Today, I’m joined by Josh Hix, CEO of Season Health, a digital food pharmacy and meal kit service prescribing food as medicine.
Season is rethinking nutrition-based healthcare. Season’s platform allows doctors, registered dietitians, and other health experts to prescribe evidence-based meal plans to manage multiple chronic conditions. For patients, the platform provides convenience, affordability, accessibility, and education designed to drive sustainable lifestyle change.
In this episode, we discuss Josh’s experience building and exiting meal kit service Plated, Season’s approach to food as medicine, and the company’s recent $34 million funding round.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How Season uses technology to prescribe nutrition
- Season’s approach to creating the right business model
- How Season works with insurance companies to prioritize customers’ health
- Season’s innovative pairing of clinical care and personalized meal plans
Links & Resources
- Subscribe to the Fitt Insider newsletter
- Visit the Fitt Insider jobs board
- View current Fitt Insider investment and get in touch
Josh’s Links
Episode Transcript
This is a machine-generated transcript. Please excuse any errors.
[00:00:00] Josh:
Part of what we’re doing is helping people change their food environment. That was the secret to what was happening all those years ago for Plated customers; we made the food around them delicious and healthy, and that’s how people really think about it.
I’m convinced that whether you’re an Ironman or a person with uncontrolled diabetes, we all look at a menu and think, “What looks good on here?”
[00:00:38] Joe:
Welcome back to the Fitt Insider podcast. I’m your host, Joe Vennare.
Today I’m joined by Josh Hix, CEO of Season Health, a digital food pharmacy. In this episode we discuss Josh’s experience building the meal kit service Plated, Season’s approach to food as medicine, the company’s recent $34 million funding round, and the growing need for solutions that target diet-related chronic illnesses.
Let’s get into it.
Hi, Josh. Welcome to Fitt Insider. Thanks for joining us.
[00:01:03] Josh:
Thanks for having me.
[00:01:04] Joe:
Looking forward to today’s conversation. I think you have not only an interesting background, but a very interesting approach to the problem that you are trying to solve.
To kick things off can you introduce yourself and tell us about Season Health?
[00:01:19] Josh:
Sure. I’m Josh, Co-Founder and CEO of Season Health. My past life was building Plated, one of the big D2C meal kit businesses, which was acquired by Albertsons in 2017. We started that business really with a long-term interest in health, nutrition, and fitness, something directionally that way, but it was only ever a consumer product with no explicit health design.
So we were very excited when one of the insurance plans—one of the “blues”—called us up and said, “Hey, a bunch of patients are telling their doctors they accidentally got healthy by using this product. What’s up? We can’t get people to change behavior, on average, no matter what we do, and it’s happening accidentally.”
We learned some stuff there that we never got to really do anything with. Fast forward to Season Health, my co-founder Mustafa had been the founding CTO at a large mental health care business. We also had spent a lot of time with one of our primary advisors, a woman named Dr. Andrea Feinberg who built the Geisinger Fresh Food Farmacy, which is sort of the gold standard if you will, for food-as-medicine programs in the health care space, like true kind of enterprise healthcare space.
So we launched the business about two years ago, and what we’re really doing is trying to institutionalize nutrition into healthcare in a certain sense, but more today or in the here and now we’re a software platform for clinicians to prescribe nutrition, which has not been a thing that’s really done all that commonly or, well today we don’t think, it kind of the standard is you get a little bit of, “Go home, you know, eat less, move more. Eat this, not that” kind of stuff.
So software to let them formally prescribe nutrition, and then for the patient a consumer-grade app to actually fulfill that prescription. So let the patient actually come to the dinner table as a consumer. Tell us what you like, what you don’t like. Who you’re eating with? What your budget is. What your time budget is. How often do you want to cook? All these things that really matter for how we all choose what to eat?
Put that together with the clinical piece, and then map it on top of the whole world. On top of your Uber Eats, your Instacart, your Walmart curbside delivery, wherever you’re buying food today, as long as it’s digitally, which is most places, and we’ll help the patient make the right choices, make it easy for the choices to be good, in part, by helping them pay for the food—the insurance plans—helping them to do that. That’s what we’re doing.
