This week on the HIPAA Insider show features an interview with Fred Pira, CEO of ProNex Inc., about their healthcare technology solutions. ProNex offers PatientFlow® and The CORE Platform, designed to improve patient care and operational efficiency for chronic care and surgical practices. The CORE Platform focuses on Lifestyle Medicine, automating key pillars like nutrition and exercise, while PatientFlow® streamlines practice workflows and reduces costs. Both tools are HIPAA-compliant and aim to enhance patient engagement and provider efficiency.
More about Pronex https://www.pronexinc.com/
Transcript
Adam Zeineddine
Hello, welcome back to the HIPAA Insider show. I’m Adam and this week we’re diving into the future of patient care with a very special guest, Fred Pira, the CEO of Pronex. Fred leads a company at the intersection of patient engagement and operational control and efficiency. And their tools, namely patient flow and the core platform, are designed to help healthcare professionals deliver better outcomes with less administrative friction. So, Fred, welcome to the show.
Fred Pira
Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here. Fortunate that I’ve been working with HIPAA Vault for well over a decade.
Adam Zeineddine
Yeah, yeah, it’s great to have you. And yeah, so we, you know, we, we’ve been, as you say, working with Pro Next for quite some time. But tell us a little bit, if we go a little bit further back, tell us a bit about your background and what led you to launch Pro Next.
Fred Pira
Sure, sure. So I have been in sales my entire career. I absolutely love it. Without sales, there’s no company. So in the world today we talk about sales and sometimes it comes across as a bad word. But I wake up every morning with a burning in my gut to sell. And I was working for a software company many years ago and I was doing very well. I thought that’s where I was going to hang my jersey. But things turned out to be a little bit different than what I had planned. And during that time I had to, you know, I work out a lot and I had to see a doctor because I wasn’t feeling well. Anyway, make a long story short, the discovery produced results in my diagnosis that I was insulin resistant. And I had no clue what that was.
Fred Pira
So that then led me to have a conversation with their registered dietitian. And one thing led to another and I had a stack of information that I had to fill, communicate and so forth. And so I said as I was going through that process, you know, carrying around a three ring binder, a Palm Pilot at the time, one of those block phones, you know, this is back in 2000. And I said, man, I sell software. There’s gotta be a better way than this. This is insane because I’m journaling, collecting the information, faxing, showing up at their office. Anyway, make a long story short, I had, I started a search to find out if there was a better way and when I did it within our company, and I shortly realized that there was a better way.
Fred Pira
And then that led me to explore the possibilities of making the connection online. And I, I had the fortune of working with a systems engineer and I said to him, I’ll never forget these words as long as I live. I said, nor is there a way that you could put all this stuff in my hand somehow? Is there a way for me to communicate with these people? And he said, yeah, let me go look. And he comes back with all these standalone solutions where you just capture the information. I said, no, no, you’re missing my point. I got up from my desk, went to the whiteboard, drew a circle. This is better than two decades ago. Drew a circle. I said, norman, here’s what’s going on. I’m here in the center. I said, I want to connect to this health professional.
Fred Pira
And the way that I can do that today is too cumbersome. I said, we sell software that allows organizations like Motorola, Eli Lilly, Walgreens, all these enterprises to make these connections and change requests and so forth. And so he went out and he started looking and came back, says, it’s not out there. I said, okay. So I then pursued that, and fast forward the tape came up with the idea of making the connection to health professionals online. And at the time, people were not talking about that. Everything was, you know, security, and why would somebody want to put their health information online? So I made a couple of phone calls, being the sales guy that I am, and I had landed on an organization called the Society of Certified Nutritionists. It was my fourth phone call and exploring the possibilities of this.
Fred Pira
And I said, hi, my name’s Fred, and, you know, I’m calling to talk to you about the possibility of connecting with your clients, your patients online. I said, is that something that you would be interested in? They said, we are exploring that. And I said, really? And so got in the car with four of my teammates and drove down there, and I had nothing. I had a legal pad and a vision and basically otherwise known as vaporware, I had nothing. We get there, we meet with their CEO, and she said, you know, we’re very interested in this. I’m thinking to myself, oh, my, oh, my. What did I get myself into? Anyway, we ended up leaving, and she expressed an interest to go ahead and move forward.
Fred Pira
And I got in the car, and I looked in the back seat and off to the passenger side, I said, okay, now what do we do? And I said, can we do this? And one thing led to another, and we built an emr, collaborated with a very large educational medical school here in Chicago. And then after that, we kind of made some decisions to make some very important pivotal moves which brought us to patient relationship management. We were talking about video and telemedicine. Long before it ever popped up. We were talking about engaging the patient differently through a digital front door and fast forward to tape. And here we are today with our suite of solutions that help health professionals communicate, engage with their patients long term.
