I had a great conversation and demo with Katie Logan and Christine Smith from Gozio a while back. Finally got it up on THCB. Gozio provides two types of patient navigation for health systems. One as a digital front door helping patients navigate to doctors, services and tools like virtual care and appointments from the hospitals, and actual navigation from the parking lot to the clinic/bedside. Why should hospitals hire Gozio (and spent a few $100k+) when some of this stuff is buried in MyChart in a typical health system? Calls go down, visits go up and Google ratings go up. They are in 25-35 systems now and aiming for many more.–Matthew Holt
This was such a great discussion I wanted to publish the transcript. The way I do that is to copy the YouTube-generated transcript and drop it into Claude to smooth it over. I then read it, and if I think it’s made an error, I dip back into the video and listen to what actually happened and make a correction. This is all to say: I think this transcript is pretty accurate, but it might have a bunch of AI- and human-generated mistakes.
Matthew Holt
Hi, it’s Matthew Holt, back in with a THCB Spotlight. This time we’re looking at a company called Gozio Health, and I have with me Katie Logan, who is the Chief Strategy and Head of Product, and Christine Smith, who is the VP of Strategic Solutions and Partnerships, I believe. Have I got everyone’s titles right there?
Katie Logan
Officially correct.
Matthew Holt
Fantastic. It’s very, very rare to get anything correct these days. So let’s start. Gozio is in the business of helping hospital systems help their patients and clients navigate, in various flavors and various ways. Did I get that right, Katie?
Katie Logan
That is right — that’s really good. We exist to make the patient experience better through navigation. We want to make the journey more seamless, hassle-free, but also help organizations realize their objectives around growth, quality, and, of course, the overall customer and patient experience.
Matthew Holt
All right, so navigation and digital front doors, et cetera, have a couple of different flavors, right? One of them, obviously, is how people are finding the hospital — how are patients, if they’re being sent there, figuring out how to access information about the hospital, the digital front door, what treatments they’re going to have, the doctors, and all that kind of good stuff. And then the other one is actual navigation — I’m in the hospital, I’m lost, I’m trying to find the X-ray facility or whatever, what do I do about that. You do both of those, right?
Katie Logan
We do, we do both. Our position is that nobody visits a doctor or a hospital because they feel good, so fundamentally we want to make it easier for them to navigate and meet people where they are, which is on their phones. So it starts, at the highest level, with our mobile platform, which can be branded and configured to the unique needs of the health system and the market. It then integrates a myriad of the digital solutions and touch points they’ve already deployed through a single pane, so patients, visitors, or community members are empowered to spend less time searching and working around the inefficiencies of the place, and more time getting back to feeling well. Our platform allows a brand to build that mobile channel of engagement to enhance the experience. And then, beyond the digital navigation, we offer solutions that make the physical journey easier with wayfinding — enabled by real-time location awareness, blue-dot, turn-by-turn directions that get people from home to parking to their point of care with ease. The best part is it can be deployed in whatever way the health system prefers — they can build an app with us, many already have their own custom apps and we can tuck wayfinding into that build, and, newly released, we now have an option to embed that wayfinding component directly into the patient portal. We’re really passionate about helping our customers move from being just app owners to truly experience owners, and when you bring mobile and wayfinding together, it really allows them to move the needle.
Matthew Holt
There’s a lot of different activity going on around patient touch points and the patient front door — telemedicine, appointment scheduling, content and information, that kind of stuff — and a lot of different people doing it from different angles. You’ll often find people getting some of this from their health plan, but also — take me as a random example, since I always tend to do that — I’m a One Medical member, and they’ve got some front-door stuff, some telemedicine stuff. I use my local health system, which is also connected to UCSF, the big academic medical center in San Francisco, and they’ve got a MyChart thing that offers me certain appointments and other stuff — there’s still a lot of phone calls involved, but they do offer stuff. And then, of course, I’ve got my health plan — Blue Shield at the moment — and I think they’ve got a telemedicine option somewhere in there too. So how do you place Gozio in that whole ecosystem, and how do you position yourselves relative to all the other point solutions people may already have — telemedicine, content, information, marketing, or whatever else? Just give me the landscape a bit.
