What we talked about
Harry Soza traces a three-decade arc of health-tech innovation:from pre-internet pharmacy transactions to AI-assisted, patient-reported data that keeps people healthy between visits. He founded Preferred Solutions in the 1980s, adapting credit-card authorization technology to enable the first real-time formulary checks at the pharmacy counter and showing that simple peer comparisons could shift physician prescribing within weeks. He then built Resolution Health, which stitched together messy claims, pharmacy, and provider identifiers to surface “care gaps,” sending insurer-backed member reports that improved doctor–patient conversations and even exposed miscoding and fraud.
Show notes
Harry Soza built the first company to run a real-time prescription drug benefit transaction:in the 1980s, before the internet existed, using the same phone-line technology that powered credit card authorization at airline clubs. Thirty years and two successful exits later, he’s now applying AI and smartphone cameras to keep patients healthy between the four-to-six-month gaps between doctor visits.
What we covered
- Preferred Solutions, Soza’s first company, pioneered what is now routine at every pharmacy counter: checking whether a drug is covered by insurance, what the patient owes, and whether an alternative is available:all in real time over phone lines, with no internet. He describes it as adapting proven Visa and MasterCard transaction technology to a healthcare setting that nobody else had tackled.
- Resolution Health tackled the “master patient index” problem:the messy reality that the same person might have four different ID numbers across their hospital, doctor, pharmacy, and insurer. Soza’s team would link these records by birth date and name to build a complete claims picture, and in doing so uncovered fraud: a podiatrist who could only get paid for certain services if a patient had a diabetes diagnosis was coding 14 patients as diabetic when none of them were.
- Resolution mailed four-page pamphlets to patients showing their last 25 healthcare transactions, then flagged care gaps:things being done twice, treatments causing side effects treated by another doctor, or specialist care needed but unavailable. A Wall Street Journal article featured a patient who brought one such letter to her doctor; it turned out two doctors had each assumed the other was handling the same drug.
- At CAREMINDr, Soza argues that telling patients they need to “understand” their condition is the wrong approach. What works, and what his American Heart Association-recognized study confirmed, is giving patients a small number of specific, actionable prompts:“does food taste metallic?”:that surface meaningful data without requiring medical literacy.
- A 30-second smartphone selfie can now measure blood pressure, heart rate variability, cardiac stress, and parasympathetic index. Soza describes how combining this kind of passive biometric data with structured daily check-in questions creates a “motion picture” of a patient’s health that AI can analyze to alert clinicians before something goes wrong:in contrast to the 20-minute snapshot a doctor currently works from every few months.
- Half of all US adults have high blood pressure, and nearly half of those are in what Soza calls the red zone:dangerous levels. He contends that 60-70% of them could move to the green zone quickly if they follow their care plan, and that removing even half the resulting heart attacks and strokes would be worth enormous amounts to insurers under value-based care models, which he sees as the payment shift accelerated by the pandemic.
About Harry Soza
Harry Soza is the founder and CEO of CAREMINDr, a health tech company focused on remote patient monitoring and chronic disease management. He previously founded Preferred Solutions and Resolution Health, both of which were acquired by insurance companies, and holds engineering degrees from Notre Dame and Stanford.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrysoza
- Website: https://caremindr.com
Episode 27 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:01.036) Welcome to Prevetted Podcast, a blend of tech and leadership. Our guest today is Harry Sosa, a health tech veteran with engineering degrees from Notre Dame and Stanford and two high value exits under his belt. And his career has been based on leveraging data to change the way healthcare works. So hello, Harry.
Welcome to the podcast. I’m happy to have you here. So I want to ask you little bit about Prefer Solutions. This is your first company. Can you tell us a little bit about how the idea, describe what Prefer Solutions is for the audience and how that idea came up?
Harry Soza (00:30.423) Hi, Federico. Hi.
Harry Soza (00:54.165) Well, the company came out of actually a job that I had prior to Preferred where I was working in the financial transaction industry. We were working with creating, if you can imagine this, telephone sets where you could stick in a credit card and make a telephone call. That was considered very groundbreaking in the 1980s, which is the era of Preferred.
and We were we had a big job for AT &T we were producing units that were being put into the the airline clubs the red carpet club those kind of places where travelers would want to make a lot of calls and they wanted to use credit cards they weren’t going to be using payphones because that’s all they had there were no cell phones then and So we were building that and we got a call from AT &T that said would you go out and talk to a company?
that would like to use this technology but wants to use it in a healthcare setting. So we went out, I went into Albany, New York or thereabouts and visited with an HMO there and they wanted to use it to manage a prescription drug benefit. And when they said that to me, I said, okay, I said, can I kind of understand each of the words but I don’t understand what you just asked me to do. And they said, all right.
Well, there’s a thing called the formulary, which is the drugs that the HMO would pay for. There is the membership of the HMO, which says this is only for their members. They’re not going to pay for not their members. And there are other things they’d like to know about the pharmacy and the quantity and a lot of details. Could this technology actually help manage that process? Because without this, it’s very difficult to stay inside the rules.
So I took that project back to my boss and I said, look, you know, this is, I was running a division out in California. My boss was at the headquarters back in the Midwest. And I said, they want to do this thing with healthcare. And he said, well, we really don’t do that. We’re involved in merchant support primarily with these Visa cards and stuff. Managing healthcare is not one of our things.
Harry Soza (03:17.086) So I thought about it for a while and after a month or so I said, you know, think I’d rather go try this. The entrepreneurial streak came out. I’d had a company in microwave telecommunications before. I’d been brought into this company to do a turnaround. And I said, you know, I think I like this better than what I’m doing here. What’s going on here is pretty solid. So I think I’m going to step out and try to start a company. And that’s where Preferred came from. We went right back to those people in New York.
and said, look, AT &T was not interested in supporting this because the product line that we were working with doesn’t have anything to do with healthcare, but I’m interested in it. And I think I can build what you need by assembling a team and pulling this together. And that was where Preferred Solutions came from. So the goal at that time was to use a technology that had been proven in the Visa and MasterCard authorization system to adapt it
to be able to work in this new service of trying to manage a prescription drug benefit that a payer, an insurer, would cover with all of the nuances and complications. And it turns out to be there’s a whole lot of them. But you had to get into the industry to learn about it. And we were successful. I think we were the very first ones to ever do what today is very common. Today, people go to a drug store. They have a prescription. They usually show their insurance card.
The pharmacist might scan that card or they might have it on record from the previous visit. And they can tell you whether the drug that’s been prescribed is covered by your insurance company, what you have to pay. They’ll tell you whether there’s other dosages or possibilities that you could have. it’s too expensive, could you talk to the doctor about switching to this one? Those sorts of capabilities, that very detailed information about a medication.
that has been described by your doctor for you, making sure it’s within the bounds, that’s commonplace and very simple today. And I will claim that our company, Preferred Solutions, was the very first one to ever have a transaction like that actually go through. So that’s what we did.
Federico Ramallo (05:27.318) Wow.
I didn’t realize that preferred solutions was in that age before the internet and the whole interconnectivity. There was no internet.
Harry Soza (05:38.615) There was no internet, there were just phone lines. There were just phone lines with wires. And there were no cell phones. But it’s kind of a measure of what I believe technologists should be looking at is the core capability that they’re working with. And today it’s AI in the various forms that AI takes, not just degenerative or the agentic or the other kinds. It has a core capability.
Federico Ramallo (05:46.51) You
Federico Ramallo (06:00.771) Yes.
Harry Soza (06:06.796) And the question is, is that useful in another application that really needs it to become more efficient, to become more beneficial to people? And we’re the technologists. We’re the ones that understand at its root, how does it work? What are the pieces that make it work? How does it all communicate and do whatever it does? Now the question is, is there a place that needs it? And if you find that, is somebody doing that already?
In the case of Preferred, the answer was no. There were companies that were going trying to, but they were very large companies. They were kind of bound up in their own inertia. And then here we came out of the blue, someone no one had ever heard of. And we put it together and we did the job that they wanted done by that HMO up in New York, up the Mohawk Valley of New York. That was what they were called. So I don’t even know if they’re still in business, but there was one very interesting thing that happened there.
Federico Ramallo (06:49.198) you
Harry Soza (07:05.046) This is before social security numbers were, were become became super private. People would use that as the identity openly. And so, yeah, sure. And so this is the eighties. Nobody thought about this stuff at that point. When we were testing the system, we punched in a code 123456789 as a test code. And we got a response. Turns out there is a person.
Federico Ramallo (07:05.208) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (07:16.762) really?
Harry Soza (07:33.793) There was a person in upstate New York that was their social security number. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. So, oops. So we started being a little more careful with that. The numbers come, the coding comes from districts. So it turns out that one, two, three is a district. And so we found places that didn’t have the district and we use safer numbers, but that was kind of a funny thing to bump into. So anyway.
Federico Ramallo (07:42.058) Oops.
Federico Ramallo (08:02.355) In Argentina they use sequential numbers for people similar to social security number and they as I mentioned you know before start recording I just come back from Argentina and they they asked me for that number everywhere I I moved out of Argentina since 17 years ago so you know
Harry Soza (08:25.132) But it’s stuck in your head, isn’t it?
