“I overcome fear [of loss, regret, etc.] by simply acknowledge the existence of failure. Fear is packaged into everything single thing in life, so the only rational thing to do is to accept it. And if you couple fear with a bit of reason, resilience and good luck [which only comes from persistent hard-work], anything is possible”, says Yasir Ali, CEO & Co-Founder, Rivews. The company leverages two-way SMS surveys to enable healthcare organizations in collecting real-time patient feedback immediately after check-out.

Driven by self-conviction, perseverance, vision and belief, Yasir follows an interestingly productive routine. He starts his day with 15-minutes of self-reflection, followed by journaling along with setting up OKRs for the day. He then jumps into the most challenging and thought-provoking projects early in the day when his mind is in a flow-state. He feels daily reflection not only helps him plan with more efficacy, but enables him to always refresh his intention behind his purpose and more importantly allows him to think critically every single day in comparison to doing it just once a week or month.

Collaborative effort to provide value-based care

From his experience, Yasir discovered that healthcare organizations are forced to focus less on improving clinical outcomes and more on patient acquisition. He feels that with value-based platforms like Rivews, organizations will be able to understand their patient experience and outcome metrics and then optimize their processes based on new insights and metrics.

Yasir believes that a collaborative effort is required to bring a change in healthcare. “Provider organizations and health systems attempting to move to value based care models, should actively collaborate with payors, employers and most importantly other providers. This can’t be a one man-show. We’d be able to achieve a viable value-based care model if all players actively work together towards it, instead of trying to achieve it just by themselves”, says Yasir.

Digitization can’t replace the patient-doctor experience

According to Yasir, digitization has unarguably improved health care. Though there are some defects associated with implementation of digitization, they are not the defects of digitization itself.

“Digitization has driven significant value across every component of healthcare, ranging from neural networks in assisting radiologist in early detection to on-demand telemedicine to something as simple as a scheduling portal. But, it’s important to keep in mind that technology is not here to replace the doctor. Digitization must go hand-in-hand with providers as it can’t entirely replace the patient-doctor experience, at least today”, says Yasir.

When customer pain-points become an obsession 

Yasir, with his co-founders, initially built a self-scheduling platform for urgent cares and a component of this scheduling system was an automated after-care follow-up. His team felt that, around 2015 to 2016,  the digital medical era had made engagement solutions very ubiquitous and that the next wave in healthcare was around patient experiences, especially when they found that the organizations were having a hard time with receiving immediate aftercare survey responses. Yasir and team carried out a thorough research combined with enough experimentation. As a result, they figured out that SMS was the best mode of engagement which became their competitive advantage and eventually their obsession. “As we grew, we became even more obsessive about our process”,  says Yasir.

“We’ve engaged with over 1.75 million patients, with a 27.5% response rate on the initial survey message and we take a lot of pride in these numbers; essentially, at any given location and provider, over 1 in 4 patients, aftercare, will tell the provider how they felt about their visit”,  Yasir proudly expresses.

Customers are the bottom-line

Though Yasir started his entrepreneurial career as a student at NYU, his passion to problem solve eventually propelled him into a healthcare opportunity when he founded MedTimers, eventually winning the NYU Entrepreneurs Challenge’s Audience Pitch Award in 2015.  Yasir feels that he’s gotten this far primarily because of his focus on customers. According to Yasir, it is crucial to constantly interact with them and learn about their expectations. He advises entrepreneurs to always think about the customer’s needs, despite the company’s growth, after all retention is a much easier strategy than new client acquisition. The piece of advice absolutely makes sense because studies suggest that it costs up to five times to acquire a new customer than to retain the existing ones.