In this episode of the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast, host Steven Schwartz interviews Jad Shalhoub, founder of CareFlo. They discuss Jad’s journey from industrial engineering to healthcare consulting, the importance of data in managing concierge medical practices, and the role of feasibility studies in starting a new practice. Jad emphasizes the significance of patient analytics and report cards in demonstrating the value of services to patients. The conversation concludes with insights on the challenges and rewards of starting a medical practice.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to CareFlo and Jad’s Background
03:05 Starting a Concierge Medical Practice
06:26 The Importance of Data in Healthcare
09:25 Integrating EMR with Analytics
12:01 Final Thoughts on Starting a Practice
16:06 Introduction to Concierge Medical Marketing
16:07 Strategies for Growing Your Practice

Steven Schwartz (00:24)
Hello and welcome to the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Steve Schwartz, and it’s my pleasure to have you along on our discussion today. Today is my friend, Jad Shalhoub. Jad and his company is CareFlo and we’re going to dig into that. Jad, thank you for being with me today.

Jad (00:41)
Pleasure being here, Steve.

Steven Schwartz (00:42)
Awesome. I appreciate that. We met several years ago in Vero Beach. I actually met at church and did some work together. And currently you’re now in the Orlando area. Is that correct?

Jad (00:53)
That’s right, winter springs.

Steven Schwartz (00:55)
Awesome. We love visiting

Orlando and million things to see and do. And then it’s always nice getting back to Vero Beach with less traffic and less crazy, right?

Jad (01:04)
Understandable, yeah. Winter Springs is a nice area though, Steve. We definitely lucked out landing here, but Vero is great as well.

Steven Schwartz (01:07)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And when you say Orlando, mean, obviously there’s so many different towns and areas around that are quieter, more peaceful, more nature. But certainly, you know, so many cool things to see and do. again, thanks for being with me on the podcast today. Why don’t we jump right in? Tell me a little bit about your background. And I know you had a great story of kind of your backstory and what got you to CareFlo.

Jad (01:40)
Sure, yeah. So my backstory actually, I ironically am an industrial engineer by trade. However, shortly after graduation, I went through this program where I was kind of led to pursuing a career as a healthcare consultant. And so I started with freelancing and then that ultimately led to…

a joint venture with my parents to start Advanced Vascular Solutions back in 2020, right when COVID started, you know, officially from a business perspective, our business was started as well. So that’s kind of where I learned the ropes. I was the practice manager, started with one location and grew to three.

My dad is a vascular surgeon and so he would be seeing the patients and I would be responsible for setting up the business components of the practice. Also working alongside my mom with some support there. So that was really kind of where I wet my feet in the healthcare industry and where I learned about the various challenges. So when I started CareFlo a few years later,

I started it to appeal to other physicians and practices in general to help them navigate the difficulties of whether it’s starting a practice, managing practice, understanding how a practice is performing. I saw that, you know, there’s quite a few moving parts and I felt that my skill set as someone who has a technical and analytical background.

was well applied in an industry that has some complexity.

Steven Schwartz (03:42)
Very cool. I appreciate you sharing that, the way people know where this discussion is coming from and kind of where we’re going with this. When someone is considering starting a new concierge or DPC medical practice, if they were your clients, what major items would you bring up in your discussions as far as location or demographic or finances or business?

configuration, what do you suggest?

Jad (04:13)
Well, generally our process, Steve, would involve conducting a feasibility study. So based off of where the client is located, the client being the physician or the individual looking to start the practice, we would look at some surrounding areas, look at the population, age demographics, household median incomes to determine are the spots that we want to select going to be ideal for

the makings of a good concierge practice where you’re have a pool of prospective patients that are gonna be willing to pay whatever premium you set for the practice. And then of course, we wanna look at what’s gonna be that patient acquisition month over month as you ramp up. What are your operation expenses gonna look like? And then what’s the profit and loss as you’re starting up?

And we do that to determine one, the goals that you should set in terms of how many patients you’re bringing the door as you’re ramping up and two, understanding if there is any deficit, possibly securing some financing or figuring out how we can cover the gap financially.

Steven Schwartz (05:31)
Very good. I mean, there’s so many different things to consider from a medical point of view. But when it comes down to it, it’s still a business. It’s very much still a business. So you have to deal with all of the typical business things, business plan, focus, customer is your patient, but they’re still customers. And so so many things to consider. And then you get into all the extra stuff, HIPAA and EMR systems, obviously insurance.

is a dicey topic when you talk with direct primary care and many concierge practices. We simply don’t want to deal with insurance whatsoever. so a lot of things to figure out. I know that you’re really focused on data. I mean, that was one of the things that impressed me most about you when we first met a few years ago is how focused you were on data.

Can you share with our audience a little bit about the data points that you look at, that you analyze, and what it tells you for the health of a practice and directions?

Jad (06:37)
Right, so depending on the practice, there’s gonna be different key performance indicators that we look at. But what we’ll do, Steve, generally is we’ll integrate with the medical record system so we can pull all that big data that sits underneath the hood and automate how we’re monitoring the performance of the practice, right? So in a concierge setting, really what’s important, obviously, is your membership growth, your membership retention, right?

What is your operation looking like on a day-to-day basis? How many times is a certain member or certain class of members being seen within a month, within a year? All these things are helpful in decision-making for concierge practices. And so what we do is we work with the client to build a custom solution that gives them at a glance, some of these indicators. Just think like the dashboard of your car. You can see your tire pressure.

