[ALISON]:
You’re listening to the Grow a Group Practice podcast. Whether you’re thinking of starting a group practice, are in the beginning stages of a group practice, or want to learn how to scale up your already existing group practice, we have lots of great content for you.

Hello, and welcome to the Grow a Group Practice podcast. I’m Alison Pidgeon, your host. Today, I have Danny Freed on the podcast. He is the founder and CEO of Blueprint Health, which is a very cool new tool that clinicians can use to provide measurement-based care to their clients. But, before we get into the interview with Danny, I wanted to tell you about a couple of events that are coming up in October. I’m going to be speaking at both of them. The first one is Killin’It Camp which is put on by Practice of the Practice. It’s going to be October 5th through the 7th. Normally, the conference is in Colorado, but because of Coronavirus this year, we are having a virtual conference. So, tickets are super cheap, only $95, and there are a ton of great speakers, and I’m going to be speaking about group practice. So, I think, no matter where you are with your business and what you’re looking for help with, there will be something that you’ll be interested in, that you’ll find helpful. If you’re interested in getting on the list for that, it is killinitcamp.com, and you can get on a list for that or buy a ticket.

And then, the second event in October that I’m going to be a part of is through my virtual assistant company called Move Forward Virtual Assistants, we’re doing what’s called a Scale Up Services Summit, and that’s going to be October 20th through the 23rd. Again, that’s another virtual event, but it’s totally free for participants, and what our purpose is really helping practice owners to learn about different tools and different services that they can use to develop sustainable growth in their business. So, we have a number of different speakers, myself and Whitney Owens, another consultant through Practice of the Practice is going to be there, and we’re going to cover a variety of topics, but if you are looking to figure out, okay, I know I want to get, you know, maybe, my group practice to a certain size and I just, I don’t know how to get there, or I know I need to hire out for these various things, like, I don’t want to be the bookkeeper anymore, like, I need to, you know, just pay somebody else to do that who knows what they’re doing, this is a good place to just become familiar with what those things are and help you figure out how to really begin to scale up your business. So, if you’re interested in that, it is at moveforwardvirtualassistants.com/scaleup, you can put your name and email in there to be on our list, so you get information about that. And yeah, so I think that’s about it.

I am trekking right along here with consulting and podcasting, and if you are interested in getting connected with more group practice owners, definitely check out our Facebook group, it is under the name PoP Group Practice Owners, so like Practice of the Practice, but it’s PoP. You just have to answer a couple questions just verifying that yes, you are either interested in starting a group practice or you are already a group practice owner and, you know, come on over and join the group. I share, you know, valuable information as I come across it, and there’s always a good conversation going on in there, so if you’re, you know, needing some extra support, it’s totally free to join that group. Feel free to find us on Facebook. So, let’s dive right in here, with the interview with Danny Freed from Blueprint Health.

Today, on the podcast, I’m talking to Danny Freed, the founder and CEO at Blueprint, which is a digital mental health screening and assessment platform. They have partnered with mental health clinics across the country who use Blueprint to more easily practice measurement-based care and earn additional reimbursement revenue for doing so. Prior to Blueprint, Danny founded a mobile security startup called Companion and graduated from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Welcome, Danny.

[DANNY]:
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, I’m really excited to talk to you. I know we were introduced by Jeremy Zug, who owns Practice Solutions, and he had great things to say about you, and so we connected recently, and I’ve been talking to you actually about using your service in my own practice. So, I’m excited that you were able to come on the podcast today and tell our audience about it. Maybe a good place to start would be just kind of telling us how you started Blueprint and what it is, for people who aren’t familiar.

[DANNY]:
Yeah, yeah. So, the founding story actually starts about seven or eight years ago, I was a junior at the University of Michigan, and one of my closest friends and actually roommates at the time, was struggling with bipolar disorder. And he actually had access to care, he was seeing a psychiatrist, he was seeing a therapist, but unfortunately took his own life between appointments. And so, this was roughly 2013 and, at the time, this was really my first exposure or awareness or experience with, you know, mental illness. Up until that point, just really didn’t have much insight into these illnesses, for better or worse. And this happened, and over the next couple of years, I spent a lot of time just trying to learn more about these illnesses about these disorders, eventually about the healthcare system that was in place to support people struggling with these disorders. So, I met a ton of smart people, asked a bunch of questions, learned a lot over these next two or three years, and always thinking about it through the lens of technology. My background is in technology and building products and companies, I don’t have a clinical background, so all of this clinical and healthcare stuff was very new to me and very interesting.

