Jeff Standridge: This is Jeff Standridge, and this is the Innovation Junkie’s Podcast. If you want to drastically improve your business, learn proven growth strategy and generate sustained results for your organization, you’ve come to the right place. Over the next half hour, we’re going to be sharing specific strategies, tactics, and tips that you can use to grow your business. No matter the size, no matter the industry and no matter the geography. Weekly, we’ll bring in a top mover and shaker, someone who’s done something unbelievable with his or her business and will dig deep. We’ll uncover specific strategies, tactics, and tools that they’ve used to help you achieve your business goal. Welcome to the Innovation Junkie’s Podcast.
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Jeff Standridge: Hey guys, Jeff Standridge here and welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkie’s Podcast.
Jeff Amerine: And I’m glad to be back, Jeff. I think we’re going to have a great episode today.
Jeff Standridge: Yeah, it’s good to be back. What have you been up to?
Jeff Amerine: Trying to stay out of trouble, bourbon, and bad habits. Just another typical week.
Jeff Standridge: How’s that working for you?
Jeff Amerine: Well, the bourbon part starts really good, but it leads to the bad habits, and that’s the part that’s not as good.
Jeff Standridge: Got you. Well, tell us about our episode today.
Jeff Amerine: Yeah. So today we’re lucky enough to have two guys that are really at the forefront of innovation within a variety of different areas within the healthcare and medical space. Today, we’ve got Dr. Joe Sanford, he’s the Associate Vice Chancellor of Clinical Informatics officer, Director of UAMS Institute for Digital Health & Innovation. He’s also an associate professor in the UAMS College of Medicine, Department of Anesthesiology with a secondary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Joe is a Arkansas native. He got his medical degree from UAMS and his Bachelor’s degree with honors in Computer Science from University of Arkansas. And needless to say, he’s a smart dude. We’ve had the good pleasure of having Joe involved with the health sciences bootcamp over the years. And he’s always a huge value add.
In addition, we’ve got Dr. Kevin Sexton with us today. He’s the associate professor in the Department of Surgery with secondary appointments in the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Department of Health Policy and Management, Department of Pharmacy Practice, division of pharmaceutical evaluation and policy at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. He serves as the Associate Chief Medical Informatics Officer for Innovation, Research & Entrepreneurship and the Associate Director of UAMS Institute of Digital Health & Innovation. And he’s the Interim Director and hopefully soon to be full-time Director of BioVentures, which is the group that is responsible for tech commercialization at UAMS. His clinical focus when he has spare time is on hernia surgery. He must do that in the middle of the night with all he has going on, but he’s a fantastic guy. We’re really happy to have both of these gentlemen with us today.
Jeff Standridge: Hey guys, good to have you with us. Good to see you again.
Joe Sanford: Likewise, thank you for the invitation.
Jeff Amerine: It’s pretty clear you guys need more to do based on your bios. You clearly don’t have enough to do, seems like.
Joe Sanford: Like any good entrepreneur, we’re always looking for another opportunity.
Jeff Standridge: Idle hands on the devil’s playground or something like that. So ain’t no devil hanging around you guys.
Jeff Amerine: That’s it.
Joe Sanford: Being bored is a dangerous proposition.
Jeff Standridge: How about we talk about our random musing. We like to start off some of our podcast episodes with a random musing. It has nothing to do with anything other than just kind of kicking the ball off here. Random musing for today is your favorite childhood role model or hero. Kevin, we’ll start with you.
Kevin Sexton: Okay. Thanks, Jeff. I’m afraid mine’s going to be traditional. It has to be my mother. My brother and I were raised by a single parent. Having two kids of my own, I now appreciate the difficulties associated with that. She was also a social worker in our small rural community, and I got to really learn from her the value of family support and the opportunities that I was given at a young age.
Jeff Standridge: Very good. And traditional, yes, but you generally can’t match those kinds of role models. Joe, how about you?
Joe Sanford: I was just thinking about this kind of in the pre-show. I guess my childhood heroes were fictional, because I loved to read a lot as a kid. So I guess my biggest role model though, in a similar vein to Kevin, has always really been my dad. I’m his namesake, Joseph Sanford Junior. And certainly in what he accomplished and he and his family pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and starting his own in business and the way he modeled responsibility, work ethic, and character, they weren’t just touchstones for me then. But they remain things that I look back on and refer to now. And as Kevin can attest, I am not afraid to quote my old man.