You can see your oil level, how much gas you have. mean, imagine if you didn’t have a dashboard to see those things. You’d be opening your gas tank. You would be checking each tire individually. So, I mean, it really depends on the scale of the practice. Of course, some people feel like they’re small enough where they have a pulse check on all these things and it’s not a real pain point. But if you really want to grow and get to a scale where you have a healthy…

practice financially, maybe if you’re a group as well, supporting an operation like that. Having dashboard analytics is a nice tool to be able to make decisions.

Steven Schwartz (08:16)
I know you mentioned to me before about the report card. Is that what you’re referring to here, or is there something even more for this report card that you referred to?

Jad (08:27)
So yeah, that’s

actually another feature of the analytics. What I was talking about previously is more of an internal operations. Now there are some DPC practices that actually work with groups like employers, for example, where they’ll contract with the employer as a whole for some flat rate per employee per month. And they will provide services for that employer group. And in that instance, it’s important also to show them some data to justify the cost.

But if you are a provider and you have direct to patient agreements where they’re paying a premium, having something like a report card adds value in terms of your services because it can show the patient how the services you’re providing them is impacting their health over time. So yes, we do develop report cards where it looks at previous visits, current visits, and it shows

based off of biometric data or otherwise, how the patient’s health is improving given the services that you’re rendering to them.

Steven Schwartz (09:33)
And is that report card part of an EMR system? Is it separate from an EMR? How do those work together?

Jad (09:40)
So we

would integrate with the EMR to automatically generate the report cards based off of the patient’s visits. So when that information is documented in the EMR, the integration sends that data to the system we’ve developed, which generates a report card, which can be sent to the patient, either through a portal or…

it can be printed and given to the patient in the practice as well. There’s HIPAA compliant ways of issuing that information to the patient. So we actually, we haven’t really put a name on this because mainly we use a BI software called Tableau. So it’s kind of, you know,

Steven Schwartz (10:17)
What is the name of the software that you’ve created?

Jad (10:35)
using Tableau and actually Amazon Web Services were able to develop a solution that generates these report cards.

Steven Schwartz (10:48)
So it’s basically customizing the Tableau platform with the data from the EMR so that the reports that come out of it show exactly what needs to be seen by the physician owner of the business, correct?

Jad (11:05)
Yes. yeah, essentially like Tableau is kind of like maybe if you could call it a fancy Excel, right? So like if you have the data in Excel, right, you could go in there and you could create a graph or, you know, do some sort of transformation on the data. Tableau has the capability of doing that and displaying it as a visual. So

It’s a platform in which we can develop what’s called a workbook or it’s really a dashboard, but it looks like a report card. So that’s how it generates a report card.

Steven Schwartz (11:46)
It’s very cool. I find all this really fascinating and I appreciate you sharing just a little bit of this with our audience.

Are there any other final thoughts that you’d like to share with our audience before we wrap up our discussion today?

Jad (12:01)
I think, you know, really, it, in terms of final thoughts, I would say starting your own practice, it’s a venture, but if you take the proper steps to analyze the prospects of success and you see that it’s there, then I have seen that it can very much be worth it.

It’s an asset that you get to grow for yourself and for your family and potentially even generations, you know? So I think that what’s important is making sure that you have, whether it’s a team or even just an individual that you trust close to you that’s able to help you walk through those decisions and that has also had some experience.

going down that road before to help you understand what you need to look for, what are the upsides, what are the pitfalls, et cetera. So what I would say is if you’re considering it, find someone, a consultant, whether it’s CareFlo or otherwise, that is going to help you study the feasibility and to walk that path in order to get things set up and it could be very successful.

Steven Schwartz (13:23)
Very, very cool. I appreciate your time. Jad, if someone wants to get in touch with you and CareFlo to have a discussion and perhaps see if you’re right for working together, what’s the best way that people can get in touch with you?

Jad (13:35)
Yeah, so my email is [email protected] And my phone number is 772-230-4477 and 772-230-4477.

Steven Schwartz (13:53)
Right. And so that everybody knows JAD is J-A-D.

Jad (13:57)
I didn’t spell that out, did I? That’s probably the most likely area of error there because I’ll get either Jade or Chad or Jack. So thank you for calling that out.

Steven Schwartz (13:59)
No, you didn’t. But people like Chad, different kind of unique name.

Yeah, totally. No worries at all. Thanks for sharing that information. You had brought up a few interesting points about where a medical practice is in their lifespan, whether potentially a practice exists with 3,000 patients in the traditional insurance-based model and they’re transitioning to concierge or DPC, or there may be an existing DPC that wants to grow.

Or perhaps it’s a practice that’s, you know, maybe has 250 or 300 patients, maybe with a waiting list and don’t want to grow. Here at Concierge Medical Marketing, which is our digital marketing arm of our company, we can help the practitioners, the physicians with growth, whether it’s transition, whether it’s growth, or whether it’s we call nurture to nurture existing patients.

I’ve written a book called the definitive guide to winning with digital marketing for concierge medical practices. The book is available for download for free. Simply visit our website concierge md dot marketing on the home page. Scroll down a little bit a little bit until you see the book put in your email. Click the orange button that says submit and our system will send you a link where you can download the PDF of the book free of charge. Please take it with my compliments and

If you have any questions about how to grow your medical practice, whether it’s concierge or DPC, that’s what we’re here for. Happy to chat. My phone number is 772-304-2420. And again, feel free to reach out to me personally, have a discussion and see if we can help you grow to achieve whatever goals you have for your practice. Jad Shalhoub, thank you for taking the time to be on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.

Jad (16:01)
Thanks for having me, Steve.

Steven Schwartz (16:02)
Absolutely. Take care and for everyone in the audience, we’ll see you next time on the next episode.