And so, over these two or three years, just really my focus was not on starting a company, but it was actually just trying to better understand what my friend had been going through. And so, building up this mental model over the years, didn’t really do anything with it, and fast-forward a couple years, I had moved out to Chicago, I was working at a company here in Chicago called Trunk Club, doing product and design and engineering work there, and I had an idea to build a really simple product, kind of like a smart journaling service, pretty much meant to help individuals track and monitor their own mood and mental health and wellbeing through conversation, through a chatbot. It was a really simple idea. I built this in the course of a couple of weekends. I launched it on a Monday. Six months later, there was roughly 50,000 people who had heard about and use this thing. Another six months later, close to 100,000 people had used this thing. And it was a really interesting time where we didn’t know, at the time, why people were using this or how people were using this, we were kind of learning as we were going and definitely got a little bit lucky.

But we saw a couple of interesting things happen through that initial kind of project. The basic premise is, we would send a message to individuals on a daily basis, check in with them, ask them a series of questions, engage them in this conversation about their own mental health, and we would analyze the conversation and the text within that conversation, and then once a week, we would send back a report. And the report was pretty simple, but it was meant to be a quantified self type of report about your mental health and your mental wellbeing, and pretty quickly, we saw this report was inspiring people to continue having this open dialogue with this kind of chatbot, and share more and more information, so long as they got valuable information back in the report. But we also saw pretty quickly, through some user research, that most of the people using this product were also seeing a therapist or a psychiatrist or a social worker or some type of clinician, and that was happening totally independently of this product that we had built. So, that was really interesting.

And then we actually learned that a segment of those active individuals were also screenshotting the reports we would send them from their phone, printing them out, and then bringing them to their next appointment and giving them to their provider. And when we started to hear about this, we really stepped back and realized the bigger opportunity here is to take that concept of engaging with individuals, asking questions, collecting valuable information, but share that information with the people who can really have the most impact which, at the end of the day, are these mental health conditions that these individuals were already seeing. And so that’s really how the idea for Blueprint came to be and, you know, in 2019, we launched that clinical grade platform in roughly August and September, and as you said, we’re now partnered with clinics across the country who collectively serve close to 50 or 60,000 patients, and what people use Blueprint for is, like you said, to measure outcomes, collect data from patients both before, during, after, and between appointments, and then hopefully utilize that information at the follow-up appointment to make more efficient or more effective decisions with just more information at your fingertips. So that’s kind of the backstory, that’s kind of the last seven years of my life in a few minutes.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, that’s great. And I really appreciate when, you know, people have an experience in their life and then they try to, you know, take their, you know, skillset and their strengths and, like, make something positive out of it, which it seems like that’s what you’ve done, so that’s really cool. Was that early app that you were talking about, was that the same name, Blueprint, or did that go by a different name?

[DANNY]:
No, it went by a different name. It was called a couple things. It started out being called Joy, and Joy was actually, like, the character that you interacted with, and then it became Hello, Joy, which was kind of the initial way to get that robot or chatbot to respond to you. And then, when we switched over to become more of a clinical grade product in 2019, that’s when we rebranded and became Blueprint.

[ALISON]:
Okay, so you can’t get the Hello, Joy app anymore?

[DANNY]:
It’s still floating around there on Facebook Messenger. But yeah, it’s not something we actively are developing or focused on today.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, one of the big reasons why I wanted you to come on is because I know one of your big clients are group practices, and obviously that is the whole purpose of our podcast, to give good information to group practice owners or people who are wanting to start a group practice. So, do you see specific things related to group practices that you find especially beneficial when you have a facility with small providers in terms of what Blueprint can do?

