value as well, which is obviously important to multiple stakeholders.

John Shufeldt:
Well, yeah, you know, we always, you know, emergency medicine and you know, you probably your own perspective on this that someone shows up. There are a couple of days post-chemo treatment. You know, unless they stub their toe, they're probably going to get admitted because they feel off or their weight counts are low, they're immuno-compromised. We don't have any results back yet like cultures that are meaningful. So we're like, I'm not sending you home with a white count of 0.6 and you may have nothing, but I'm not going to send you home if you can prevent those ED admissions from ED, which may not pan out to be anything. You know you prevent a couple of those and it's you made a huge impact.

Bobby Green:
A 100%. And, you know, listen, there's a good amount of data that, you know, and if you define care navigation broadly, that there are a lot of interventions that can really have impact on that. Everything from trying to engage patients proactively and assess symptoms. So you find symptoms before they get bad to honestly something as simple as being a resource that when someone hits the emergency department, you know if you're in the ED seeing a patient who you're worried about, if you can talk to someone who says I'm going to make sure that they see their oncologist at 9:00 tomorrow morning and they're going to understand what to do, you're going to have a lot more comfort with the decision not to admit them.

John Shufeldt:
Totally true. And, you know, some of you said a little bit ago, which perked my ears up, as you said, you know if you're still practicing like you are three, 3 to 6 months ago, your probably committing malpractice. Emergency medicine is not moving quite that fast at all. Or maybe just means it's not quite that fast. And it really strikes me as interesting because if you're saying that who's an expert in the field, there is no way in hell I'm going to keep up with it. And so you people are coming in with I've probably never heard of. I probably heard of the cancer, I hope, and I've certainly probably not heard of the treatment.

Bobby Green:
Right. And you definitely can't spell it.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, definitely not. So. Okay, so another question for you. So I'm a kind of a big life prolongation sort of advocate. I've been doing this for my taking medications, all of those myself for now, years and years and years, and including doing all sorts of genetic studies. Now, I have this belief as we all have cancer floating around in our body right now, that our T cells are just gobbling up because they recognize it as foreign. But are we at the point yet where you join a health plan, they send you to get this pharmacogenetic testing or genetic testing that says, look, John, you have a predilection for X. We're going to hook you up with Thyme Care because now they're going to help you prevent X from happening or monitor X so in case it does happen, they are on it like a pit bull on a poodle. Are we anywhere near there yet?

Bobby Green:
I think we're I don't know if near is the right word, John, but I think we're definitely heading in that direction. One of the sort of really exciting areas of science advancement right now, and it's an area where we've had a lot of conversations, is in the early cancer detection, cancer screening blood tests. So there are a number of assays and companies in this space. Yeah. And like I think you can sort of think about the liquid biopsy in two settings. One is liquid biopsies to look for genomic alterations in people known to have cancer, to look for targets. And then the technology that is, you know, I'm a smoker. I know I'm at risk for lung cancer. No one's ever told me I have lung cancer or colon cancer or pick your disease. Can you do a blood test and maybe tell me that I have a cancer earlier than you would have been able to detect it otherwise? And there's a lot of active research in this space. And as you can imagine, trying to iron out how do you get the sensitivity and the specificity, the false-positive rates and the false negatives of these tests, rates of these tests in a place that really makes them useful for the right population. But we 100% see a role for Thyme Care there, as you said, in helping people understand the implications of those tests, navigate what the right follow-up is, and when people end up having cancer, getting them to the right place. And again, we've had a bunch of discussions. It's not something we're doing yet. We think there's a good opportunity there. And I do think the next step before that is, well, there's early detection and then there's prevention. And I think that's something that's really interesting and really important as well.

John Shufeldt:
So that's really cool. So I'm with you on the prevention, but I think despite our provider health care physicians and providers' best efforts, people will still do things like smoke that set them up for cancer. It's just the nature of humans, I think. So if you take that as a given, then wouldn't it be a cool business model, which sounds like you're headed there to say, listen, join us either through your health plan or individually? We will hook you up with a test, liquid biopsy, or Cologuard, or what have you. And we'll because, you know, is it true that we're all going to if we live long enough, we're all gonna get cancer? It's just a matter of when. And where is that? Is that a fair statement?

Bobby Green:
I would say it depends. But given that the risk of cancer keeps going up as you get older, if not everyone, like lots of people, I mean, even in like there are autopsy studies in men that a very high percentage of men have prostate cancer when they die. And then the other question is, you know, there are cancers that matter and then there are cancers that don't matter. You know, a cancer only matters if it's going to cause you a problem in your life expectancy. Know, if someone finds you had prostate cancer at an autopsy and you never knew you had it, then it's sort of like you never had it. Right.

