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- [00:00]
Scott Becker
This is Scott Becker with the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. Thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant founder and leader. We're joined today by Matthew Guttelis. Matthew's got a fascinating background and he's founded the company called Patient iq. They've done a tremendous job. They now work with the data of more than 2 million patients a month. I think it is. Matthew went to medical school. He was a business undergraduate, worked for several years, then went to medical school and, well, in medical school founded this company. He'll tell us more about it as we get going. Matthew, can you take a moment and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Patient iq?
- [00:41]
Matthew Guttelis
Yeah, so first, Scott, thank you so much for having me today. So, yeah, so a bit about me first. So as you mentioned, Matt Guttelis, I'm the founder and CEO of Patient iq. I guess about my background, I guess I would describe myself, you know, first a business guy at heart. You know, I started my career first as a commodities trader and then I was a Wall street analyst. And then in my, I'd say in my mid-20s, I kind of had an epiphany where I kind of woke up one day and really questioned what I was up to every day saying I wanted to have more impact in this world. So that put me on a little bit of a, of a different trajectory where I kind of left my career in Wall street to go to medical school, which I did. And then when I was in medical school, I had my second career pivot, and this one was definitely not planned. I ended up founding a company while in medical school called Patient iq. On the timescale, that's about nine years ago. So I've had this really amazing privilege over almost like the last decade of leading the team at Patient IQ as we scale and grow our impact in healthcare.
- [01:51]
Scott Becker
Matt, I'm asking you one question before we get to Patient iq. You're in this fascinating situation and I apologize to introduce you as Dr. Kattellis. Now there's another Dr. Kitelis who probably, if didn't help to encourage medical school, might have helped at all with finance. And I have no idea. I have no idea. But at some point when you tell your parents, I've spent four years in medical school, I've gone to one of the great medical schools in the country, went to Rush, and you just tell them, you know, I'm pivoting again. Not Wall street, not medical school. And you decide software, you know, founder of a software company. What are the parents thoughts at that point? Are they all Supportive or do they think, oh, my goodness, my son, who's going to be a trader who worked in Iowa grain, who was, you know, went to med school and is now going into business. What is the look on the face at the dinner table when you tell them about that pivot? Or they know it was coming all along.
- [02:49]
Matthew Guttelis
All right, well, yeah, okay. So there's a lot to unpack there. So this is pretty, pretty funny. I guess. So, yeah. A bit more about my backstory is I grew up in a. I guess the best way to describe it as a medical family. So as you alluded to, my father's physician, my mother's a nurse, and actually I'm one of five kids and my four siblings from really the time, I like to say, like they were in the womb, they all knew they were going to be in medicine. And so they're all physicians today or working in the industry. So I was first, I was the black sheep of the family. I did not necessarily want to go into what I perceived as the family business. And that's why I pursued a finance degree at the University of Illinois, got really passionate about working at the Chicago Board of Trade, and then went to Wall Street. So I already was the disappointment to my father and mother that I was going to go a different direction. But to their credit, they really didn't pressure any of their children to follow in their footsteps. They just provided a lot of support in general. But yeah, fast forward. I now am kind of having success in my first career in Wall Street. I guess I wasn't super creative. I saw the self sacrifice of now my siblings, who are now physicians treating patients, and I saw the real world impact that they were having. And that's where I was like, well, shoot, maybe you should give it a try too. That led me to Medical School. I180 went back to school, took all the prerequisite coursework, and then I went to Rush Medical College as you described. I do have to put an asterisk in there, though. I actually did not complete medical school. I'm one of those, I think now, proud medical school dropouts. But I took. What I did is I founded my company while in medical school and I ended up taking an extended leave of absence. And eventually the dean, he would call me every year. He's like, matt, you coming back? What's the story? And I'd be like, I need one more year, I need one more year. I got to give this thing a shot. And then after, I think a three year leave of absence, I ultimately ejected out and just went all in to patient iq.
- [05:01]
Scott Becker
And let me ask you a question there. Do you ever feel like LeBron James, that at some point you'll go back and finish your md like he went back and finished college or high school. I mean, where do you see that? Can you be the LeBron James of patient IQ and physician?
