Why read anything I write?

Hi, I’m Nick! Thanks for stumbling upon my site.

Why read anything I have to say about healthcare? Fair question. First, my LinkedIn does a good job summarizing it up: LinkedIn Profile

If you want to read more about my healthcare journey, read on!

In short, I’ve been in healthcare since 2018 when I joined a telehealth and patient engagement company. My experience includes a number of business development and partnership roles at digital health startup companies. Though, when you’re in these roles in startups, you’re often in product, customer success and account management, and more.

Learning the Ropes of Sales at Mend

In September of 2018 I joined Mend as an SDR. Mend was, and still is, a telehealth and patient engagement company that primarily serves mental health organizations and FQHCs. I was employee 15 and a member of Mend’s first SDR team.

My first four months as an SDR, I led the small team of 3 SDRs in outbound qualified meetings. So in December, I made the transition to being an inbound SDR. Working with the CEO, I made an inbound sales playbook that resulted in Mend 4x-ing the number of monthly inbound sales accepted leads. The playbook optimized everything from the lead form on our website to increasing the conversion rate from marketing lead to sales accepted lead through automation and personalized communication.

After 8 months of being an SDR, in the Spring of 2019, I became an Account Executive. The rest of 2019 was a rollercoaster journey. Telehealth was still a questionable endeavor for many organizations as parity laws varied state to state and virtual care platforms were quite an expensive if you couldn’t get visits properly covered. Many of our sales calls ended up being providers asking for insights as to whether they could get paid or not for different visits. The slowness of this time period was beneficial for my career as it allowed me to be ultra-focused on the organizations I was speaking with instead of being so focused on selling them - a mindset that still helps me today.

In late 2019, Mend went from four Account Executives and four SDRs to three Account Executives (including me), four SDRs, four Directors of BD, and one VP of Sales. The Directors and VP only lasted six months. In that time period, the VP also let go of the SDRs.

Three years of sales experience in twelve months

In March of 2020, COVID started to close down parts of the United States. For weeks, I was showing up to our office at 7am and leaving at 9-10pm. The 14 hour days were a consequence of being a HIPAA complaint video visit platform that offered live tech support. The rush and speed of the time was ultimately what resulted in our CEO letting go of the Directors and VP. At this point, I became responsible for the eastern half of the country and another Account Executive had the west half. I was 22 years old and leading sales for half the country. Over the next fifteen months, I would work with organizations like Optum, Humana, Albany Medical Center, Cambridge Health Alliance, and countless FQHCs and CMHCs across the eastern half of the country. I also helped us secure a preferred partnership with Echo, a behavioral health EHR.

In my almost 3 years at Mend, I was directly responsible for closing half of Mend’s revenue growth, helped guide us through pricing changes, key partnerships, and in my last months hired and built a team of six SDRs. At Mend, I became an expert in patient self-scheduling, digital patient intake, and telehealth workflows. Essentially I had to. I helped over 100 organizations adopt virtual care technologies during COVID who may have never even piloted the solutions before March of 2020.

Consulting at Panda Health

In the Spring of 2021, I made the move to Panda Health. After most organizations had adopted virtual care technology in the previous year, I was excited to help health systems through digital health transformation across a wider variety of solutions, ranging from scheduling systems, website virtual assistants, and even telehealth platforms.

During my year at Panda, I split my time across two teams. The first six months I worked with Raj Aggarwal, current founder of Twenty.30 Health, helping recruit health systems to join the Panda marketplace. At Panda, health systems would look to us to complete the evaluation process on digital health solutions to expedite their evaluation process and help them make better technology decisions. During this time, I worked closely with Vizient and helped recruit Premier Health in Ohio to join the marketplace. When it was time for Panda Health to evaluation digital patient intake and telehealth solutions, my experience at Mend made me an easy candidate to join the digital health evaluation team. For the categories of digital patient intake, telehealth, and remote patient monitoring, I was a member of the team reviewing and evaluating RFP submissions by dozens of vendors in each category. I gained key experience in evaluating technology solutions and running an efficient RFP process.

Ultimately, In June of 2022, I left Panda Health in order to focus on building my own company.

Building haley inc.

In December of 2021, I had an idea that stemmed from personal experiences.

When I was in college, I called our campus counseling center as I was dealing with severe anxiety and depression. To my disappointment, I was told I had to wait about 6 weeks for an intake appointment. After waiting six weeks, I did a PHQ-9 and then met with a psychologist who evaluated my mental state. At the conclusion of the appointment, I was offered two options, (1) wait two months to start regularly seeing a therapist, and (2) I could get medication from the student wellness center. I was shocked that after waiting six weeks I would have to wait another 2 months to start regularly seeing a therapist and I was given no alternative locations to get therapy. But, two days later I walked out of our student wellness center with a 6 month prescription of sertraline and 30 xanax. I was so disappointed with the process, I never saw a clinican again during my time at university. About 4 months into my prescription I slowly stopped taking the medication without guidance - and am very lucky it worked out for me.

I wanted to solve the problem of what happens in-between therapy sessions.

I wanted to solve the problem of what happens between the time someone acknowledges they could use support and the time they start receiving it.

So, we built the first content platform that required creators to have a healthcare license. Think if Youtube combined with Substack/Beehiv and in order to create content you had to prove you had a mental health license. Initially, we got decent traction but with our focus on accessibility to content we failed to find great revenue streams. We attempted raising funding and received offers for $40,000 in angel funding but ultimately turned it down.

After reaching 200 therapists with accounts and hundreds of pieces of original content, we realized we created a better resource than a business. After self-funding haley inc. with my cofounder, I needed to find a new job, and began that search in Spring of 2022.

Getting Healthie 🙂 

In December of 2022, I started as an Enterprise Account Executive at Healthie, a leading EHR for virtual-first care organizations. In my first six months at Healthie, I helped organizations like Culina Health, Mantra Health, and many more adopt Healthie for their practice. I was more than 150% to quota before I took on the role of Director of Marketplace.

As an EHR, there’s tons of companies that our customers want to integrate with Healthie to help serve their practice. My job involves building these partnerships with third-party technology and service companies. In H2 2023, I led the complete legal restructuring of Healthie's marketplace to ensure compliance with a number of federal statutes as Healthie became ONC certified. This restructuring included moving existing partners to new agreements to create more standardization across the marketplace. To date, Healthie has over 40 partners building to our APIs. In March of 2024, we relaunched the marketplace as “The Harbor.” Some of our partners include, Zocdoc, Fullscript, Dock Health, Candid Health, Adonis, and many more. My role also includes direct management of a Clinical Operations Program Manager and Partner Success Manager.

Every week I get to meet with digital health companies building the leading edge of technologies to support provider organizations.

So, why am I writing?

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot go right and wrong in digital health business development, adoption, and rollout to organizations - from as small as a solot therapist adopting a new video visit tool to as large as a network of thousands of clinicians adopting a new EHR.

Today, I work at Healthie, consult for digital health tech companies, and sit on an advisory board of an EAP.

Here’s where you’ll find straight talk about health tech. I’ve been on both sides. Evaluating it and selling it. Trying to get in EHR marketplaces and now running one. Even trying to build a company myself.

Here’s to Talking Health.