[DANNY]:
Yeah, absolutely. So, I think the first benefit of Blueprint is that we can make measurement-based care more accessible. And so, there’s a ton of research out there that shows that when patients receive measurement-based care, which is the process of routinely administering these standardized validated outcome measures and then utilizing that data at follow-up appointments, when that happens, there’s higher remission rates, higher responses to treatment, all sorts of clinical benefits, which is great. And so, we’ve actually focused on group practices because it helps us reach as many patients as possible with our small team. But one of the cool parts about a group practice is that you can not only look at this data from an individual provider to an individual patient, but you can also zoom out and look at, you know, a single clinicians caseload, but also all the clinicians in that practice’s caseloads and how that clinic or how that group practice or how those outcomes are trending over time. So, you can start to see almost population level data, and you can dig into and say, okay, you know, these providers are having a really positive effect according to the symptom rating scales with these types of assessments or these types of disorders, so that can be used and is being used for all sorts of different purposes, everything from using that data to try and negotiate better rates with insurance, to kind of training and supervision purposes, to a whole number of other use cases that we’re kind of still even exploring and learning about from our partners, how they’re using that data.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, that was one thing I was really excited about when you were talking to me and my staff about Blueprint, was the idea that we would have a lot of data based on, you know, what our outcomes are in terms of, you know, how quickly are our clients getting better and that type of thing. I know, you know, it’s commonly recommended that, as a practice owner, you go to the insurance company once or twice a year to ask for a raise and, you know, they want to see data, they want to see, you know, evidence that you’re doing good work and getting people better effectively. And so, I think that could be huge in terms of being able to get those raises, because without them, you know, with taking insurance, obviously, then I can’t get my staff a raise and that kind of thing. So, that was one aspect that I was really excited about, because I think that would be a big game changer in terms of going to the insurance companies and getting a raise.

[DANNY]:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that we think about often is parity on the, kind of, the pay level, at the insurance level, between mental health providers and, like, physical health providers or, you know, kind of, everything else, which is a large problem. A lot of people are working on it, but I think one of the ways we can help with that is basically by helping providers prove the value, instead of having to tell the story that, you know, here’s how I’m making a difference and here’s how treatment is effective. We can do that and we can also back it up with all the data, and we can make it really easy to gather that data without having to require extra work or time or energy, because most clinicians are extremely busy already and they don’t necessarily have time to add another, you know, another piece into their workflow. So, it’s, I think, a really interesting opportunity, when you think about it, at the macro level of how we can get pay parity across the board.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, for sure. And I think what’s nice, too, is you figured out from the billing side how administering these assessments can result in potentially a little bit of extra reimbursement from insurance companies. Can you explain that a little bit?

[DANNY]:
Yeah, yeah. So, there were a handful of codes, right around that time when we were transitioning from that direct to consumer initial product, Joy, to Blueprint. A couple of new CPT codes, at the time I didn’t even know what CPT codes were, but a couple of these new codes came out, and actually we’re covering this service of administering and scoring and documenting the results to the use, standardized assessments or symptom rating scales, or sometimes the insurance plans even call them psychological tests, and, you know, what’s really interesting is that we’ve actually, since we launched, had a number of insurance plans reach out to us and see how we could help more of their providers utilize these types of services, because they want their members receiving measurement-based care.

And the reason is, it’s actually more financially efficient for them, the more members that they have receiving this type of care. It’s more effective for patients, it’s more efficient. And so, to them it’s kind of this, you know, initial upfront investment financially to see long-term ROI. I wish I could say that it’s purely kind of a, you know, patient-centric thing, but it’s a beautiful thing when financial incentives and the, you know, the interest of patients is so tightly aligned. And so, what we focus on is two things; one, helping to reduce all the confusion and variance around the CPT codes, there’s three to five codes, depending on the state, that can cover these different services, and there’s a ton of variants when it comes to the provider license level, the insurance plan, you know, the actual service being provided. And so, we take that process and we simplify it and we can even automate the workflow and submit claims on behalf of providers.