Katie Logan
Yeah, I love this. When I zoom out from an industry perspective for a minute — I’ve been in it almost 20 years now — and reflect on the evolution of point solutions and digital inside healthcare, it’s a bit of a culture problem. I was talking to a physician leader last month about how the whole system is fundamentally designed around the physician first, and then around some of these broken operational processes. Over the last 15 or 20 years we’ve digitized that chaos, but none of these point solutions really talk to each other. So you end up with a bunch of digital dead ends, sending people down different rabbit trails to find their ultimate answer and point of care, and we’re exhausting people with all these point solutions. It’s not that there are too many tools — they all do great things — it’s the friction of the fragmentation. I like to think Gozio is an aggregator of those things, because we can integrate, we can stitch it all together, we can create a more uniform, seamless experience, while still letting the operation take advantage of the tools that serve a particular clinical need, outcome, or scheduling workflow. Our platform allows them to bring it all together into one unified launch point — one experience — that helps folks like you, me, my husband and kids, and everybody else navigate those complexities.
Matthew Holt
So I have to push you a bit on that. All of your clients are health systems, hospitals?
Katie Logan
Yeah, we’re in just under 35 health systems across the country — academic, children’s, adult, combination.
Matthew Holt
Okay. And in terms of the digital front door — if a health system becomes a Gozio client, do you essentially white-label and take over their — what parts do you take over and white-label? Their whole website, just their mobile app, some combination? Where are you guys on that?
Katie Logan
Yeah, I’d think of it more as offering them the white-label native mobile experience and channel, first and foremost. We don’t want to just be a bunch of links to a website, or replace a website — you can do that with mobile web. The richness, and the hassle-free experience, comes when we make things native — that ‘find a provider’ search, that appointment scheduling, that access to content, or even the one-click to get to a phone call, because operationally they still sometimes require the phone call, versus hunting and pecking to find the number. So we think of it as truly owning the mobile experience — that channel — in the palm of their community’s hands.
Matthew Holt
Okay. And what are the most-used parts, once someone becomes a client and is outsourcing that navigation experience to you?
Katie Logan
It’s a good old-fashioned ‘it depends’ answer — health system priorities, what they want to build, how they configure it, what they put at the forefront of that mobile experience. But, as some of what we’ll show you in the demo illustrates, it’s all about driving access as a priority — getting people in the door, getting them seen. So provider search and scheduling, and those pieces coming together, is a top use. The ability for health systems to communicate and connect with patients via push notifications and content, and engage them in personalized journeys, is another top area. And with wayfinding, being able to search all the assets on a campus — not just get me to my appointment, but I’m in a waiting room, I want coffee, I need lunch, I need to send this location to a family member coming to visit our kid in the hospital — we have lots of ways to push that out and get people to the right location on campus. So that search-and-get-me-to-the-right-place function is sort of the top use within wayfinding. Christine, keep me honest — you’ve been with the organization a long time, and worked with a lot of our customers. What else would you add?
Christine Smith
Yeah, I think that’s a good overview. One thing we continue to see energy and excitement around is AI too — embedding virtual agents and chat-like capabilities inside mobile, to help facilitate that digital navigation, as Katie mentioned.
Matthew Holt
Christine, when you talk to clients and potential clients — I don’t want to give too much away before the demo — there’s now any number of people claiming they’re building AI solutions and deploying agentic engineers or whatever into health systems. I got in trouble with someone yesterday who’d just raised some money, for saying I don’t get how they’re different from the 17 other people doing the same thing, because it used to be ‘I have one thing that solves this problem,’ and now it’s ‘I can come in and solve multiple problems with my AI agent.’ So when you have that conversation — ‘we have a thing that does this, and we’re bringing AI into helping with that’ — how’s it going? Are people saying, ‘oh no, ChatGPT could do all of this for me instead’? How are you hearing about that?
Christine Smith
Yeah, I think we’re in a transformational era, but it’s easy to get lost in the sauce of ‘AI is going to fix and change and transform everything.’ What we’ve seen is that we really need to understand what problem we’re solving, and whether AI is actually driving efficiency — are we making something easier or better, or is it just cool tech? In some cases it’s somewhere in between, and in some cases it’s one of those extremes. I think healthcare continues to dabble in specific use cases, and as those use cases show value, adoption of different AI tools will keep growing. From a Gozio Health perspective, we believe AI is table stakes just to be efficient and make progress quickly — but that doesn’t mean you should throw AI at everything and expect it to be a silver bullet. So we have a pretty pragmatic approach, but the conversations have definitely varied. Katie, please —
Katie Logan
No, go ahead — sorry, Christine. I think it’s great, and, to Christine’s point, table stakes both from an internal perspective and a development process — we’ve been spending a fair bit of time, as most companies have, thinking about how that fits. Your engineers are all token-maxing, right?
