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AI and the Patient-Doctor Relationship | Dale Ellicott of Rely Health | The Brainiac Blueprint

  • Acy Rodriguez
  • Jan 11
  • 36 min read

Updated: Mar 8

Today on The Brainiac Blueprint Podcast by Left Brain AI, we sit down with Dale Ellicott, VP of Growth at Rely Health, to explore how AI is being used to bring efficiency and empathy to the patient-doctor relationship.


From athletic training and brain injury rehab to leading growth at an AI-driven healthcare startup, Dale’s journey bridges clinical insight with business innovation. At Rely Health, his team is combining automation with human oversight to help hospitals communicate better, reduce clinician burnout, and improve continuity of care.


We discuss how conversational AI is transforming patient follow-ups, how “human in the loop” systems ensure safety and trust, and why empathy will always remain at the core of healthcare.


If you want to see how technology can enhance (not replace) human connection in healthcare, this episode is for you.


Full transcript below.


🎧 Watch or listen to The Brainiac Blueprint Podcast:

Apple Connect: https://bit.ly/3VMNtlH 


⏱ In this episode, we discuss: 

 00:00 –Intro

 01:13 – From sports medicine to AI in healthcare

 02:37 – What “human in the loop” really means

 04:29 – How Rely Health evolved from appointment reminders to agentic AI

 07:30 – Reducing clinician burnout through automation

 09:20 – Using custom GPTs for faster sales and proposals

 13:45 – Why follow-ups matter more than ever in patient care

 18:25 – Case study: 10x outreach, 5x appointment scheduling

 20:54 – Ensuring safety and compliance with AI in healthcare

 25:00 – The “zero lift” onboarding model that drives adoption

 33:35 – Future of AI diagnostics, wearables, and patient trust

 39:29 – Leadership lessons: healthy conflict and diverse teams

 48:24 – When productivity becomes burnout

 50:35 – Dale’s take on trust, AI balance, and human connection


🔗 Dale Ellicott:


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 If this episode inspired you, taught you something new, or gave you a different lens on AI in healthcare, share it, leave a comment, or tag us.


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Episode Full Transcript:



Kyle: All right, welcome back everyone to another episode of the Brainiac Blueprint, where we discuss the intersection of AI and how it impacts business and the world around us with our esteemed guests. I'm Kyle Lambert, your founder of Left Brain AI and Action Hero Marketing.


Today's episode is part of our healthcare series where we're going to discuss AI being used to bring efficiency to the patient-doctor relationship. With that being said, today's brainiac is Dale Ellicott. Welcome to the show, Dale.


Dale: Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.


Kyle: Of course. Of course. Yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing all your insights and your learnings here. Dale, can you tell us a little bit about you, about your role? You work with Rely, so a little bit about what Rely does, all that kind of stuff.


Dale: Sure. I'll probably start at the beginning, how I kind of got into this from the healthcare side. I was on the somewhat clinical side as an athletic trainer. So did sports medicine for a while and then started selling some of the devices that I was utilizing.

So got into the s

ales business development side, mostly in brain injury rehab, some pretty intense programs, and just realized how many gaps there were just in simple communication, especially for longer term programs. So spent some time with bundle payment programs and trying to coordinate care there.


I got into telemedicine for a while. You tried to use that to connect some of the gaps. Then I was introduced to Rely about a year and a half ago, and it was like, this is exactly what they're doing. They're using AI in a new, cool way, human in the loop still, so it's very safe, but helps to add a lot of efficiency so everybody can get some guidance in their care journey.


Kyle: Very cool. And you said the one quote that I was planning on bringing up, human in the loop. I think that is a great concept, a great phrase to kind of be your North Star, it seems like, in terms of what you're trying to do to improve the relationships in the offices and everything like that. So I think that will set a good foundation.


So before we jump into that, can you finish the prompt? I think AI is, and then we'll jump into what you mean by the human in the loop stuff.


Dale: Sure, not to date myself too much, but I think AI is exactly what the Internet was to my generation, right? It's this new, big, scary thing. It's going to take all our jobs. It's going to change the way everything acts. Nobody's going to have to work. We're all just going to be sitting around prompting, doing, letting the Internet take over. So it's not something we haven't seen before.


I would say it's game changing, right? For those that are just finishing school, like, hey, you just spent six years learning something that may seem obsolete now. From a professional perspective in healthcare, I think it's exactly what we've needed. We've never had the capacity to communicate with patients and to help patients and to diagnose patients the way that we need to.


So, kind of across the board answer, but there's all different aspects. I think it's the new shiny toy. How do you play with it, right?


Kyle: Yeah, absolutely. And again, I think that really ties in your point nicely. It's not this completely autonomous thing that you can just flip a switch and it's going to be just doing everything for you. There needs to be someone at the wheel kind of steering, instructing, at least providing directions. So, it seems like Rely, no pun intended, relies on humans still to make sure that it's doing the right stuff.


Dale: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I mean, that's where that's our roots, right? We were founded, there was a care navigation branch under Vituity, a physician group, and there was a tech company that combined the two literally.


So by putting those two together, you get both aspects, that human aspect, that empathetic aspect that's needed sometimes, but also the high volume tech aspect that helps everybody get assistance.


