Lessons from Caitlin Reiche, Zus Health, on listening to your customers as a Chief Commercial Officer
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Happy Thanksgiving all! I am thankful for each and everyone of you! 🦃
Today, we’re excited to get to know Caitlin Reiche, Chief Commercial Officer at Zus Health — the first Chief Commercial Officer we’ve had on the podcast! Founded in 2020, Zus Health is a health data platform designed to accelerate healthcare data interoperability by providing easy-to-use patient data at the point of care.
At Zus, Caitlin leads the commercial organization with the goal of growing the Zus builder community and is responsible for marketing, sales, partnerships and customer success. Prior to Zus, Caitlin was the Chief Operating Officer of Buoy Health and led Product Strategy at Patient Pop and Athenahealth. She graduated with a MS in Health Policy and Management from Harvard Chan School of Public Health and a BA in Psychology from Middlebury College.
In 2021, Zus raised a $34M Series A financing led by Andreessen Horowitz and followed by F-Prime, Maverick, Rock Health, Oxeon and more.
In this episode, Caitlin shares about her various roles in health tech, building community in the health tech space, the new era of Data as a Service companies, and what it means to be a Chief Commercial Officer at a quickly-growing startup.
Or, if you prefer to listen here!
Caitlin’s journey through health tech:
- Caitlin studied psychology at Middlebury College, where she fully intended to become a clinical psychologist. She worked for two years as a research coordinator at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is where she made an important discovery:
“I’m working at one of the most preeminent institutions, and we do everything on paper. There must be a better way — this is truly inefficient and no wonder your healthcare costs are so high.”
- Instead of getting a PhD in clinical psychology, Caitlin went on to get her masters in health policy and management. At Harvard, she worked on a project that studied time-driven, action-based costing for total knee replacements through a new cost accounting methodology. Her team was thinking about how to create a bundled payment model reflective of the cost of care rather than simply the time and people doing the work — another moment in which Caitlin recognized that there needed to be a more efficient way of doing the work.
- Caitlin then went into product strategy at AthenaHealth, where she worked a number of different roles from product to enterprise strategy.
“I would recommend to almost anybody starting their career, and I say this as a startup person now: starting at a bigger company with a variety of different roles and departments and part of the organizations was really exciting for me. It allowed me to figure out — what am I interested in? What do I want to be doing?”
- Caitlin helped launch a new population health product, supported sales to some of Athenahealth’s largest accounts, and ran a product analytics team. After 6 years, Caitlin wanted to move to a smaller company and worked on partnerships at PatientPop, a patient acquisition platform for smaller healthcare practices. This is where she met Andrew Le, CEO of Buoy Health, who ended up bringing Caitlin on to be COO of Buoy Health for three years.
- At Buoy, Caitlin focused on building partnerships with virtual care delivery companies and became more excited in supporting the infrastructure for these companies. Jonathan Bush, who led Athenahealth as CEO and Founder, started Zus Health with this same purpose. Attracted to Zus’ mission, Caitlin joined as Chief Commercial Officer, where she’s been for the last 6 months.
Zus Health maximizes the value of patient insights through a shared health data platform, providing easy-to-use patient data at the point of care via API and direct EHR integrations.
- Caitlin shares that Zus is focused on not only building data pipelines, but transforming that data into usable information for clinicians at the point of care.
“If you think about healthcare technology, there’s a lot of SaaS out there. What we’re really doing is building the DaaS layer: Data as a Service. We’re helping SaaS companies enrich what they do with a data layer that’s truly connected across the healthcare ecosystem.”
- Zus is connected to a variety of data platforms: healthcare data exchanges through Commonwell Health Alliance and CareQuality, and medication history platforms from SureScripts, lab data from Quest and LabCorp, care intelligence from Bamboo Health and ADT data from Collective, etc. On top of that, any data that is contributed to the Zus platform by a builder also becomes part of the Zus aggregated profile for every patient. The goal is to create a shared and common record of every patient in the United States.
- Caitlin shares that Zus’ core use case right now is solving for the “get-up-to-speed moment”. A clinician is seeing a patient for the first time. Their EHR has built a pipeline to data sources with a bunch of continuity of care documents (CCDA) that they can sort through to get an understanding of patient history — however, they don’t do it because it takes too much time. Zus is building an aggregated profile to help clinicians and their staff quickly understand what’s going on with a patient and better develop care plans or direct them to the right point of care. This saves clinicians a ton of time, which Caitlin believes is more important than ever with the healthcare workforce losing almost 335k providers in 2021 to clinician burnout.
- On top of this, Zus has many secondary use cases: pre & post analytics, helping digital health companies prove ROI to their customers, care gap analysis, etc.
- Zus goes after 3 customer types, which Caitlin describes as their “three-pronged go-to-market approach”:
- Virtual specialty care. These virtual companies focusing on one type of patient population are going at risk with plans or employers. Zus data is critical to connect them to the rest of the healthcare ecosystem and help them prove their value.
- Digital primary care. These companies leverage Zus to not only give them a complete and accurate picture of what’s happening with a new patient, but also connecting them to specialty care providers as well.
- Software companies that serve the first two types of companies.
- It’s important that the Zus profile is embedded in clinicians’ workflows: for example, Zus is embedded within Healthie (we chatted with Erica, Healthie’s co-founder more recently!) and offered to all their customers. Caitlin shares that they’re focused on finding software companies that could be a patient relationship management (PRM) tool, CRMs, EHRs, etc — they don’t want to be a SaaS company, but a SDaaS (Software as a Data Service) company, and Zus can help them.
When should customers build in-house and when should they outsource to companies like Zus?
- Caitlin believes that Zus’s customers should be focused on something that is differentiated for the clinical care model. Zus is focused on building access and meaning layers for the data, abstracting this layer so that their customers can focus on more specialized features that might be more proprietary to their care model.
