AI-Powered Scheduling Revolution: Shahram Yousefi and Mesh AI in Health Tech - Part 1

[Music] welcome to Delta the podcast that dives into the heart of healthare innovation each episode we bring you insightful

conversations with people who are at the Forefront of the industry researchers policy makers and startup Founders join us as we explore the challenges triumphs

and breakthroughs that are driving a significant change or a delta in the Healthcare System today's episode is brought to you by supportful are you looking to grow your team at hire

Engineers look no further supportful is a company specializing in connecting you with the right people with the right skills whether you are building a web application or a mobile app supportful

can help they specialize in offering high quality remote talent and have established successful Partnerships with companies in the US Europe and Singapore

additionally supportful addresses the brain drain in leanon aiming to retain young skilled Professionals in the count country by promoting remote work

opportunities Physicians spend quite some time of their training in residency or Fellowship which are considered the busiest years of their life however

managing their schedule efficiently can be logistic nightmare ensuring that residents are assigned to their right night shift taking into account their

preferences clinical requirements and the need for fair distribution it's not just a matter of convenience it's matter of patient care and Resident well-being

furthermore in many programs resident scheduling is one of the administrative tasks of Chief residents which could add up to their clinical duties another task

that has no benefit for their own professional growth this is where mesh AI steps in Dr yusfi and his team have recognized the critical importance of

streamlined resident scheduling in healthcare institutions Mesi groundbreak breaking platform is designed to alleviate the burdens associated with this process reducing staff scheduling

Time by remarkable 80% and eliminating the pain and the frustration that often accompany scheduling challenges by optimizing a schedules with mathematical

Precision mesh AI ensures that residents can focus on what truly matters delivering high quality patient care and advancing medical knowledge today we

explore how Mesi transformative techn techology is not only revolutionizing Healthcare staff scheduling but also enhancing the overall Healthcare

experience for both residents and patients and our host today is the CEO of Mesi Dr yusfi all right then welcome again thank

you so much for being here today it's a pleasure Reuben and absolute pleasure to speak with you today about our journey I'm very excited to have you it's it really touched upon one of the most important things that I experienced

during residency which we're going to talk about more in details but without further Ado I want to hear from you so can you provide our listeners and

provide me with an introduction to Mesi how did the Journey of Mesi begin and what inspired you to start this

platform thanks Ren I think that's a very good question I love to start there because that's really uh the core of our why um you know um I'm a I'm a faculty

member in Canada I've been a professor at coins for about 20 years and uh not from within Healthcare I my area of research is algorithms I work on

mathematical um aspects of Telecom you know that's what I did uh until a number of years ago where I had u a near near

fatal um um incident in healthcare uh so today nothing that I hide from people anymore I'm dealing with DVT V trombosis I'm prone to block cloths so we

discovered that back in the day and essentially my uh near fatal story um has to do with fatigue which has to do

with errors on scheduling with uh spreadsheet manual scheduling of a staff so like many things in life rupen you know sometimes you need an impetus uh sometimes an incident an accident

Randomness to begin something but it takes a lot more than that to to go for another 10 years right to continue so for us that was really the starting

point and uh very soon I started reading and learning about Healthcare and then uh the data that I collected what I learned through that journey is the

thing that keeps me and the team going forward it's no longer personal anymore this is about really what we've learned in healthcare um as we think the number

one challenge of healthcare today so that's our story yeah I can't agree more I think one of the common theme that I've noticed around um lots of Founders

in the hech space it's having a personal story someone from the family experienced um an issue or a problem or a disease or a pathology uh and that's

what triggered them and I think that's what Healthcare needs Healthcare needs doers uh people who see a problem and work on it um I want to dip dive more

into the name of Mesi uh it suggests collaboration between AI or the name suggest collaboration between Ai and

systems can can you tell me more um the about the significance and inspiration behind the name absolutely it's sort of a double meaning uh uh me is the four

acronyms of four scientists and Engineers co-founders uh uh of the company where this began as an experiment or activity at Queens