And then the other interesting thing we can do is, something that’s becoming more and more possible now is, as we have scale, we can see, you know, the best guidelines across the board, the best ways to submit these claims, purely by the data set that we’ve been able to build up. So, you know, Blueprint is, I would say, a clinical tool first, but fueled by this financial incentive that sits alongside with it. So, we can help providers deliver more efficient, more effective, more data-driven care, and get reimbursed in the process for doing so.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, that was one thing that excited me about your service, is that it just seemed like a win-win all around, in terms of, like you said, giving better care to clients but also potentially helping us as providers to get more reimbursement, which, we all know mental health typically tends to be underpaid, compared to physical health services, so that’s great. I realized that we probably should have talked about this before, but can you tell us a little bit about the types of assessments that are in Blueprint? And also tell us about, there’s kind of like a worksheet component, as well, that clients can utilize?

[DANNY]:
Yeah, so there are kinda three different types of data that we collect today. The first are outcome measures, and we’ve got a library of about, I think we’re at 110 outcome measures. So, these would be, you know, your standard PHQ-9, your GAD-7, but the long list of other outcome measures out there that can measure more pathological constructs and symptoms, can also measure therapeutic alliance… there’s a whole library of these, and we’ve also got screening measures that can help identify which are the right outcome measures to actually assign to a client or a patient. And all of that can be set up to be automatically delivered to clients, automatically scored, automatically documented and charted, and, you know, the whole end-to-end process kind of managed by Blueprint. So, that’s the first type of data.

The second thing that we do is, we can also administer deliver therapeutic worksheets or symptom trackers or mood trackers. We call all these things a daily check-in, but they could be things like a CBT thought record or a DBT diary card, and we’ve got a pretty big library of these, as well, and clinicians can go in and they can assign specific worksheets to their patient. Patient can then set up what cadence they want to receive those, and they can complete them on their own time, either through our mobile app or during sessions. So, that’s the second bucket. And then the third bucket, we call it passive data, and this is data that, if a patient wants to opt into, they can, and it’s things like exercise, sleep, movement patterns, all of these different data streams that we can actually measure from the sensors on the patient’s smartphone, or their wearable devices if they have them and they’ve connected them.

So, one of the really interesting things I think that we can measure through this is a metric we call homestay, so this is the number of hours per day that you spend at home, and there’s, you know, a handful of different research studies out there that have concluded there is some correlation or potential causation between, I think, this one specifically with depression symptoms. And so, this bucket is much more kind of in the research realm, but it’s an interesting supplemental data point, and obviously, also over the past six months, it’s been an interesting metric to track, really for anyone. Most people are seeing an increase in homestay over the past six months compared to the six months prior. But there’s a number of other metrics as well that we can track that can be relevant for certain clinicians and certain patients.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, that’s awesome. And I really like that you included that because I feel like, you know, when clients come to us and they might be struggling with depression or anxiety or whatever, they don’t often think about, well, how are you sleeping? How are you eating? Are you getting some exercise? Like, you know, I think a lot of therapists now see all of those issues and symptoms as holistic and everything is sort of connected, but I don’t think clients always connect those dots, and so I think it’s cool that you’ve integrated that.

[DANNY]:
Yeah, and I think one of the more powerful things that we offer clients, and we get feedback on this all the time, is they have access to this data as well and so they can be more actively involved in their treatment plan and their care, because purely they have awareness over these metrics and they can see some of these charts and how things are trending. So, it’s a cool experience for patients as well, you know, they’re not just filling out a survey and clicking ‘Submit’ and then that’s it. We really try and build this experience, you know, really around them and having them involved. And so, we get a lot of good feedback from patients and from clinicians as well.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, I think even just the act of, like, taking a couple minutes a day to think, like, well, how am I feeling today? You know, did I sleep well last night? You know, all those kinds of things because we don’t often do that, we get so busy, we don’t think about those things. Yeah. So, that actually brings me to my next question, which is, you know, what types of feedback are you getting from providers and clients about kind of their experience with using the service and, you know, what they, I guess, what they’re experiencing in terms of outcomes?