[laughter]
Matthew Holt
It’s a new word I heard — token counting.
Katie Logan
That’s absolutely right — how much money can we spend on Anthropic.
[laughter]
At some point someone will ask, ‘what are we actually getting for all of that?’ The return will have to be proved, just like with any digital solution. But from a product perspective, what’s table stakes now, and what’s the expectation, as end users in our day-to-day lives, of how we want to interact with a tool — being able to ask questions — that’s where I think you’ll see us continue to head in the near term, applying that into a native mobile experience and wayfinding. Less clicking, more conversational — I think that’s just around the corner, and it’ll be an exciting evolution for us.
Matthew Holt
Right. Well, let’s look at what you’ve got so far. Christine, I think the first thing you’re going to show us is that general consumer patient front door — why don’t you bring that up and we’ll take a look.
Christine Smith
Absolutely. And as Katie mentioned, we really believe in supporting our healthcare clients to deploy this in whichever way makes sense for them as an organization.
Matthew Holt
And this isn’t a fake one — this is one I’ve heard of.
Christine Smith
That’s right — this is real tech, this is not vaporware.
Matthew Holt
I’m thinking about — most people put some random, anonymized health system logo up top, but Rush has a real name, so I assume they’re an actual customer.
Christine Smith
Real client, real tech, real solution — yes, we thought it was important to show that.
Matthew Holt
Well, look, sometimes the customer doesn’t want people to see this — but they obviously aren’t the ones watching this here in Chicago. Yes, I know you’ve got it on a slide with Gozio’s logo next to it, but they don’t know who the hell you are, and it doesn’t really matter, right? Sorry — I interrupted, you were about to tell us. Go ahead.
Christine Smith
I was going to say something good, but it’ll come back. We’ll walk through a couple of things here, but I’ll start by orienting around your question earlier, Matthew — really, the goal is to bring all these digital solutions together into one pane of glass, one seamless experience. So I’d like to show you a couple of different things. You’re probably already sensing it — I see a patient portal, I see online scheduling, I see ‘Get care today,’ access to low-acuity care options, I see ‘Ask Isabella,’ that virtual chat agent that’s becoming table stakes, I see ‘find a provider’ recommended for you. These are the types of digital solutions health systems have deployed as point solutions, and sometimes adoption is minimal, because users have to go search for these things and then engage with them separately. When they all live in one mobile application, in the palm of your hand, in your pocket, it’s much easier to access them and drive the value of all of those solutions when they’re in one place. That varies by health system — they can deploy whatever makes sense for them — but these are some of the themes, the core modules and features, that tend to resonate most in the market.
I’ll stop here — as we think about the physical space, what about accessing everything inside an enterprise? There are hospitals, sure, but as you see here, there are also pharmacies, primary care, urgent care, walk-in clinics, and standalone buildings that are part of a health system, where you want to drive patients and users to access those facilities. So we’ve built a native experience around searching for those facilities, saving them, sharing them, engaging with them — maybe that’s a call today, operationally, maybe it’s a direct scheduling link — embedding that online scheduling capability. We build a native UI focused on the mobile experience and the benefits of being on a device, to make that as easy and seamless as possible for patients, visitors, staff members, community members, even prospective patients who don’t yet have a relationship with the health system.
I’ll keep going and click through a bit — here’s an example of some of the types of places. We’ll go to another section — I’ll pick on provider search, because online search and scheduling is always the top priority for driving more patients into the facility to actually get care. Again, our priority is around native experiences — how can we make this as easy as possible while leveraging the investment the health system has already made to manage their provider database, online scheduling tools, and information about those physicians. We can search by specialty, maybe by symptom, maybe by location, maybe by physician name specifically, because I already know a physician, I’ve already been referred. And then I’ve got access to that physician — again, leveraging a location-aware platform, I can navigate straight there, or call and book. You can see the theme here — making access to all of those calls to action as easy as possible on a native platform.