Defining the Chief Commercial Officer role
What does a Chief Commercial Officer do?
- Caitlin shares that the role includes everything from marketing to sales to partnerships and customer success.
“Especially at a young company like Zus, the Chief Commercial Officer role is really a jack of all trades. I see my responsibility to the company as not only growing our customer base, but also helping the company to define our role in the healthcare ecosystem as a technology company.”
A Chief Commercial Officer’s North Star is understanding the customer’s pain points
- As the person responsible for not only sales but also customer success, Caitlin is focused on tracking the value they’re delivering for customers and figuring out how to measure their customers’ pain points. Especially at an early startup where there’s less control over what to measure, simply having conversations with a lot of different companies every day is essential.
“How do we turn those early proof points into an ROI model that can demonstrate the value of Zus to the broader organization?”
- Caitlin and her team have a responsibility on the sales side for finding the common denominator across all the prospects they talk to and deliver those insights to the R&D organization.
0–1 GTM: finding the right early customers who share a common denominator problem
In the early days, it can be helpful to find smaller digital health companies that are willing to be early customers that work through the kinks.
- When Caitlin first joined Zus, they’d spent a lot of time with a couple of large healthcare delivery organizations that were primarily brick and mortar. They weren’t quite ready to dig in and work with a startup that was still figuring everything out.
- Caitlin believes the key was finding primarily newer digital health and virtual care companies and focusing on their common denominator problem. These smaller early adopters helped Zus hone in on the “get-up-to-speed moment”, a problem these customers really needed to solve.
“We found digital health companies to be more innovative, more willing and excited to work with us. It was easier for us to hone our product, cut our teeth, have lots of conversations and find those common denominator problems to solve, rather than focus on one or two really large customers that might take us in a direction that wouldn’t then be applicable across a broader customer base.
We’ll continue to support these organizations and grow with them, but we’ll also work hard to connect them to other parts of the ecosystem in building out partnerships with larger health systems, brick and mortars, health plans, etc.”
- Some investors have pushback on selling to startups, but Caitlin believes that the long-term viability of selling to startups is that Zus is part of their growth and long-term success. Zus is able to support them with data from other parts of the healthcare ecosystem that might not be willing to play ball with them.
Community is essential when it comes to tech-first companies.
- Caitlin shares that Zus has an Early Access Community, which was created to build up interest and engagement in Zus before their product even launched. There is a Developer Sandbox, but the Slack community is open to all — there’s CTOs, Chief Commercial Officers, anybody that is part of a digital health company that has a problem they think can be solved using Zus data.
“I’m glad we built it as a broader community. What we found is our messaging is really gaining traction with Chief Medical Officers or their business leaders in an organization who are trying to solve this clinician burnout problem.
Think out of the box when it comes to building community.
- Caitlin is a big proponent of the HLTH Conference and events like it. She believes that it’s very important that Zus has a presence there to build a community of digital health companies, championing and supporting that cause whether or not customers are in attendance of the conference. I, for one, enjoyed Zus’s fun event for builders at the Madame Tussad’s wax museum.
- Caitlin calls the Zus Summit the company’s “most successful endeavor”. It wasn’t about positioning Zus as a thought leader, but rather championing the thought leadership of all the attendees. The summit had about 40 attendees with C-suite roles from various virtual specialty care companies. Everyone came to Maine for two days, connecting with each other and sharing the challenges they were facing. This was a win-win for Zus: not only are they able to help connect these companies, it gave them a lot of great product ideas.
“We really see ourselves as a connector of these companies, and a champion. This is also reflected in our business model, like the way we price our product. Our revenue grows as the company grows, so the more patients you’re seeing and the more engaged your patients are, the more money Zus makes in supporting you. We have no implementation fees, we have no minimums. This is really important to us, because we see ourselves as a critical part of success for these businesses and we want to be part of that journey.”
Implementing newly available data from CURES Act to shareable patient records:
- Zus has been built from the ground up as a truly shareable patient record. Caitlin shares about a new feature being released soon: if you’re a provider using Zus to get up to speed on a new patient, you can invite any other provider (even if they aren’t on Zus) to get guest access to the aggregated profile. In a way similar to Google Docs, they can view and comment on a readable version of the patient profile.
- When it comes to referrals, providers typically give patients a business card of a specialist or a phone number to call and hope that they’ll follow through. Zus wants to change the paradigm of referrals to actually inviting a new care team member to collaborate on the care of a patient, rooted in this shareable patient record. This feature has been really supported by the CURES Act; Zus only requires that you share the things that are required to share by law in the interest of better patient care and reduced care redundancy.
Caitlin’s thoughts on the future of digital health:
- At the Zus Summit, Caitlin shares that groups did a mini-pitch of a solution they wanted to see for their own companies. A pitch she was interested in was an MSO for digital health companies. In the US healthcare industry, there’s so much redundancy — getting insurance in every state, building contracting processes, etc. Zus is solving the tech layer of that problem, but there’s a services layer that could help companies focus on delivering better care rather than the administrivia.
Caitlin’s advice to those aspiring to work in the healthtech space:
Don’t wed yourself too early to a particular path.
- Caitlin never thought she’d be a Chief Commercial Officer or work in sales. But, through all the career steps she took, she realized that she loved being part of the external conversation and talking with prospective clients.
“You might have one idea of where you’re going to be and what is the right job for you, but be open minded and try lots of different things if you have that privilege.”
Work down, up, and across in any job you have.
- Don’t let your job description limit you, especially in a startup. Help chime in and do whatever it takes to move your organization forward.
“I tell people that if they have the same job description in six months, then they haven’t done their job.”
Caitlin leaves us a lot of motivation and a high bar to reach for :)