Kyle: Awesome. So can you give us a little bit more about Rely? When you and I connected, I know there's been an evolution in terms of where the company started to what it is now. I believe there was kind of texts and communication based at first. And then now it's really honed into agentic AI and using that to just make things a little bit smoother overall. So can you dive into that a little bit for us?


Dale: Sure. Yeah. Initially, we're very similar to a lot of the patient experience, care transition, care coordination companies out there. It was, I think even Epic has their own app now where they'll send you a text to remind you of an appointment. And that was really the extent of it, really. It wasn't an experience. It wasn't engaging with patients. It was just sending reminders and notices.


So we built a platform similar to a CRM, Salesforce or HubSpot, something like that. Obviously, you need to keep documentation on the communications you have. And then on top of that, we had a text-based, AI-driven communication platform. So it was really some pretty simplistic, one-way communication. We could do some surveys, ask some questions, your basic chatbot.


About a year and a half ago, LLMs really advanced things to the point where now we can create completely conversational AI. And it's interesting because we say conversational AI, that can be voice or that can be text-based. That can be back and forth over text. It doesn't have to be one or the other.


The idea is it's prompted to be responsive, to be intelligent, to be able to consider different variables and drive it to the outcome. A lot of times I just call it your branch chain logic, choose your own adventure. Like you as a clinician, you tell us what questions you ask patients. If they answer this, what would you do next?


And we program, we prompt all of that in and we're able to mimic a lot of it. We also know where the off ramp is, right? Once it gets to a certain point, yes, now we need a clinician. Now let's call the clinician in and have that person to person empathetic interaction. So really just in the last year and a half, even in the last six months, we've been able to get a lot more intelligent with the AI instead of just regurgitating messaging.


Kyle: I really found it interesting that there’s benefits to both the clinician as well as the patient, because obviously the relationship doesn't stop as soon as they leave the office. There's always homework or prescriptions to grab or new schedules that are needed and all that kind of stuff. So, to help the patient stay organized and really understand what needs to be done is huge, as well as helping to prevent burnout and all that stuff from the clinician side. It's great to kind of have a two birds, one stone approach here.


Dale: Yeah. And it really, I mean, no clinician at the end of their day thinks, oh, I want to call a hundred patients I just saw and make sure they're okay. They want to call the patients that need to talk to them. 



Kyle: Well, maybe they do, they just can't. Right. We'll put them in the benefit of the doubt.


Dale: I mean, they're going to dial the phone a hundred times and maybe 20 or 30 percent pick up. So let's move that 70 percent, let AI do that, leave the message, maybe not have that interaction because nobody picked up. And now the clinician is using that time to actually engage with the patients, which is where we want them, top of license.


Kyle: Very cool. Very cool. And so what is your specific role with Rely? What is it that you're trying to accomplish? And do you have any kind of AI processes or tools built into your day to day at all?


Dale: Sure. Yeah. So VP of growth really driving the front end commercial engine, right? From generating leads to nurturing the leads, getting them into the pipeline, really trying to figure out like, how can we work together?


If you've ever sold in healthcare, this is not a widget business. This is not a features and benefits sales process that you're going to follow out of a book. It's really solution selling. You've got to figure out, okay, what's the pain point that they're trying to solve today? And does what you can offer apply to that?


Because if you try and sell them something that doesn't fix their problems, they're probably not going to talk to you again. And they'll need you eventually. But the timing is everything.


Where I use AI specifically for my process, where it's helped me a lot. One, obviously, you can get recordings real easily from all of your meetings. So you don't have to sit there and take notes while you're trying to talk to somebody. You can pay attention and be engaged.


Outside of that I could take those notes, we've created some custom GPTs where we can drop the notes in and create an executive summary or create a proposal, create an SOW, do those things from the materials that we collect over all of these sales calls instead of manually having to have five documents up on my screens and pull bits and pieces from each one.


The process has made it highly efficient where typically this would probably be a team of two or three sales reps. It's really just me and the CEO at this point. And we can handle a lot of that volume because we're not spending two hours after every call trying to write out that perfect response.


Kyle: You've got six extra arms already built in, kind of helping you out with that stuff.


Dale: Oh yeah. Yeah. It really is game changing because it's just that time consuming part. We get a good summary, we could still put our personality into it, our flair into it, whatever you want to call it, and create that product that really brings that company personality out.


But it doesn't take all of the time that it used to. Now I can do five sales calls and follow up on all of them in one day versus five in the week and maybe be able to follow up the way I need to.


Kyle: I personally love that stuff as an entrepreneur. Obviously, you have to wear a lot of hats and get a lot done, but sales is not my thing. I'm a marketer at heart, right? So being able to kind of have that built in, that easy follow up is huge for me. So I certainly know where you're coming from there.


How do you make sure that you kind of tailor your follow ups and your responses and everything? Because it is obviously a very relationship based business role that you're in and organization and industry. And you're not just saying, here's our templated approach, right? This isn't, I'm sure there's some customization. So how do you kind of marry the two?


Dale: Right. A lot of it, we built up a good bank. So when I say custom GPT, we feed all of our previous deals and all of the work we did on those into this GPT and use that as the resource. So we're not going out to the general internet and just pulling whatever from an LLM.