Jeff Standridge: There you go. Very good. Jeff Amerine, how about you?
Jeff Amerine: Yeah, I mean, there’s a recurring theme here. I would say I was influenced a lot by the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. And seeing those, you didn’t have a lot of TV then, but those were all broadcasts and that was an influence. And the realization I had as I started to really think about that was, I was living with somebody that was every bit as impressive and influential, and that was my dad. He was a three war combat pilot, flew multi-engine aircraft in Korean and Vietnam. And this is a guy that grew up on a Kansas wheat farm where in the winter they didn’t have refrigeration, so they just would hunt, hang sides of meat and game in his bedroom to keep them frozen. Overcame all kinds of adversity, raised a great family, and was just extremely influential in my life. He’s passed away but influences a lot of things that I do and say, and I’ll quote him quite a bit as well.
Jeff Standridge: Yeah, definitely recurring themes, I have to say the same thing. So my dad was a lineman for Arkansas Power and Light, which became Entergy and so spent his years working ice storms and thunderstorms and all that good stuff doing construction work. But he taught me how to fix just about anything. I mean, we didn’t hire anything out. In fact, when I was 13, I had saved up enough money to buy a motorcycle. And he talked me into buying a 1950-model Ford car. We towed home, actually no, we drove it. And for the next two and a half years, we put new heads on it. We put a new overdrive transmission in it. We taught ourselves body work. And so I did that with a 50-model Ford, a 69 Ford pickup, and a 74 Honda Civic. So he taught me how to do things that I can’t even do anymore today because of the nature of automobiles. But yeah, same kind of thing. Always working on something.
Well, awesome. Good to have you guys with us today. So we certainly talked about your bios and introduced our listeners to you guys. But maybe take it up a level and talk just about your respective roles today in the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, specifically as it relates to innovation. So Joe will start with you. How’s that?
Joe Sanford: Certainly, happy to. So, as was said at the top, my two primary roles are as Chief Clinical Informatics Officer for the health system and as Director for the Institute of Digital Health & Innovation. So innovation is baked into at least half of my job and then through what Kevin and I have built on the informatics side. And he’ll talk a little bit about that. It is really the heart and soul of what we’re doing in terms of how we interact with data and make that available to our patients, our providers, and our partners in the health system. We are responsible for all of the data ingest. So that becomes from device side through signal acquisition, cleaning, normalizing storage of the data in the EMR, presenting that data back to either the patient or the provider and involving decision support and computerized order entry, things like that.
And then on the data export side, getting it out to our research organizations and partners through the ARCDR, which is a clinical data repository, getting it out to the state health information exchange and facilitating data visualization and strategic insights into our clinical and enterprise data. On the institute side, it’s all about digital health and the education research, clinical opportunities related to that, as it becomes a new and growing field of medicine, digital health modalities, as well as algorithmic medicine are really redefining what we expect in terms of standard of care and gives us insights into practice habits that we just didn’t have before. So the innovation side of all that is, how do we make this new field fun for students, clinicians, researchers, how do we get people excited about entrepreneurial opportunities into this new nontraditional, non bedside field of medicine, and really turn it into something that helps our data partnerships and the underlying talent create potentially a whole new industry.
Jeff Standridge: Very good. Kevin, how about you? And also, I know you’ll include the kind of your new role that you have today on the BioVentures side. So talk about it from your perspective.
Kevin Sexton: Sure, Jeff. And so we can start with BioVentures, that’s UAMS’ technology transfer office. So we help inventors develop their intellectual property. So them file patents. We help them protect their intellectual property. We then move to help inventors find licensees or ways to develop their technology. We can provide grants and other things to inventors as well as maintain an incubator space for life sciences companies that anyone in the community is open to rent.
Joe talked a lot about our operational focus. So I’ll switch gears a little bit. I work with Joe in both of those avenues of clinical informatics and Institute for Digital Health & Innovation. What we do a lot of the time is customer discovery. I think Joe and I realize the value of entrepreneurial skills, and we use them every day. We are always dealing with customers. Now Joe mentioned those customers may be the state. They may be our internal researchers. They may be our frontline clinicians or providers. All of those folks are customers. And I look at what we provide through operations as a service, and we are building products, they’re just usually based on internal systems.
