Samir Malik: Executive Vice President of Genoa Telepsychiatry (Raise the Line)

Hi, I'm Shivani. Thanks for checking out our raise the line interview series.

In which me and my cohost osmosis chief Medical Officer Dr Rishi Desai explore how to strengthen our healthcare system with some amazing leaders in medicine, technology, education and government.

And they have some great advice for people starting careers in healthcare as well. I hope you'll watch these highlights and then go listen to the full podcast interview wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Rsai. And today on Race Line, I'm happy to be joined by so Malik, so is the executive vice president and General manager of Genoa Telepsychiatry, one of the largest outpatient telepsychiatry providers in the country, which is a special focus on expanding access to mental health care in rural America.

I'd like to just kind of dive right in and maybe just with your background. What led you to co found one do and how you eventually got acquired by uh GENOA to become genoa telepsychiatry.

You know, the story starts back in 2011. Uh I was working in a psychiatric hospital doing business development and strategy for them.

And one thing we saw, uh pretty frequently was that we do hard work, helping patients get better. We discharge them back into their communities.

And when they didn't have access to good follow on care, they get sick again or they decompensate. And within some period of time, we'd find them back at the hospital.

And that was really unfortunate because you could see all the good work that was done by the case managers and the social workers and the nurses and the physicians would be undone because there is a lack of good follow on care in the communities these patients were going home to.

And so the thinking was well, we've got all these psychiatrists here at the hospital, we use telemedicine to extend care and create follow on programs for these patients and the communities that they were going home to.

Um This pretty quickly turned from an initiative at the hospital into an opportunity to build a standalone business. And so as we were partnering with community mental health centers, we saw these general pharmacies time and time again, you know, we explored a partnership with genua that turned into an acquisition.

Do you mind sharing advice? Now we have kind of a a way I like to close interviews is to have people give advice to people that are rising up and starting their clinical journeys, whatever the journey that might be, you know, maybe they're starting out as nursing assistants or kids or physicians, whatever it may be.

Uh any thoughts as they start going down this road of seeing patients. It may seem obvious to some people in their training but not so obvious to others.

Never lose sight of the patient. We're all here in service of the patient and it's easy to get abstracted away from that and get tied up in.

How does reimbursement work or what is a payer gonna pay or what are the requirements to document or code something or you know, is there a market for, for developing this new treatment?

Those are all important questions to ask. I'm not saying dismiss those questions, but as you address those questions in your, in your clinical pursuits, frame them in the lens of how will this impact the patient and for the positive or not?

If you can keep your eyes on what you're doing and how it impacts the patient, you will always be effective and successful.

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