We're utilizing cases that we've already stood up that have already been successful and drawing from how we shape those programs. So in most instances, we're trying to solve a problem we've already solved. We'll go back to that documentation, utilize that to create the first draft, but it is crucially important that you dig through with a fine tooth comb and make sure you're checking that human in the loop.


You got to check your work and check GPT's work because there's always some little surprises in there that just might not make sense or might completely send your conversation in a different direction.


Kyle: Very cool. So in this custom GPT that you guys have built, is it a kind of a one step thing? You say like review these docs and now provide me this or do you kind of have multiple checkpoints and different actions that kind of build off of each other?


Dale: It depends on how well I'm prompting that day. I'm in a hurry. I give it a poor prompt. I get a poor response. So very simple. Kind of like having a conversation with my teenage kids, right? I don't ask the question just the right way. I just get a grunt instead of an answer.


So you have to it's all up to the prompting. If I take my time, I put in a good prompt, I tell it what resources I wanted to draw from. I'll even feed in the internet site, the website from the hospital that we're talking to or maybe somebody's LinkedIn profile. You feed all those materials in, you get a really good solid response. If you're a little lazy, then you get what you get.


Kyle: Oh 100%, yeah. I tell everybody, figure out how to prompt. If nothing else, figure out how to prompt. That's great. I'm curious, have you measured by any chance - I know you mentioned you can do five a day now or whatever it is - I'm curious, do you know, were you tapped at two before or do you know, are you saving a day's worth of hours each week now? Do you have any of those data points by any chance?


Dale: I don't have those data points. And one of the reasons is typically what will happen is a sales rep will take on absolutely as many sales calls as they possibly can. And then the follow up hurts. So instead of doing 100 percent of the follow up to the best of my ability, I'll do 10 percent because I'd rather get on that next opportunity. As many opportunities as I can.


It's a fault of a lot of the sales process. But when you are commission based and in those type of roles, you want to follow up with as many leads as possible so you can pick the best leads out of the pile. What it's allowed me to do is not have to spend a lot of that time.


Yeah, I would say after every sales call, it's at least saving me an hour of getting that first draft out. And if I use it to write the email, typically I'll get the draft and executive summary of how the call went. Then I'll use that executive summary to write the email. Between the two, hour, hour and a half for every sales call, yeah.


Kyle: Very cool. Very cool. And do you guys have a marketing out there or do you have different partnerships? Where are these leads coming in from?


Dale: Well, we do have a really strong partnership. Vituity is a physician-owned physician group. They have a great innovation branch. They actually offer innovation grants to their physicians. So within their innovation hub, that's where we were founded. That's where Rely was founded.


So that is a large source for us. They introduce us to a lot of the hospitals they're working in. And frankly, we like to think we're an asset to them as well. If we can help them navigate their patients through this emergency care or hospital medicine journey, we're going to get better outcomes. They're going to build a better relationship with those hospitals and those clients.


So, yeah. We like to think we contribute to the relationship, but they definitely are a great ally of ours. Outside of that, it's RFPs, it's going to conferences, it's doing a lot of those things. We do email campaigning, use AI a lot there. I mean, simple prompts will get us what we want.


A good example is CMS Team just came out, right, for surgical follow-up and 30-day readmissions. So fed that website in, fed all the CMS information in, asked for a three-series campaign, and then we have a contractor we use to put the email campaigns together and monitor those.


Kyle: Very cool. Very cool. Great stuff. I would assume just like most sales calls, you need to obviously build the relationship, provide some credibility, some highlights and all that kind of stuff. So I'm curious if there's any kind of go to highlights or case studies that Rely has that work really well. Again, whether it's like a time saving thing, a burnout saving thing, any of that kind of stuff. I'm curious if you have any of those numbers.


Dale: Yeah, it really depends on the topic. One of my favorite for, especially for health systems that are looking to secure market share and some of those things, we worked with an eight hospital system in the Midwest.


And they were able to follow up with about 1100 patients a quarter after their ER visits, reach out to them, usually only the sickest of the sick, right, to try and guide them to the next step. We took that up to 100% where every single patient at least got a call. It might have been an AI agent, but it could escalate to a human if needed.


We were able to pretty much 10x outreach, but also 5x the amount of follow-up appointments that were scheduled within their hospital network.


So, you know, the hospital group, it was a CIN. They had physicians. That continuity of care greatly improved the outcomes. So they weren't just sending - I just took my daughter to an emergency room appointment. She's a gymnast. Hurt her wrist. We got an 18 page packet said, go find an orthopedic. Fun. Awesome. Where am I now?


Luckily, my wife had the next day off. She was able to spend six hours on the phone and find an orthopedic surgeon that could take a look. Most people don't have that luxury. Most people don't have the ability to invest that much time in finding a highly rated physician or any physician for that matter.


Frankly, it's hard to get an appointment right now anywhere. So having somebody call you up that next morning and say, "Hey, would you like me to schedule that appointment for you? You know, where are you located? What's your insurance?" Make sure everything aligns and get you to the right point of care at the right time. That's what we're trying to do.


Kyle: And I have to assume there's a compounding effect there, you know, whether it's patient satisfaction. So they become a repeat patient, doing some referrals, even things. I would assume you get some reviews, right? So five stars keep popping up and all that kind of stuff. So it feels like as you start to use Rely and, you know, it just you get that hockey stick type of growth, right?