Jeff Standridge: Got you. And I know we’ve had the privilege of working with both of you as Jeff Amerine said a few moments ago in our health entrepreneurship bootcamp, but I want to talk about the clinical informatics side. I’ve heard these stats before, and I want to throw them out there, and maybe they’re accurate, maybe they’re directionally accurate. But I’d love to just get your thoughts on it. So I’ve heard it said that 20% of health outcomes are a result of genetics, 20% are healthcare, what we actually do to people from a healthcare perspective, and 60% are generally the aspects over which traditionally we’ve had not much insight, which is the social determinants or other kind of social factors. So number one, how would you respond to that? And then let’s maybe dig into that just a little bit if you don’t mind. And particularly as it relates to innovations that are occurring to get after that 60% or that large proportion that we hadn’t traditionally had visibility into.
Joe Sanford: Sure. I’ll start by saying I can’t confirm those percentages specifically, though it is a truism in medicine that oftentimes patients get better or their healthcare trajectory is independent of anything we may or may not be directly doing for them. So I think directionally you’re on the right vector and certainly through work that Kevin and I are doing. And data sources that we’ve begun to try and integrate particularly consumer data, given your background, is pro lots of insight into the entire social web by which your social determinants of health feedback onto your health and wellness as well as your geographic opportunities for wellness can, if not dictate some of your outcomes have a greater predisposing influence than we like in terms of providing equally high quality healthcare to all our patients.
Jeff Standridge: Very good. Anything you’d add, Kevin?
Kevin Sexton: I would say that with anything in healthcare, the answer is always, it depends. So those percentages, like Joe said, seem aligned. I can’t confirm them. I think you touched on the fact that there’s probably the largest opportunity in social determinants of health and in the circumstances with which someone lives. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have opportunities in other areas. One thing that we focus on in clinical informatics is democratization of data to allow all users to have access to as much information as they would reasonably need to do their job and compare their performance to others. So I agree with you, and I think we have a lot of progress to make in social determinants of health. But we’re still moving forward in the other areas with genetics and doing precision-based medicine based on someone’s actual genomic profile and looking into how to optimize the healthcare delivery system.
Jeff Standridge: Very good.
Jeff Amerine: As you guys, because you have this, sort of the big picture of all these different pieces that fit together. It seems like in order to get better outcomes, in many instances, if you believe the proportionality of what Jeff said or it’s the right type of vector that getting behavior changes and getting people to make better choices as a means of prevention is a big opportunity. Are you seeing anything or are you working on anything in the innovation space that’s headed that direction?
Joe Sanford: Absolutely. Behavioral economics is enormous. Almost foundational part of what we do and how we design our interventions of the system. A lot of it’s geared towards behavioral economic and nudges against, or for the provider as opposed to the patient directly. But these are all tools that are being used in every other industry, not the least of which food services and marketing in order to get users to choose products and services for whatever given reason they want to be advertised to. And we think it’s absolutely necessary to incorporate the lessons learned in that space, into the delivery of healthcare. Then this might be things like promoting certain activities by using color choice. So making something green. I’ll give an example for anyone who’s booked a flight recently, if you go down to the bottom on the two airlines that I’ve seen this year, they offer their insurance package and the insurance text of, if you ensure this flight, you will do this, that, and the other.
That’s always in bolded green text. So as to get the user to think, well green is good. I should click on that. Similarly in that same example, I saw recently they use a thing called social norming, which is to say, 65% of your fellow travelers selected the insurance option, which makes people think, well, if it’s good for the majority, then I should probably do it. Because most people should be right about most things playing into kind of a common sense phenomenon, using those same tools and data points for things like vaccine hesitancy to say, 97% of physicians that are treating you for COVID are vaccinated, are things that we believe can and should used for the societal good to affect change.
Jeff Amerine: Hey folks, we’ll be right back with the episode. But first we want to tell you about a limited opportunity to take advantage of our GrowthDX. For a limited time, we’re offering a free strategy call to see whether our unique diagnostic tool is right for you. Go to innovationjunkie.com/growthdx to learn more.
Kevin Sexton: And Jeff, that is really one of the most exciting parts of our field. When we work at tools, we tend to focus on the easy, attractive social, and timely. And back to your question, I think I can’t take credit for this intervention, but we’re finding ways to approach patients when they’re most amenable to change. Our smoking cessation team had a great idea that when folks come in to get a screening CT scan for lung cancer, that’s a great time to approach them about smoking cessation, because if you’re getting screened for lung cancer, you are definitely thinking about the consequences of perpetually smoking. And so we look for opportunities like that to design conversations when patients are most receptive to change.