Federico Ramallo (08:29.614) Yeah, so I had the same reaction as you. It’s like, oh, this is so invasive. They’re asking for my social security number, right? But people are used to do that there, right? So they ask me for that number, and then I will give the number. And then they say, OK, but we need the physical card. Again, they have a 17 years out.
Harry Soza (08:56.352) have a teen years.
Federico Ramallo (08:59.468) So used to be like a passport, a paper passport, right? So now I’m stuck in a situation where, uh-oh, I don’t have that plastic to show them. Eventually I learned that now it’s a plastic like a credit card. So I don’t have that. So now I have to explain, well, I actually moved out of Argentina. I don’t have any.
Argentinian document that can prove that I’m actually who I say I am and all my paperwork are from Mexico, right? So all my IDs are from Mexico. So from their point of view, it looked like I was lying or I was, you so it took me a lot of time to… This was the security guard that would let me in to the hospital where my mom was, right? But still it was, you know, it was… And then other places they would ask me for that information as well. So…
Harry Soza (09:39.756) Sure. Under suspicion.
Federico Ramallo (09:55.567) And they use it for ID as well, you like you go to buy some groceries, right, to the supermarket. And then they use your social security number as ID, you know, for promotions and whatnot.
Harry Soza (10:10.4) Yeah, I get it. I, I, I, that’s one of the things that I don’t like about what’s been happening in the current administration where there seems to be gathering up a lot of data. When, when the healthcare industry decreed that it would no longer use social security numbers, which is around 1999, everybody had to get a new number, but it was all very specific to whatever organization you belong to. So the number that’s used by one insurer.
Federico Ramallo (10:36.558) Harry Soza (10:40.382) say you’re insured by Blue Shield of California, that’s a very large insurance plan here, you get a number from them and it’s only for them. If you went to Blue Cross of Arizona, they don’t know what it is. They have to ask Blue Shield who you are, because it’s a number given out by each organization. You have a different number if you’re covered by United Healthcare or if you’re covered by one of the other insurers. That is not your Medicare number, it is not your Medicaid number.
Your social security number stands as the one thing that connects it in the background, but it’s never really given out and it’s a whole number. It’s more of a crosswalk number that says, well, this is the same person because he has the same social, but the only people that know that are the folks that are in charge of those databases inside the organizations. At least that’s what it’s supposed to be. Nowadays, there’s so many hackers and there’s so much with the dark web and so on that, you know.
Very few things are truly secret, but it was a big movement when healthcare switched away from the social security numbers because everybody was using them and they all had to stop and they all had to change to new numbers.
Federico Ramallo (11:49.612) Right, the reason for the change was to provide more privacy.
Harry Soza (11:54.925) Yep, that was exactly it. was during the, the change happened during the transition of HIPAA, the Health, Insurance, Portability and whatever the other P is, the Portability and Accountability Act. That happened between 1999 and 2002. It was a three and a half, four year cycle of moving from one to the other. And you get, entered, everybody had the same number, you came out of it. Nobody, each organization had a new number for you. And so…
Federico Ramallo (11:56.504) can
Harry Soza (12:24.78) You know, that transition happened right around the year 2000. you know, things like the internet were still nascent, they were still tiny. But it was a step in the direction of privacy and personal security.
Federico Ramallo (12:40.996) Yeah, yeah, I mean what you gain in privacy you lose in data consistency, right? Because, yeah.
Harry Soza (12:46.132) Yeah, well, and that’s one of those tricks is that that made certain tasks downstream much more difficult, which got like to our next company, which was at resolution health. One of the things that you found out was that if you were trying to put together a person’s history, their claims history, the things that that an insurer paid for, like like a blue shield or a blue cross or some organization that is your
Federico Ramallo (12:57.176) Yes.
Harry Soza (13:15.38) insurance company, you would find out that there was different numbers, that the hospital knew you by a different number than your doctor knew you, and that they both had a different number than the pharmacy knew you. And putting that together was kind of a trick. They used to call it the Masturbation Index, where you would have several numbers associated to a individual, sometimes misassociated, and you would have to, if you were trying to understand what was happening from a healthcare perspective,
Federico Ramallo (13:37.302) Wow.
Harry Soza (13:44.225) You had to string those together somehow at the beginning. You had to create this master patient index that said, okay, this is Frederico and this is Frederico and there’s the four numbers. So when we look at a given type of, of, of, of medical expenditure, if it’s the pharmacy, it’s this number. If it’s the, if it’s a doctor office, it’s this number. If they went to this clinic, it’s this number.
But it’s all the same person. We can line it up by the birth date, by the name, by other things that would give us a chance to be able to tie those together. And then we’d find out mistakes would happen because some people, the most common mistake would happen at the pharmacy where very often there was a number given out by a pharmacy managing company. And it was given if your insurance was from your employer, it came through employment.
Usually the employee was known as person number 01 and the spouse was known as person number 02. And one of the most common mistakes was when the employee was the woman and the man was the spouse. And so sometimes they would be recording that as the woman would come in and there was no 01 or 02 on the card. It was just the number.
Federico Ramallo (14:48.483) Right.
Harry Soza (15:04.502) But the pharmacy would add the suffix to say which one of the people in the family was it. 03 was a child, 04 was a child, et cetera. And there would be a lot of guessing going on. sometimes those were really, in the case of resolution, that would be a mistake that we would see relatively common. The woman might, we would get someone, we’d be working for a client and they, you know, they said we had somebody call up and say, do you think I’m diabetic?
Federico Ramallo (15:23.213) Right.
Harry Soza (15:33.941) Most common question was asked that, why do you think I’m diabetic? We would look at the records and we’d say, well, looking at your history, you’re taking diabetic medicines. That’s one of the key indicators that you’re diabetic. And they said, I’m not taking… my husband’s taking diabetic medicines. And it was like, okay. So what was happening is the pharmacy was assigning the number back to the wrong person.
Federico Ramallo (15:50.318) the
Harry Soza (16:03.242) And I said, did you change? And then the question came up, did they change pharmacies recently? Well, yes, they did. OK. So the old pharmacy had it right. The new pharmacy made a mistake. And so they made an assumption, and they put the wrong code on it. And so now a woman that was not diabetic was being declared diabetic. she was wondering why she was getting all these warnings about things that she has to look out for being diabetic when she’s not.
Federico Ramallo (16:12.94) Right, made an assumption and…
Harry Soza (16:30.684) And so that was the kind of thing we would bump into occasionally.
Federico Ramallo (16:34.626) Right, right. And the…
Harry Soza (16:36.62) So you gotta understand, again, if you understand how the technology works, some of these mistakes make a lot of sense. It’s like, okay, they put it together, they put it together badly, and this kind of error was bound to happen. It was going to happen at some frequency. And especially when people moved and they’d be establishing new relationships again, the chance that their numbers would be put in properly, it was another set of
of vagueness to it. again, if you’re in a system like this, exception reporting and the way you hunt those down becomes very important. And understanding the nuances of the application you’re in, the coding you’re in, and the things that you have to look for, that becomes the world of the technologist. You may not understand the business completely, but you can understand why numbers get transposed, why things get
wrong assignments, et cetera. And you have to find ways of capturing, catching it so that your applications, so that the processes you’re working with, so that they’re accurate and they do some good. Cause you know, these are not small databases. You may be dealing with hundreds of thousands or millions of people in a database and things happening every day. And you want it to be extraordinarily accurate when you know that the system has been built with certain, certain disciplines gaps.
that there were going to be these kinds of mistakes.
Federico Ramallo (18:05.71) Right, right, and once it becomes a record, then that error gets dragged because now it becomes a truth, right? Because it’s there, you know?
Harry Soza (18:15.7) Right. Well, that’s part of it. Well, and then you find out, then you start learning about again, the application people start learning about things that the data people can tell you. So like we had one case where somebody said, why do you think I’m diabetic? That’s like I said, it’s my favorite question. And then there was a criteria. was, it was not simply one time that one doctor said it, it had to be a pattern to, know, sometimes doctors say something in order to get a test done to make sure you weren’t.
So, you know, exhibiting diabetic symptoms is a code that says that’s it. And that’s one of the reasons they order certain blood tests. So that’s the rationalization they’re showing you. But then there was one case where someone said, why do you think I’m diabetic? And they looked at it. They said, there’s a doctor that keeps saying you’re diabetic. But then the data people got in here and said, you know, this person is not taking any diabetes medicines. And they see other doctors, but the other doctors don’t say anything about diabetes.
So then it turned into this discussion with our client on a conference call and they said, okay, this case here, what are you seeing? Well, we see, and then it dawned on us looking at the data. We said, you know, they never really say they have diabetes. They say they have diabetes symptoms or in their feet, which is, that’s a code, you can put it in there. I said, but nobody else is saying this.
At which point they said, what was the doctor number again? We gave them the doctor and they said, okay, that’s a doctor that can, it’s a podiatrist. They cannot get paid unless the person has diabetes. So now they’re lying about it. Then it turned into a different kind of search. How many of these, how many cases do we have where there’s a diagnosis of diabetes has occurred because of a continuing code being presented, but there’s no other diabetic indication of care at all.