[00:04:07] Joe:
Yeah, I think a lot of those pieces, are Coming down to convenience. coming down To automating a lot of the things that are already happening. You mentioned from the delivery standpoint and obviously getting that buy-in from both the clinicians who are prescribing this and then the insurance companies who are paying for it.
When you look at all of those pieces and you kind of mentioned that. From the doctor’s office are basically getting like, Hey, maybe try to be a little bit healthier. no real direction beyond that. Certainly no education or a support system as they’re going through that process. Is it, or has it been a hurdle to get that buy-in from the clinicians or from the insurers?
And what are those conversations before?
[00:04:53] Josh:
I think it’s less. The first thing I would say is we’re about 2 years into this, which in healthcare time is about 2 seconds. So take all of this with a grain of salt, but my early, yeah, my early observation would be It’s more about aligning incentives than it is about, getting buy-in there’s The good news about healthcare is, you know, by and large people are in it for the right reasons they’re in it because they care because they want to help.
People and they want to make people healthier. that’s all the backdrop. So it’s not about, I don’t think it’s about buy-in It’s not about convincing doctors or, you know, the clinicians or it might be dieticians, et cetera, that eating healthier helps people. It’s not about, convincing them. of that it’s about Creating the environment. They can actually do that, thing right. I mean, in a fee-for-service environment, your dietician or whomever is running, encounter to encounter, to encounter. They don’t, if there’s not a reimbursement code for a tool like Season Health, they simply can’t use it.
They’re also, you know, bombarded with a million digital health companies. It’s just not a good setup. So for us, it’s been more about. Creating value-based in some broad sense arrangements where, you know, people have the the right business model to do the things they already want to do, which is help people get.healthier
[00:06:23] Joe:
To this point you mentioned, 2 years in, super early as it relates to anything healthcare.
Oftentimes when you’re talking about getting that somebody else basically to pick up the tab, It’s got to be proven. There’s got to be some type of, if not clinical study, some type of early indications that you’re proving this out. what have you done down that path to say Hey, these incentives are aligned and it is working. So now let’s continue to expand. this
[00:06:49] Josh:
So we do not. We’ve in a couple of things. We are partners with Geisinger. They are our anchor customer. So we’re essentially taking over the existing, fresh food pharmacy operation there and helping to scale it up and out to more people and to more conditions. So we get the sort of benefit of all the years of work research and outcomes that are there.
So that, that helps. a bit we’re also starting to do our own research. So the The first and now announced clinical trial where we’re running with CommonSpirit So some of our own research and leaning on some of our partners is the sort of early effort. But I think the other, you know, more honest answer is we still do need to do a lot more. We’re getting positive reactions from the, the early adopters, but some people just want to see our own primary research. and we’re, we’re working hard on. that
[00:07:46] Joe:
Yeah, for sure. And to the initial point, like it takes time and you mentioned, even expanding the number of conditions or people that you’re able to, you know, serve. Right now, how do you think about who that core customer is? That core patient is, are there specific conditions because you are, like you said, there has to be the doctor involved.
They are making the decision to essentially prescribe this. So who falls into that bucket of a customer?
[00:08:14] Josh:
We’re live today, serving patients with diabetes and with chronic kidney disease. the way that we’re thinking about it is it’s the intersection of the people that need the help, the most, which needs to be the highest priority. Those are also the people that are the most expensive to their insurance plan.
So insurance plan is the, customer, right? I mean, this is the, strange and weird world of healthcare. You have a customer and multiple users, and sometimes it’s not clear who is who, but the insurance plan is the customer or whoever the risk-bearing entity. is and we’re simply here to make people healthy.
This, the The downstream effect of that is that they’re cheaper to ensure and care for, which is what the plans care mostly about. So we’re starting by serving patients that need the most, because they need the most, they’re the most expensive to the plans and those plans are willing to pay for care for them.