Jeff Standridge: It’s interesting Kevin that follows a long-standing sales psychology, where if you can get them to say little yeses along the way, they’re going to have a much greater likelihood of saying the big yes when you need them to say that yes. That’s interesting that you’re starting to see that as well.
Joe Sanford: Well, and to build on that, the other sales thing is if you even get the product in their hands, that’s going to make someone more likely to purchase it. How do we do that in healthcare when the product is data? What sort of deliverable do we need to give to the patient or to the provider, depending on who we’re trying to get change from to make them buy in to the concept. And so that it builds on Kevin’s point earlier about our position on fairly radical data transparency. We want the user, whoever that may be, to feel fully invested in their healthcare journey and have confidence that they are seeing not just the data that we or their provider feel they should see, but that they have the all of the data that they could have access to in order to make the best healthcare decision for themselves.
Jeff Standridge: So I’ll throw a phrase out there, and let you finish it as it relates to digital health. Wouldn’t it be great if?
Joe Sanford: That’s a good one. Give me a second with that. Kevin, you want to take first credit? I’ve been talking a lot. I’ve been going first on a lot of these questions.
Kevin Sexton: It’s all right to throw it to me. Wouldn’t it be great if digital health became our default choice. We now have a new method that expands availability and access and meets the patient when they’re most ready to be seen. What we’ve seen through the programs that we have at UAMS is that when folks come to digital health, they’re in the comfort of their own home. Most of them are calling from their bed. So the barrier to access no longer do you have up, get dressed, get to a physician’s office, plan on being there for several hours longer than your appointment. And so I go back to, wouldn’t it be great if this became the default choice, and we started engineering solutions specifically for patients in digital medicine.
Jeff Standridge: That’s a good one, Joe.
Joe Sanford: I would say, wouldn’t it be great if digital health just worked, and it builds on a little bit of what Kevin was saying. But more specifically relates to the user experience of how all of these data handshakes come across the system and the interoperability needed between traditional home medical devices, EMRs, which may be frank competitors in the market. And then the overall health system data as it relates to insurance companies. There is a lot of friction in the health system. Some of it is good and necessary. A lot of it is bad. That slows down access to healthcare, because we rely upon systems and processes designed 20, 25 years ago when the technological landscape was completely different from what it is today. I think that the best design solutions will look at these interactions on a case-by-case basis, and design on a frictional standpoint. And by friction, I mean difficulty in interacting with any given process in a very deliberate and contextual fashion.
Jeff Amerine: To follow up on some of that, I had an experience just today. We’re getting ready to do a little bit of travel and where we’re traveling they require either a PCR or an antigen test for COVID two days before you go. And we went through all the kind of pain and suffering, and we’re going to go to the drive through. We’re going to go raid an urgent care, or we are going to do this, we’re going to do that. Well, it turns out Abbot Labs has got this tool that I think it’s called Binax that you can purchase the kit. And it’s a proctor telemedicine process where they give you all the instructions. Someone comes on, it’s 24 by seven. They have people around the world, and they take you through the whole process. And within 15 minutes you get your results.
In addition to that, they’ll send you the test results in multiple different forms. You’ve either got a big QR code that you can scan or the full report. And I have to tell you, I was really not optimistic. I was thinking, this is going to be like freaking rocket science to get through this, but it wasn’t hard. Even at 5:30 in the morning, it was pretty straightforward. And it just worked, to your point, Joe, it just worked. And it was really an eye opener of where we’ve come on some of this stuff.
Joe Sanford: And I think one of the interesting aspects of digital health and these tools is, we’re no longer in competition or being compared to healthcare. We’re being compared to the best possible digital interaction regardless of what industry that may be. So in terms of clinical education and online training, we’re not compared against, say, what the University of Texas may be doing or the University of Mississippi. We’re compared against YouTube, because if YouTube can figure it out and users can have just as easy of an experience using that, then fair or not, the expectation is that everyone should be able to do it. In terms of purchasing goods and services, we’re not compared against a competitor in state that is a health system. We’re compared against Amazon. If it’s easy to just buy things and know what something’s going to cost and have it delivered to me in two days, then why can’t I get my medical device or my medications done in the same way.