Federico Ramallo (19:54.766) Harry Soza (20:14.272) that turned out to be there were 13 other doctors that were in the same boat. And so that was a case of finding what would be constituted as medical fraud. That if a doctor was putting a code in in order to get certain payments, and if they didn’t put a code like that in, they couldn’t get paid, then they were gaming the system. There’s a huge case of it right now. It just came down with United Healthcare. That they would up code the diagnosis because
Federico Ramallo (20:35.997) I see.
Harry Soza (20:43.882) they would want the people to appear sicker than they were. So they would say they had conditions. They would say the conditions were of a higher severity because that meant a financial return that was higher. Now they got caught and they’ve had to pay penalties, but that’s kind of what happens in this world. That’s the sort of thing that, know, at least in healthcare, it’s extraordinarily complex that people can have a condition. It can be mild. It can be medium. It can be bad. It can be
You can have somebody that just diagnoses it. You can have somebody else that treats it. You can have procedures. You can have other kinds of clinicians involved. And somehow you got to knit together a picture of what is happening in this person’s life. Now that’s the industry that I know. I’m sure there is equivalencies in other industries, but that’s the one I’ve got. And that’s the kind of life that I’ve been involved with for the last several decades.
Federico Ramallo (21:46.286) So what you were doing in resolution health, I understand you were giving more sharing the data with the patients, right? So they could have better.
Harry Soza (21:56.683) Yeah, that was kind of an interesting exercise there. When a patient has many doctors, and several people do, because maybe they have something that is, you know, it’s something that a normal primary care doctor might take care of, like a high blood pressure, but they get injured. And now they’re going to go see a specialist because their knee is screwed up or because something like that. So now they have several doctors, and we would see things in the data that indicated that something
We call, was, it was the colloquial term that we created was there a care gap. And well, what did that mean? Well, the kind of three, three categories, either there is something that should be done that isn’t being done. There is something that is being done by, by two or three doctors that like you’re getting the same drug, whether you know it or not, whether the name sounds familiar or not, you’re there. It’s actually the same stuff. And now you’re duplicating and that’s not good.
Federico Ramallo (22:52.032) Also, there is a drug overlap.
Harry Soza (22:54.984) It’s a drug overlap in some way. And nobody can know because the names are so different. You don’t necessarily know and names that sound alike can be remarkably different. Like so, you know, like loratadine and renitidine. All right. They’re nothing like each other, but one of them is, but it sounds the same. One’s used for allergies. The other one’s used for ulcers. It’s like, okay.
Federico Ramallo (23:16.952) But they sound…
Harry Soza (23:24.172) And then you get to sometimes one medication or one treatment is causing another problem that they can be treating you with a non-steroidal, an NSAID, an anti-inflammatory drug. And that’s because your knee is hurt and because you have swelling and because that’s painful. But it also has a side effect that it can give you stomach problems.
which means a different doctor could be trying to treat your stomach problem. And you’re looking at this going at the stomach problems being caused by the drug for the knee. All right, so that was a gap. That’s a problem. That someone is not informing each other that they’re not being careful about what’s happening. But in the kind of system we have here, it’s very often the case that the doctors, don’t belong to the same organization. The only string of continuity is the patient. You have the same patient I have, yeah, but for a whole different reason.
And this happens a lot. So resolution was about hunting out those gaps, where there was duplication, where there was a missing something, where something was causing something else. Those were the kinds of things that we were hunting for. Sometimes we were just looking at whether a condition was being treated by a doctor with specialist qualities, special licensure that would be more appropriate. And some people can’t because they…
They have a limited number of doctors available to them in rural areas or in tribal lands or in places like that. They don’t have a lot of specialists. And you look at this and go like, you know, look at these diagnoses. They really should see somebody that knows a whole lot about this. You know, a normal doctor, there’s a limit to how far they can go in every little nuance. So we would find that. But then the question is, who do you tell? All right, we have a care gap, right?
We don’t even know who to tell. These people are not, there are systems that are built around a caretaker doctor where you have a primary care, a PCP, a primary care physician. That is, you’ve chosen them or they’ve been assigned to you and that’s your main, that’s the quarterback of your healthcare team. They’re the one in charge.
Federico Ramallo (25:40.43) He sent you to the specialist, basically.
Harry Soza (25:44.223) Right. He should send you to specialist. He should be taking you to the right place. He or she should be the one in charge of you. All right. But if you’re not in that kind of insurance where you’re choosing doctors as you wish, which a lot of people choose to do, and because they may not be in one location much of the year, they may travel a bit. They may have summers in one area and other parts of the year in another area. Those are people that are picking their doctors. And so
They’re the only ones who know who they’re talking to and which doctor they trust. And so the idea became, well, why don’t we tell the patient what’s going on? Let’s do it gently. Let’s try not to create alarm. All right. And create a system that when we identify the gaps, we can, at that time, which was the early 2000s, we will mail them a report about themself.
coming from their health insurance company because they’re the ones who have the data. So you would get a letter from the blue plan in your state that that’s your insurer or from your HMO or from somebody. It looked like it was from them. And we working with a data-driven mailing company based in San Diego. And they would print these up and send them out.
Federico Ramallo (26:59.949) Right.
Harry Soza (27:11.06) and it was just a sheet of paper folded so it had like a four page little pamphlet. We would show them the last 25 transactions that were on record because that would convince them that it was them. They could see they got prescriptions, they could see they went to see a doctor, they could see that maybe they were in the emergency room where they got a shot or whatever. So they would say, well, that’s me, okay. And then the facing page had these little paragraphs.
that would give them ideas about you should talk to your doctor about this. And we actually got mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article about information flowing back to a doctor. There were a couple of companies mentioned, we were kind of the last one brought on. It happened in Massachusetts, and a woman there got one of these letters, and she said she was a little hesitant because she…
Federico Ramallo (27:51.31) Interesting.
Harry Soza (28:07.168) doesn’t like questioning her doctor but she went and said of so this says that there’s a type of drug that maybe i should be getting and the doctor said well i thought the other doctor was doing it and it’s that kind of thing that would happen and so you know there were there were places where we feel like we really made a difference because we didn’t were giving we were empowering the patient with information that was written down that they didn’t have to explain it to the doc
They didn’t have to tell them they found it in a book or like today you’d find it on Google or you heard listen to some AI tell you about it. This was brought to you by the clinical professionals of a health insurance company bringing the information to you. So it had high credibility and that meant that the doctors would usually react very positively to it. One of the things that doctors hate is when someone walks in with a bunch of sheets that they printed off the internet.
Federico Ramallo (28:53.409) Right.
Harry Soza (29:05.096) Lord knows how accurate any of that stuff is because you just I mean somewhat there’s great websites believe me there’s you know there’s excellent websites for information and there’s a lot of junk and you know and
Federico Ramallo (29:16.056) Right, I read this online, so it has to be true, right? So treat me, right?
Harry Soza (29:19.378) Exactly. I saw this person interviewed on this cable show and this doctor said this and so I went up and I got this and this is, you know, and the doctors are going like, I’ll never get back these minutes of my life. They’re gonna just get eaten up by having an explanation of nothing that has reality. So, you know, in our world, having credible sources, having data that backs it up, living by the standards that are
that build it up, that’s how healthcare is. I imagine that in other industries that there are sources of whatever is the highest level of truth that they have today. Things that have been tested over time, run by many experts. The best thoughts they have today can become the guiding principles. But again, the technology could do something very sloppy or it could be through something pretty precise. And if you wanna make a change,
Usually it comes down to coercing some number of people into believing what you just showed them that they have to look at this and say This is right. This is probably right is like This is important. Yeah, because their first thought is I’m I’m I’m in charge of this I’m the expert here I’m somebody who’s who has responsibility for this and you just put this in front of me and you want me to do something it’s like it whatever they put in front of you, whatever you are your story is
Federico Ramallo (30:28.536) This is important for you to read.
Harry Soza (30:47.092) you really have to reach that level of where this looks like it could be right. I see what they’re saying. And so now you’re headed in the right direction and you made something better.
Federico Ramallo (30:59.438) I, when I had my first son, well, my only son, but when we had our first son, the doctor would say, you have to give them this amount of milk or whatever, right? And then we will go on. The doctor said 250 millimeters, right? And then with precision, we will give the baby, and then the baby will start crying and crying. It’s like, what’s going on? Doctor, we follow instructions.
Buy the letter. And then the doctor will say, well, it’s still hungry. Give them more. Give the baby more. And he was saying, it’s not exact size. So the way that I see it is the patients are experts of us, of the patient. Some people had an average of higher blood pressure. Some people had lower blood pressure. And then take the.
Harry Soza (31:33.462) Give him what?
Harry Soza (31:39.99) Sorry. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (31:56.547) the advice or the recommendation from the doctor because he’s the expert on the human body, right? But what we need to understand around bodies to understand, the general rule doesn’t apply to me because whatever, whatever, right?