Patients with diabetes, and/or chronic kidney disease today. and we’ll have some new new conditions I think, to, to announce and new populations to serve shortly. But that’s where. we are now
[00:09:31] Joe:
Yeah. And then there’s the, and that definitely all makes sense and checks out when you think about the number of people impacted by chronic conditions and the expense that then goes to the health insurance companies, but also the overall economy. if we get down to the basics of what can we do to help people improve basic aspects of health?
Certainly food is at the center of that. So you start to then expand from there. you mentioned. Having kind of learned through Plated, right? That like people were getting in shape, they were losing weight, and they were getting healthier. maybe that wasn’t the kind of core goal, or maybe you didn’t get to explore that to its fullest extent.
When you think about that on the kind of consumer side, right? Like the number of meal kits that cater towards keto or building muscle or losing weight or a plant-based diet. Now on the other side of that It may be many of the same or similar diet plans or meal plans or ingredients.
Why go this path now this time around to healthcare, instead of saying look, we get it. There are Tons of people who are already fit and healthy, who are going to spend a bunch more money on these different meal plans and options. where was the decision point now looking back on, it are you thinking that was the right decision or are you, you maybe look and say, like, how do we get into that consumer market?
How are you thinking about how that continues to evolve
[00:11:02] Josh:
One day, we will get back into that more. Consumer is not exactly the Right? word, because there are some, you know, consumers and, you know, out-of-pocket patients today, but that more fit patient and consumer base, we do have aspirations to sort of come back to that market eventually,
But the decision, which I think is still the right one based as of now, it’s a crazy early-stage You know, high-growth company. So ask me again in a month, but the decision has been to start again by serving the patients with the highest needs. Right? I mean, you sort of said it for folks that in a lot of ways look like you and I, there are a ton of options, right? I mean, it’s almost overwhelming how many food supplements exercise products and programs are out there for folks that are, in a different socioeconomic status in a different life stage, there are not all of these options. and the disease burden sadly is pretty correlated to that. So You look at the populations where they just don’t have access to a lot of these things that you’re talking about. And I think there’s a much higher need and from a business perspective, less competition in a certain kind of way. and we wanted to be a real healthcare business. You and I think that fit consumer is after a preventative solution, which is really important, but doesn’t currently fit within the healthcare system.
So we’ve chosen to start with the sort of highest-risk people members with the highest needs. and over time work our way into the healthier population
[00:12:48] Joe:
Yeah, hugely, hugely important work. And I think about. To your point that it’s not even so much the, what the market is or who’s spending money or what even the competition is, it’s so much, like you said, it’s like, well, there aren’t a lot of people focusing there and they don’t have the same options or access, or solutions that are catering to them.
So that contributes to that problem. Continuing to get worse. So we talked about, you know, that prescription, working with the doctors, working with the, kind of health insurance companies, what does it look like in terms of the experience? you know, So I get that prescription, and the food shows up at my house.
Where does it go from there in terms of that support from the app or, how people, you know, follow through with any type of behavior change in that learning experience? That’s so. important
[00:13:41] Josh:
You’re meeting a dietician at some point in this journey. It’s either a dietician that works for Season’s virtual. clinic Or for whoever the big hospital/provider big hospital capitated provider or partner is, but from the patient experience, it almost doesn’t matter in a certain way. So you meet this dietician then there are 2 things, 2 big work streams that start, you sort of receive this prescription, which comes in the form of an email, right?
Here’s a link to this app, a web app or native, however you want to choose to engage. Download it log in and start your journey. And there, there, there are those 2 parallel paths. one is clinical programming. You’re seeing a dietician, you’re seeing a health coach, there’s content, both culinary and health-related helping you to manage your condition, teaching you about, You know, what’s happening at the health level.
Then in parallel is the food. What you are shown is a set of recommended options, both recipes and prepared meals, restaurants et cetera. and you’re given the choice. part of what we think we’re doing back to the depleted story is helping people just change their food environment.
And I think that was the secret to what was happening all those years ago for the Plated customers. We just made, we made it so that the food that was around them was delicious and oh by the way healthy.