Matthew Holt
I can also tell how far Atlanta is from Chicago — get the mileage.
[laughter]
That’s great. Probably not going to drive 500 miles to find an allergist, but I get you guys aren’t in Chicago, where Rush is.
Christine Smith
That’s great, that’s great. I’ll keep going here — another key access point, of course, is the patient portal, where I want to be able to quickly access clinical data as a patient. What’s interesting is that everything I’ve shown up to this point is really for anybody — I haven’t authenticated as an individual. Those things should be accessible to everybody in a health system’s community — patients, prospective patients, community members. But once I authenticate, which is something very cool and unique with the mobile platform, we can use information about your demographics and other clinical details to tailor the experience further. So now we can pull things forward — what upcoming appointments do you have, let’s drive some calls to action around that. I don’t have any upcoming appointments, but imagine I did — maybe I need to call, maybe I need to reschedule, maybe I need to get prepared, and there are things I need to do — let me get a quick look at the instructions tied to that appointment. Let me quickly access anything inside my patient portal, like test results or messages. And then, as things get even cooler, let me further personalize this experience — Rush has also deployed a concierge program, so they’re able to tweak that home screen and mobile experience to highlight some of the unique solutions available to their concierge members, which is awesome. And as my little user scrolls here, you’ll notice my patient education content has completely changed — I’ve now transformed into a middle-aged man, which is great — but that’s because, once I’ve authenticated, the mobile platform has information about the user that makes the content pertinent to them. Men’s health — I don’t just want generic health tips, I want tips appropriate to me. So it’s a really great thing that becomes available.
Matthew Holt
That’s great. So in this view, now you’ve logged in — I think it looked like you had biometric authentication there, or maybe you didn’t, or you could obviously log in with username and password. Now you’re on the My Rush site, the mobile site. You then log into MyChart — the things you’re servicing, like appointment times or whatever. What’s the interplay between Gozio and MyChart, or whichever practice management or scheduling system is in the back end? Are you having to hook into that, or is it that, once you do something in your layer, the Gozio layer, it automatically appears in the back end?
Christine Smith
We have seamless integrations with direct booking solutions — could be the patient portal directly, could be a third party; there are a number out there that facilitate that booking experience. We pass the tokens and the demographics and integrate directly with those solutions, so the user just feels like they’re in one app the whole time, filling out their information, and their appointment result lands in the patient portal.
Matthew Holt
And do you find this actually changes usage — that most people are now using this rather than going straight to, say, a Rush Epic MyChart login? I should look up my UCSF one, which doesn’t have anything like this — I’m just going straight into MyChart. Obviously it has some of these features, but not the look and feel, the front end, or the bunch of extra features you’ve added. Are you seeing a big shift away from people going to MyChart directly, to this, or was no one really using MyChart much in the first place — I don’t know.
Christine Smith
Oh no, lots of people are using MyChart.
[laughter]
I’d say it’s not a shift, but a complement — in many of our clients we actually see an increase in portal utilization, because now they have a different entry point, and it’s all contained in one spot that gets them where they want to be.
Matthew Holt
But essentially you’re using the MyChart back end, I guess, with this front end. Are you finding, in terms of user experience, that more people are using this, or are they going, ‘well, I’ve got this, but I still have to go into MyChart to find some other specific thing that’s not available here’ — how’s that working?
Christine Smith
Yeah, in this case it’s leveraging the data from the EHR to personalize the experience, plus a few workflows that are easy buttons into what you’d get in the portal — but you’ll notice they can still launch straight into the portal if they need to go deeper into some of those workflows. We’re very mindful that we’re not here to recreate the portal — it’s very complementary, and in some cases it should absolutely be contained and managed and executed in the portal. But it depends on how far a given client — Rush or another — wants to adopt those workflows and bring them into the native experience.
Matthew Holt
I think we should let Christine finish the last bit of the demo — but I wanted to stop there and chat a bit about what else is coming. Go ahead, show us what else you were going to show.
