Levi Pavlovsky of medflyt: In Light Of The Pandemic, Here Are The 5 Things We Need To Do To Improve The US Healthcare System
An Interview With Luke Kervin
An excellent healthcare provider should be obsessed with their patients and caregivers, rather than their paycheck. Customers and patients should be top of mind and put before all else. Richard Branson put it best, “Take Care of Your Employees and They’ll Take Care of Your Business.”
The COVID-19 Pandemic taught all of us many things. One of the sectors that the pandemic put a spotlight on was the healthcare industry. The pandemic showed the resilience of the US healthcare system, but it also pointed out some important areas in need of improvement.
In our interview series called “In Light Of The Pandemic, Here Are The 5 Things We Need To Do To Improve The US Healthcare System”, we are interviewing doctors, hospital administrators, nursing home administrators, and healthcare leaders who can share lessons they learned from the pandemic about how we need to improve the US Healthcare System.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure to interview Levi Pavlovsky of medflyt
For over ten years, Levi Y. Pavlovsky has been a noteworthy leader in the home care industry. You may know him from his work as the COO and Co-founder at Medflyt, an app that connects caregivers with home care providers and manages everything they need to succeed as a caregiver. Levi can also be credited with contributions and being responsible for managing the growth of both, Girling Community Care and Prime Home Health Care Services. Before working in the healthcare space, Levi got his start working in Denver, Colorado, managing sales and generating new business at Yellow Pages.
Levi holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Yeshiva College in Manhattan, New York. Today Levi continues to help innovate, enhance, and streamline services, agencies and caregivers to help provide for varying communities.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into our interview, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about your backstory and a bit about what brought you to this specific career path?
I started my career in the home healthcare space working for an agency in New York as the VP of Development and Operations. While working there, I noticed the operations were not scalable and didn’t make much sense. The industry was stuck.
It was odd to see people aren’t getting sufficient care because of the outdated systems home care industries were using — in a world with a new iPhone coming out every year, papers and fax machines were still being used to manage the patients’ care and the administration. Every process that should have taken minutes — from staffing caregivers to patients and training the aides to billing — was taking days and weeks due to a very long response time.
There needed to be an urgent evolution in the home health care space and bring it into the 21st century.
I connected with Omer Klein who resides in Tel Aviv, the startup capital of the world, because he had a robust background in the tech space all while I was living in NYC. Our first meeting was a hit — a blunt tech-savvy Israeli entrepreneur in flip flops and meets the American businessman that spent most of his career in a suit. The spark between us was immediate. We became business partners and in 2017 we founded medflyt, a cutting-edge technology platform connecting the healthcare industry to caregivers.
Shortly after launching, we understood that we were not tweaking the industry — we were revolutionizing it. Caregivers are seen as the bottom of the ladder in the healthcare world. Many of them are immigrants who don’t speak English well and are paid the bare minimum. This is a very difficult and taxing job, which is why its agencies are struggling with an average churn rate of 70% a year. That’s astronomical. Imagine needing to replace 70% of your workers every single year. While more than 10,000 baby-boomers become seniors each day — it’s clear that the industry cannot continue in the current path.
Our amazing discovery after releasing the medflyt app was that caregivers want and love to serve their patients. The problem is that no one considers their needs in the current workflows. We learned that focusing on caregivers’ experience is the fastest and most efficient remedy for the home health care industry.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
We launched the first customer in April 2017. We spent so much time updating the app, making it user-friendly for caregivers because we had so much ambition to become successful. We quickly realized we were building something much bigger as caregivers started to review the app and send their appreciation. The staffing process that was made manually by agencies coordinators, was biased and took days suddenly became easy and seamless. I’ll never forget reading a review where a caregiver explained that she was finally able to fill her schedule with work and pay her bills thanks to medflyt. Another mentioned she could finally give her family a Christmas because she had the funds to do so — this was eye opening.
We had five employees at the time and from there we decided this wasn’t about our entrepreneurial spirit, but about helping the people who save the lives of others. We pivoted the mission of the company and focused on being a caregiver-centric brand rather than payor-centric. In this industry, most agencies look to satisfy the payers (i.e. Medicaid, Medicare and insurance companies). At medflyt, we understand the most valuable point of contact with the patient is the caregiver. The caregivers are the ones who meet the patients every day and there are a lot of studies proving that they have a crucial effect on the patient’s condition.
So, building the management system around them — in order to empower them and make their work easier and more efficient — is the key to a better home care for everyone.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I love technology, but I am not an expert when it comes to product building. As we were testing the app, we were constantly doing so in the demo rather than the client-facing version. So, when we launched our first customer, the entire app crashed, as it tends to happen at the first time. We were not prepared for hundreds of people to use it. It was terrifying at the time. Eventually, after a very long night, we corrected the issue and the customer we had this experience with, is still with us today and has watched us make incredible strides over the years.