Harry Soza (32:17.502) Well, I’ll give you a better example there is that, know, today at CareMinder, we gather data from our patients and we gather biometric data, which people would expect if you’re working in hypertension and blood pressure or you’re dealing with diabetes. They would expect that you measure something. Okay. The same way you measure temperature or you might measure your pulse oximeter number, your blood oxygen level, like we did during the pandemic. Those numbers are important.
But then there’s other things that they ask. And that’s because if you listen carefully when the doctor was talking to you about your situation, they were usually telling you things about, well, I’m going to give you a medication, but if you feel drowsy in the morning, or if you feel like you’re walking on eggshells, or if you feel like you’re a little bit dopey in the middle of the day, you got to tell me.
or if you start having a funny taste in your mouth or if you’re not sleeping well or if they tell you all this stuff they might even give you a pamphlet and believe me five minutes out of the out of after the doctor’s office you don’t remember any of it you just had a download of information in a couple minutes that probably has 10 or 12 things that you should be aware of and how can you possibly remember that because you have to be someplace you got to pick up the kids from school you got to
Federico Ramallo (33:34.296) Right.
Harry Soza (33:40.525) go to the grocery store, have to get the cars, oil change, you gotta do things in your life. And those are crowding out anything that you just heard from your doctor visit. So one of the things that we do is when we contact people and say, you gotta give me a biometric today, this is for your doctor, wants to keep track of how things are going. We often are asking questions. We have in every one of our disease states, we have, I don’t know, probably 10 to 20 questions.
that are related to the treatment of that condition. know, some of the, and they’re very specific. The kinds of questions you ask in diabetes and the kinds of questions you ask in hypertension and the kinds of questions you ask in depression, they have very little overlap. All right. Maybe there’s some basic stuff about, are you sleeping well? That kind of pretty, it’s a pretty common question from almost every condition. But most of them have very specific things they’re asking. And by gathering those,
Federico Ramallo (34:25.495) Right.
Harry Soza (34:39.88) You don’t have to remember why the doctor said you needed that. You just have to say, well, yeah, my food is tasting metallic. All right. I got that weird flavor. I don’t like eating certain foods that I normally like because they taste weird. That’s an indication that you’re having a reaction or that something is getting worse. And that’s the things that doctors need to know to course correct for you.
Federico Ramallo (34:44.344) you
Harry Soza (35:08.498) every condition of any size, there are multiple channels of treatment, you know, and the doctor is going to pick one pretty much in the middle of the pack because it works for most people, but it might not work for you. And the only way they’re going to know that is if you were aware enough of, you know, I’m waking up.
Federico Ramallo (35:25.698) Right.
Harry Soza (35:32.173) Way way too early. I get it I wake up at 3 in the morning and I can’t go back to sleep and I can’t I just can’t because my body I feel that kind of statement When that’s a change that kind of thing You don’t necessarily are tying it back to the treatments you’re receiving But the doctor may be may come back and say well, let’s try something else for a while and see if this works so That’s the kind of thing you need as a patient
Federico Ramallo (35:56.174) Right.
Harry Soza (36:00.229) I sit there and it’s a, from my technology, there is what I think is a fallacy, all right, of concept. If you ask any of the chat engines, what should a person know about a long duration condition? How do you get them to abide by the care plan they have? And they all start off with,
The patient should be informed. They should understand. They should know what the consequences are. They should understand. And I actually, I don’t believe that. I think that’s taking people in the wrong direction because most people, if they have a condition and you start with pregnancy and you go to all these others, they’re not really ready to have somebody read them a book of information that they’re going to have a test on. All right?
What most people need to know is what do you need me to do? Just tell me what I’m supposed to do. And I may not understand why you ask these questions about how food tastes or if I stand up, do I feel a little dizzy? don’t, there’s probably good reasons and if I wanted to learn, I probably could learn, I could find it and maybe you’re giving me all the pamphlets. But just tell me what you need me to do to do my part.
So does that mean they have to be all tuned in and understanding and stuff? The answer is no, that’s not really what they need. They need something else. They need guidance. They need a chance. They need to be given something they can do. And they need something that prompts them to do it. That’s been the success that we’ve seen at resolution. I mean, excuse me, at CareMinder. That’s the thing that we saw to stop the gaps of resolution is that
Federico Ramallo (37:40.611) Right.
Federico Ramallo (37:44.972) and Carminder, yeah.
Harry Soza (37:49.886) if they know what they’re supposed to do, they know what they’re supposed to be aware of, if they know what they’re supposed to be looking for.
They may not understand why. It’s just this. And so do you answer that. And that’s a huge help because nobody expects you to be the doctor. Nobody expects you to know enough to be a doctor. And that’s kind of the role of the patient right now is that, know, just give me the things, me the, get it to me. Don’t give me a 19 question checklist. Ask a few questions at a time.
Federico Ramallo (38:03.47) you
Harry Soza (38:26.348) give me a chance to answer it and get it out, that’ll work. And it’s been shown to work. We got a press release from the American Art Association for a program that we were part of. It’s shown on our website. And it shows that we were able to accomplish something that nobody else had ever accomplished. And we did it in a bilingual manner, where we had people whose first language was not English, that they, you know, we have a Spanish version of our program.
And it was working fine for them. And the community that we tested in was a economically stressed, underserved community. These are people that are not well off. They don’t have enough money. They work very, very hard. These are the places where you have migrants and you have folks that are undocumented. And they’re out there doing their jobs. And yeah, they get these conditions too.
Federico Ramallo (39:05.964) Right.
Harry Soza (39:23.594) They don’t necessarily want to learn everything about the condition. They just want to do the things necessary to be as healthy as they can be. And that’s sort of the mantra of CareMinder, trying to get a person as healthy as they can be. Some of us are going to be healthier just roll the dice lucky in the genetics. But everybody should be as healthy as they can be so that they have a chance at having a
Federico Ramallo (39:31.948) Right, then.
Harry Soza (39:52.274) a fruitful and productive life.
Federico Ramallo (39:55.651) Right, right. And a Kerrminder is your third company and the current company you’re doing. I’m showing that for the audience so they know. We kind of switched to Kerrminder. I wanted to give them the, you know.
Harry Soza (40:01.856) That’s right. That’s the one we’re working on right now.
Harry Soza (40:07.51) I’m sorry. Yeah, yeah. So the first one was preferred solutions. The second one was resolution. The CareMiner is the third. The first two were each one of them was sold to an insurance company. All right. Yeah. And at a multiple that’s absurd. I mean, if you work, I kind of lay this out in a recent series of articles I put in LinkedIn.
This is my post. said, you know, one of the crazy things that I learned about this industry is that the hierarchy of value is not based on your income statement necessarily. Okay. Most of the time people build companies and the companies are, they sell something, services or products, and they, they, they’re profitable. And then based on those profits or based on the volume they sell,
or based on the amount of territory that they dominate, that determines the value of that company. But there’s other industries where the value is, you don’t start by selling to the person who needs the value. You demonstrate value and you recognize that the value that you’re providing is so much greater to the top of the food chain than it is down where you’re actually providing it. Healthcare works that way.
Federico Ramallo (41:12.77) Yes, yes.
Harry Soza (41:35.205) And so that’s kind of one of the things that we found out that, you know, we’re down here managing a drug benefit, getting the right medications and the right people at the right times. That’s worth enormous amounts of money to the people that have to pay for the drugs. That the things that don’t go well are so expensive. the volume and the expense of doing it wrong. I mean, that’s the problem. Then you get down to the care gaps. What is it worth?
Federico Ramallo (41:52.782) Because of the volume, right? The volume that they manage.
Harry Soza (42:04.352) to keep a person from going to the hospital. The kind of expense that gets generated there by catching it when you notice that something isn’t right. That’s what resolution was about, was you would see something not right, you would tell the patient, they would have a talk with their doctor, we hope, and things would be taken care of before anything bad happened because something that wasn’t right was actually happening, okay?
Federico Ramallo (42:19.256) Great.
Harry Soza (42:34.858) You get to CareMinder.
Federico Ramallo (42:34.862) before it becomes a bigger problem and more expensive for the health insurance.
Harry Soza (42:39.092) Yeah, and like, the magnitude of change is so big. And then you get to CareMinder, which has all of the advantages of today’s telecommunications and cell phones and the analytic capabilities of servers up in the cloud and now AI’s interpretation of stuff. You take all that and you sit there and say, what if we could just change it so that they’re as healthy as they can be before a gap appears? What if we head that off?
so that people are doing the right thing and the right thing for them is happening. And sure, there will still be people that will have a heart attack or a stroke or they will have other problems. That will still be, but you turn that percentage down. And if you could get rid of half of the heart attacks that an insurer has to pay for, what is that worth to them? That’s an enormous number. So that’s what we’re hoping for in CareMinder is that, you know, we’re sitting down here
Federico Ramallo (43:28.226) That’s a big saving for them. Yeah.