Adam Zeineddine
Wow. Yeah, it’s so fascinating how innovation works. You know, it’s one thing to just have an idea, but that, like you said with the society of clinicians, they had an idea, but it was just sitting somewhere and without the drive and the will to, you know, pick up the phone and grab your, you know, notepad and get on the ground and get things working, innovation doesn’t happen. So, yeah, thanks for that insight there. So let’s fast forward a little bit to you. You’ve got, you’ve started up Pro nex and your tools help a wide range of clinicians, right from bariatric surgeons to primary care to lifestyle medicine professionals. What would you say would be the unifying challenge if there was one? That you see with all these practices.
Fred Pira
It’S very cumbersome. It’s for them to manage the patient throughout the continuum of care. Typically they use Excel spreadsheets or they use in house made solutions and tools that really don’t satisfy the need. It’ll get them through to a certain point, then all of a sudden they’ll have this enormous pipeline of activity with patients and really can’t fulfill, you know, the engagement, the education, the movement of that patient throughout the continuum of care. That is the challenge in bariatric surgeries, surgical clinics. It is the now, it’s the decline in surgery procedures because of the success of the GLP1s and so forth. Yeah, they have to figure out ways to go ahead and make the adjustments to see the revenue stay at least par. And unfortunately that’s not the case in primary care. They’re the ones that are delivering GLP1s and so forth.
Fred Pira
Now what’s really exciting and an area that we’ve made an enormous investment is lifestyle medicine. The AMA has certified and put their stamp of approval that lifestyle medicine food is medicine. Food Rx is strong evidence based for better outcomes. And although pharmaceuticals and medications are important, you’re seeing something significant happening in the marketplace. And I was introduced to this two decades ago, the word health care consumerism. And that basically means that the consumer is becoming very educated and spending a lot of time in the area of health. And so when you have health care consumerism meeting up with food as medication food Rx, culinary Rx, you have this dynamic that’s taking place. And we’re very, very fortunate to be a leader in this movement. We provide the entire ecosystem and the entire platform to allow that kind of engagement.
Fred Pira
Patient walks through the digital front door, fills out the information, is assessed at some point in time, and then gets engaged with a variety of healthcare professionals that may be delivering the services to that patient. So we’ve automated that. Now with the onset of AI, we have AI that’s helping to move that patient throughout the continuum of care and make it very easy because most of the portals are very cumbersome and they really don’t serve the patient other than a database that has a bunch of information that they can view or educational materials. Well, we’ve taken it several steps forward. And being a leader in this movement of connecting patients or connecting people to healthcare professionals, we’ve developed an entire set of solutions that allow that engagement, whether you’re insourced in the clinic or whether you’re outsourced, that’s working for the clinic.
Fred Pira
So it allows that movement of the patient to be engaged in ways that typically you would have never seen before. And you know, as fast as technology moves, you know, it really is significant to see how worried. I mean, I got to pinch myself sometimes thinking, wow, I got a team. That’s amazing. We have a solution. That’s amazing. And we’re solving problems. When we first started, it was multiple Excel spreadsheets and we realized that we had functionality in our software that could eliminate that problem. And now we’re finding out a lot of other things in terms of the delivery of services to the patients that are within that population of care within a certain clinic, whether they be a bariatric surgeon, primary care physician, dealing with obesity management, medically supervised weight loss, and the list just goes on and on.
Fred Pira
More exciting is the ability to connect within the lifestyle medicine area and deliver our software delivers recipes, ethnic sensitive and also does food prescriptions, gives you a grocery list, gives you the ability to on the spot, look at your handheld device and look at what you need to eat, take a picture of what you need to eat, send it to your clinician and have these kind of conversations. And really leveraging technology and AI to the point where it can actually change behavior and also drive value to the clinic.
Adam Zeineddine
Yeah, the rates of change of technology never ceases to amaze me either. And at this point, I thing I’d like to highlight you have a YouTube channel where a lot of these demos, if anyone’s interested, they can go and check that Out. Right. Would you like to talk a little bit about that? Where can they find that? Just type in Pro next or.
Fred Pira
Yeah, Pronex Inc. Yeah, Pronex Inc. And you’ll see it. I think there’s a link on our website.
Adam Zeineddine
Yeah, we’ll put a link in the description as well.
Fred Pira
For they’re variant, they’re testimonials. That YouTube channel is. Got a lot of good content up there. It features my vice president of clinics of innovation and strategy, Carol Clark, Deepa de Kuchmuk, who’s our Vice president of Lifestyle medicine, Jean Laforest, who is our cto. And you know, this team is just, I’m so blessed to have this team because I have brain power that I can go to make very sound decisions in terms of how to move the business forward. So I’m really excited about this time and I’m not ready to retire.