And I think that’s how people really think about it. I’m convinced that whether you’re an iron man or, you know, a person with uncontrolled diabetes, We all look at a menu and think what looks good on here.
And maybe you choose to say, I’m not going to have that burger, even though it looks great because I’m trying to, you know, do whatever, but we all look at it and think the same thing. So we need to meet people where they are as people, as consumers, you know, food is, a complex emotional, cultural thing and show them options that are delicious. And also. healthy. that’s part of the the sort of patient promise. There everything in here is going to be good for you. You don’t need to think about it. You don’t need to worry about the potassium levels for those kidney disease patients, whatever the right, you know, things are, you don’t need to worry about it.
It’s It’s an autopilot kind of experience. Not in that you don’t get to choose, but in that in all the choices are healthy. You just pick whatever looks best to you to your partner and your kids, whomever you’re eating with. that’s the sort of patient consumer experience. You have this 12-week intervention of various forms of therapy, medical, nutrition, therapy, peer support, some other clinical content and programming and in parallel. the food
[00:16:35] Joe:
And then just curious, what’s the feedback loop like, is that like a daily check-in I’m submitting. Did I eat that meal plan Did I eat other things. Am I tracking any type of calories or metrics or, you know, measuring my food? how do you guys, take that into the. equation
[00:16:52] Josh:
We’re trying to not ask the patient to do anything that isn’t absolutely necessary. Everyone’s busy. Everyone’s got too much on their own. minds So in terms of the, There are a couple of feedback loops there. One is for the clinician, right? The dietician and the rest of the care team. They can see what the patient’s ordering.
They can see the status of labs/laps how they’re progressing on their measures of A1C for patients with diabetes and so on for the patient. They’re seeing their intended contact schedule, right? Your next dietitian. Visit is scheduled for 3 weeks from now. If you want to talk to somebody today on demand, here’s how you do that So on and so forth, but it’s more pull than push what that schedule looks like is really up to the care teams. You know, part of what we’re we’re aiming to do is empower those people that the dieticians, and whoever else is sort of part of that care team You know, we don’t think that we have all the answers.
We certainly don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer. We are, we are the platform that helps the clinicians care better for these patients and for the patients to actually take advantage of, the care the advice and so on. But, the clinician should be driving exactly what that. looks like
[00:18:11] Joe:
Yeah. And then, are they also, or part of this education or part of the overall, kind of intervention with that, whether it’s a dietician or health coach, Is there like a holistic health approach to that? Are they also talking about exercise? are They also talking about sleep or mental health or at this point it’s primarily Hey, let’s focus on what you’re eating, sticking to that meal plan.
And maybe we’ll tackle some of, those other things. down the road
[00:18:36] Josh:
A lot of clinicians, dieticians and so on are talking about those topics with patients, but it’s not something that Season directly does today. we’re focused on food. it’s one of the pillars, if not, perhaps the most complex. one and where we think our, you know, our real specialty is you can’t be all things to all people. There are lots of, of interesting folks. you’ve had many of them on here. and Lots of people listening who are focused on sleep and exercise. we’re focused on the food certainly over time. we’ll, we’ll look to do, real and better partnerships on those fronts. But the clinicians today use us as, again, one part of their care programs. you know, for many of these patients living with chronic disease, there’s a whole host of things they need to. do there are actual medications, pharmaceutical prescriptions. and There are clinical encounters. If you, you end up on dialysis, so on and so forth. So we’re one part of it. We think we have a lot of value to add to clinical outcomes and quality of life, but, it is one part of a bigger care plan
[00:19:45] Joe:
Yeah, absolutely. And I was also, I was asking that from the perspective of. in general Oftentimes like healthy behavior changes, a nudge or a slippery slope in a good way to other things like you start eating healthier, you start feeling better. and You start being like, ah, I’m not sleeping too great. I’m not maybe as physically active.