Harry Soza (43:36.023) grunching along, doing our thing, but the demonstration of getting people healthy that no one else has ever been able to accomplish, you one of our real hallmark conditions is high blood pressure. High blood pressure is very dangerous because you get above a certain point and it’s defined kind of for the human body. your blood pressure
If the systolic is above 140, if your diastolic is above 90, it’s bad, just is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a great big person. If you’re an adult, those numbers are just uniform. There’s not a whole lot of variance in there. You gotta get down. This is just where the human body functions. Blood pressures, one of those things is consistent. It’s like having a temperature. If you have a temperature of 101, it’s bad, just is.
Federico Ramallo (44:17.102) are bad across the board. Yeah.
Harry Soza (44:31.116) You know, and it doesn’t matter what age you are or whatever. You just, it just is. Okay. So, um, in blood pressure, the problem you have is that there’s no symptoms. So people may have a problem and not know it. It might be very dangerous and elevated and they don’t know it. Or they can deny it. If somebody tells them about it they got like, Hey, I’m feeling fine. I don’t, I don’t need to take these meds. I don’t need to do this exercise. I don’t need to do these things.
I’m feeling fine, which is exactly right, right up until they have a stroke. All right, so this is a very difficult condition to cause change. And it’s extraordinarily prevalent. Half of all US adults have high blood pressure. That’s just a statistic. And of them, almost half of them have way too high blood pressure.
And it’s been a consistent number for a very long time. For decades of measurement, that’s just sort of what happens. Ever since the drugs that can manage it, the systems that can manage it, the understandings of the mechanisms showed up. It’s always been 40, 45 % of those who have blood pressure problems, they have it way too high. So can you get them out of that danger zone? We call it the red zone, just for the sake of making a shorthand.
Get them out of a red zone, get them to the green. It’s like, how can you do that? They can, high percentage of them can. 60, 70 % of them can, quickly. But they gotta follow the plan that’s been laid out. They have to do it with awareness of the things that they should be looking out for. That’s what CareMinder’s all about, is trying to get them there and trying to use the mechanisms and expanding now to conditions that are.
Federico Ramallo (46:15.107) Right.
Harry Soza (46:24.588) Also really dangerous, like depression, like diabetes, even pregnancy is a very dangerous condition for the 12 months of having a baby and then immediately after. These are not short-term things, which means that there are occasional visits with a doctor, but you’re not in the hospital, you’re out trying to live your life, and while you’re doing that, it’s on you to do the things you’re supposed to do.
even if you can’t remember them all. And that’s what we’re doing with CareMinder.
Federico Ramallo (47:01.878) and you’re changing the model of going to the doctor every once in a while, getting some tests and then just follow ups, that you don’t see the whole picture with that, right?
Harry Soza (47:16.278) That’s right. So now what happens is if this is a new thing that’s occurring and we’re making a big deal out of this right now, literally right now in the middle of 2025, there is a convergence. There are three technologies in healthcare that have been kind of rolling along each developing. And now it’s becoming to point where the three of them can be brought together and create a new way of taking care of people.
The three ways, the three technologies are the sensor technologies. The sensors being devices that a regular civilian can use and to get a pretty accurate biometric number. Most people know how to use a thermometer, but now they’re digital, they’re easy to read. You don’t have to look for little red lines in the middle of a glass tube. The pulse oximeter that used to only be in hospitals.
But with the advent, you know, during the pandemic, we all had those things so we could figure out whether our oxygen levels were going crazy. You get to things nowadays where there’s like a flashlight tool that was just brought out by a company in France that you hold up against your chest. And it’s kind of like doing a an upper body x-ray. It’s unbelievable the kinds of data it can pull out. And now one of the ones we’re using, uses the
Federico Ramallo (48:34.167) wow.
Harry Soza (48:39.628) the camera on your cell phone, you hold it up and you take a selfie that takes a little bit of time. It used to be a minute. I’ve been told that the latest version takes 30 seconds. And in 30 seconds, it will measure things about you biometrically. It will measure your blood pressure. It will measure your heart rate variability. It will measure your level of cardiac stress. It will measure the flow through your face. It will measure your parasympathetic.
index, which I don’t even know what the hell that is. I just know that it measures it. And all of that data can be done in 30 seconds wherever you are, as long as there’s light. And you just hold the phone up like you’re taking a selfie. Put all these together. You can have a patient that is providing data about their journey with their condition on a regular basis every day.
Federico Ramallo (49:10.286) You
Federico Ramallo (49:22.03) That’s amazing.
Harry Soza (49:37.266) once every three days, once a week, once every two weeks, whatever the right number is.
Federico Ramallo (49:43.042) because the cost is so low, know, just spend 30 seconds, right?
Harry Soza (49:45.069) Yeah, exactly. It’s 30 seconds and it’s whenever it’s convenient for you. You can do it in the car sitting in a parking lot waiting for somebody. You can do it whenever it’s necessary. Those sorts of things create this ability to be able to take a sensor that is inexpensive, easy to use like cell phone or like one of these other devices and be able to send that data in somewhere.
and assemble a snapshot of that moment of what you have. It can be many biometric factors. It can be answers that you provide to some questions. It can be pieces that are just subjective. You know, you can have objective answers like, you have your refills? Do you have, you know, have you been taking your pills? Yes, no, how many days, that kind of stuff. It can be subjective questions like, are you feeling depressed today?
Why? Because depression is often one of the things that happens with one of these drugs. You didn’t, we told you that, but you don’t remember that. You know, that’s one of those things. And if you’re feeling depressed, somebody’s going to call you and ask you about, well, what is that getting to you? Do you want to get out of bed in the morning? Those kinds of things. But now you’ve taken a snapshot and you can do that every day. So the snapshot of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, it becomes a motion picture. Just like the frames in film become a motion picture.
And now that motion picture, that should be analyzed. But who has the time to analyze it? Well, that’s where AI shows up. AI today in healthcare, there’s over a thousand FDA approved processes that are out there. And most of them have to do with imaging. Looking at the complex x-ray, lungs x-ray, looking at an x-ray of your lungs or a broken leg or whatever.
MRIs, CAT scans, PET scans, massive amounts of data in those pictures that you used to have an expert sit there with their glasses on looking at it, looking for things, looking for stuff. AI does it so well. It sees it faster, better, consistently. It never gets tired. It never gets sleepy. It just does it. And so now,
Federico Ramallo (51:59.631) pattern recognition is one of the things that AI does really good.
Federico Ramallo (52:11.17) Yeah.
Harry Soza (52:13.664) Think about a picture, a moving picture of you. Think about a motion picture of a day at a time, snapshot each day. And now it’s all coming in and there’s an enormous amount of data, but AI can analyze that. And it can tell the clinicians something looks like it, things look going great. Something doesn’t look like it’s going well. There’s something new showing up that’s a little bothersome here. They’re complaining about muscle stiffness, you know.
Things like that are the things that can be noticed. The doctors can use their expertise to deal with the patient. that’s what we’re building now. In fact, that’s latest patent we filed because this convergence is real.
Federico Ramallo (52:54.926) Interesting.
Because with that, now you can have a much complete profile of the person throughout the years. And you can use that data to, you can analyze the data much better than a specialist.
Harry Soza (53:13.356) specialist who sees you once every once every six months, what’s I mean, they’re trying to be good for you. They only have so many minutes in the day, they have other patients they have to see. So you only get your turn once every four months, once every six months. And they got a kind of like, wonder what happened in between. Now that could have been analyzed for them. So that they saw it, they said, well, you’ve been doing fine. You may not even need to come in because
Federico Ramallo (53:19.054) You
Federico Ramallo (53:23.554) Right.
Harry Soza (53:39.553) You know, we’ve been looking at this and the report says it’s all going well. Just keep getting the data coming to us. Or you want to come in, we’ll do a couple little measurements, some things that we can do here that should be done in the clinical setting. It’ll be quick. You just go in, you do your thing, come. That can be the way healthcare works. It shouldn’t have to be that all the discovery takes place in the context of a 20 minute session with a doctor.
Federico Ramallo (53:39.598) You
Federico Ramallo (54:05.87) Right, right. Which is, I mean, one of the things, conflicts that I have with the healthcare industry, know, I don’t know if conflict is a word, is that it’s healthcare insurance, you know, it’s like when you crash, we have an insurance that will take care of your damage, right? Right.
Harry Soza (54:22.944) Yeah, it’s not trying to keep you well. It’s not geared to try to keep you healthy. It’s geared to deal with the crash, you know.
Federico Ramallo (54:29.678) And there’s no incentive to keep you healthy before the crash, right?
Harry Soza (54:36.448) Well, see, that’s what’s happening too, is that the other part of this era is there is a transformation of the payment mechanisms where doctors should be incentivized to keep their patients as healthy as possible. When patients, when doctors are being paid to do things, they want you to come in because then they can do things and they get paid. All right. I mean, that’s, that’s their livelihood. But if, they can, if they can keep you help.
Federico Ramallo (55:01.314) Right, right. I get paid by visits, so you know.