Christine Smith
Yeah, we’re close to being there, which is great. This is a quick one, but I’ll just highlight — building on Katie’s comment — the patient portal solves tons of clinical data needs for users every day, but a lot of times health systems are looking beyond the patient now too. They’re looking at direct-to-employer experiences, staff experiences, student experiences, especially in academic medical centers. So to really personalize a mobile experience that includes all that clinical data plus the other personalized things they want to make available, sometimes a bit more is needed beyond the patient and the portal, to make that a truly seamless experience that lives inside one mobile platform. That’s kind of the continuum of where we see health systems deciding what to use as their mobile experience platform — what are the goals they’re trying to accomplish, who’s the catchment area, what’s the experience we need to deliver — and based on those answers, that helps us understand the best approach.
Matthew Holt
Yeah, and I assume, Katie, there’s a bunch of things that are either coming in through Gozio’s world, or that you’re being asked for — around telemedicine, remote deployment, Q&A, actual connection with either a human clinician or maybe an AI clinician — I saw the chat there. What are you finding people are bringing into this and asking you for? Is telemedicine currently built into this for some systems?
Katie Logan
We’re not a telemedicine platform, but because we have an API, we can integrate and help make it a native experience. I was just with a client yesterday — their priority is their children’s hospital and system trying to get more telehealth visits out into the community and make it better known, and wrestling with how to build that channel well with their population — everyone’s got a phone, but may not have other devices — so that was one of the priorities we’re starting to work through, bringing it in, making it quick along the way. So telehealth, virtual care — most of what you’ve seen here from Christine — but we’re really mindful of not recreating those other solutions. It’s about how we can simplify and stitch it together.
Matthew Holt
But your goal at Gozio is to essentially be the front door to all of that, and more as it comes.
Katie Logan
Yeah, absolutely — because we want to help them really improve the experience, and we believe this is a fundamental way to do that.
Matthew Holt
All right, fantastic. Christine, let’s go — let’s go somewhere.
[laughter]
Now I have to go to a hospital — what happens next?
Christine Smith
That’s a perfect segue — let’s travel through time and space and actually go somewhere. So we’ll show you a demo of our wayfinding experience. As Katie said, this can be deployed however a health system wants to operationalize it — in a Gozio-powered application, like you saw with Rush, directly in the patient portal, which we’re excited to announce, or inside an application they built themselves — maybe something in-house, very unique to their community — and we can partner with them to deploy our solution there. What I’ll show you first is what wayfinding looks like in a Gozio-powered application. We’ll start at an important point, which is that the experience really starts at home — it doesn’t start when I get to the health system running late and open my phone to start navigating; it starts when I’m sitting on my couch and my phone, which is notifying me all day long, reminds me I’ve got somewhere to be. That’s a great plug to start the navigation experience — there are many appointment-reminder solutions out there driving those kinds of patient communications, by email or text, and this is really the best place to kick-start the wayfinding experience. So — I got my text message, I’m ready to go, I click my link, I get a quick view of the appointment details coming straight out of the patient portal, through that communication vendor, right into the native experience. Then, as you saw before, there are a couple of pieces to my navigation — we’ll start with driving. I’ve got a ‘drive there’ option — we facilitate a seamless handoff to Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, and rideshare vendors, depending on what app the user has on their phone, so they can personalize that piece of the journey. And we’ll travel through space and time — now we’ve arrived in Atlanta, at the campus. I’ve finished driving, I’ve arrived in the right parking deck — as you know, sometimes there are eight parking decks, and you’ve got to get to the right one to reach your appointment — so we do some configuration on the back end to get the user to the right spot, and then encourage them to save their parking spot, because after two or three hours of a stressful health experience, the last thing you want is to fumble around a campus trying to figure out where your car is.
Matthew Holt
Old Seinfeld episodes on losing your car in a parking lot — we’ve all done it many times. Exactly — for that matter, finding a parking spot is the hardest part, where I tend to go. Yeah, that’s San Francisco for you.
Christine Smith
That’s exactly right — so we try to make that as painless as possible, so the user can save their parking space — there’s my spot. And now I get a prompt: do you want to continue to the information desk in the main building? This is fully configurable by the health system — maybe I go straight to Dr. Logan’s office, maybe I need to check in at a desk first, maybe I need a visitor badge, maybe there are steps along the way — we facilitate that handoff in the mobile app to make sure people go to the right stops at the right time. I’m going to hit ‘no’ — so there’s my point of interest, and as you can already see in the background, now I’ve got this wonderful indoor view of the campus — it includes the parking spaces, the surface lots, the points of interest inside the facilities, the hallways, the doors, the stairs, the elevators — all of that level of detail, which we’re able to capture from the CAD plans of the facility, and build into a rich 3D map where users can engage directly, or just navigate wherever they need to.