Dale: Right, right. And there's additional things that we add on to these programs, right? Like the patient experience surveys, some of those type of things that are also important to CMS are important when you're dealing with Medicare patients. It changes how much you get reimbursed for seeing those patients.


So we can automate a lot of that too. We can have an AI agent call the patient, say, "How was your experience? Did your doctor explain to you how, you know, everything that you need to know?" and make sure they get that.


So of course, yeah, patient experience is going to go up. We see great improvement in those scores. But just that continuity of care staying within the system, anytime somebody helps you get through that entire care journey versus just having a spot solution, you're probably going to go back there, right?


Kyle: Especially when you consider the emotion that goes into health care. I mean, the point that you just gave, there's pain with the wrist and frustration with having to search and all that kind of stuff. So anything anytime it's easier, you're just going to have that higher level of satisfaction. So that's that's great to hear. Awesome. Awesome.


So we've obviously talked a lot about the positives of AI here. I think that there's always red flags and there's an additional level of scrutiny that is needed when it comes to health care. So I'm curious how you approach making sure that you're not being overly reliant on AI and how you're making sure you're being compliant and all that kind of stuff.


What is your process for testing out a new GPT, testing out a new tool, upgrading the service for Rely, any of that kind of stuff?


Dale: Sure. Yeah, right now we built this bank of 1000, maybe 1500 at this point, different cases, right? So anytime we send an agent out into the wild, we want to make sure they were tested through all of those cases.


And it could be anywhere from feeling suicidal, do I have chest pain, I have shortness of breath, we already have those pre-built. I think we use Vapi to run those through. So we'll build an agent, we'll run it against all those use cases, really as many as we can think of.


And if any of our agents are out there and get hit with something they don't understand, one, we escalate it to the human to make sure they get taken care of, but two, that goes right into the bank. So that's really how we hold that quality control over building the agents, deploying the agents and giving folks confidence that we are continuously improving, but we have a lot of safety checks in place.


Kyle: That's really smart. I think there's so many people who - I actually just had a conversation the other day who kind of overlook that kind of like inventory of information that can be used for a variety of different reasons for improving AI, improving your product, improving your customer satisfaction, all of that kind of stuff. And that's just, you know, your first party data should be kind of the core at everything. So it's great that you have that banking strategy that helps out for a lot of different things.


Dale: Yeah, we really start out because we're not purely tech, because we do have that human capacity. We start off with a larger human capacity and then build the AI. And when the more and more comfortable we get with it, the less monitoring it needs.


So we'll always have somebody in the background doing QA, but that's going to go from 30 or 40 percent of the calls. We have an after hours call line now out in the hospital, one of the busiest emergency rooms in California with their physician group. And it is 95 percent autonomous, handles all of the calls, routes them to the right people.


The next morning when they get in, they can follow up on them. They know what priority it is. They can listen to the call. They can see the documentation on it. So it gets there, but it takes time. And that time takes a lot of quality people. Our care navigators, our prompt engineers, our content engineers sitting behind it, making sure it's working the right way.


But yeah, it does take three months, four months, six months to get to that fully autonomous state. And when I say fully autonomous, 95 percent is probably what we're shooting for, but always having that human back there.


Kyle: Great, that's awesome. You kind of read my mind there. I was curious about the onboarding process because I think everybody is always like, oh, another tool, another process, like all this kind of stuff. And obviously the goal is to simplify, right? And make things easier. So I'm curious how, you know, what does onboarding look like? How do you guys make that as seamless as possible? And how do you get adoption even from the patients?


Right. Like, again, you have to make sure. And that might be more on the clinician side. But, if they're not looking at their texts and following up, then it doesn't help as much. So I'm curious what that looks like.


Dale: One, it's identifying the patient population you're going after and trying to understand them. So our roots were in substance use navigation, behavioral health navigation, some of the most challenging populations there are out in California with California Bridge programs.


So we learned there very quickly, like we hired people, we put them in the emergency room, we met with the patients, we build a rapport there. and then we turn it over to what we call our back office, our remote navigators and our AI navigators.


So if you know that population is gonna be a lot of handholding, a lot of rapport building, and really come in lacking trust in the healthcare system, you need that personal interaction. So we have all three components. We can hire somebody, put them on the ground, boots on the ground where you are.


If your nursing staff is highly engaged, we just brought on a client up in Ohio. They wanted to hire their own navigator to be boots on the ground. And then they use us for the remote and for the AI agents. So kind of a la carte that way we can add and take away those pieces, but we just want to make sure they all exist somewhere.


Kyle: Interesting. I don't know that I realized that it's kind of that customizable. It seems like you can kind of adjust it based on, I guess, like the hospital system as well as the cases being seen and the clientele.


Dale: Yeah, well, my experience in healthcare is if anybody has to do anything different with their workload, they're already overwhelmed. It's not going to be adopted well. So I think I told you this on our first call.


One of the first things that really drew me into sales was went into a rehab hospital and was trying to sell something. And she's like, "Well, how much work is this going to be on my team?" And we're like, "Well, we just need this, this and this." She's like, "Let me show you something."