And, oftentimes when I’ve talked to other folks who have similar interventions down one path Well, the, the user starts asking questions like, Hey, what should I do about this? Or how can I do that? And it sounds like you, in this case, this is one tool in the toolbox. as you think about helping these people achieve that healthier lifestyle and maintain, living with and dealing with some of the chronic conditions that they are, One of the things I did want to ask as well is to this point, you mentioned kinda like two years and, ramping this up.
Do you talk about, or is there any type of sense of how many people have been through this? What type of results you have seen thus far? or even if it’s metrics in terms of like, how big is the team or, you know, the group that’s working on this that is able to, you know, kind of drive it forward. and then I’ll, I guess I’ll kinda have a Follow Up basis.
[00:20:55] Josh:
There aren’t a lot of metrics that we’ve talked about yet. I think it’s still a little early. We want to be rigorous about the clinical outcomes and so on. So all I would really say is overall, we’ve been happy with how patients are progressing through, we’ve only just launched the first of these big enterprise partnerships.
So those are, those are fairly early and, we’ll have more to talk about sometime later this year.
[00:21:20] Joe:
Yeah. And then I was kind of asking that down the path of, oftentimes. It’s not a matter of, you know, not knowing at least at a, it kind of like a basic level. Like these foods are not good for me. and then oftentimes you have access can be a huge issue, especially depending on where you live, especially depending on socioeconomic status, you know, from food deserts to affordability to a whole host of issues.
So that challenge is, is always kind of there. but then there’s the, the food comes to my house, right. And I’m talking to my. Clinician dietician health coach, and maybe I’m eating the healthy food, but I’m also eating the other snacks. I’m also, you know, maybe seasoning it in a way that’s not super helpful in terms of what I’m trying to, achieve.
How are you taking that into account? Just like the human element, right? Because it is. It’s an emotional experience, eating and food.
It’s a social experience. and there’s a lot of factors that go into an, and even people who are 100% healthy. I think there’s all types of different, like, you know, studies or cases where it’s, you know, report what you ate today.
And people wildly underestimate, you know, the number of calories or how big, the servings, where all those things.
So just how do you take that into it?
[00:22:40] Josh:
I think the biggest, the biggest thing I would say is we think, and certainly for the patients that we’re serving, it’s about what’s happening on average. It’s not about what happened at any specific meal. We’re you’re not asking them to log it one because it’s, I think it’s just too much.
Nobody really wants to do that. Certainly nobody is doing that over an extended period of time. We know what’s being ordered through the platform. We can make very reasonable guesses about what people are eating based on that. And we see the health outcomes. And this is one of the areas. I think one of the areas where I think you can see the difference between.
What you would need to do to, to serve that person. Who’s trying to get their, their cards dialed into the gram because they’re, you know, working on that iron man training versus somebody who, for a variety of reasons is coming from a diet of a hundred percent processed and fast food. We don’t need to get them.
We’d like for them to completely move off of that. But we don’t actually need them to, especially in the immediate term, it can be a gradual thing. You will see clinical results from, any movement away from that diet. So it’s, more about, you know, helping them to understand what’s happening, helping them to change their environments, right. The food that’s around them making it easy for there to be better food around them and eat better. Ideally one day it’s all of the time, but let’s be real. Very few of us eat well, all of the time, certainly some of my weekend meals, would be, you know, things I wouldn’t want to publicize. so it really is about that.
That it’s about on average over time, what’s improved the average quality, not some hard shift away from, oh, maybe they Season a little more or there, you know, still having, you know, more of this. Food that we’d like them to avoid here and there. If we’re impacting, you know, a reasonable percentage of the meals, the research would say we can help, improve health.
[00:24:53] Joe:
For sure. Yeah. so, thinking about, you know, Launching and, doing one of the first bigger partnerships, right? So that’s, that’s fairly new also, you know, two years into, in general, but also I think maybe it was earlier this year that like officially emerged from stealth and you have some type of, clinical studies you mentioned, in the works and planning on doing more of your own research.
So a lot going on, right? No shortage of things in terms of continuing to drive forward.