Matthew Holt
Out of interest — is there a standardized indoor map, or do you have to create that yourselves when you go into a new facility? Do you hook into a floor plan, or do you have to build it from scratch?
Christine Smith
It’s leveraging whatever they have, which isn’t always standard, and then we basically standardize that and get it into the mapping you see here.
Matthew Holt
So you have to do some work there — I had no idea. I mean, there’s Google Maps, satellite imagery, and that’s fairly familiar, but inside buildings, I didn’t know if there was such a thing as a standardized way of mapping.
Christine Smith
Yeah, and that’s a unique point, Matthew, because healthcare is very different — nothing is standard about the buildings. Most Home Depots look the same — big rectangles, with rows and numbers, and I know exactly how to maneuver those — but our platform is built to uniquely handle the complexity of healthcare campuses.
Matthew Holt
Imagine every In-N-Out Burger in California is exactly the same — clearly not the case for every hospital in the world.
Christine Smith
So it takes a bit of work, but it’s something we’ve done at scale, and we continue to tweak our platform to handle those complexities as best we can, so patients don’t feel any of it — they just follow the instructions and off they go, which I’ll show you here in a second. So I’m looking at my preview route — I don’t know if you’re like me, but every time I want to go somewhere, I need to see what it’s going to look like before I start. So we enable that too — a bird’s-eye view of where I’m about to journey — and then I can go ahead and kick-start it and follow the yellow brick road. So, there we go.
Matthew Holt
Oh, here we go — you love it, faking the walking. [laughter] We could always send Christine out to a local hospital and make her walk around and show that directly, but here we go.
Christine Smith
I do like to collect my steps.
Matthew Holt
Yeah — and the little blue guy, it’s kind of fun.
Christine Smith
We’ve had some requests to make that unique to the brand — for a children’s hospital, their logo, maybe a teddy bear — so we can do all of that and make it super unique to the customer and the experience they want to create.
Matthew Holt
Okay, but presumably the average person is just seeing their own dot, like on a Google map when you’re driving, but indoors. Do you have problems connecting — do people have to connect to Wi-Fi, or is 5G good enough these days inside most buildings, and it just works?
Christine Smith
Go ahead, Katie.
Katie Logan
Sure — no Wi-Fi required here. It’s all running off Bluetooth-enabled sensors hung inside the ceilings.
Matthew Holt
But is there any need for the consumer to connect something, or is it just automatic for them?
Katie Logan
No need for the consumer — if the phone is working and it’s open, it’s routing. Part of the beauty of that is, as Christine mentioned, with how hospitals are built and then keep adding locations and sprawling, and the walls are three feet thick, we wanted no disruption or friction from needing Wi-Fi or other technology to make it work.
Matthew Holt
But they’ve put in sensors — sensors just for you, or is that something being used for other tools as well?
Katie Logan
Yeah, we have our own sensors, our beacons, that we hang — that’s all included. And then, as the technology advances, with Bluetooth-enabled RTLS, asset tracking, lighting, and the smart hospitals of the future, we can certainly integrate with that infrastructure — they may have some already, they may not, and we figure it out on a customized basis.
Matthew Holt
All right, brilliant. Now we’ve made it to the information desk. I think, Christine, you were going to show us the same thing, or something similar, within the MyChart portal.
