Making Complex Healthcare Systems Feel Simple With VITL

[00:00:05] - [Speaker 0]
What happens when a founder discovers the frustrating customer problem beside the original opportunity is actually the business that is worth building? My guest today is Charlie Jordan. He's founder and CEO of Vital, a platform designed to simplify specialty prescribing and cash for pay medical practices. Now Charlie saw large telehealth companies and independent clinics struggling with the same old pharmacy workflows that included manual prescription entry, uncertain fulfillment, inconsistent pricing, and endless follow ups. So today, we're gonna discuss how founders can spot opportunities inside broken systems and understand why health care continues to rely on software that was built decades ago and how simplicity can coexist with compliance and trust.

[00:01:00] - [Speaker 0]
And Charlie will also share why fast decisions matter when a founder cannot know every customer. So whether you build in health care or another legacy market, this conversation should offer useful lessons about removing friction without removing responsibility. So thank you for joining me on the show today. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:01:26] - [Speaker 1]
Yep. So my name is Charlie Jordan. I'm the founder of Vital. We make prescribing beautifully simple for cash pay clinicians here in The US. Essentially, what we do is we trim the time to prescribe down to thirty seconds or less from four and a half minutes.

[00:01:44] - [Speaker 1]
We give them more scaled access to various pharmacies, and we, bring the price of medications down for practices and the patients.

[00:01:53] - [Speaker 0]
Well, it's a pleasure to have you join me. And we were talking before we started recording today. You're talking to me in Nashville, Tennessee, where for people listening that haven't been, I know there is a big health tech scene there. So was there a particular customer problem or conversation that made you realize that the pharmacy workflow challenge was a a much bigger opportunity? I feel there's gotta be a story there too.

[00:02:16] - [Speaker 0]
Right?

[00:02:17] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. No. It's interesting. Right? So my professional career in health health care started in 2020 around the time that you saw this boom in telehealth.

[00:02:27] - [Speaker 1]
Right? Yeah. The whole industry shifted. It was a 65 x growth in telehealth alone, thanks to lovely thing called COVID that we all experienced everywhere. So that was when I jumped into the healthcare space, I was at a couple of different health tech companies and I got to experience the pharmacy world through two different lenses, through the lens of a scaled organization and through the lens of these independent practices that were starting to pop up everywhere, especially in this cash pay health ecosystem.

[00:03:01] - [Speaker 1]
And what I saw was interesting. Right? And it was this compound pharmacy lane that had been around for several decades, never really had quite the market demand that occurred in 2022. Part of that thanks to the telehealth boom and direct to consumer boom, but also this world of GLP-1s, right? And the craze that came with it.

[00:03:23] - [Speaker 1]
And so immediately you saw these compound pharmacies that while they had existed for a while at various different scales, they did not have the infrastructure needed to support the demand that was driving into their facilities. And so you would see these large scale telehealth awards like the one I was working with in 2022, where we would stand up this fulfillment supply chain and it would crumble within a couple of weeks. And what that would look like in terms of like actual metrics, right? So you would be sending scripts in, they'd be filled within say like a seventy two hour period, then all of a sudden it would be a two week backlog, right? And so that's no good for patients, it's no good for the practices, it's no good for anybody.

[00:04:10] - [Speaker 1]
So it became a really tough issue at that point in time. And that was just the supply chain, right? The actual writing of the prescription wasn't much better. You'd have prescribers where they're having to build out each individual medication that they were having to send to. There was this void, right?

[00:04:26] - [Speaker 1]
You send a prescription out and there's nothing that came back. And I thought that was interesting, but I didn't know it was worth pursuing until a couple years later. And so I had this idea of, okay, wow, this is a really tough issue. Everybody's dealing with it here in this scaled world. It must not be worth solving.

[00:04:46] - [Speaker 1]
Right? And it wasn't until I got to work in this independent space with individual practitioners that were starting to open their own practices. And I was surprised on two fronts. One, these practitioners were also using compound pharmacies and I thought, okay, that's interesting. And two, they had the identical issues that these scaled groups are having but with essentially no budget to go solve the problem, right.

[00:05:13] - [Speaker 1]
So you have the big budget orgs can't solve it, the small budget orgs can't solve it. And that's when I said, hey, you know, this is really interesting. Somebody has to fix this. It's going to be me, right? And so that's when I built Vital and said, hey, like prescribing doesn't have to be this difficult.

[00:05:33] - [Speaker 1]
It should be a simple part of the work stream. And equally so, you know, relying on quality partners to manage fulfillment shouldn't be this difficult. You should be able to route things where you see fit or where it's gonna best benefit the patient. And then the third part, which was its own bear, if you will, is the whole pricing of these medications, right? Everybody's got a different price.