But when you look at the roadmap, maybe even over. The back half of the year, what are the priorities that stand out to you that say, like, these are the benchmarks we’re pressing towards as a team that really get us in a position now where we can, whether it’s continuing to expand or roll out the services more broadly and just continue to make progress going forward.
[00:25:42] Josh:
Yeah. So for context, we literally announced these partnerships 12 weeks ago, it was early to mid February. It feels, it feels to me like many years as well, but, we just announced those first big customers. and just more recently started onboarding those patients. So I think the back half of this year for us is really about, focus on our existing partners.
We have that to them onboarding right patients, delivering outcomes for them and secondarily exploring, you know, new customer relationships and new disease states. So it’s, it’s really about, I think, getting to those first sets of outcomes right now through serving these.
[00:26:27] Joe:
And then when you think about, if we were to like zoom out a little bit and think about. The various approaches, or I don’t necessarily want to even call them trends because a lot of them are kind of proven interventions. but from prescription weight, loss drugs, obviously kind of gaining traction with that, like digital weight loss platforms, obviously.
Coaching, some of it’s digital AI texts, some of it’s like actual humans, health coaches. so you have all these different things. maybe I’ll even throw in there, like, wearables, wearables from activity trackers all the way to like glucose monitoring. In the case of diabetes, that’s very much essential in the case of more kind of health optimization.
It’s just another kind of tool in the, in the health optimization toolbox there. do you think about, or how do you think about where Season Health is trying to fit in there? Because it is like, in, in one sentence, The, the weight loss approach right now, talking about this and going and getting a prescription and doing the tele-health and involving, you know, different, clinicians and health coaches is kind of like, Hey, let’s back into it, right.
Let’s deal with it where it is now. And try to lose this weight. And this approach is like, let’s fundamentally change what we’re eating and introduce these healthy behaviors and start to tackle it that way. so just how are you thinking about all of these trends?
And they’re all kind of like, very much. gaining steam at the same time.
[00:27:54] Josh:
First off, it’s exciting that they are, you know, I’m relatively new to healthcare, but I think I hear commonly is there’s more change happening right now than at any time anybody currently working in this industry. Which is, which is exciting. I think, you know, it’s needed and there’s a lot of good stuff going on.
So what I would say is I think one, all of these solutions in some form are needed. And I think, you know, it it’s, maybe a, a little silly or obvious, but we just need more technology generally. And not because, you know, technology is the answer in a vacuum and not because it’s replacing people or anything like that, but because there’s not enough people, there’s a severe shortage of, you know, healthcare workers first off, right. You haven’t sort of this terrible trio of a shortage of healthcare workers and not enough healthcare access for the population for America. And too high of costs. I don’t see any way out of that. Other than to build better tools that help people scale their own work. Specifically the healthcare workers, clinicians I’m talking about. So helping them to have better day to day work lives. Many of them are experiencing huge amounts of burnout. So let’s build tools that help the healthcare worker. That are currently working, hopefully, you know, help sort of change the paradigm So that more people want to pursue those kinds of careers, which will also have the effect of bringing down costs.
Without losing any jobs because there’s such a severe shortage, and improving the patient experience. I mean, it’s, you know, I certainly don’t mean to say that there’s any silver bullet here, but you know, building better experiences for everyone involved in the system, I think has got to be a big part of the solution here.
So not to mention that, you know, most of the cost and most of the problems come from, you know, so-called lifestyle diseases to. And those things need to be addressed in a different way than the acute system that’s been built. So, you know, we’re still figuring out where we think are our best and highest uses in that.
But, certainly hopefully it’s in the food-as-medicine, you know, end of the spectrum, which I would, I would distinguish from you know, the weight loss companies. They’re, they’re doing important work, but, you know, we’re focused on. Again, diabetes and kidney disease today, which are certainly, you know, somewhat related to, you know, obesity, but not entirely. and down the road, some of the conditions that we’re exploring certain forms of cancer, not all, but certain tumor sites are very nutritionally, responsive, maternity, in the form of gestational diabetes and, the avoidance of low birth weight infants, very nutritionally response. heart failure, hypertension and cardiac related conditions are very nutritionally responsive.