Opened a closet - there had to be a million dollars worth of equipment just thrown in there, waiting to be thrown away. and i'm like, "Why are you showing me this?" She's like, "These are all the things that just needed one or two clicks. Right? Look out on the floor - those are the things that needed no effort from my team. Those are the things that we keep and that get used."


So I learned a great lesson there. And that's why we do it. That's why we have so many humans in the background to make sure it's zero lift for the team. Because I think I read mentioned that article. 95% of AI agents are failing. And it's because people are like, "Hey, here's some tech. Good luck with that. Let your team work on it. Let your team prompt it. Let your team fix it."


It's just not going to fly in healthcare. Maybe some other industries, they might find a place for that to work, but healthcare is just most likely not going to be one of them anytime soon.


Kyle: Yeah, that makes sense. I am just picturing this closet with all kinds of machines in it. Like that is just mind blowing. Honestly, that's crazy.


Dale: I'm sure I'm fairly certain I might've sold one of the pieces of equipment. 


Kyle: It's actually got your name on it. Call Dan. 


Dale: Turn that one around. 


Kyle: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's so funny.


When we first connected, I think I remember you saying the close rate was close to a year. Is that right?


Dale: It can be. It depends. That would be if I went and met someone at a conference once, right? It was a cold lead, somebody I didn't have a relationship with. I would say our pace right now is about a year with those.


Usually the first three to six months is just kind of that feeling each other out period, right? Like, "Do I really trust these guys? Do I want to let them into my network?" Once we get to that point, really once we find that real pain point and there's alignment and we know we can solve it, that's when it starts to accelerate.

So it's really just ambiguous timeframe up to that. Once we find that pain point, probably about six months, we'll have a contract, an SOW out there. The nice thing is we can stand things up a lot quicker than most companies because we do have humans. Instead of FHIR HL7, that nine-month build, Epic saying, "Oh, yeah, we don't have time for that. We don't have time to integrate that."


Our humans are interacting with the EHR. So it's just like hiring a part-time staff member. They access the files that they need. They navigate those patients and they document right back in there. And we don't need to tax your IT team with some big integration.


Kyle: Nice. That's smart. That's smart. So then in terms of, like you said, this is a cold person. Maybe you met them at an event. They're kind of feeling you out. I'm curious, do you have AI or automations built into your follow-up process? Or do you just - it's very human-based, I assume, in the beginning. So is it just you call every month or something like that? What does that look like?


Dale: Yeah, typically, for me, I've always liked - I'm a big fan of utilizing LinkedIn, utilizing things like that, watching what they're posting. Maybe I see an article, you know, I'll keep them in mind, keep our conversation in mind, look for an article that's relevant to them.


Right. Like if I'm not bringing somebody value, I shouldn't just be knocking on their door asking if they're ready to buy yet. Like that's just lazy, sloppy sales. Right. Like bring value to people, do your research, go online, find something that might bring value to their day, shoot it over to them.


They know I want to work with them. I don't have to keep reminding them of that. But if I can validate the fact that, hey, I'm keeping an eye on the industry, I know what's going on here and I'd like to try and solve a problem with you. That's always been my best approach.


Kyle: Yeah. I mean, in the end, again, if you're providing value, I guess it just comes down to can they afford it, right? So, yeah. Awesome.


I'm curious. We've talked a lot about sales here and you kind of nurturing relationships. And you mentioned that one about the machines in the closet. I'm curious if you have a favorite pitch or a most memorable pitch. And it doesn't even have to be at Rely. I'm just curious if there's anything in your career that just stands out as kind of an impactful pitch for you.


Dale: I definitely have one of my favorite pitches more because it's comedic than it's anything else. I'll have to tell you that offline though. Probably not an appropriate story to record.


But really for me, it's not even so much in the pitch. It's once we get stood up after that first two weeks or three weeks. One of our account managers just met with one of our newer clients. And he was digging and digging for a negative, something that's going wrong. And they didn't have anything.


Right? They didn't come back with the, "Oh, we thought you were going to do this and you didn't." Like when you get those calls that's like - like that's the validation. I don't like selling to sell, I like selling to make things better, to find a solution, to find, squash some of those problems that folks are seeing in there every day.


So, that's really where I see it more. I'm always a little tenuous when I'm pitching because I don't want to oversell. I've been with companies where nine months into it, you realize that they're really nothing more than a pitch deck. There's not a lot behind that screen. And you can tell real quick.


Sometimes it takes longer than others, right? Sometimes they have some really savvy marketing folks that put together great materials. So yeah, I've been with those companies and it's just really depressing to find out, hey, we couldn't actually stand that client up. We didn't have the technology that we told you we did. So very selective in picking companies at this stage of my career to make sure.


Sure. Yeah, never take a wireframe, never take screenshots as a demo. Make them show you the actual product. 


Kyle: Oh my God, that's making my skin crawl just thinking about it. That's worst case scenario right there.


Dale: Yeah. Yeah. It was tough. And I mean, the case had happened to me. It was somebody that I had sold to in the past that I'd built a relationship with that trusted me. And I just, still today, we're friends. We see each other at conferences. No harm, no foul. They realized I couldn't have known that, but still very quite disheartening either way.