John Shufeldt:
So exactly. But it seems like there's a role for literally exactly what you're doing like you said. But one step earlier, maybe two steps with prevention, but one step earlier with the. Okay, now I know I've got the rocket gene or now I know I've got X predisposition to whatever cancer it is. What can I do to either mitigate it or prevent it or.

John Shufeldt:
Yes.

Bobby Green:
That early?

Bobby Green:
I think that's right. I think one of the practical impediments to building a business in that space is a function of what our health insurance looks like. Right. So if you're a Medicare patient, for the most part, Medicare is going to be responsible for you for the rest of your life. If you have a commercial plan from your employer and your commercial plan knows that, well, most people on my plan switch jobs every couple of years and switch on to a new insurance. You know how much? And you know, it becomes a financial thing. But I also understand it, if I'm a health plan, how much do I want to spend preventing things that are going to benefit someone's health plan eight years from now, which isn't going to be mine?

John Shufeldt:
Yes, I see that. Yeah.

Bobby Green:
Yeah. And we have to think about how do you align those things, right?

John Shufeldt:
So why would I diagnose you now when 20 years from now it's going to be the outcome is going to be bad if you don't treat it, that's on you, not on us. So yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Do you think part of it's going to come down to how accessible and how inexpensive this genetic testing is becoming? So people can say, look, I'm going to spend 500 bucks to get this test done. At least I don't care if I have the pace or not, but at least I'll know what I'd better be on the lookout for in the future. I mean, if you offered that service through Thyme, do you think you'd have this population of patients that just waiting to pick up? Well, they're not waiting, they never want to, but they know you're there when they need them.

Bobby Green:
Yeah, I do. I think that the things that ultimately drive this outside of insurance reimbursement is the cost, but also the impact of the test. So if you have a screening test that causes lots of false positives and leads to lots of interventions that can potentially cause harm, you want the net to be a benefit and not a harm, right? So screening a healthy 20-year-old for cancer, it's pretty tough probably to get an assay that's going to be helpful there. But for lots of populations, I think we're going to see data hopefully that's going to where that's going to pan out.

John Shufeldt:
Interesting. Well, it's like the old house of Gad if you don't take a temperature, you can't find a fever. And so the question is when do you start taking the temperature. Yeah. Do you do it at 20? Probably not. Not a lot of success, but if you do it at 60, maybe there's some early detection stuff you can pick up.

Bobby Green:
Yeah. And if you think about even the colon cancer landscape or the lung cancer landscape. How do you find the right test in the right population is going to be key. And, you know, the exciting things are there are a lot of really exciting, well-funded companies doing great science in this space. And we're excited to figure out how to partner there.

John Shufeldt:
So what's the next iteration in time where you all had it?

Bobby Green:
So, you know, in the I would say short to medium term, continuing to engage with new health plans. I think that's something that we're really excited about as well as other entities, as I said, risk-paying providers or as well as employers. Really over time being able to continually demonstrate not only that the patient experience is getting better, but continue to show that value on keeping people out of the hospital, making sure that people get goal concordant care at the end of life. Really think of this, John, as a value-based oncology solution with a core focus on navigation, but really thinking holistically about this and how do you partner with practices as well as with health plans in order to you know, people have been talking about value-based care for a long time. There are pockets of value-based care. But at the end of the day, most cancer patients aren't in value-based arrangements. And we want to change that. And really through these partnerships and through the technology platform that we're building, be able to do that. And on the tech side, I think part of this is the technology that we're building to enable our care team so our oncology nurses and our lay health workers to really effectively and efficiently interact with people with cancer. But also to be able to do it, whether it's on the phone for someone who only has a landline, but also with technology for people who are able to do that. And whether that is through texting or other things, that sort of ability to interact asynchronously, to be able to collect patient-reported outcomes from people at scale. Those things are all critically important and that's really the direction that we're moving in, that we're excited about really a technology-based, value-based care oncology solution that's really focused on the patient.

John Shufeldt:
So it seems like there's a huge A.I. component for this where you can have these bots interactions via text message using AI driven algorithms, but AI driven assessments that ultimately may or may not you end up with a human or are you really human-focused because that's what oncology patients need?