- [05:16]
Matthew Guttelis
It's a good question. I. For a while, that was always what I had in the back of my head that, you know, I'm going to go complete my medical degree and stick to the original plan of dedicating my life to patient care. I think what I've now learned and have come to terms with while, you know, while being the CEO and leader of this, this health care company is that I find it very fulfilling. There's other ways to have big impact in health care. And I don't think I can go back to, I think all the, like the note taking and the documentation and the rigor, the rigorous, I think, schedule required to be a practicing physician. I don't think I'd be very good at that. So, no, I don't agree.
- [06:02]
Scott Becker
Okay, so we will differentiate you from LeBron in that way. Matthew, take us forward now because you've built this incredible company. You've built a great team of leaders at your company. I'm so impressed with what you're doing. Tell the audience a little bit about what patient IQ does and the big things you're following with patient iq.
- [06:21]
Matthew Guttelis
Sure. Yeah. So Patient IQ is a healthcare software company. It's headquartered in Chicago. And really, we've been building a full kind of technology stack around this really important, and I would say simple concept that for healthcare providers today, it's more important than ever to measure patient outcomes. And specifically, what we help our customers measure are patient reported outcomes. So I'll take a moment just in case anyone in the audience is less familiar. So patient reported outcomes are validated assessments that are meant to measure, and this is the really important part, directly from the patients themselves or the patient voice about their quality of life, their functional status, their physical function, pain, et cetera. And what we do is we provide a platform that can measure these assessments, but with a methodology of every patient that walks through the front door of your hospital or clinic. And that's really not how it works in most of healthcare today. This is a rather newer concept, but the industry trends are very much in our favor. So today we have this wonderful privilege where we support more than 750 healthcare organizations. We're deployed at more than 5,000 sites of care supporting tens of thousands of frontline healthcare providers. We're in their clinics and their workflows and we're touching the lives of about 2 million patients a month. And what we do is before they have their first appointment with, let's say, a healthcare provider, we reach out to the patients about their goals for treatment and we measure them on domains that really matter to them. You know, whether they can go up a flight of stairs without pain. Oftentimes they're unable to do that before they get treated. And then we follow up with them after they ultimately get the care, let's say the surgical procedure. We, we follow these same patients for years, one, two, five years later. And then what our technology does is we aggregate all the insights about what we're learning and we package it right back up to those frontline providers. So first, they could understand how patients are recovering after treatments in a more patient centric way so they can modify their care plans to meet the needs of these patients. But second, we also provide the data and aggregate it at the operational level and the hospital executive level because as you can imagine, you want to understand how your hospital and your clinics are performing not only internally, but actually relative to everyone else. So we've actually been very busy at work building performance benchmarking into our technology as well. So you can understand if you're providing high quality patient centered care in a very objective and measurable way. So long story short, this is what patient IQ does day in and day out. It's an absolute privilege to work with so many really innovative and forward thinking healthcare organizations. And we're well on our way to having the impact that I set out to pursue almost 10 years ago.
- [09:25]
Scott Becker
That's really amazing what you're doing. And take a moment, Matt, and what are you most excited about and focused on this year? What, where are you most focused and excited this year as we get to the second half of 2025 and into 2026?