[DANNY]:
Yeah, so we get really awesome feedback from both clinicians and patients and there’s a couple of conversations that stand out in my mind. But to kind of summarize, I think one of the more powerful things that we offer providers, that is understated but really powerful once you see it and use it in action, is just the ability to visualize these outcome measures over time. So, even if you were taking the time and energy to routinely administer and score and document a PHQ-9, let’s say, at every appointment, oftentimes, you’re left with a stack of papers with numbers on them, and that can be helpful, but once you see those scores plotted over time and you can see them alongside that individuals exercise patterns and sleep patterns and, you know, movement patterns and all the other data that we that we collect, it’s really powerful. And so, we have stories both from providers and from patients about how they can now finally see this disorder. And so, we had a story from a clinician who had this conversation with their patient who had been recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and they could actually visualize, sort of, the ups and downs and the swings through some of these different measures.

So, just that pure visualization aspect we get a ton of feedback on, and then, you know, the other feature that we’ve built in based on feedback is something we call a safety net. And some of these outcome measures will ask about suicidal ideation, for example. And so, one of the things when we were starting out, we’re trying to figure out how should we handle that? How do providers want us to handle that? And where we landed was a safety net feature where, if providers want, they can turn this feature on and if a patient positively endorses suicidal ideation on the PHQ-9, for example, then we do a couple things. Number one, we prompt the patient with a screen that positions the safety net as a tool that can actually help them get connected to crisis resources, so it could be Crisis Text Line, or the suicide hotline, or really any other resources that that group practice or that provider wants to show up here. And so, we had one example of a provider telling us about how patient got this, connected with the crisis resource, and really credited Blueprint with, you know, assisting in helping to keep this patient alive, and that was a pretty cool one to hear because that’s, I mean, quite literally why we do what we do, why we started this company. And so, we’ve heard a number of stories like that, but just, when we’re able to hear those stories, it’s really awesome and everyone on the team, like, people, including myself, when we heard that were almost tearing up, how awesome it was and how powerful it was.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, that’s amazing. And I think too, you had said that, you know, kind of the power of giving these assessments is that, you know, you’re sort of maybe asking a question that you wouldn’t normally ask in the session and, you know, you’re learning more, having more insight into, you know, what’s happening with that client than you might have picked up on in the session.

[DANNY]:
Exactly, right. So, sometimes these things can go unnoticed. Whether it’s, well, this was how I was feeling two weeks ago, or sometimes more than that, but also sometimes things are just difficult to bring up and speak about, even if you have a really great, you know, relationship and partnership with your clinician. Sometimes it’s easier to just fill out this survey and communicate it that way, and so… This does not replace that clinical conversation or the appointment or the session, it’s really meant to enhance it and give that provider more insight up front and also let the patient, the feedback we get from patients, it helps them better articulate themselves. Whether it’s because they can track this day-to-day instead of looking back at the past week or being able to share some of those more difficult things that might be harder to share during that appointment in a face-to-face session.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, that’s great. One thing, too, so we did a demo with myself and my staff at my practice so we could see what it actually looks like, and one thing I was really impressed by was, it seemed like everything was very streamlined. I think that was one of my concerns that I had voiced, like, I don’t want to necessarily, you know, give my clinicians something extra to do that’s going to be time consuming, obviously they have a lot on their plate already. So, can you talk a little bit about just sort of, like, how much time it takes on the clinician side and kind of what feedback you’ve gotten about that like the time element?

[DANNY]:
Yeah, that’s been and will continue to be really our number one focus is, building this tool to really work on your behalf instead of making you work for it, as a provider. Our mission is to really drive adoption of measurement-based care, and we know we can’t do that unless we make it so easy that there’s really no reason you wouldn’t do this with clients. And so, everything from getting patients enrolled on Blueprint to getting assessments delivered and scored and documented, to surfacing up the insights at the start of an appointment, to getting claims submitted, the whole process can really be automated and managed by the platform and/or our team. But it can also be really personal and high touch, so if you’re a clinician who wants to go in and select a specific assessment or change an assessment cadence for an individual patient, you can do that, too. So, one of the, sort of, principles that we build our product with is convenience, but also control. And so, the system can be set up to just work and you don’t need to necessarily do anything to make it work. You can almost set it and forget it, in a way. Or, you can really have, you know, a really high touch experience as a provider, you can go in and control, you know, each individual thing, and it’s really up to each provider’s comfort level and working style and also capacity.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, that’s great. And I know you said, too, you’re starting to integrate, somewhat, with some of the more common electronic health records. Is that right?