Adam Zeineddine
No, there’s plenty of time for that. So let’s dig into the products a little bit more. So you mentioned their lifestyle medicine.
Fred Pira
Right.
Adam Zeineddine
And one of the sayings I grew up with is you are what you eat. But there’s a lot of sayings that go along with that. So could you talk to a little bit about my understanding is that core. It’s not, it’s not like, I mean, I guess the generic term for it would be an emr, but I think that the phrase, specific phrase here is lmp. Right. And could you talk about that a little bit? And what are the, the six lifestyle medicine pillars that you know that this is based on?
Fred Pira
Sure. So we, with my vice president’s insight and her two decades of being a registered dietitian and her culinary expertise and being able to take patients with certain chronic conditions and see reversals in some cases of those conditions. Fate would have it that we met a year ago, a year and a half ago, and she loved, I loved her vision of what she wanted to do in terms of technology. But it is basically food prescribing. Not delivery of food advice or consultation, but food prescribing in the area of nutrition, in the area of activity, in the area of social history, in the area of all these six pillars that allow the engagement between the healthcare professional and the patient to have deep discussions, first through an assessment, and then they have deep discussions about where they’re going and what path should I follow.
Fred Pira
And the goal is to make it as easy as possible. So there is a need for some EMR functionality. But more importantly is the six pillars of lifestyle medicine, which is part of what the American College of Lifestyle Medicine does. They are advocates of food is medicine. Also the plantation organization, which is another very large organization that is all about plant based food, culinary prescribing, food prescribing. And so they have many thousands of members that are very passionate about delivering the services necessary in order for patients to see results. And so, following a framework where you can offer the technology that’s necessary in any environment, we’re seeing primary care physicians, medical professionals, orthopedic surgeons who are looking to go beyond just the day to day service.
Fred Pira
And one of the things that has become very evident in the world today is that food is medicine. And to your point earlier, you are what you eat. And if we’re all eating and have bad habits, I guess we’re going to turn out bad. But we’re seeing this change take place. And you know, the American Medical association has adapted this whole module, this whole medical discipline and the individuals, the health professionals are primary care physicians, surgeons who want to go beyond that are very passionate about lifestyle medicine. And then you have those that are nutritional coaches, lifestyle medicine professionals that have a medical degree to one area or another, but have decided to adapt this particular medical discipline and deliver it to their patient population because they’re seeing results.
Adam Zeineddine
Yeah, it’s fascinating. So some of the key highlights I reviewed here before the call is that the call automates things like food rx, behavior plans, tracking, engages patients through the dashboards. There’s a HIPAA chat as well, is that right? Sorry, there’s a chat feature as well in the software tool.
Fred Pira
Yes. And by the way, all of that is hosted on our cloud with HIPAA Vault. All of our software is there. Gil has been a wonderful partner. He’s. You know, when we enter into certain engagements where large hospital organizations require you to go through an it, a technical review board, you know, it really pays off to have somebody at the level that Gill is at to show up on your behalf on that call. And it really lends an enormous amount of credibility. You know, one of our customers is the fifth largest hospital organization in the country. And you know, you don’t just knock on their door and say, hey, I got a solution for you.
Fred Pira
You know, you’re interested in talking to us, you better be ready to sit down at the table with the technical review board and answer anywhere between 300 to 1,000 questions. And by the way, this is not an. You got it. This is not an overnight. Okay, let me get back to you in the morning with a quick email. This is a 2, 3, 4 week process that takes place because they have to be concerned about security. And, you know, the one thing that I love about working with Hip Evolved is that they’ve been with us all the time and actually suit up and show up on the call and, you know, talk, help us talk through the questions, the difficult questions, complex questions that are asked about, you know, our software, where is it hosted, how secure it is, so on and so forth.
Fred Pira
So that, you know, it’s also really good to have a partner like that. Yeah.
Adam Zeineddine
And likewise, we. We have nothing but great words to say about your team. And like, you know, we work. We work a lot on the side with John laforest on the CIO side. So it’s been a pleasure working with.
Fred Pira
It’s. It’s really. It’s really a weight off my shoulders to have been able to take and turn everything over without John takes vision and turns it into reality. I see something in my mind, and he’s the one that’s able to take and put life to that. And that. That relationship that we have has been for 14 years now. I’ve been doing this for two decades. He’s been with me for 14 years. And, you know, he’s. I’m a triple A. He’s a triple B personality, which is great, because if I had to live with a triple A personality like me, I’d probably go crazy. Crazy. You know, what.
Adam Zeineddine
What’s AAA and triple B?
Fred Pira
AAA is somebody just like me who’s very passionate and very personable and very, you know, excitable about a lot of things. And Jean, on the other hand, he’s. He’s steady. Eddie, he’s very calm, you know, a. A B person. A B personality.