- [09:40]
Matthew Guttelis
Yeah. So one of the things that we've always have been focused on, and I hate to use such like a cliche or buzzword, but when I got really passionate about this space and you think about, you know, value based healthcare or the value equation, the way I think about that very simply is value. One way to describe it in healthcare is it's outcomes over the cost to achieve them. So at patient iq, we're really focused on, well, what are ways. Of course there's a lot of talk in healthcare in the industry broadly around what are ways to reduce costs and eliminate inefficiencies but there's another way to drive value and that's just improve outcomes. So we've been very focused on that this year. So we actually released a new product, we call it Data Pro. And what this technology does is it allows healthcare organizations to benchmark their performance relative to their peer groups all across the country. And we're also providing benchmarks at the provider level themselves. I'll give one quick anecdote is that as we've grown and have been deployed across more clinical settings in the United States, once again, our methodology is we measure outcomes on every patient that walks through the door. We've now actually amassed a critical mass of data in one of our segments, let's say in orthopedics, we're actually now capturing one third of orthopedic surgical volumes volume across all care settings. Inpatient, outpatient and ambulatory surgery centers are now flowing through Patient IQ's platform. So we, what we're really focused on right now in this year is really focusing on, well, first defining what is a good outcome. If you think about it, there's a lot of talk about value, but I actually would argue we don't necessarily have consensus in the medical community around what is a good outcome and how do you define it. So for instance, if you think about orthopedics, let's talk about one of the most common procedures performed. You know, the knee replacement. This procedure has been performed for 40 years. If you ask anyone in the country, you know, like a busy clinician, everyone says it's, it's great outcomes, very consistent outcomes. Well, we're, we're the platform that measures these things at scale. And one of the things that we've been doing is we created a performance benchmark on a primary knee replacement. And, and I think that what we found is actually really surprising. And I think it's surprising a lot of our stakeholders and constituents, which are these hospitals in the, in the executives that work within them. So I'll just give you the real quick anecdote which is a knee replacement, once again, very common procedure. If you actually measure it from the patient's perspective, they start with some level of symptomatic burden. Let's say they have knee pain, they have limited mobility, it's becoming debilitating. They have knee on knee osteoarthritis. Now we have to perform a surgery. What we do is we measure that patient's symptom burden once again from their perspective and we're able to quantify this. That's the Cool thing about patient report outcomes is you actually can do this in a very scientifically valid way today. Then we measure again at one year post op. So we define, well, what, how much are we expecting these patients to improve on these assessments and we derive what's called substantial clinical benefit. And this is becoming more accepted in the medical community, is a really great way to measure performance. So here's the punchline for this procedure. What we see in our national data is about 63, maybe 65 out of 100 patients achieve what's called substantial clinical benefit after a primary knee replacement. Said differently, 35 out of 100 patients don't improve to that degree. Obviously, some subset of patients unfortunately don't get better after surgery. They actually get in a worse symptomatic state. That's relatively rare for that procedure. But the next question is, well, do they improve meaningful or substantially? And 35 out of 100 do not. So that to me then forces all the secondary questions, well, why is that? Is that good? 65 out of 100, what can we do to improve that? And so that's like the center of the focus of patient IQ today is all those secondary questions about, well, is it patient factors that we should be thinking about more? Are there surgeon or provider factors about how we perform these surgeries? As I'm sure you know, Scott, there's so much innovation happening in the realm of knee replacements and orthopedics around using robotics, mechanical alignment, the way we perform these surgeries. And then there's the settings themselves. Should these cases be done inpatient, outpatient and ASCs. So that's really consuming a lot of the mental power of my teams. Internally at patient IQ is building the insights and analytics to help really, the surgeons, the innovators, the researchers to try to figure out how do we actually improve outcomes incrementally further. And that's what we're seeing is improvement doesn't happen all at once. It happens very incrementally. So we're trying to provide the right data and insights to those on the front lines who really understand how to move the needle.
- [14:53]
Scott Becker
Thank you very much. Just literally fantastic and deeply thoughtful and really fascinating research as to what works and what doesn't work and what the potential patient outcomes are. On it. Matthew, where can people learn more about patient iq? Where can they learn more about what you're doing?
- [15:11]
Matthew Guttelis
Well, I mean, one of the first places of course to start is, you know, just look us up online, you can go to our website and you'll learn about our first, our company. And we have multiple products. We have our Clinical Pro platform, which is really for hospitals. We have our research platform, which is for those in R and D who are trying to find more evidence and data to improve their products. And then Data Pro is our newest solution for this performance benchmarking to drive insights. But we're also very active in the community. My teams were very active going to healthcare conferences. We're visiting our customers all across the country. I would just encourage you, if you're seeking to learn more, just reach out through our website and we'll get in touch with you. And we'd love to talk to share more about what we're up to. And we're very collaborative because it takes. One thing that I've learned is that there's no single company or single innovator who's going to really solve these problems. It really takes all of us to work very collaboratively together. And that's why we were very big believers in working closely with our customers and other stakeholders who are oriented around the same goals.
- [16:22]
Scott Becker
Matthew, congratulations on all of your success with this. It's an amazing journey. It's amazing what you're doing. It's an amazing team you've developed. Congratulations, and thank you for taking the time with us on the Becker's Healthcare podcast today. Thank you very much.
- [16:35]
Matthew Guttelis
All right. Thank you so much for having me, Scott. I appreciate it.