[DANNY]:
Exactly, yeah. So, our long-term goal is to surface this information up where providers already are. Right now, most providers use our portal and they can log in, they can export PDF reports, or they can view it in the portal and see these insights. And so, many providers have this open in a separate browser window or a separate tab, but we would love to embed these results and these insights where providers already are. So, it’s something I think, over the long term, we’ll do more and more of, and we’re kind of scratching the surface with that right now.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, I think what’s great is that, you know, so many clinicians would really like to use more assessments and more, you know, measurement-based data, but it’s like the, you know, in reality, it just, it adds a lot of time and, like you said, you end up with, like, this stack of papers, and now we have to scan it into the EHR and, like, the data is not aggregated, and, you know, you start to see why clinicians just abandon it pretty quickly. And so, what I like about this so much is that it just makes it so easy and simple and, like you said, kind of does all that, you know, data aggregation for you. So, it’ll just make it easier to implement/integrate it into your, like, clinical practice.

[DANNY]:
Yeah, one of the things we often talk about is, to drive adoption, we have to do two things; we have to make it taste good and then we have to make it really, really easy to eat, which is kind of a metaphor, but, you know, making it taste good is putting some financial incentive behind it and having a reason to try something new or adjust from the status quo, and then making it really easy to eat is making it so easy that, you know, once you know it tastes good, there’s no reason why, there’s no friction in the sort of process to start doing that thing. So, everything we do is kind of through those two lenses and we have long way to go. We’re by no means perfect or fully there. But we’ve made a ton of good progress over the last 6 to 12 months.

[ALISON]:
Yeah. Is there anything else that you wanted to add about Blueprint Health before we wrap up today?

[DANNY]:
Oh, well, we’re always looking for more clinical partners. Most of our partners are somewhere between 5 to 100-provider group practices. We can work with practices that are smaller, we can work with practices that are bigger or, if you just want to reach out and learn more about measurement-based care and some of the stuff we’re doing, we’d love to talk to you. And we’re also offering a discount for anyone who comes to us from this podcast.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, awesome. And the discount is 50% off the annual implementation and support fees, right?

[DANNY]:
Correct.

[ALISON]:
Okay, awesome. Yeah. So, there’s no, like, code or link you have to go to. If you just contact Blueprint Health and let them know you heard about it through the Grow a Group Practice podcast, then they will give you that discount. I want to thank you so much, Danny, for taking the time to come on today. I think this is really exciting and I’m interested to see as you grow and more of this, you know, measurement-based care comes into practice, I think it will just be good for everybody, the providers and the clients. And yeah, I’m excited to see how you continue to do good in the world of mental health.

[DANNY]:
Thank you so much for having me on. It’s been awesome.

[ALISON]:
Yeah, thank you.

So, I really love that interview. I think what Danny is doing with Blueprint Health is super cool, and I’m looking to potentially implement it in my own practice. I just see it as being a win-win for clients, for providers, yeah, I think it’d be really cool to see clients be able to look at that data and feel more, I guess, included, or feel like they have more power over, you know, helping themselves in their treatment and helping themselves get better. So, I really appreciate that Danny took the time to talk with us today. And if you’re looking for a way to get a hold of Danny, his email is [email protected], and if you want to check out the service, the website is www.blueprint-health.com. So, thank you so much and I’ll see you next time.

Grow a Group Practice is part of the Practice of the Practice Podcast Network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you grow your group practice. To hear other podcasts like the Imperfect Thriving podcast, Bomb Mom podcast, Beta Male Revolution, or Empowered and Unapologetic, go to practiceofthepractice.com/network.

This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, Practice of the Practice, or the guests are providing legal, mental health, or other professional information. If you need a professional, you should find one.