Kyle: Yeah. I mean, a sales rep in a lot of ways has their reputation, right? And when it gets harmed because of your own organization, that's heartbreaking. That's good on you for rebounding and maintaining that relationship. That could have fallen apart quickly.


Dale: Yeah, well, the first time I saw him, I was two or three years ago at HLTH. I was definitely hesitant to walk up to the booth and say hi, but they greeted me with open arms. So I feel as if I did something right.


Kyle: There you go. There you go. Well, awesome. So I wanted to kind of switch the lens of the conversation here and think about forward thinking type of stuff. And there's so many different angles that we can take this, but I'm just going to give you the broad question of what kind of external trends are you watching right now?


Dale: Watching a lot of where we can connect to broader clinical applications, right? So radiology, I think, is they're always ahead of everybody. They were the first telemed, right? They were the first store and forward review and x-ray that way. They're getting way advanced in being able to take last year's MRI versus this year's MRI and create predictions.


I just think there's a lot of that out there that could shorten the diagnostic cycles and also shorten the treatment cycles, get people to care sooner. Really interested in seeing what develops there. But again, the biggest thing is trust.

Something interesting, I think, in AI is, you know, the most accurate diagnosis. Clinicians, even if they're the best clinicians out there are 90, 95% accurate, right? But AI has to be 100% before we'll deploy it. So we're - our bar is higher than any bar that's ever been set before.


I don't see a place where AI completely takes over in those areas. But to help guide and lead clinicians to the right outcome sooner. I think that's really exciting. And if we can capture some of that, capture some of the voice conversations we have with patients, feed it into that, I'm hoping some of that material, that patient reported outcome, patient reported symptoms, because we gather a lot of those, can help in the diagnostic process sometime soon.


Kyle: That's interesting. I've had several conversations with people in health care and diagnostics is always something that comes up a lot. And especially from the angle of outside of the doctor's office, whether it be in their home or the joke I always like to use is like some AI diagnostic toilet that talks to you or something like that, you know, but it seems like that's the direction that it's going, that it's just going to be kind of this almost 24-7 health care monitoring diagnostic type of thing to make sure that the doctor is well informed, the patient's well informed. There's no gaps in the whole process.


Dale: Yeah. Even as far as like wearables have gotten, like what they can measure and how they can report, they're all spot solutions, right? You don't have a wearable that takes information from your platform and goes to another because there's this, you know, they want every, everybody wants everything on their platform. 



Kyle: Of course.


Dale: So it's really trying to find that how do we get all of these things unified? I joke with a lot of the hospitals as we're pitching to them. I'm like, "You guys probably don't even know how many contracts you've signed with digital health companies." I guarantee you there's an RPM company out there that would be perfect for this patient caseload or a wearable or this or that. And you probably already have a contract in place.


But like, that's one of the things we like to do too, is just dig down deep and see like, what's this patient eligible for? What does their insurance cover? I mean, a lot of times rides will be covered. Like you can't get a ride to your PCP appointment. It definitely behooves the payer to pay for an Uber 14, 15 bucks and get you there versus having to skip that and miss a diagnosis, right?


So like really digging deep into some of those things. I think that's another great use case for AI where we try and look into their insurance benefits, try and look into the community programs that are available, things like that.


Kyle: Very cool. Very cool. Do you have anything on your horizon? So, again, future thinking just in terms of your day to day, your role as a growth agent, if you will. Are there any tools or AI or processes that you're really hoping to implement, whether it be Q4 or in 2026 or anything like that?


Dale: At this point, we're trying to just keep up with the pace, which is a great place to be. You know, we have a lot of folks that are interested in what we're doing. We're standing up a lot of clients right now. Yeah, it's really, really catching up with the potential that we have now.


um, you know I mentioned we have two or three clients. We have one client we just wrote our ninth statement of work for, right. Another one, the fifth and sixth statements of work. So it's like, once people see what we could do, they want more of it.


but how do we get to that point faster? Right? So if there's a way that - and I don't think there is, I don't think there's a way to build trust faster. You can't force trust on people. So there's always going to be those human elements, but but really just helping me keep organized, helping me frame things up better, things like that. I'd love to be able to use AI to do some of those things.


Very cool. So that's one of the toughest things to do is really write that statement of work, set up guardrails that work for you and the client, and be able to stay within those guardrails all the way through implementation. It's always tough for startups, right? Especially in AI because you might have two or three new models come out in the timeframe that you're implementing over six weeks. So like a lot's changing. 


Kyle: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's been a couple episodes since my cat has made an appearance. She came to say hi. All right. 


Dale: She needs a space helmet. 


Kyle: Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Cool. So you mentioned something that I think is interesting. So, there's always this change and things, in just six, seven, eight weeks, you could have new models and all that. So I'm curious if you have any thoughts of what makes someone successful as a leader in health tech or, if you're trying to get a startup or build something out like, what should they be focusing on to be successful?


Dale: I'd say one is hiring counterparts that have the opposite personality that you do, right? I think too many people want to hire similarly minded people and then you get tunnel vision. Hire people that you can have healthy conflict with on a daily basis and that keep running with you in the same direction anyway.