Another instance was when we were working with a few agencies and had over 1,000 caregivers on our platform. We were just 90 days in from the launch of the app, and about to kick off another agency, but they were big and did not think our system was capable or scalable for their size. We were confident we were and convinced them to move forward with us — and they did because the industry was so hungry for innovation and a solution. They ended up crashing the system for over two months. We learned a valuable lesson and are proud to say they are also one of our customers to this day. It speaks volumes that they were willing to bear the consequences of us updating the app and perfecting it along the way.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Our Greatest Glory Is Not in Never Falling, But in Rising Every Time We Fall” — Confucius.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Predictive Quality Care (PQC) is something medflyt recently coined. The PQC is a new tool we are developing with the goal of efficiently collecting data from caregivers. We recently discovered in a survey we conducted that 70% of caregivers didn’t submit patient reports in the past week. To combat this issue, we developed short and concise questionnaires caregivers must answer before they clock out. From there, our AI will find the small and not so obvious signs that indicate health deterioration. This means that all the valuable data caregivers collect and input into the questionnaire could detect health issues even before major symptoms appear. This can dramatically decrease hospitalizations and prevent complications in patients.
With our upcoming new feature — InstaWage — caregivers won’t have to wait till the end of the week to get paid. They can collect it in real time through the app. This is a small change, but for caregivers who struggle financially — it’s a huge difference that can change lives.
By tying the PQC questionnaire to the process of caregivers clocking-out and then again to InstaWage, Medflyt is building a new workflow where all the participants — caregiver, patient, and agency — get what they want and need in a co-dependent ecosystem.
How would you define an “excellent healthcare provider”?
An excellent healthcare provider should be obsessed with their patients and caregivers, rather than their paycheck. Customers and patients should be top of mind and put before all else. Richard Branson put it best, “Take Care of Your Employees and They’ll Take Care of Your Business.”
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the main focus of our interview. The COVID-19 pandemic has put intense pressure on the American healthcare system. Some healthcare systems were at a complete loss as to how to handle this crisis. Can you share with our readers a few examples of where we’ve seen the U.S. healthcare system struggle? How do you think we can correct these specific issues moving forward?
Over a year ago, everything was flooded with misinformation and contradicting messaging. During the pandemic, you had to quarantine but you could be outside to protest; You don’t have to wear a mask, but you needed to wear a mask everywhere; etc. Fear was sparked as our country focused on the negative rather than success. If one person had a bad reaction to the vaccine, it was put into the spotlight rather than the number of successful doses. Medflyt’s State of the Homecare Industry Report — one of the biggest surveys among US caregivers — highlights the misinformation in the industry as well as the massive shortage of PPE seeing as home care was the last in the industry to receive government supply. 30% reported last May that they didn’t yet get the proper equipment, and 20% said they didn’t get instructions to deal with COVID-19.
At the beginning of the pandemic, CMS released a brief of Covid-19 instructions to home care providers, but it wasn’t in layman’s terms. Agencies just didn’t have the time and resources to educate their aides, especially when it was risky to gather all aides in classes due to the social distancing guidelines.
At medflyt, we understood that we can help, and fast, by using our online training center in the app, and make the vague instructions accessible: we took that document and turned it into an online course designed for a mobile experience using micro-lessons and Instagram story-like videos for caregivers and agencies.
It was translated into 12 different languages — and in less than a week over 35,000 caregivers complete the training — and dozens of thousands later. In a time of chaos, where caregivers had to become heroes without proper protection and instructions — it was a demonstration of what the industry could look like. Imagine what would happen if we still were stuck in the fax and paper era.
Of course the story was not entirely negative. Healthcare professionals were true heroes on the front lines of the crisis. The COVID vaccines are saving millions of lives. Can you share a few ways that our healthcare system really did well? If you can, please share a story or example.
It didn’t start off great, but I think everything ended well. Many of the states approved PPE for hospitals, but not for healthcare agencies. The state dismissed the vital services the home health care space provided. Agencies and caregivers should be at the same level as the hospitals. Finally, after successful lobbying, it was finally approved — It was the most meaningful thing that happened.
Additionally, suddenly, the caregivers were not transparent or invisible anymore — they discovered their importance and how vital they are to the industry. COVID-19 forced a change, and we need to remember it — for a future with increasing demand for home health care.
How do you think we can address the issue of caregiver burnout?
The average caregivers’ churn rate in the industry is around 70% — this is not sustainable. Today, Caregivers are struggling with too many challenges — from language barriers and tedious bureaucracy to stay compliant, to inefficient schedules and lack professional and psychological support. We tackle these issues by empowering caregivers and giving them the proper tools to manage their own careers. It turns out when you let caregivers choose their own shifts (based on algorithms that suggest them the best matching cases) they tend to work 50% more! We see medflyt as the caregiver’s little helper — we remind them what they tend to forget, give them support when they need it, train them personally, and offer advanced tools to manage their work. That way we slash the churn rate by over 35% on average — and that’s continuing to improve.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
We need to rebrand caregiving. It is not just a profession, families do it for their loved ones. Caregivers are lacking the supportive environment and the reflect they truly deserve — they are lifesavers that have perfected companionship.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Website: www.medflyt.com
Medflyt LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/medflyt/
Levi Pavlovsky LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/medflytcofounder/
Instagram (For Caregivers): www.instagram.com/medflyt/
Facebook (For Caregivers): www.facebook.com/medflyt/
Thank you so much for these insights! This was very inspirational and we wish you continued success in your great work.