Harry Soza (55:06.538) Yeah, that’s right. But if they can keep you healthy and make make just as much money by just being a really good doctor and really smart about keeping you healthy. And they can use the time on the places that I mean, they’re still crashes. So there’s still other people to see, then they’re going to be it’s a much more successful system. And what that’s called is value based care. So value based care is a payment mechanism. And it’s it’s it’s patient first care. It’s like
get the patient as healthy as they can be and we will reward you for that. so, you know, that’s actually a good thing. It’s tough to do because you’re undoing a system that’s been in place for 60 years and people know how to use the old system and the pandemic accelerated it because during the pandemic people could not come in.
Federico Ramallo (55:40.27) Interesting.
Harry Soza (56:04.086) They could not come into the office because everybody was scared of seeing each other, of even walking into the office. The doctors didn’t want you. But then the doctors realized, well, if they don’t come in, then I can’t do anything. And so my revenue just crashed down to nothing because I’m not actually seeing a patient. Maybe this value-based care thing would be better. And that’s when it started.
Federico Ramallo (56:17.998) you
Harry Soza (56:31.914) massive shift. They’ve been trying for over 10 years to move the industry to value-based care, but the big step forward happened during the pandemic and now it’s going to become growing and so on and I believe that the disciplines necessary for value-based care are going to get better. The first ways they’ve done it I think are, you got to start somewhere.
It’s a first pancake kind of thing. Whatever they’re doing right now is not the best way to do it. I believe that what they have been doing is saying, all right, people cost this much if they’re not being cared for by you. Yours should cost less. All right, so we’re just gonna do it with cost. All right, how much are you spending? How much are you spending on a per patient basis than these people? And that’s where…
That’s where everybody starts cheating on saying how sick are my people because see how well I want my people to be compared to the sickest people we can possibly find because then mine always look cheaper. All right. The right way to do it is to use the science is to use the fact that there are clinical standards for managing diabetes. There’s clinical standards, there’s measurements for managing hypertension. There’s clinical standards for managing depression or anemia.
Federico Ramallo (57:37.422) You
Harry Soza (57:59.077) anxiety. There are ways of coming up with a score and people who have the problem score in the bad zone and people who get better move over to the good zone and that should be one of the best ways that things should happen because if your doctor is keeping you healthy and your scores are good why do you have to take any time out of your day to go see them? More than once a year.
Federico Ramallo (58:25.25) Right.
Harry Soza (58:26.996) Maybe it’s just to get a few tests that they can’t, I mean, you’re gonna do a blood test. You gotta get a blood, you gotta go someplace and have a blood test done. I mean, we don’t have a way to do that at home quite yet. But between the blood test and maybe an eye exam, I mean, we’re getting down to stuff that’s so, you’re getting to the point of saying what cannot be done in the home? What cannot be done by a civilian that’s just.
It’s too involved. Things like that, I get it. I understand. you’re dealing with a muscular skeletal problem and they have to do MRIs, then you got to go to an MRI place. You just do. There’s no home MRI machine.
Federico Ramallo (58:58.477) Right.
Federico Ramallo (59:11.47) Yeah, but at you’re 50, 70, 80 % of the, you know, general cases, simpler cases. Yeah.
Harry Soza (59:16.778) Yeah, most of the stuff can get done now and the capabilities are so amazing that, you know, yeah. But I will give you an example. During the pandemic, I injured my hand. I jammed my index finger on my left hand very badly. But it was the pandemic. And I called the doctor and I said, listen, I’m gonna tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna send you a picture of my finger.
Federico Ramallo (59:24.716) I yes.
Harry Soza (59:44.769) and I held my two hands, I held my fingers up like this, and this one was all swollen. This one was like, it looked like a sausage compared to the other finger. And so he saw that, he said, okay, I’m gonna have you go get an x-ray. So he went to get the x-ray. Then he called back and he said, we’ve seen on the x-ray, there doesn’t seem to be anything broken, but obviously you got a lot of swelling. I’m gonna have you do an MRI.
Federico Ramallo (01:00:13.068) Right.
Harry Soza (01:00:13.512) We did a hand MRI. He comes back and he says, yeah, there’s tissue damage there. So I’m going to refer you to a hand specialist. Went to see a hand specialist and he gave me some exercises, showed me how what I had to do. He said, no, he says, it’s going to take a while, but you’re going to be fine. You’re going to be able to get kind of all the motion. But he did give me this warning. I don’t think it’s going to go away. I think you’ll always have a little thing. And he’s exactly right. It’s like five years later.
Federico Ramallo (01:00:37.029) wow.
Harry Soza (01:00:42.302) and my left index finger, if I really try to close the fist that last millimeter, I feel a little thing that still hasn’t gone away and probably never will, I guess. the point being, my doctor took care of me and never saw me. I never went to the office. He didn’t want me there. I didn’t want to go there. But we had to do some very interesting testing. That was the extent of having to go anywhere at any time.
And so this was, I thought this was great. I didn’t, I’m fine. I didn’t have any reason to go in. And that was kind of how it works right now. And so now what happens to me routinely is I get my blood tested several times a year, like four months apart. That’s how he’s following the guide right now. If nothing hurts,
Federico Ramallo (01:01:22.556) You
Federico Ramallo (01:01:33.922) Right.
Harry Soza (01:01:40.99) And if things are working, I do get my eyes checked because I got to go to a place where somebody can do that.
That, that I can live with that. You know, I can, I can arrange the blood tests so I can get a blood test at that. One of these labs here, I pick a day of the week and do it at seven, 10 in the morning. Doesn’t interrupt the day at all. Just, just get there and get it done. You know,
Federico Ramallo (01:02:04.674) Yeah, yeah, And then you get the report, send it to the doctor, and then, yeah.
Harry Soza (01:02:10.26) And he gets the report and everybody’s got the report and that one blood test. I was, I was showing it to my company and I said, you know, they do this blood test and honest. was in the lab. They’re so good with their appointments. go in at seven when the door’s open. I sit down. They call me before seven 10. I’m out of there. Five minutes later, eight minutes later, like that’s nothing. And by seven 15, I’m back in the car going on with my day.
Federico Ramallo (01:02:33.485) Right.
Federico Ramallo (01:02:38.552) right.
Harry Soza (01:02:39.852) 58 readings come out of that test.
There’s 58 different things that came come out of those eight minutes. And I’m going like, you know, and then they they start lining them up by the four month intervals. And you can see that some went up a little bit, some get down, some are kind of the same. And it’s so. From my standpoint, I find that very, very comforting that it doesn’t take any time, but I’m checking.
Federico Ramallo (01:02:45.998) you
Harry Soza (01:03:10.292) And I know that I don’t have prostate cancer. I know that I don’t have certain bad things happening. I know that I don’t have certain things that are occurring because they’ve tested and it’s not there. And the test is saying good stuff as well as the places where I need to focus on. That tells me that the meds I’m taking are working. That my, you know, I have mildly elevated blood pressure. It’s, it’s under control. I have a little bit of cholesterol thing. It’s under control. I mean, those are the things that make me feel good.
Federico Ramallo (01:03:19.053) Right.
Harry Soza (01:03:40.426) You know, my B12 apparently was very low through bleep started taking B12. We just bought it at the drugstore because the doctor said to my B12 came in line. It’s under control. I’m just I’m loading the dice as positive as possible so that bad bad numbers don’t turn up.
Federico Ramallo (01:04:00.327) Right, right. I’ve been trying to do the same, getting a full blood test, but it’s been hard here in Mexico because people are saying, why? know, why do you need that? Well, I want to do a full blood test. And then they, you know, they asked me to do a, to get a doctor’s order, right? So I cannot go to the lab and ask myself, right?
Harry Soza (01:04:25.996) Yeah, no, that’s true. I agree with you. I will tell you something about probably two thirds of the things on the lab test answer. I have no idea what it is. I mean, I’m a technologist in healthcare and I look at these things and I’m going like, I have no idea what they just measured here. I really don’t understand this one. have to, they put little paragraphs to explain it. And even then I don’t understand. Okay, I understand what you just measured. I have no idea why you need to know that. What does that indicate?
Federico Ramallo (01:04:27.98) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (01:04:34.318) .
Federico Ramallo (01:04:48.451) Yes.
Harry Soza (01:04:56.076) Which doctor cares about that particular number and there’s 58 of those so I really understand about 20 of them
Federico Ramallo (01:05:04.814) Yeah, I went through all of them, you know, reading what it is, you know, what they’re about, right? Read the description and understanding. And the thing is, on my report, you know, I had, I don’t know, four, four, out of what, you know? It’s four good, it’s four bad, I have no idea. So I spent a little bit more time just researching like every single metric. I got the PSA, you know, because I had to insist to getting that, right? Now I’m 40, so I, you now I start.
Harry Soza (01:05:29.514) Yeah, sure. Yeah. That’s the time to get it, sure.
Federico Ramallo (01:05:34.127) to need it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no doctor told me that I should. a relative told me it, so I started doing it. So basically, I had to ask for it. I want to do that PSA. And now that I’m getting blood, just do everything. It’s like, oh, no, but it’s going to be more expensive. Yes, but I don’t care because it’s not that much more expensive compared to whatever could happen in the future.
Harry Soza (01:06:03.06) Right. Well, see, that’s a lot of it. that’s health. Health care has that capability. Again, the cost when you look at the at the the pyramid of value up at the top top point, there are two there’s two entities there that both value the same thing. There’s the patient and there’s the payer and they both want the patient to be as healthy as possible. That would be they both they both win if that happens.