Again, different industries, hugely different complexities of delivering service. But to our customer, to our client, the expectation remains. So if we don’t realize and appreciate that this is a global market and just because your primary catchment area maybe a given set of counties, or even a given state you’re in a different field than we were certainly five years ago and maybe even as recent as pre-pandemic. If there was one silver lining to the pandemic, it was that it had pushed forward digital health in a way that would’ve taken another five to ten years otherwise.
Jeff Standridge: I’d like to shift gears a little bit, and talk about some of the assets we have in our state that I think could be fashioned and deployed toward making Arkansas a digital health hub. So if you take a look, we’ve got arguably the largest if not the second largest, depending on how you count it, a retailer in the world who has used technology and data to large extents, to be able to get where they are today. You’ve got one of the largest core financial systems companies in the world in FIS. You’ve got obviously a handful of very large health systems in UAMS children St. Vincent Baptist Health, what have you. So a very large healthcare contingent.
Universities that are producing a lot of healthcare data analytics, software development folks, and then obviously one of the largest aggregators, processors, and analyzers of data in Axiom Corporation. What needs to happen in the State of Arkansas to bring all of those things together, all of those assets together into making perhaps a dent in the world of digital health, because we’ve got the assets, we’ve got the capabilities, and we’ve got the skill sets. How do we bring those together in your experience to perhaps create an innovation cluster in the State of Arkansas around data, clinical informatics, and digital health.
Kevin Sexton: That’s a great question. And I do believe that we should start by acknowledging that Arkansas has a unique cluster of attributes not found elsewhere when it comes to data and data sciences. Healthcare is fragmented and the data sources that we use are siloed for lack of a better term in different system. So the way that I see this first coming together is to solve particular problems. I think we need to get a use case that makes sense to approach with a population health data driven perspective, thinking about chronic disease management or something along those lines. It’s almost so overwhelming the number of problems and opportunities. I think we just need a single point to focus all of these resources.
Jeff Standridge: Joe, how about you, your perspective on that?
Joe Sanford: I think Kevin’s correct. I think that the biggest risk is in trying to bite off too much, too quickly. We have a great set of assets as both of you elaborate on. And I think that we, by targeting a specific intervention that is of importance to the state, pick a chronic disease, hypertension, diabetes, we could have a consortium of facilities and partnering organizations that apply in a very meaningful way a lot of the jargon that is being thrown around in digital health right now. And by jargon, I mean, everyone’s advertising machine learning, artificial intelligence solution. You can throw that at any number of things. What we don’t see is a consistent large scale longitudinal study, like the Framingham study done, it’s actually still ongoing. That shows us what outcomes consistent algorithmic intervention can accomplish on a large population.
Jeff Standridge: Any exciting things that you guys are working on today, specifically that you can share with us in the world of digital health, that you can kind of break it down for our listeners. You could tell me but then you’d have to kill me.
Joe Sanford: Well, it’s not that top secret, but I mean, our biggest things right now is in digital health, we’re really looking to partner more across the UA system. And we’ve got some beginning work that we’ve done with the McMillon Innovation Studio under Sarah Goforth and others. We’ve got the work that we do with you at UCA, we’ve got work that we do with Harding and work that we would love to expand to basically any other interested higher education center to start to build this, not overly administrative consortium, but really I think a consortium or a collaboration group that is looking for ways to break out of our traditional silos and start to spin up assets and get a lot of diversified, small companies solving manageable problems. I think that’s really the most exciting opportunity in the long run because it turns us from a more traditional environment into an any willing player state.
And that is a fun place to be when you don’t have, when you’re not swinging for the fences with every project trying to make it a unicorn. But you’re very realistic about, well, let’s build a sustainable seven to eight figure 20 year business. And if it gets acquired, that’s great. If it doesn’t, it still brings jobs to Arkansas. We are realistic about what we can accomplish in the short term. We’re not on that treadmill of ever increasing venture funding that becomes harder to do in a rural state like ours. I mean, we’re not like East Coast or the West Coast. We’re going to have to define a unique value proposition here.
Jeff Standridge: That’s right. Good.
Kevin Sexton: Yeah. I think my addition of things that we’re working on, lot of solutions are designed for the urban market. We see a big opportunity in designing software solutions for healthcare in rural areas. Around 80% of healthcare in the country is delivered in these types of environments, yet when we look at innovation, it’s software innovation specifically for or larger companies that have development shops and other resources that aren’t common in the smaller types of facilities that we find in rural areas. And so a lot of the work that Joe and I have been doing is with how do we help companies with EMR integration and help them provide solutions that are particular for our rural market?