Bobby Green:
John, you're definitely going to get me in trouble because when I start talking about AI, my engineering and data science colleagues make fun of me. But I'm going to I'm going to do it anyway. And it's a great question. So it's both. So we do think that AI and machine learning, these are all sort of critically important parts for how do we, as just one example, stratify people with cancer, stratify our members to understand who's going to be at high risk and what's the right intervention. And with a system that can learn and refine that and do that better over time, and whether it's through bots and automatic responses like those are going to be critically important. But one of our really core beliefs is that you can't do this with technology alone, that you need technology to enable people. And that's really why we have this hybrid model.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I agree with it. Particularly for cancer patients. They don't want to be texting when they're vomiting. They want to be able to pick up the phone and call somebody 100%.

Bobby Green:
Yeah.

John Shufeldt:
How scalable is because it seems like it's almost by definition like you just alluded to it. It has to be a high-touch warm embrace sort of business. Is it scalable? And then if so, what's do you have an exit strategy for this or is this going to be a long kind of a long term play?

Bobby Green:
So answer part two first. I mean, we view this as a long-term play. There's we've done a ton and there's a ton more to do. And I think we're all loving what we're doing and want to build this into a successful and impactful company. So yeah, we think it's scalable. I mean, listen, I think inherently the services component always makes things harder to scale, but we think it's scalable for a couple of reasons. One is there's a ton of inefficiency that goes on in the care navigation process in general. So what we're building and we've already seen from our internal metrics, clearly the ability for technology to enhance the efficiency of care navigators and to make them more effective and for them to be able to manage more members. There's also just again, as another example, not everyone needs the high touch and there are some people who you can do everything that you need to do through texting and a lot of that can be automated. So another sort of key component of scalability here is how do you identify the people who need the high touch and give that to them in the most efficient way possible while at the same time, how do you engage lots of other people who may not need that? And that's and that's really the balance here.

John Shufeldt:
So are you working with any research organizations that say, listen, you have this population of patients who have cancer, can you segregate them out and give us access to those patients that fit this criteria with this cancer so we can put them in this study is that seems like be very powerful.

Bobby Green:
It's a great question and it is and it's something we've sort of had active discussions around are actually building out the team and the hypothesis around that. I spent a lot of time in my last role thinking about how to increase clinical trial accrual. And one of the sort of take homes for me is that directly engaging the patient and making the patient their own advocate for that while being able to layer on the technology that it allows you to identify what might they be eligible for. That is what I think is going to be a key component to driving increase clinical trial accrual, which I think in general and COVID has clearly taught us this clinical trial accrual sort of across the medical spectrum is important and just so critical in oncology because it's how we, you know, the landscape is totally transformed and it's because of people who've been willing to go on clinical trials.

John Shufeldt:
So totally. Have you had to go out and raise money or is this all internally funded?

Bobby Green:
We have raised a round of money. We completed our first raise, I think it announced in October, and it's exciting and we have a nice runway and a lot of resources to build. Lots of incredible things.

John Shufeldt:
So very good. Congratulations. Well, Bobby, this has been awesome. Where can people find out more about Thyme and more about you?

Bobby Green:
Find out time. We are at ThymeCare.com, so they can definitely find us there. We're on Twitter @ ThymeCares. We have an Instagram account. I'm not savvy enough to know how to tell you about there, but we'd love to hear from you and the Twitter is at Thymecares. There's an S at the end of it.

John Shufeldt:
Thymecares. Got it. That's how we got it.

Bobby Green:
Yeah. Someone else took at time care. So if that person wants to give us that Twitter handle, we're open to taking that, too.

John Shufeldt:
So who would have time care spelled? I mean, come on.

Bobby Green:
I don't know. I'm with you. So ThymeCare.com will get you there, too.

John Shufeldt:
So there you go. Well, this has been amazing. We'll have everything in the show notes for folks who want to contact you and look up more about Thyme Care. But hey, first up, thanks to all this, what you're doing for patients with cancer because clearly they need to be embraced. That's awesome.

Bobby Green:
Thank you, John. I appreciate it. Thank you for taking the time. It was great chatting.

John Shufeldt:
Thanks, folks. Thanks for another great podcast of Entrepreneur Rx. We everything in the show notes. And until I see you again, have a great safe week. Thanks.

John Shufeldt:
Thanks for listening to another great edition of Entrepreneur Rx. To find out how to start a business and help secure your future, go to JohnShufeldtMD.com. Thanks for listening.

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Key Take-Aways:

  • To be a successful oncologist, you need an infusion center.
  • There are plenty of well-funded companies in the oncology space. Partner with them.

Resources:

  • Connect and follow Bobby on LinkedIn
  • Follow Bobby on Twitter.
  • Learn how Thyme Care can help cancer patients through their cancer journey.
  • Follow Thyme Care on Twitter.