University uh almost a decade ago uh so that's that but the second part of that that has to do with what we wanted to do is that we with our initial studying of

the problem you know going deeper in clinician scheduling uh at the time to understand why um the thing that had happened to me had happened and and

understand what's really the state of healthc care uh clinician scheduling or staff scheduling we learned that there's a b big disconnect Rin between between

the Frontline workers and the management and the leadership that could be a Residency program potential disconnect between the program director program administrators and the residents and

possibly the Chiefs um and then you go higher level you know at at a level of a healthcare Network hospital again a disconnect between the leadership the SE suite and and Physicians and nurses and

fellows and residents that are actually running the system dealing with patients on a daily basis so uh the idea of me M AI is really the idea of meshing all of

these people these stakeholders key players of Healthcare Systems together that the leadership matter as we all know significantly uh they set the

culture the direction for for the entire uh organization but the actual time to spent with physician with patients is really what our physicians and nurses

and fellows and residents are are doing so we wanted to really mesh all of that together and and this is really the thing that LED later on to us really creating a new category inclination scheduling called collaborative

scheduling the idea is having everybody on the same page or on the same network go let's say I'm a program director and um I heard about M can you

explain to me in simple terms what is M what does it do and how can I Implement in my program very very simple uh rupen when we were doing our conversations at the

beginning about uh scheduling couple of things you learn first of all scheduling is probably the most non-standard thing and not patients scheduling not or rooms scheduling equipment scheduling

clinician scheduling uh provider scheduling is in fact the most non-standard thing that happens in healthcare today in Canada and the US uh you could go to a hospital and two two units side by side that are very very

similar to each other can have nothing in common when it comes to scheduling of their staff it's completely something that is left to groups to deci side locally they even choose their own software and methodology and that's why

you go to a hospital mediumsized hospital and you have 20 different scheduling products being used at the same time so you can think about all the challenges there so we learned through

the conversations there that you need to have a system that has three foundations one it asks clinicians what they need that's foundational Healthcare is human

centc and we have to start by taking care of our own humans our providers so ask them what they need the second part of that is now now that we figured that out you're probably looking at a very

very challenging scheduling problem if there are um you know leadership in healthcare sitting listening to this um they're probably thinking oh my God I have a hard time managing the vacation

requests how can I ask them whatever they want and this is the whole thing we believe that you can have the cake and eat it too and I can talk about that later the second part is having a

powerful engine mathematical algorithm that can grab all of that for any size team and then generate schedules that are fair transparent and compliant that

meet the requirements of residency program you know payroll acgme wherever the location might be and also local continuity of care clinical needs of

that unit it's a very very tough mathematical problem that's our mode really one of our competitive advantages that we have had 20 years of research in

a very a different but similar area of algorithms that we brought into this space and the third part of that is that life doesn't happen on a schedule you generate the schedule you push it out

things happen from the pandemics to accidents covid positivity um where you need to cancel last minute or even weeks before because of a conference you need to pull somebody out pull somebody back

in there how can you do that again to keep as you maintain fairness transparency and compliance so that's the third component so Mei is really A system that is that is giving these

three modules if I may to people in healthcare in a very customizable fashion yeah I just want to add one thing here people underestimate

scheduling until they are in residency no one knows as a resident like one extra one extra I I emphasize that one

extra call shift per month it will make or break your month literally because like it will affect your sleep so I can share my experience uh so lots of uh programs when it comes to scheduling

their residents and people who work there it's just like an Excel sheet we bring couple of humans whether they are Chiefs of the program or whether they they are administrative people we pay

them like 40 50 $60,000 and we ask him to schedule different residents on different call schedule and eventually who is doing this in the current state is a human being who's a prone to

mistakes who is prone to uh error and cannot remember how many calls ex individual or why individual has already done during the past six months or what

EX indidual has done in the last month if I'm a resident who is working in an ICU rotation which is Intensive Care Unit which is very very hard rotation

and then I switch to Internal Medicine rotation and let's say I have the two last weekends I'm working on the Intensive Care Unit and the first two

weekends for those you don't know residents work two weekends of out of four weekends that's what we do in medicine so if I'm working the last two weekends in critical care and the first two weekends in internal medicine rotation and this rotation is back to

back so I will have a full month working nonstop without even a day off and that's brutal I've been through that I had weekends where I worked three

weekends back to back and it's it's very hard like you need a system to schedule people in a fair way and you need a system also you brought up the point of covid and I don't think we are immune

from another out of hopefully it doesn't happen but in case things happen in the future hopefully not Co again but like you need to have a system place where we can schedule different people into

different rotation in a Fair Way respecting human nature which is something we forget when once we are in the healthcare we just like assume that as physician we don't stop we work work

work we bring work home and we just continue anyways so as the CEO of M what is your vision for the platforms

of future are there any specific areas within Healthcare that you you see that Mishi is making a significant difference in the future

absolutely so for us um it really comes down through our initial studies and really five years of being in the market with the product that you see today as a