Federico Ramallo (01:06:04.01) It’s, yeah.
Federico Ramallo (01:06:29.166) you
Harry Soza (01:06:31.892) And if somewhere down in the level down here, you can get work done, you can be administratively better, you can fix something. The value you’re delivering is enormous. What’s it worth to you to not be in a hospital bed right now? What is that worth to the patient? What is that worth to the person that would have to pay for the hospital bed? That’s the technology we work in. You get this in a lot of industries. You talk about the, I was just reading today about the airliner in India that crashed and I said, you know,
Federico Ramallo (01:06:32.45) Right.
Federico Ramallo (01:06:52.578) Yes.
Harry Soza (01:07:02.312) if you were an aeronautics engineer and you can improve some component of that so that a plane doesn’t crash, what is that worth? What is that worth? What is the benefit of those things that get there if you can really do something amazing so that a common issue suddenly doesn’t happen anymore?
Federico Ramallo (01:07:11.937) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (01:07:26.284) Right, and how many lives can you save? How many, you know, yeah.
Harry Soza (01:07:29.238) How many lives can you save? What is that value? How much would somebody pay to have that added to their plane, to their process, to their electronics, to whatever? This is where it gets serious, because when you start talking about human lives, and you start talking about the cost associated with creating wreckage in a human life, now you’re talking about very, very high values.
And you’re talking about people that want to see that. They want to make sure your house doesn’t burn down. They want to make sure your car doesn’t, you know, it can survive small little bumpers, you know, that little things don’t completely destroy them. Those are the kinds of things where the value is very, very high. And that’s where technologies, for me personally, that’s the area of technology that I’ve enjoyed the most, is that if I feel like whatever I’m doing,
Federico Ramallo (01:08:06.789) Right.
Harry Soza (01:08:24.534) You know, I remember telling a company, said, you know, that there was one time, said, statistically, you know, we’ve touched about, you know, we’re just starting out, we touched 3,000 people. And 3,000 people have changed. Statistically, 10 people would have died if they didn’t get the 3,000 letters out. So feel good about what you did. I don’t know who they were.
Federico Ramallo (01:08:50.205) Right.
Harry Soza (01:08:52.724) I can’t tell you that it happened. can just tell you that the statistics around not getting the movement, not fixing this is going to cause some number of strokes, some number of heart attacks. And these people are, you know, they’re probably grownups. They probably have families. They probably have jobs. They have people that depend on them. Think about the societal wreckage that you, yeah. Yeah. So that’s what I do.
Federico Ramallo (01:09:11.758) But your single action just generates that impact.
And right, right. And when I was reading about Kerrminder, the other thing that kept coming to my mind is what I was talking about to you before, the quality of life versus the years of life, right? What is the point of living many years if you’re going to be tied to a bed, being connected to a machine or whatever, right? That’s a really bad quality of life, right? So I’d rather, you know,
have more years of quality of life, right? Have an amazing life, you know, doing work, you know, spending time with the grandkids and, you know, family and living adventures, whatever it is, right? So I think that that’s in, you know, the highest impact that I see that CareMinder is providing, quality of life to people.
Harry Soza (01:10:12.052) Right, if you can be as healthy as you can be, for as long as you can be, you just as soon achieve that. And there are plans, are, everybody can give you a plan. The question is, can you stay on the plan? And you do that and you make your odds of having that kind of life. They’re a lot better. And, you know, I mean, I had the blessing of having some, a couple of parents that lived very old. They were in their 90s before they passed.
Federico Ramallo (01:10:15.139) Right.
Harry Soza (01:10:42.48) And, you know, my dad in particular, as you watched his body begin to fail, he still really enjoyed his life. He enjoyed watching the ball games on TV and talking about the athletes and he enjoyed certain programs and talking about what he saw there. He liked reading the paper. He liked knowing what was going on. He loved seeing his grandchildren and his great grandchildren and getting together for family activities. And even when his legs
Federico Ramallo (01:10:56.803) Right.
Federico Ramallo (01:11:07.722) you
Harry Soza (01:11:12.042) weren’t so good and he was very unsteady or he had to put him in a wheelchair to move him from one place to another, didn’t matter to him. He just wanted to be there. He just wanted to do the things that he liked. And if I could have that in my mid-90s, that would be a win. If I could give that to others, that’s a huge win.
Federico Ramallo (01:11:30.767) That’s a huge win, yes. And the moment you get tied to a bed, everything in your body starts to fall apart. And you go down pretty quickly. If you stop doing things, if you’re not allowed to do things that you like, that you enjoy, either mechanical, that your body is in bed, or psychological, because you’re tied to a bed, you cannot do anything.
Harry Soza (01:11:40.439) yeah.
Federico Ramallo (01:12:00.866) you get into a deep depression that, you know, the body stop functioning because of that,
Harry Soza (01:12:06.592) Yeah, actually there’s a book that I would recommend to anybody that’s kind of your age. It’s called Younger Next Year. And Younger Next Year was a best seller years ago. It was recommended to me probably over 20 years ago and I’ve given away about 15 copies of it. And basically what it says is live like you’re 50 until you’re 80 and beyond. And the idea is that you can make those later years.
perfectly comfortable. You have things you can do and they’re simple. But one of points you just touched on was one of them is that if you become sedentary, if you get stuck in a bed, what’s going to happen is the caveman instincts of your body are going to take over. We’re not far enough in evolution that we have beaten this out of the body yet. What happens is
and I experienced this when I broke my leg, is that if you are not moving around, some part of your biological system says, it must be winter and we’re stuck in a cave and it’s snowing outside and somehow we gotta survive to spring. So the best thing to do is slow way down. And suddenly you have no interest, you have no event, you’re just, you’re in what I would call a biological depression.
that your body thinks that the best way to survive is to stop everything, stop thinking. You’re always, you’re laying there, you don’t sleep well, you don’t, all of those things are clinical. It’s a kind of a clinical biological depression. I remember when I started experiencing that after having read the book, I got myself up with my crutches and I went down to my exercise place that I had been working out and I tried to figure out what exercises could I do.
Federico Ramallo (01:13:52.736) Interesting.
Harry Soza (01:14:06.176) with this shoe that was on my broken leg and I figured out I could do a rowing machine with one leg, I could do certain other kinds of machine and I just started doing them again and suddenly I felt better. I got back to well, I can read a book and I can watch TV and I can call people on the phone and I don’t, up until, when I started not wanting to do that, it frightened me because I was beginning to understand what clinical depression looks like. So.
Federico Ramallo (01:14:15.15) you
Federico Ramallo (01:14:29.603) Right.
Federico Ramallo (01:14:32.878) you saw the darkness and it’s frightening.
Harry Soza (01:14:35.648) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and it was, yeah it is. I I like reading, I like learning things, I like watching certain programs where I learn stuff. I like talking to my friends from all over the country and asking how their lives are going. I like that. And I like being out and doing some interesting stuff. But when I broke my leg, there was like two weeks when I just couldn’t do any of it. And about 10 days in, I was realizing that I’m not reading anything.
I don’t want to watch TV. I don’t feel like calling anybody. I just lay here and I’m just and then it dawned on me. It said that book said that this is how it’s going to be and my body has decided that well we must be in the middle of a terrible snowstorm so we got to survive so we’re just going to lay here until it goes away. No it’s not with the terrible world. It was it was a broken leg and I was stuck in my bed and so getting up and moving around was a huge benefit to me.
Federico Ramallo (01:15:33.258) Interesting. Yeah, I am younger next year.
Harry Soza (01:15:34.378) Yeah. Check out that book, Younger Next Year. There’s a woman’s version too. The original book is for men, but there’s a woman’s version of it that talks about the same thing. And the idea is you learn some basic stuff that you really should incorporate into your life and try to go with that.
Federico Ramallo (01:15:47.245) Right.
Federico Ramallo (01:15:56.847) Very interesting, I will read it. I was having a conversation about how would you like to go. My thinking is I’d go living a great adventure, just living life the fullest, which is kind of what you’re talking about in the book, and the biological depression.
Harry Soza (01:16:22.508) I have friends that are 60 years old and they seem like old men. And I have friends that are 90 years old that seem like they’re young men just because of the way you’re with them. And when you talk to them and you think about, they ask you questions and their interests will jump out at you. I mean, I have a sister that’s approaching 90 now and the other day we had a…
Federico Ramallo (01:16:38.029) Right.
Harry Soza (01:16:52.128) We had a phone conversation that ran almost an hour long when she was describing to me the French tennis open final, which went for five and a half hours. And she was taking me through every, every match, every point, why it went back and forth, why it was so exciting, why it was such a neat thing. And I was so, I was so pleased because she was animated and she was having fun reliving it. And she had been a tennis player and a tennis fan all her life. She can’t play tennis now.
but she can watch it with expert eyes and she can tell you things of what she’s seeing that I’d never see. I’m not that, yeah, Dennis is okay, but for her, it’s like life.