[00:05:56] - [Speaker 1]
Let's make some consistency, add some transparency, let prescribers know upfront what things are gonna cost and where they can get the best rates from ahead of time. So that way it benefits the practice. Right? But it also benefits their patients. So their patients are always paying what's appropriate.

[00:06:11] - [Speaker 1]
And so that's really the journey that that I embarked on as far as, like, where I saw opportunity and how we brought Vital to market to satisfy that need.

[00:06:23] - [Speaker 0]
And it can be confusing from the outside looking in because we there's a huge health tech moment, movement going on at the moment, but also many of the areas of the industry still seem a little left behind. We've seen AI just about everywhere over the last three years. But why do I I can't believe I'm saying this out loud. Fax, phone calls, manual paperwork, why are they still so deeply embedded in this market? And what is this friction costing clinics, pharmacies, and most importantly, of all patients?

[00:06:53] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. I mean, it's it's interesting. Right? It's almost a penalty of the infrastructure of the space. It's you've got the long standing core infrastructure software components that each of these stakeholders run on, and they were built in the eighties.

[00:07:09] - [Speaker 1]
Right? Or they were built in the nineties. And so you've got a tremendous amount of tech debt in this space that prevents a lot of the innovation that you require, especially in this new age of health care that's separate from, like, the traditional health system style of health care. And, what's interesting, right, is you have the software that's a penalty and it creates bleed or it creates drag in the pharmacies, it creates drag in the practice. And what that is, is 30% of the pharmacy zone operating expense is caught up in this whole flywheel of receiving prescriptions, manual input, processing these orders, accounts receivable on these orders.

[00:07:54] - [Speaker 1]
And that's an interesting segment. But also on the clinical side, I mean, you've got sure. It might take you in, if you're a few years ago, five minutes to write a prescription. We brought that down to thirty seconds. That's great.

[00:08:07] - [Speaker 1]
But you've also got what I call the long tail of the prescription, which is the whole follow-up and problem addressing cycle of, okay, the script was sent in, but four days has gone by and there's been no update. Okay, well, where is it at? Like, where is it at in the pharmacy process? What problems could exist? Has it been shipped?

[00:08:25] - [Speaker 1]
Okay, now it's been shipped. When is it getting delivered? Is there an issue there? That's all manual labor on the practice until we came along. And that's really where we knuckled down and said, okay, let's optimize here.

[00:08:37] - [Speaker 1]
Let's eliminate this clinical drag around writing a prescription, but also let's eliminate this whole long tail of the follow-up cycle associated with each and every one of these prescriptions. Front end, you're saving four and a half minutes, back end, you're saving hours, Right? And those are hours of clinical time that could be spent in front of patients.

[00:08:57] - [Speaker 0]
And for founders listening in this space, when you build a marketplace around verified five zero three a and five zero three b compounding pharmacies, how do you balance speed and simplicity with trust, verification, and regulatory responsibility? It feels like a real juggling act, but tell me more about that.

[00:09:16] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that's an interesting part of the space. Right? It's not like you're you're Amazon, you're connecting somebody selling a pen to a customer, right?

[00:09:26] - [Speaker 1]
Relatively little compliance barrier there. Here, like you've got medications, right? Some of these might be controlled medications. Some of these might be injected into the patient, right? And you've got a really serious threshold across of what is real, what is real quality.

[00:09:42] - [Speaker 1]
You know, I take a stance in this market in particular of saying these doctors and patients, they're all being sold quality, right? But not a single one can really point to what that means. And I think that is a real issue in this space and something that needs standardization. And that's one of the torches that we carry at Vital is how do we go in and verify and make sure these pharmacies are upholding their own quality standards, whether it be with their individual state boards or nationally, all the way down to the ingredients that they use for their medications, right? Like how do we go in and make sure that each of those things are verified, but also reflecting that down to the practices and saying, hey, look, like you have a trusted ecosystem where you can go in, you've got this swath of pharmacies to pick from and every single one of them has been vetted.

[00:10:36] - [Speaker 1]
You can lean on the authority of Vital in this space to know that any of these pharmacies you prescribe to hold the same quality standards that, it would just take a practice a lot more time to identify on their own.

[00:10:50] - [Speaker 0]
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[00:11:23] - [Speaker 0]
So what benefits is this creating for clinicians and patients, and what risks should the industry be honest about? I suspect you've seen and heard a few things here, but tell me how you feel.