I think that's one of the biggest things I've learned throughout my career, whether it was with tech or whether it was with other companies. I think, you know, that too homogenous of a crowd is not going to help you grow at the pace that you need to.


So I think that's a big component that I've seen in a lot of startups where, yeah, they've got great talent, but they all have this skill set. So I think 


Kyle: That's what comes back to having the right people. 


Dale: Right. Yeah. Right people, right seats.


I can't stress the healthy conflict part more than, you know, it's just, you're going to have conflict in a startup. You're going to have two ideas and both people are going to put their stake in the ground and yet you got to figure out how to deliver for that client. So being able to just kind of eat crow and move on is a big, big part of early on startups.


Kyle: Without putting anybody on blast or anything, do you have an example in your career in which you've had to have this healthy conflict and how you kind of resolved it and moved on?


Dale: Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, the example where there was nothing behind the curtain is a great example. You know, we were definitely butting heads and hat blows trying to deliver something for this client.


You know, unfortunately, it came down to the fact that we just didn't have it. But that was definitely a moment of conflict. And yeah, we moved on. And, you know, a week later, we stood up a different client because we did have that solution.

So, you know, you just have to you have to keep moving through it. You're going to have disappointments. You're going to have especially from a commercial side. Yeah, you're going to think you're you're capable of certain things. And some of the best tech teams out there, they just figure it out. And some of the other tech teams say, "nope, we build it this way and that's what you get."


So it just depends on what kind of company you want to be, right? 


Kyle: Yeah, it comes down to the culture for sure. How you approach that stuff. Yeah. 


Dale: Well, there's something to be said for selling a rigid platform and into the box solution and selling it to a lot of people. 


Kyle: Totally. 


Dale: A lot easier to manage. But there's also something to be said if you want to sell into health care where every hospital is going to be different and you really are going to have to be flexible with solutions to be successful.


Kyle: Absolutely. Yeah, there's a place for both of them, for sure.


Awesome. Well, Dale, this has been great. We have reached the rapid fire section of the podcast here. I have five rapid fire quick questions for you. So you kind of already mentioned this, but we'll ask it anyway, a little bit of a different way of framing it. What would you automate right now if you could snap your fingers and just have this fully automated process?


Dale: I'm going to go with rapport building. As much as I love that part of the job, man, if people could just trust me the day I walked in the door and we started on that level playing field, that would be amazing, right? I don’t see AI ever fully replacing that, but man, it would make this job a whole lot easier, right?


Kyle: We'll get a Dale avatar set up and that can kind of talk with people and then you can jump in. The report will already be there. 


Dale: Hologram would be great. Conference floor. 


Kyle: Exactly. That's awesome. Question two. Do you have a buzzword that you hear a lot that you can't stand?


Dale: Swirl. I've got to go with swirl. 


Kyle: So like what does swirl mean? 


Dale: Challenges within an organization, right? People having - not communicating well, they create swirl. It's a pretty new phrase and I kind of thought it was just us using it but I've heard it everywhere and I think the reason it's tough for me is it doesn't describe anything, right?


I say swirl and you have no idea what I'm talking about. It's this super generic word that doesn't get to the details, but like you just keep throwing it out there. I like very specific details. So, hey, you tell me exactly what the issue is and I'll try and help you solve it. But if you just tell me there's a lot of swirl happening, it's hard to hard to solve that problem. 


Kyle: Remove the swirl. I like it. I like it. 


Do you have someone that you follow or that you appreciate for the way that they are operating or using AI? And that could be an organization. That could be a person, anything like that. Is there kind of like this like AI person that you just you really appreciate?


Dale: I don't know. I really just I don't follow anyone individually. I like to keep a scan across the marketplace, and I think that helps to keep balance. I've definitely done that in my career before, maybe following specific, you know, kind of the sales guru and you fall into their sales system. And that definitely didn't work out well.


I didn't think it was a good path to follow. So I think, yeah, I try and just keep an open mind. really like just seeing what different thought leaders are doing out there. 


Kyle: So... You froze up for a second there. I don't know if it's me or you, but I think we got the most of it. You don't have one person. You'd like to just get a bunch of different ideas from a lot of different thought leaders. Was that the gist of it? 


Dale: Yeah, I like to stay fairly agnostic just so I don't get tunnel vision is, I think, a challenge for sales folks. 


Kyle: For sure. For sure. Makes sense. Makes sense.

All right. Awesome. If you could have any animal as a pet without worrying about safety, what would it be?


Dale: Tough call. I mean, we're down here in South Carolina. It definitely wouldn't be a gator. I see plenty of those. I don't know. Probably some kind of large cat would be interesting. 


Kyle: Okay. Yeah, that would be cool.

So are you also the plant dad? Did you curate the plants and everything behind you or?


Dale: Yes. Yes. These were all rescue plants, if you will. So very nice. A lot of these. I mean, this guy, this guy was down to one branch at one point. We brought him back. So I actually just brought him out for the podcast. He's going to go back to where he likes to live. 


Kyle: But I'm glad he made an appearance. 


Dale: I had an empty gap there because I just replanted my aloe plant. So I thought I'd fill it in.


Kyle: Awesome. I like that. All right. Fifth and final rapid fire question. If I were to force you to do karaoke right now, what song would you do?


Dale: I am probably one of the few people you will ever meet that has never done karaoke.