So, you know, there, there’s a, at least a, short list of chronic diseases that are very interesting and responsive that I think are different in nature. So somewhere in that space, we think we have a lot of value to add. Helping patients delivering outcomes. It will almost certainly involve partnerships with many of those companies and integrations across the newly sort of emerging ecosystem of remote patient monitoring or wearables, or, you know, I think a lot of this is the language, the business models haven’t even been fully sorted out, but, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s an exciting time for sure.
[00:31:39] Joe:
Yeah, I think, that was well said and just to, you know, tie a ribbon around it, it’s, hugely important and much needed just in terms of, the scale of the problem. So it’s almost like a, all of the above, right? It’s it’s all of the above. There’s all these. Kind of solutions and platforms potential. We need all of them, many of them, probably more of them to your point with more technology.
[00:32:02] Josh:
What’s happening is not working. I think that’s, you know, there’s very few things that are clear as far as I can tell, but clearly what we’re all doing right now, isn’t enough costs. Continue to go up the rates of chronic disease. Continue to go up. None of it’s sustained. All of our, Medicare, Medicaid are trending towards insolvency.
You know, these are big, big problems not to mention that they’re very important, just, cost of human life and quality of life. And that this sort of quality and quantity of years of life. So, there’s a lot of exciting stuff going on, but, we all need.more
[00:32:42] Joe:
Yeah, I would just kind of say to that, like I also wrestle with, and the last question before we get you out of here, wrestle with them conflicted about. Continuing to make things more complex, add more layers, add more technology, add more solutions. but also just how simple, right? problem is at the root of it and how we, you know, continue to deal with that because it’s like, we are throwing so much at it.
It’s not working. But what do we need more of, right. I guess is the question. So being thoughtful about those solutions, and I think you’re approaching it in a way where it is kind of simple, right. And, you know, more, elegant in terms of how you’re packaging it and delivering that access.
But, yeah. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that path of like, making it more complicated when I think we need simpler solutions for.
[00:33:38] Josh:
I totally agree, you know, and we certainly don’t have all the answers. We are still figuring out many, many things, including some fundamental stuff, you know, things about our business. But I would say if we’re making things more complicated, we’re failing, you know, we need for things to be simpler for everybody, for clinicians, for payers, for patients, really, for everybody, it is the whole industry is wildly complex as you described, with many layers. And it is pretty wild.
First off there’s a lot of business models and regulatory changes that need to happen and are happening. Certainly the kind of big, broad umbrella of value-based care is one of them. There’s lots of complexity in there, and lots that needs to be figured out, but certainly making it simpler for doctors to do what they think is best to make you healthier is the headline. The technology has a role to play in making all of that more seamless. There’s already technology in the system, it’s just pagers and fax machines. Those are the tools of the trade today.
There are problems with any example, but if you look at Amazon, I can open my phone, I can use the app, and I can have basically anything delivered tomorrow. Not that there aren’t some externalities created there, but from a simplicity perspective, that is amazingly simple, and it’s software that is obscuring the complexity underneath. That is one frame of reference for how we’ve thought about healthcare. All of this complexity where I have to fill out this form in triplicate, and figure out if I have this insurance or that covered. All of that needs to be automated, and there’s a lot of people working on that stuff. No silver bullets, but at least lots of good stuff happening.
[00:35:40] Joe:
Yeah, as an industry there’s a long way to go. That creates a lot of need and opportunity, and with Season being early in your journey, and as that continues to evolve we’ll definitely be following along.
In wrapping up, where would you point people to learn more? To keep tabs on what you’re working on? What’s the best place?
[00:35:58] Josh:
SeasonHealth.com is probably the best way. We’re working on better ways to engage for the healthier folks out there, and more content and so on. That’s the best place for now.
[00:36:12] Joe:
Yeah, I hope folks check it out, and thanks so much for taking a few minutes today, Josh.
[00:36:16] Josh:
Yeah. Thank you, Joe.