[00:11:36] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah, I mean, think it's a phenomenal time to be a patient, right? Because you have the ability to pick and choose where you get your care from, what you feel comfortable paying for. And you also get to go out and say, hey, like I'm interested in this new type of therapy. Let me go talk to a physician and see what benefits that actually has to me as an individual. And you're not having to worry about the whole insurance game, right?

[00:12:01] - [Speaker 1]
You're going in with expectation that you're going to pay for this thing. And you could even pay significantly less than if you went through the traditional health ecosystem in order to get that same level of care. I also see this as an area where patients are getting more high touch, right? If you want that, right? So like that's part of it.

[00:12:21] - [Speaker 1]
You get to pick and choose how frequently you talk to your physician. These are typically more innovative physicians to begin with. So they're excited about the care that they're delivering. It's not just, hey, let me cycle through my book of 400 patients. Right?

[00:12:35] - [Speaker 1]
It's more of how do I get to sit down with this person, really understand what they're looking to achieve in health journey and how they can really contribute and be a value add to that health journey. And so I think it's interesting from the patient's perspective for that reason. On the physician side, I think what's most exciting is you have all of these physicians that are just tired of being in the traditional health ecosystem. They're tired of going and working in a health system. They want to go out on their own.

[00:13:05] - [Speaker 1]
They want to essentially build their own practice around what they see as their own medical opinion being the standard of care. And it's exciting because you're allowing these physicians to go out and innovate and create practices that are extensions of themselves in terms of how they treat and how they manage the patients that also align with that medical opinion, right? And so I think it's an exciting period of time for for those two reasons.

[00:13:34] - [Speaker 0]
Before you join me on the podcast today, I was reading how you've talked about making complex systems feel simple. So how do you remove friction for users without hiding the controls and and safeguards that matter?

[00:13:47] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. Yeah. So it's funny. It's, there's something to talk about with my team. Right?

[00:13:52] - [Speaker 1]
It's like least common denominator. Right? That's so true in literally everything you do. You can distill it all down to what is, like, the least amount of information possible to make this thing succeed, or what is the fewest amount of steps required to get to the result. Right?

[00:14:11] - [Speaker 1]
And so you set your compliance guidance and framework, and then you go into this world and you say, okay. Like, where can I turn dials or where can I optimize this from a flow, from an experience? And I'm a firm believer that whether it be health care, whether it be automotive, whatever the industry is, nothing has to be a pain. Right? Like, nothing has to be an absolute stick in your side whenever you're going through a process.

[00:14:43] - [Speaker 1]
How I relayed that to prescribing is you had physicians that were having to enter the same exact information on three, four or five different screens through their prescribing process. Ridiculous, right? It's like enter it once and have that transfer all the way through your workflow or better yet as your patient's coming through their intake process have that be the repository of information that carries through the rest of your workstreams. And so my whole thesis around anything that I build is this concept of beautiful simplicity, right? It's like make things look great and feel great while you use it.

[00:15:23] - [Speaker 1]
And if you can achieve both of those things, like, your your users will absolutely love you for it, one. And the result is just incredible because it creates this sticky and and uniform environment.

[00:15:35] - [Speaker 0]
Amen to that. Completely with you. And for any founders that are listening to our conversation today, any lessons you've learned from your previous companies, and how they are maybe some of those learnings that are helping you shape how you scale Vital after, I believe, a series a and supporting more than 700 clinics. Phenomenal what you've done there. But any lessons you've learned along the way that would be useful for founders in this space listening?

[00:16:00] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. I mean, we could, we could probably have a whole session just talking about the lessons every week. And I think that's part of it. Right? It's like, hey.

[00:16:10] - [Speaker 1]
Failure is always part of the process. And if you're not failing, it means you're not pushing yourself hard enough. And and so, I really revel in the failures that I've had over the last decade. I started my first business in college, and I've had my fair share of whips and scars along the way. I would say the biggest thing that, you know, a founder can take into a new situation is just understanding they're not gonna know the answer to every question that they have to answer.

[00:16:39] - [Speaker 1]
Right? And I think that's part of the journey is going into a room and saying, hey, look, I don't know what the best path forward is, but I have no other choice but to select one and hope it's right. And being able to select quickly so you can figure out if the path you're on is the wrong path and you need to change is the most valuable lesson any founder could take into any business that they start.

[00:17:04] - [Speaker 0]
And as this is an international show, a question I've got to ask is why is there such a hotbed of health tech companies in Nashville? Because there will be people listening that just associate country music with Nashville, but, of course, there's so much else going on there. It'd be great to put Nashville on the map from a tech standpoint for people listening. What what's the story behind that health tech scene there?