SAS solution or Cloud solution it comes to really five areas um if you want to do call Scheduling really well we're known right now from coast to coast in

Canada and us as a call scheduler that provides call Stars really St RS uh scheduling collaborative scheduling the S the first s is really Square the

fairness and a fairness that is transparent that's the T that comes after so it's we we truly believe that you know fairness doesn't doesn't really matter unless everybody sees it right if

you have the people ones and twos right rupin that believe their schedule the calls are not really fair uh then it really doesn't matter it doesn't have the impact that you would hope to to get

through your investment into a platform where you can get rid of the uh friction uh animosity that might exist among among staff in fact we have data that

shows when M launches we improve relationship among uh colleagues beat a Residency program a Physician Group or the entire Hospital you know Hospital

staff that migrate to M so the other the other ones adaptable uh really making sure that because as I just said a few minutes ago and and and rupin I'm sure you've seen this that is scheduling you

know even when you rot you do your rotations at residents you go from program to program or or specialty to Specialty things are done differently right the rules uh creditation rules might be different but you know the

program directors administrators and Chiefs make make decisions um you know when you look at the history Legacy of that group that really determine the future of a scheduling and then make it

different from other units make it unique so we need systems that are adaptable and and as a result you can manage manage various workflows again we're I should say m is quite unique in

terms of how adaptable it is to to give you the workflow that you have rather than having you to to change uh your scheduling right now and and the RNs at

the end of a stars is really reputable and seamless we are really knowing as a product that is is going to be behind you as a partner we typically don't

think of ourselves and it sounds like marketing but I you know I I really really uh emphasize this aspect that we don't want to be a vendor you would like to be a partner in scheduling and this

is really the way the entire clinician success team at Mesi structur we're there to support no matter what it takes and then in in one of the things that

team measures our clinici success team measures is that as we go through exact customization and uh setup of Meshi for

any un any team that is unique as we just uh covered uh that we do that with minimal involvement from people like yourselves uh rupen and P PDS and PAs

and the Seas Suite directors who are typically Physicians very valuable stretched stretched super thin staff in healthcare we would like to make sure

that this is done with minimum number of minutes of their time and we've spent quite a bit of time in the past six seven years um devising inventing

technology and processes that minimize the involvement so we go from a demo If This Were a demo of Mesi to a full launch in three to four weeks I think the fact that we can afford that it

really uh is a is a testament to the to the uh significance of this for us over the years and and how we do that so the way we see the future openin is that

really being able to provide a 360 solution we don't want to move into any other area we're going to be focused on Healthcare every so often Ruben I I I have to cancel the team has to to cancel

a demo coming from outside Healthcare unfortunately we can't even though the problem is the same problem no matter if you're looking at a restaurant or manufacturing we don't do that we're really committed to healthcare and and

to our clinicians and we would like to grow vertically to be the the solution when it comes to calls ORS clinics and as we speak right now also we're building block scheduling components to

automate that top level Residency program is scheduling that is primarily done by hand as well uh from coast to coast so that's really where we want to be in the

future that's so sweet um I just also want to add U my input about one point that me I show that it improve relationships um between like residents

or co-workers which is very important again I'm explaining this for people who don't know um usually the person who schedule residence or physician usually they are not that likable person because

like as a resident when you are scheduled on a different calls or five or six calls you can always oh why did he schedule me on five calls why did he SCH on six calls why this resident have