Adam Zeineddine
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you got it. You got to have both in every organization, you know?
Fred Pira
Yeah, you got to have both. Yep.
Adam Zeineddine
Okay. So I think we. We touched on core. I think we should probably touch on the. The other aspect, which is patient flow. Could you. You tell me a little bit about patient flow and how that works?
Fred Pira
Yeah. So patient flow came about as a function in our emr. When I made the decision to move out of the EMR space because there was a tsunami of EMRs coming into the marketplace, I. I realized that there was some functionality inside Page and inside our EMR, which was called my ProConnect, that was really being optimized a lot by our customers. And what was really interesting is what it was doing the problems it was solving. And so I went to John and I go, john, we need to make a move. Things are getting heated up in the marketplace and, you know, competing with these EMR companies is not. Not something that I want to do.
Fred Pira
And we looked at the functionality that this particular piece of technology, software was doing, and I said, you know what, let’s yank it out, put it as a standalone, and let’s bring it to the marketplace as a patient relationship management software solution. And the reason I got that, I was inspired because of the success and I used it a lot back in my Sales career was salesforce.com Salesforce is a CRM tool and they are extremely successful. And what I didn’t see was a patient relationship management tool. And so it’s important because if you’re a corporation, you want to stay in touch with your customers. You want to give them access to certain pieces of data that are important to them. Why would that be different for healthcare? It doesn’t make any sense.
Fred Pira
Doesn’t it make sense to have a relationship with the healthcare provider and be able to communicate with them using technology? And that was really an inspiration for us to go ahead and see that evolved. And all of a sudden we started selling more and more patient flows and realized that it was bringing a lot of value because it allowed them to put a stop on another fte. In most cases, it would help them increase surgery conversions. It would help them manage their entire pipeline, keeping patients engaged, educated, and informed in ways that allowed that individual to see success. And, you know, being one of the tools within the. In that kind of environment really is. Has been pretty exciting to see the success that they’ve had. And you know, we, our customers have been with us for two decades. Some. Some. Yeah. And. And that’s really a testimony to, you know, the success that we’ve experienced in terms of what we’ve built the team and how much our customers really like what we have.
Adam Zeineddine
Yeah. And your ability to continually innovate right with. With products coming out left, right and center to be able to maintain those customers. Customers and keep them from 10 in the heads. That is, that really is a testimony, like you said. So. Okay, so I think we covered quite a few aspects there. Fred was. Is there anything that you feel that we. We should touch on that we haven’t already?
Fred Pira
Stay tuned for this area of lifestyle medicine. I had, I personally, my personal experience and I love stories is I had hip surgery two years ago and I went through therapy and I’m really a very Active guy. And the pain was just. Didn’t go away. Everybody said, oh, three months after your hip surgery, you’ll be able to be normal and no problem. Well, four months, five months. A year went by and I was still experiencing pain. What? I took shots, I went to therapy, I had x rays, MRIs, on and on. At a particular point last year, I said, okay, why don’t I just do what we’re building? And I started taking some, you know, food as a prescription. And I added turmeric to my daily activity, my daily consumption of food. Rx, I got to tell you something. I am not experiencing pain.
Fred Pira
This is not a plug for turmeric. But the deal is this. FoodRx works. I have personal experience with that, and the results are so significant that I can actually move a lot faster than I was doing before. My question is, why didn’t you, the orthopedic surgeon, suggest this to me? Why wouldn’t you have at least been prepared to talk to me about. About other possibilities? You know, the word holistic seems to be scary to some people. Like it’s going to mean just this whole different kind of way of getting healthy. And I got. I’m here to tell you, I was skeptical in the very beginning. That’s not true. Get with a food Rx person who understands how that can impact your life and get healthy. And I’m. I’m proof that really works.
Fred Pira
So I’m really excited to be a part of that whole movement and providing the technology for healthcare professionals that are passionate about that area and to deliver the services to patients so the outcomes could be phenomenal.
Adam Zeineddine
Well, that’s incredibly insightful. Fred, thank you so much for your time. Where can I, our audience, learn more. Learnmore about Pronex Inc. and the platforms www.pronexinc.com and then go or go to our YouTube channel and you have just a ton of information. You could call us. I give out my phone number to everybody. I don’t care. You know, in today’s world, you know, you’ll see an email come in and the signature block will have the name and the title, but it won’t have a phone number. I guess you can call it old school. I have time for everybody. At least try to make time.
Adam Zeineddine
That’s fantastic. And thank you for making the time for us here today. It was really a pleasure to talk with you.
Fred Pira
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Adam Zeineddine
Yes, thank you. So that’s it for this episode of the HIPPA Insider show. Please like subscribe and share with anyone that you think might be interested in prox and cloud technology and healthcare. And until next time, thanks for stopping by.
Fred Pira
Thanks.