[00:17:24] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. Interestingly enough, Nashville has been a huge area for just healthcare at large. Right? You've got HCA that's located here and was founded here by the Frist family. And I think the centralization of HCA and you've got the Vanderbilt ecosystem from an educator standpoint in the health space, I think both of those really draw in interesting talent, right?

[00:17:52] - [Speaker 1]
And they've been phenomenal at giving back to the ecosystem in terms of nurturing and supporting growth, whether it be through the entrepreneur center in Nashville or whichever foundation level support ecosystem you look at here in this town. But I think you've got, so that's part of the equation, right? The other part of the equation is you have so many young people that have moved to Nashville as part of its culture, and its growing state as a city like you and I were talking about earlier. And I think both of those two things combined really create an interesting ecosystem, if you will. Right?

[00:18:31] - [Speaker 1]
Where you've got young people hungry for growth that are bringing innovation. You've got more of this traditional health cycle that's just existed for forever in this town. And it gives us younger individuals in our career this opportunity where we can say, hey. I'm gonna go out and build in this arena. I've got all these incredible people I can learn from that have seen it all from every point in health care, and I'm gonna go out and try this idea.

[00:18:55] - [Speaker 1]
And so that's really where I think some of this, like, health tech economy has come from in this town, and why it's being supported and how it's being nurtured to grow.

[00:19:07] - [Speaker 0]
Exciting times there. And for yourselves there, anything you can share around the future at Vital? Anything you're working on? Anything that excites you at the moment?

[00:19:17] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. I mean, there's there's tons of of things on the road map. Right? What I'm most excited about is this whole concept of drag in in the health care ecosystem. Right?

[00:19:28] - [Speaker 1]
I'm a huge Formula One fan. That's why I use the term drag. It's like, do you create as little friction as possible and generate the best result? And so when I look at these pharmacies and how they operate, there's a tremendous opportunity there and influencing lower friction and their operating sequence that can reduce costs internally for the pharmacies, which also bleeds in reduced costs externally for the patients in the clinics. And then on the flip side of that coin, I also see this world where the clinicians practice can be tremendously optimized.

[00:20:01] - [Speaker 1]
There's an area of of these cash pay clinics that I'm most interested in and it's specifically around time. Forty five minutes of every hour that they spend is clinical operations that does not involve the patient. Right? So there's huge opportunity there. I would love to see it flipped.

[00:20:20] - [Speaker 1]
Right? Instead of 25% of every hour being spent on patient care, I'd rather it be 75% of their time to spend on patient care, and the 25 is just doing the work required to support it. And I think this age of AI and how software is developing in real time all around us is a great way for us to solve for both of those sides of this ecosystem. And that's really where the bulk of my attention is here over the next eighteen months.

[00:20:49] - [Speaker 0]
Well, I wish you best of luck over the next eighteen months. Be great to get you back on next year, see how things continue to evolve. But for people listening, they wanna find out more about you, about Vital. Where where can they get more information? Where would you like me to point them?

[00:21:04] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. You can you can follow us on just about every social, whether it's LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook at Vital Rx, and then you can also take a look at our website at Vital Rx dot com. My handles are I'm Charlie Jordan on every social media that there is.

[00:21:21] - [Speaker 0]
Awesome. Well, I will add links to everything you mentioned there. I encourage people listening to check you out and continue this conversation we started today, but just a big thank you, Charlie, for taking your time to sit down with me. Appreciate it.

[00:21:33] - [Speaker 1]
Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you, Neil.

[00:21:36] - [Speaker 0]
Charlie's idea of beautiful simplicity, I think, applies far beyond just prescribing. Start with the outcome, reduce repeated steps, carry information through the workflow, and protect the controls that matter. And I know this sounds obvious, but old systems often accumulate work that nobody would deliberately design today. And he's found a lesson, I think, is equally useful. You won't know the right answer to every decision, so choose a direction quickly enough to learn whether it is the wrong one.

[00:22:11] - [Speaker 0]
And Vital is applying that kind of thinking to health care workflow where time lost to administration is time clinicians cannot spend with patients. So a big thank you to Charlie for sharing his story today. I'll include links to everything that he mentioned there. But over to you, what process inside your business has become so complicated simply because nobody has stopped to redesign it? Let me know.

[00:22:37] - [Speaker 0]
Techtalksnetwork.com. I love to hear from you. Love to hear your stories. But that's it for me. I will speak with you all again real soon.

[00:22:46] - [Speaker 0]
Bye for now.