X amount of calls why I have y amount of calls and that's where we need an AI solution we need a solution to make this scheduling

and a machine problem not a human problem and as a human beings when we go to a training program or we go to a hospital to learn or to go to university of medical school we're going there to

learn how to interact with patients and we are learning how to treat diseases there are some administrative things that we have to tackle there are some research things that we have to learn

but I don't think that learning how to schedule people putting them on an Excel sheet would bring any value to Physicians um learning

career makes sense makes sense and it's so sad it's such a hard work group in and then these people are not appreciated and uh yeah uh generally

speaking judged and um and uh accused of favoritism and things like that while they're doing their best to do a very very challenging work by hand I I know I

remember like I talked to I heard from many of my friends that was one of the reasons that I didn't become a chief because I didn't want to do scheduling um I heard one of from one of the Chiefs my friends not in my program different

program that they would get random messages from people on a different rotation res on different rotation why did you schedule me this amount of call why did you schedule me that amount of call so it's very emotional intense and

you never know unless you are doing it that makes sense that makes sense all right so I I want to dive bit about your backgrounds and your

strategies on team building uh you have a background in healthcare you have a PhD um but um sorry I mean you have a PhD you have a background in science uh and you have a background in electrical

engineering and Academia how has your academic experience influenced your approach to entrepreneurship you had a stable job

why did you do this and why did you develop M and how has been the transition from stable academic job to the lifestyle of

Entrepreneurship it's a it's a it's a very good question um as as you mentioned uh I am an outsider from Healthcare and one of the things I

learned very early on is that uh the challenge with Healthcare the fact that there is no shortage of innovation but there is resistance to adopting

innovation in certain areas is something that is completely understandable you know people can go and talk about Healthcare and say you know people in healthcare are still using a fax machine or they're resistant to change but if

you actually put yourself in their place these are people that are playing with people's lives like there's what else what more important thing can you imagine like profession on the planet

honorable and more challenging than playing with your loved ones lives with your own Liv so this is important the fact that people in healthare are very careful uh in adopting technology

completely made sense to me so I I I don't come from that angle at all so um so one of the things I had to learn is that if I want to do this I don't want to be another engineer building a product and shoving it down and then

expecting people to adopt and come to it you build it and they come that's not the case as we know in entrepreneurship and it's particularly not the case in healthcare so that's why you know from early on I I realized that I have to

educate myself about Healthcare that I started by reading as I was bedridden dealing with with my medical condition uh my bedtime stories very all in healthcare from strategy and policy in Canada why Healthcare the universal

healthcare system in Canada is the way it is today all the way all the way to systems like the one in UK scan Scandinavian countries and other places that have better performance overall and

so um so I had to learn it but the parts that really helped me get there quickly was the fact that as an academic for the past 20 years I would I you know I always say to people if you are coming

from an research intensive University and be doing grant applications you're basically an entrepreneur because there are great Parallels for every Grant application you find a problem the

problem has to be big enough you got to get uh grants write the grant get a bunch of people excited to give you the money then you have to hire you have to equip your lab then you got to build and

deliver now having said that you deliver papers you know it doesn't have to lead necessarily to to a product and that changes the game quite quite substantially but the process overall is

not that different so I think a lot of academics are serial entrepreneurs and they don't even know that you just have to change your objective right your cost function is different you got to make sure there's a product and people pay

for it there's got to be product Market Channel fit at some point that you might not need as much for a fiveyear grant from ener or cihr uh but so those things really help

me but I really had to make sure that I compliment myself with the other stuff specifically for healthcare and the other thing that so those are all the good things positive things that help the one that doesn't help is that we as

academics and I think you you understand it because you do a substantial amount of research group and and you're you're doing clinical work as academics were taught to be perfectionists at least my

era for the past 20 years and that is the biggest killer of Entrepreneurship you just cannot be perfect so you have to understand design imperfection

controlled imperfection and then work through a series of iterations to get a product out get feedback on it and this is not only the product development aspect of it but also the business

development aspects that they cannot be perfect and you just have to work towards incremental Improvement and and and lean methodologies and uh growth

growth mind mindsets those are things that are now common everybody these are buzzwords that people talk about but I had to learn those and you know you know those are some of the things that I keep talking about with people with younger

entrepreneurs that if you're coming from Academia the one thing you got to get rid of is perfectionism yeah I can't agree more I

think we just like the simplest thing is writing a research paper you cannot submit it you can't tell people about the results until it's very very very perfect no errors nothing and that that

doesn't work in um entrepreneurship I think you brought up very simple and sweet um analogy that or academics are

serial entrepreneurs but the product is different I completely agree with that I completely agree with that uh you