Christine Smith
So here’s an experience inside the patient portal — take us back a level. This screen is familiar to many, and there are a lot of different ways to drive a call to action for wayfinding inside the patient portal — we’ve mocked up two here. One is just general search and navigation — if I want to search for something, maybe I’m visiting someone, or maybe I just want to go to an urgent care facility and don’t need to book an appointment, just get easy driving directions — we facilitate that, fully embedded within the patient portal. And then, if we think about actually having an appointment, like we saw with that text reminder — I have an appointment, and I want that seamless handoff from getting the reminder to it being time to go — so I’ve got an appointment here, a future visit. I’ll click that — these are familiar screens inside MyChart — and we’ve got a little plug down here, a call to action to jump into the navigation guide. And you’ll hear me start to sound a little repetitive — get an understanding of the journey ahead of me, my driving piece, my parking piece, and then, of course, the walking section. So I’ll choose my driving preference, which is Google, my safe parking spot — this looks familiar too — I’m in the right parking garage, I can save my parking space, configure it if needed, and save it so I can get back to it at the end — and then, as you saw, I get to follow that same yellow brick road again, this time fully embedded within the patient portal. This journey is a little different — it goes through an elevator, pops up a couple of floors later, and has a shorter path — but how cool, to travel through time and space on these campuses. Go ahead, Katie.
Katie Logan
Yeah, I was just going to say, we’re proud that that rich experience, which has been part of Gozio’s mobile and native portfolio for over a decade now, is now available — super rich, and an equal experience — inside the patient portal. This is a new launch for us — we’re taking our first customer live this month, and looking forward to many more. We’re seeing a fair bit of interest in helping bring that navigation journey to those health systems where the patient portal is truly serving as their front door, so now we’ve got an option for that as well. More to come on that over the course of the year, but it’s something we’re excited to now officially have in the toolbox, and able to offer to systems interested in putting it inside MyChart.
Matthew Holt
Very cool. Thanks, Christine — I think we’re done with the demos now, right? This leads us to the obvious big question for anybody working with hospitals today in tech — what do you think the relationship with Epic, and to a certain extent Oracle and others, looks like at the moment, for a company like yours that’s bringing things together but also has a couple of specialized applications?
[laughter]
General conversation — more from a Gozio perspective. I know you’re in the toolbox with Epic, but tell me a bit more.
Katie Logan
Yeah, I think, in general, the way we like to think about it, it’s truly a ‘better together’ story. It’s not a replacement, it’s not a competitor to what’s fundamentally offered — clinically and operationally — by the EHR. There are ways that information from Epic, from Cerner, together with these capabilities, really fundamentally improves the experience, and that’s the way we want to approach it. That’s what we believe, and we’re really seeing that play out now, particularly with Epic opening this category into their toolbox, because the market was asking for it. So we’re excited about that possibility.
Matthew Holt
And do you think their strategy at the moment — it seems to me there are a lot of big questions around things like AI scribing, what they’re building versus what somebody else is building — we’ve seen a lot of other players, you see health systems build some of their own stuff, but also have a bunch of people in their marketplace offering solutions, and there might be reasons a particular solution is better to use than the one native to Epic, and obviously people do that. Is your sense that you’re going to be building more integration, more complexity, more features into what you’re delivering, even while they’re adding stuff on their end?
Katie Logan
Yeah, I think, like we were talking about earlier, the fragmentation of all these solutions is the problem. So if we can find a way to bring that together through rich integrations, to complement the solutions that are actually solving the operational problem, that’s a good win for the industry, from my perspective. We philosophically want to do that and deliver it, and not just hand out a commoditized, one-size-fits-all experience to every health system. There’s a need to differentiate, a need to be unique in market — there’s intense competition in some places looking to serve that community, and we can help them do that through integration and truly differentiated offerings.
Christine Smith
Yeah, and if there’s one thing I can add — many of the large health systems have also deployed multiple different EHRs across their ecosystem.
Matthew Holt
How shocking to hear that would go on in a well-organized health system.
[laughter]
Christine Smith
That’s right. But how do you maintain that one single brand, feel, and mobile experience when your patients are going to access a number of different tools depending on which regional hospital they go to? So we see value in trying to make that easier for health systems too.
Matthew Holt
So, to that end — ballpark — what’s it going to cost a hospital to lay Gozio on top of what they’re doing? And when they say, ‘okay, we’re writing you a big check here, what’s the ROI on this?’ — what’s your answer? Give me a range on what it costs, compared to what things generally cost, and what ROI they’re looking for.