Federico Ramallo (01:17:30.924) Hahaha
Federico Ramallo (01:17:37.998) Right, right, that’s amazing.
Harry Soza (01:17:40.301) Yeah, she told a funny story. said that she had her daughter lives in Phoenix and her daughter lives in New Mexico. And she said the daughter that lives near her was going to be gone for a while. They were going to go up into the Arizona mountains and be away for a couple of weeks and get out of the heat. So the one that lives in New Mexico said, I’ll come down and see you, Mom.
and my husband and I are coming down. She said, would you do me a favor not bring your husband? And she said, why? He said, well, if he’s here, then I feel like we ought to have to, we’ve got to make meals. And then we should go places and do stuff because otherwise you just sit in the house. And the truth of the matter is, I just want to watch the French open. And so if it’s you and me.
Federico Ramallo (01:18:14.83) You
Federico Ramallo (01:18:32.962) Hahaha
Harry Soza (01:18:36.532) I don’t feel the need to cook for you or anything like that. So she said, we sat there the last couple of days of the French Open. says, we didn’t, we didn’t cook a meal. We ordered in. just, she knew she was getting involved in this. And she said, she was watching too. And it got all excited about it.
Sometimes that’s what people need. It’s like I don’t need my family around me. I want to do the stuff I want to do that day.
Federico Ramallo (01:19:08.302) I love it that she has her priorities straight. I wanna watch this.
Harry Soza (01:19:10.86) That’s exactly right. Very funny. Anyway, well it’s interesting. So I don’t know if this is exactly what you wanted me to cover for your podcast, but it’s been fun.
Federico Ramallo (01:19:23.096) Yes, yes, think it’s having this interesting conversation, learning about what you’re doing and sharing with the audience. think that’s the idea. So I think this was a very interesting conversation and I thank you for being here.
Harry Soza (01:19:39.819) Okay, well thank you, Frederico. It’s been interesting to cover this stuff. I would suggest to anybody who’s a technologist that you have a gift. You can understand things that most people don’t understand. That’s why you got to the position you did. know, whatever it is you know how to do. Most of the world doesn’t know how to do it. And the real challenge for you is can you think of a way that it can be used?
beyond the ways that are kind of right in front of you or the ways that are right in front of you. they represent a new kind of challenge where you could be helping the things along, whether that’s individual people, whether it’s categories of folks that have certain conditions or have a certain state in life, whether it’s the climate and the light, the world we live in, whether it’s a social thing that needs to be better done.
whether it’s our elections or it’s our methods of informing each other or if we can stop misinformation and those kinds of things. That’s the challenge you got. And so have a vision about that and then use your skills appropriately. if you’re doing something that really matters, odds are you’re really gonna enjoy it.
Federico Ramallo (01:21:01.628) Right, you’re going to enjoy it and you’re going to change people’s lives with your invention, your solution.
Harry Soza (01:21:07.339) That’s the hope.
Federico Ramallo (01:21:12.504) With that note, we wrap it up. It’s been amazing to have you. Thank you.
Harry Soza (01:21:17.814) Thank you Federico. you’re ever in the Bay Area, we’d love to meet you and we’ll find something that we’d like to do together.
Federico Ramallo (01:21:25.678) Yes, I’m going to the Bay Area every month or so, yeah, I’ll ping you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have a friend, he’s living in Chinatown, so sometimes I stay here in San Francisco. I have clients in Sunnyvale, so yes, San Jose, yes. I prefer San Jose Airport because it has a direct flight.
Harry Soza (01:21:29.29) Or do you? Where do you stay when you’re here? What area?
Harry Soza (01:21:37.845) in San Francisco, right.
Harry Soza (01:21:46.902) Sunnyvale is much closer. in San Jose. Yeah.
Oh yeah, well I’m very close to San Jose airport. That’s easy to get in and get out a little bit.
Federico Ramallo (01:21:56.506) Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s 15 minutes, you’re in, out. It’s amazing. Yeah.
Harry Soza (01:22:01.089) Yeah, no, it’s easier than the other, well, Oakland’s pretty easy, but Oakland’s too far for me. San Jose is very close by. So if you’re down near San Jose airport, I live not even 10 minutes away. And yeah, I’m near Santa Clara University. yeah, so we could get together for a beer, for a tequila, for a meal, for whatever.
Federico Ramallo (01:22:06.498) Yeah.
Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (01:22:13.976) very nice.
Federico Ramallo (01:22:18.028) Right. Right.
Federico Ramallo (01:22:26.36) That sounds lovely, yes, yes. I love tequila, I love beer. Yes, yes.
Harry Soza (01:22:31.286) Well, if you love tequila, have a lot to talk about that. actually, actually, I just got a gift for Father’s Day. One of my, one of my daughters bought me a tequila that she found, which I learned off, called La Gritana, which is from Valle de Guadalupe. And it’s, it’s a woman tequila maker, a woman, a woman tequila making place, 100 % women. So I guess that’s why they call it La Gritana.
Federico Ramallo (01:22:48.246) La grittana?
Federico Ramallo (01:22:56.063) nice!
Harry Soza (01:23:00.228) And so, yeah.
Federico Ramallo (01:23:01.262) Interesting. A few years ago I did a trip to Baja where we went. They have wineries. So we went to the winery tour. It’s amazing. Valle de Guadalupe. very nice.
Harry Soza (01:23:10.41) Yeah.
Sure. Yeah, you went to Guadalupe. That’s where you went, right above Ensenada. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. I make wine, so I know that area very well. I never knew about it until about two years ago. And the people that I make wine and discuss wine with and so on, we’re now planning a trip. Because out of San Diego, there are wine tours.
Day tours, you get on the bus, they drive towards Ensenada, they turn like a hard left and drive up to Guadalupe. There’s places where there’s, it’s amazing how much. So anyway, yeah.
Federico Ramallo (01:23:50.275) Yeah, and the quality is really good. I made wine back in Buenos Aires with my parents many years ago. There’s a place called Mendoza where they make wine. they have the downtown of Mendoza, have the roads covered so the grapes would not get bad during transport. So beautiful places.
Harry Soza (01:23:55.285) Uh-huh.
Harry Soza (01:23:59.819) Mendoza’s unbelievable. Yeah, of course.
Harry Soza (01:24:10.335) Right.
Yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. Okay.
Federico Ramallo (01:24:19.05) I’m like 30 minutes away from Tequila, the city where they make the Tequila. And I’ve been, there’s a train that goes from Guadalajara to the Tequila plantations, right? And I’ve been looking for a partner in crime to go and take the train, right?
Harry Soza (01:24:21.964) And from what? Sure, from Medellin, Oaxaca, sure.
Harry Soza (01:24:38.151) Hahaha!
Federico Ramallo (01:24:41.23) Because it’s one of those things that as a local you never do, you know? The touristic things, right? For me it’s easier to just drive there and just, you I go to the places. you know, it’s mostly like a good excuse to have a, a good excuse to say, you know, you know.
Harry Soza (01:24:44.748) Sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, I know, I understand.
Harry Soza (01:25:02.122) No, no, have sushi buddies. I have sushi buddies for the same reason, is that I like sushi, but most people even here in the Bay Area, there’s a fair number that aren’t comfortable with sushi. But when I can find somebody who likes it as much as me, we make a point of going out. Because with our sushi buddies, where are we going to go today?
Federico Ramallo (01:25:21.87) So one day I talked my friend, he’s in downtown, he’s more of a, he used to live in Soman, now he lives in Chinatown. And he doesn’t have a car, he walks and, yeah, yeah, and he’s more of a technocrat on that sense, right? He’s like, everything, all the cars should be automated. And I love driving cars, so I’m like on the other side, right? So one day I…
Harry Soza (01:25:38.41) Waymos.
Harry Soza (01:25:49.174) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (01:25:51.943) I drove from Guadalajara to San Francisco, right? It’s like 36 hours driving. It was so much fun. It’s an adventure, right? So I took him, I picked him up and we drove all the…
Harry Soza (01:25:59.557) my.
Harry Soza (01:26:03.157) Of course.
Federico Ramallo (01:26:13.004) the coast and then we came yeah the one that goes daily city and you know the coast and high one yeah and then we we we cross through the woods and then we arrived to Redwood City and then we to a sushi place that he likes you know that he used to live there so he liked and we which is you know the excuse was a sushi but you know it was enjoying the day you know
Harry Soza (01:26:14.034) huh, sure. Highway 1.
Harry Soza (01:26:20.192) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, down that Highway 1, sure. Pacific Coast Highway, yeah.
Harry Soza (01:26:40.236) Redwood City has a bar that has tequilas that are unbelievable. And again, there are people who own restaurants who make a point of going to Mexico and finding things and bringing them back. And this one bar had an enormous collection, incredible collection. So I remember going there with a buddy and trying all kinds of new ones and things and so.
Federico, next time you’re up here, you got my email. Hit me. We’ll find a way to get together. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (01:27:09.185) It’s amazing.
Federico Ramallo (01:27:13.464) I’ll ping you. I will ping you. Nice to meet you, Harry.
Harry Soza (01:27:17.51) Good to meet you. Thank you so much and I look forward to…