Kyle: You know, it's funny. I think I've done it once in my life. So I'm right there with you. But what's your like, like shower song or something like that?


Dale: I wouldn't say shower song. I don't know. I'd have to go - I'd have to go back to some heavy metal or something like that. Something fun. Maybe even some Tom Petty. It depends. I mean, we're assuming I could sing, right?


Kyle: Oh, yeah. No, no. I have a horrible voice. So we're expecting embarrassing vocals up there. 


Dale: Let's go with "American Girl." We'll go with Tom Petty. 


Kyle: Nice. Nice. I like it. Awesome. 


Dale: Or "Enter Sandman's" a good one, too. 


Kyle: Nice. There we go. That'll be a crowd pleaser for sure.

Well, Dale, that was all the rapid fire questions. We're at the open forum section here. Was there anything that maybe we didn't discuss that you are super passionate about or you just want to kind of impart some additional wisdom on everybody?


Dale: Yeah, I would say I had an interesting conversation. So Vituity, luckily, they're great friends with us. They invite us to their annual meetings and things like that. One of their physician innovators that that I was talking to said, had a pretty interesting observation.


So a lot of docs are coming out and saying, "Hey, yeah, this ambient AI, this is great. It does all my note taking. It takes away a lot of the busy work that I had to do, that pajama time when I got home." But what he was hearing was organizations are just feeling that time in with more intense brain work, with more intense doctoring, if you will.


So, you know, his concern is it's actually worsening burnout. as much as it's helping remove some of these administrative tasks and things like that, those were a little bit of downtime between patients. Now you go from one intense patient to the next intense patient for four hours.


You take a 30 minute break, review your documentation, fix it up a little bit, and then you got four more hours. You know, one of the concerns he raises, is it too much now? Am I too productive? Am I - am I too much in the in the weeds all day long? And was that actually saving me brain space so that I could transition from one patient to the next?


So I thought that was an interesting perspective I haven't heard on the AI front before. Definitely something we'll keep an eye on and see how that plays out. But I would say for organizations that are trying to be hyper-efficient with things, yeah, there's probably, I think you asked the question earlier, maybe I didn't fully answer it, but that would have been my answer.


Like where do I see risk with AI? Some of the most efficient people out there will try and become more efficient and it may reach a taxing point for them.


Kyle: I'm a firm believer that everything has a bell curve, right? Or operates on a bell curve and you can definitely exceed that. It's funny that you mentioned that in a previous episode, um, someone, I forget the exact example, but it was something like that, that you just mentioned that you didn't expect to have this impact.


And it made me realize, I think a relatable example is, I like other people am looking forward to automated driving. You know, like it'll free up some time. Maybe I can take a nap. Maybe I can do some work, whatever it is.


But then I also realized that I truly enjoy, windows down, music up, driving down the highway. Like I'm not doing anything else but driving. And it's a little, you know, cathartic for me. So, you know, it may not be a good thing for that to get taken away. Specifically. 


Dale: So have you been in a Waymo?


Kyle: Not yet. Not yet. No.


Dale: Oh, yeah. That's - it's a trip.

Yeah. So we're based out in San Francisco. So I'll go out there every once in a while and and hang with the team for a week or so. And yeah, it's been - it's pretty interesting to sit in the passenger seat with no one driving and it is better than humans, I have to say that.


Kyle: Oh, well, I mean, if everything is synced up, then that has to be better in terms of accidents and traffic and all that kind of stuff.


Dale: Well, it was interesting because there was a bike and I could see it out of the corner of my eye. Obviously, the car picked it up, but he came right out into traffic and stopped just a couple feet into our lane.


Any other driver would have slammed on the brakes, jacked the wheel, probably hit the car next to him, got rear-ended. And this way, we would just very casually slid over, went around him, no jerky motions, but just made the perfect adjustment to not create an accident.


Kyle: Very cool. It's nice to hear that. I feel like you only hear the horror stories.


Dale: Right. Yeah. Well, one of them got pulled over the other day. I didn't get to read the article yet, but... made an illegal U-turn somewhere. I guess they changed the sign and it didn't update its programming.


Kyle: Oh man, that was probably interesting for that officer.


Dale: Oh yeah, yeah.


Kyle: That's awesome. Well, Dale, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and jumping on, sharing your insights and your expertise. Everybody can find Dale Ellicott on LinkedIn. Is there any other place that you wanted to plug where people could reach out to you or anything like that that you wanted to share?


Dale: Great, if you come to RelyHealth.care, our website, and check out what we do here. But yeah, on LinkedIn, always open, happy to answer questions. Love, you know, especially questions from early startups that are looking to form a foundation for their commercial programs.


Their questions teach me and hopefully I can contribute something and help get them in the right direction. So, yeah, just always open to communications. I'm on LinkedIn all the time. So just ping me if you have any questions or need any guidance. Hopefully I can help.


Kyle: Awesome. We appreciate it, Dale. Thank you so much for joining the Brainiac Blueprint. If you could do me a favor, look at the camera and say, "stay brilliant, Brainiacs."


Dale: Stay brilliant, Brainiacs.


Kyle: Awesome. Thank you, Dale.


Dale: All right. Thanks.


 
 
 

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