Katie Logan
Yeah, we certainly like to answer the ROI question first — that’s fundamental to this being a value, not just a cost or another tool that gets purchased and put on a shelf. We think first about a few things: revenue and growth, from access and volume; efficiencies and savings in operations and staff, from driving direct access and workflows; some improvement around quality; and certainly patient satisfaction, survey metrics, and all the experience measures, and seeing movement there. I’ll give you a few examples — we did a webinar with a client recently and talked through the rollout of their application, and shared a few key stats: total new patient visits increased by 24% after deploying our mobile app and channel with them; calls per visit decreased by 25% in primary care, and overall call volume dropped 8%, just from bringing that channel forward. From an experience perspective, their Google rating increased by a point and a half, and their brand reputation score went from 64 to 83 in twelve months, because they were able to start overcoming some of the negative feedback they’d been getting around their overall experience. That’s an example of a heavy mobile customer who’s not doing as much with wayfinding — so it depends on where we meet them and what they’re trying to solve for. From a cost perspective, it’s a platform fee, plus annual wayfinding — we look at square footage, which, to Christine’s point, factors in the optionality of how far you go into a building, how much you want to map. And we want to partner with people to scale, but we try to stay away from per-user, per-month pricing — we want it to be about the full experience, and to complement their strategy.
Matthew Holt
Give me a rough ballpark of what a decent-sized system is spending to put this in.
Katie Logan
I’d say, order of magnitude, depending on the size of the system, we’re talking hundreds of thousands, not millions.
Matthew Holt
Okay, so it’s not redoing Epic.
Katie Logan
Absolutely not — let me be clear about that.
[laughter]
Matthew Holt
Okay, but it’s not a trivial thing to line up either, and the CFO is looking at it — you’ve got to be able to prove it actually moves those numbers the way you’re describing, and that it has an impact on the bottom line.
Katie Logan
Fair enough — and we can. Our customers have. That’s what we want to plant our flag in, and really lead with the value and the outcome they’re looking for.
Matthew Holt
Brilliant. And just to conclude, give me a couple of numbers about Gozio — how many people, how much money have you raised, when did you last raise money? Give me a flavor of the company itself.
Katie Logan
Yeah, so still pretty small — about 11, 12 years in, just under 100 people, organization-wide. Fundraising has mostly been private and family funding, with some infusion of growth capital from one outside investor. It’s been strategic and intentional — marching toward profitability, and we’ll see where the next year takes us.
Matthew Holt
Do you have a total number raised?
Katie Logan
I don’t have a total number raised — part of that is I wasn’t here for the whole journey, Matthew, so I’ll have to check and get back to you on that.
Matthew Holt
I know that Morgan Stanley put in some money — using the brilliance of my AI friends, my quick search — it looks like Morgan Stanley invested back in 2022. I don’t know how much it was, but 2022.
Katie Logan
That’s right — and I joined about a year ago, and they’re still the primary, and only, outside investor, in that sense.
Matthew Holt
All right, and a good partner.
Katie Logan
Good partner.
Matthew Holt
Great. And then, what does ‘good’ look like — you mentioned about 35 systems now. Come back here in three years’ time, if you guys have done your job correctly, what does it look like?
Katie Logan
Oh man — in three years’ time, how about we’re in every health system?
Matthew Holt
I like that ambitious goal.
Katie Logan
No, but certainly, we want to accelerate growth around mobile. We want to really lean into this offering within MyChart’s patient portal, and hopefully with Cerner as well, as they evolve their patient portal offering — we want to be able to tuck that in.
Matthew Holt
Do they have any customers left by the time they’re done? [laughter] I know they still have a bunch of customers.
Katie Logan
That’s right, they do — we have several of them. So as they take their portal to the next level, I think there’s going to be an interesting story for us together too, with both wayfinding and mobile. But accelerated growth is the name of the game, like any company you talk to — and that’s because we believe we’re at a point, from an industry perspective, where it’s more ready for this than it’s probably been in a long time.
Matthew Holt
Yeah — and speaking as somebody who now goes to a lot of hospitals, I think it’s probably a very useful product, and feel free to go sell it to UCSF anytime you can.
Well, tell them you had a patient request.
[laughter]
Matthew Holt
All right, fantastic. Wonderful. I was speaking with Katie Logan and Christine Smith, who are respectively the Chief Strategy and Head of Product, and the VP of Strategic Solutions and Partnerships, at Gozio Health, showing us the system. Katie, Christine, thanks a lot for your time.
Katie Logan
Thank you so much.
Christine Smith
Yes, thank you, Matthew.
