Full Podcast Transcript: Sloan Foster: Hello everybody. Welcome to the first edition of Calavista Conversations. I'm Sloan Foster, CMO at Calavista and today we have a friend of mine, Jeanne Teshler in our studio, who has a young tech company focused on healthcare. We've known each other for quite a while and [I’m] excited to hear what her new adventure is today. So, Jeanne, welcome and why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself? Jeanne Teshler: Well, thanks, Sloan. It's good to see you again and be in the studio with you. I sure appreciate this time. My name is Jeanne Teshler, I’m the CEO of a young tech company called Wellsmith. Just for a little bit of a background before we get into what we're doing here. My husband and I are the founding partners of Wellsmith, and he and I have been in business together for as long as we've been married, so a good quarter of a century now. We have worked in a variety of different businesses, always entrepreneurial in how we do things. But we've run many companies, starting with, you know, production and catalog design, we've gone into creative services. We've done a lot of work in consulting. And over the course of the last 25 years or so, we've worked in a lot of fields including consumer product goods, technology, and healthcare. Jeanne Teshler: So our lifespan is working through the intersection of those and how to actually create great consumer experiences for all of our customers and all of our clients. And over time we've looked at problems and we've tried to figure out the most creative and the most consumer-centric way to solve them. So that's kind of the impetus for where we sit today. And what's interesting about what we're doing now is, Wellsith, sits at this interesting intersection of consumer behavior, technology and healthcare in such a way that it's bringing new light into how we solve what we see as personally as a problem in this country. And that is the growing amount of unhealthy people there are, if you look around, the statistics at the CDC saying that within the next 10 years, we're going to hit about a 50 percent obesity rate in the United States and we're going to see a lot more chronic conditions like diabetes, like heart failure and heart disease like COPD, which you know, is from smoking generally, but also has a lot of, a lot of basis in unhealthy behaviors in addition to smoking. So what we looked at is, as you know, personally, my family is full of, of bad health behaviors. There's nothing but heart disease and diabetes in my family, no matter how far I look. Sloan Foster: I think all of us probably have a little bit of that. Jeanne Teshler: That's true. And as we start looking at this, what fascinated me from a personal standpoint is having worked in all these different industries and the consumer product side, I'm in the technology side and in the healthcare side, we started to see over the last 10 years, in particular, all these little interesting bits and pieces of people trying to move the needle on health and what was missing is a way to bring all those pieces together. So that became a standing passion of ours is to figure out how to solve healthcare problems in new and interesting ways, and that’s where we came up with the idea of Wellsmith. Sloan Foster: The intersection of all those different elements and saw the intersection coming together at this point in time where it's needed and not any one company was solving the problem effectively, I'm sure. Jeanne Teshler: Correct. Correct. Sloan Foster: Well great, so where are you, what led you, I assume this is what led you to this idea is seen and what made you decide that now was the time to start a company? And time was of the essence? Jeanne Teshler: Well, we had prototype the idea of Wellsmith in our spare time during, you know, in between consulting gigs with our other company. And we started to realize that what was necessary was a brand new, basically a platform for solving this problem that, you know, if you look at the technology side, there are things like FitBits and different things that help people monitor their activity to be more active in healthcare. There are programs that you can join, for example, to help manage your diabetes or your weight loss. And on the consumer side, there's nothing but people trying to sell you on good healthy behavior, along with an equal number or greater number of people trying to get you not to eat healthy, etcetera. And all that. And so what we decided was there needed to be a platform way to solve this. And how do we bring all of those pieces together and make it work? And so our mission became a way, and we knew it was possible because the technology is now caught up in such a way to do so, the mission is to help reverse the trend of chronic conditions and bad health in the United States by giving people the right tools in a simple and memorable and actionable way to manage their own health. And that's what we've done with Wellsmith. We've created this platform by which consumers have an easy way to manage their health and healthcare has an easy way to help monitor and intervene as necessary in that care. And that's the Wellsmith platform in a nutshell. Sloan Foster: Great. And you've already had your first deployment. You've had been in the market for a brief period of time, but you actually launched the first part of 2018. So talk to me a little bit about where you are in the deployment of the platform and what you expected. Jeanne Teshler: Sure. So we're rolling out live. We've been in trial for the last year, year and a half, doing some testing with one of our customers on how this actually behaves in the wild, as we call it, in live action. So we start rolling out fully in, starting in January, so a couple of weeks from now, we start the new year with a turning this baby onto a live audience. And what we'll do is, we'll probably by the end of 2018, I have anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of users on the platform and none of the gate within about that year, we should be the largest population risk management platform in the country. It's just, there are few doing things like what we're doing, but no one to the scale and to the breadth of what we are doing. Sloan Foster: Obviously, time to market was very important and a product that works. So, what made you decide to partner with Calavista and trust a partner instead of doing it internally? Jeanne Teshler: Well, that was fairly simple on our part. We had brushed up against Calavista to during a couple of our other consulting agreements and consulting gigs over the years and had always been looking for an opportunity to work with Calavista in Lawrence and Sandeep. And so when we were, when we got the funding, when we got the go-ahead to actually build this product, we knew that we had to do it fast and all of my husband and I are great brilliant business, etcetera. Patting myself on the back of that. But we're not engineers. And the last thing we needed to do was trying to solve engineering at the same time we were trying to build a product. We had clearly the vision, we clearly had the prototypes. What we needed to do was get to market fast and we knew the team at Calavista could get us there. Jeanne Teshler: I mean, think about this Sloan. We went from nothing in October of 20, 2015 to a product in beta testing and in a clinical trial by January of 2017. Three and a half months to build actually was March. So six months we went from zero to a prototype in the market being used in a hospital system, compliance issues. Exactly. And so being able to jump through the hoops of not only designing a product but also designing it to those really rigid privacy standards and HIPAA standards for security, Calavista and didn't miss a beat. And anytime we needed to throw something at them that looked kind of odd, they would analyze it, they would, they would look at it and go, OK, I think we can do this. And they would. And that was one of the best things about is we did not have to worry about the engineering while we were trying to figure out the rest of the business. Sloan Foster: Sounds like that is a good partnership. I was going to ask how that impacted your time to market, but it actually accelerated your testing and opportunities, which I'm sure major investors happy again. I mean a lot of you don't have a whole lot of time to please or displease people. Our goal, of course, was not displeased them, but if we could bring it to market before they had a chance to think twice and go had, you know, you get rid of a lot of doubt when you can put something in the market and they can see it working. And the amazing part was our theories were right about customer engagement. If we could make it simple enough for people to follow simple plans and manage their own health, they would get better and it worked. And that was the most amazing thing to us. We knew internally and deepen our hearts. That was the problem that people are active in their own health and they're spending time on their health every day that they will get better and they will stay healthy. Jeanne Teshler: Convincing healthcare that's the case is a different problem than engineering. So I had Calavista and their teams building and managing this product. I was going out and reassuring the customers that this would work. And so I didn't have to do two jobs. I had one. And that was critical to me because getting them to understand the importance of what we were doing was harder than actually building the product. And that's the product. And you tested it. You've had quite an impact even though as only being piloted right now. So do you mind sharing some of those numbers? I know it hasn't scaled where you want it to go and have an officially launched, but I'm going to share some of the impacts you've had. Um, yes. And so during trial. So the philosophy that we'