mentioned about hiring people to your uh whether you are writing grants or whether you are um developing a product uh what strategies you look for when you

hire team members what advice would you give let's say there is a an academic person right now listening to this podcast and what ADV would you tell him when they

want to build a team to uh or hire people to to develop a product absolutely it's a that's a that's an

important and and and key area because as you keep hearing from investors and possibly uh Dusty entrepreneurs that are

getting up to start the the next big thing after a failure is that the most important thing for success is your team right so I love the fact that you put your finger on it so we have developed

very very good methodology actually very systematic about hiring and who we work with um we call it the agile care is our own system the word care connects to healthcare as well which is really nice

and it comes to a bunch of things we actually go out there and specifically and systematically um use a scorecard for each individual hire that touches on

adaptability and flexibility of that individual that's the a of agile care then we go to growth mindset integrity and honesty uh they need to be lean

operator and resourceful that's again one of the requirements of any startup uh especially for us because we never raised and we grew this company with

basically support and our number one investors are are our customers uh so I'm really proud of that obviously you know not not for everybody but I'm so

proud that we could build and learn and grow with our customers and then empathic Communicator communication is so important for us you know that

qualifier being an empathic Communicator in interaction internally and externally with our uh clinicians uh being clinician focused and caring you know we

want to hire people that are really really understanding our philosophy is that you got to start at home we're here to take care of our clinicians if you want to give tools to people in health

healthare who really see value in providing better environment for staff and they they truly believe that it is with that that you can achieve patient outcomes reduce cost improve access so

that's again something that we actually systematically check in people that we bring on board altruistic team player extremely important this is a boat we're

all in the same boat at M and I really important for for everybody who joins us to understand that we're everybody's problem is everybody's problem and uh being responsible and being

effective so agile care is the model that we've been adopting and I really really uh swear by it oh wow uh do you

do that like is there a a type of like questionnaire you make people who are applying to a job in your team to fill or is it something that you discover you

try to ask about when you are doing the interview thank you so much for asking no I'm not that as smart for sure I had to learn I've made a ton of mistakes in fact my biggest mistakes are my initial hires uh

with a and and I'm not saying that being being derogative or uh you know disrespectful not that these people were bad they were not a good match right and

this is my philosophy in life there are not there are no bad people it's always a question of being at the right time and place being a being a good compliment to the rest of the team right

so I think we started with a team that wasn't cooh iive wasn't complimentary and fantastic people really strong candidates that could come and actually

crush your team and take it take the entire you know uh ship down so um the methodology that we use comes from a book called who I don't know the rest of

the tagline wh is the book is really focused on methodology tested for about three four decades in hiring people in areas that you don't understand really well for

example I'm not a frontend developer uh but how do I go about hire front-end developers that are really the best at their job it's a challenge for a lot of people so the book gives you mechanisms

and structures that are systematic and move you away from you know subjective decision making to really objective decision making that drive results so

that's the framework we adopted but at the core of that methodology is something called a scorecard that you need to develop right off the bat before you start meeting the candidates and so we've been very uh

purposeful and careful about that agile care structure that we adopted wow very interesting what do you

think about using personality tests is that something that um you use or you consider uh I think it can be very

impactful and helpful roupen there's so many good ones from the Meyers to a bunch of newer ones that people have used in business we haven't used them but I think it would really help one of

the things I can see is that after you find the person on the team that really meets those you know seven eight criteria that we're looking for a personality test would allow us to

really understand how we can work more effectively together like if I know somebody is coming from the color blue or red of you know this particular uh

personality test is going to really change my expectations in in in the response that I would get from them when I have something crazy or Innovative versus something that is very

rudimentary or basic um there's a there's an analogy that you used by Kim Scott the author of radical cander in her book where she says you know there are there are people that are just not a

good fit you got to let them go uh from the good people on your company you got rock stars and Superstars so it's exactly that so when it comes to understanding if somebody on the team who's delivering results is a rock star

superstar which is then going to tell you in what direction you would move them whether they grow vertically or horizontally in the company and those are the things that I think can really

benefit from personality test but I'm not very optimistic about using those tests at at the entry level or basically

at your decision- making level for the hiring I hope you like this episode stay around for more because we are going to explore Dr yousef's amazing journey into

the healtech W in our next episode