Jeff Amerine: That’s so interesting, Kevin, because I think the pandemic may be kind of a defining black swan event that reverses 70 years of urbanization. I think people are going to feel more compelled and more inclined to avoid the chaos and the congestion that comes with large urban areas. The upside to that is you’re retaining your youth, elderly are going to be able to stay there, but they have to have the care and the services. So it seems like focusing on that is a really great alignment of what I think a lot of people would project as a trend, particularly with remote workers and broadband access. People are not going to be compelled to have to live in urban density if they can get to what they need to get to from anywhere, nicer place to live, less of the issues you typically face in an urban area.
Joe Sanford: So that’s a great point. And you’ve given me a good segue into something else that the IDHI is focused on, which is broadband access and infrastructure. I completely agree with the opportunity that you’re talking about in terms of re ruralization if you will. And people getting to choose to live in the environment they want to live in without sacrificing their professional growth and opportunities. In order to accomplish that, we have to have the data backhaul in order to make it just as easy to have the conversation we’re having. Kevin and I are in Little Rock, for example, as if I was in a given town in Arkansas. I’m originally from Fort Smith, Fort Smith has good data. I grew up spending my summers on Lake Ouachita. So for those familiar with it, you may know Mena, Arkansas, north of Mena you’ve got Mount Ida, north of Mount Ida you’ve got Highway 27 fishing village, north of that you’ve got Story. When we have good data in Story, Arkansas, then we’ve got something that we can really, really be proud of as a state.
I expect that someone from Highway 27 or Story is going to email the show and say, actually, we’ve got great internet now, which is awesome. And because when I was a kid, we had no out whatsoever, we had a phone, just a landline was what we were … we had that and yeah, we didn’t even have cable. We had an antenna. So it’s a beautiful part of the state. I’d love to live there. Can’t do it. Can’t work from there. Or at least couldn’t when I was a kid.
Jeff Standridge: That’s another, what this re-ruralization, if you will. The other thing that it’s doing is it’s exacerbating the war on talent because talent can go anywhere now and work. And while we’ve been fortunate to have some companies that have anchored some really strong data analytics and technology talent here in particularly central or Northwest Arkansas. We’re finding that because organizations are really not exploring coming back to the office on mass, that folks can really go work anywhere. And we have to do a good job of building the amenities and the opportunities here in Arkansas that would entice them to stay here versus to go to Boulder or some other area where they want to go live and experience the amenities there. So I think you’re right. It’s created challenges in the way of healthcare because we are such a rural state, but it’s also creating challenges on the talent management front as well, or the talent retention front.
Kevin Sexton: So Jeff, to jump in and add a comment to what you’d said with a talent pool, I think we’re seeing a divide growing in rural America. Now in IT when Joe and I are hiring folks, certifications are almost as important as degrees and to get these certifications, most of these are online courses. And if you don’t have broadband access, it’s very difficult to complete these certifications and challenges. We also see that there’s been a tremendous explosion in infrastructure as a service, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, you need broadband access to be able to leverage those resources. And if you don’t have that growing up, you’re not going to test those waters, gain those skills and be able to provide those services when you are looking for employment opportunities.
Jeff Standridge: Yeah, that’s a great point. Well, we’re talking with Dr. Joe Sanford and Dr. Kevin Sexton, both from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Jeff Amerine, any final question you’d like to ask?
Jeff Amerine: No, I’m just generally going to applaud what it is that you guys are doing, because I think that the thing that’s so interesting about applied science and about applied technology is unlike a therapeutic that might take 15 or 20 years to get the market. You can turn the crank on some of the stuff and get it out to have an impact very quickly without as many of the regulatory hoops that you have to face with things that have invasive aspects for human health and whatnot. And so this is one where going fast and doing what you’re doing is going to make a real difference. And it’s just amazing to see guys in your caliber, in the seats you’re in. I mean, we’re really lucky to have you in Arkansas.
Kevin Sexton: Thank you very much.
Joe Sanford: Yeah. You’re extremely kind. We appreciate your comments.
Jeff Standridge: Well, we enjoy working with you, as Jeff mentioned first, got the opportunity to work with you in our health sciences bootcamp, and now are continuing to explore opportunities to work together. And I know Amerine and I talk frequently about the excitement that we have about what’s happening in healthcare, particularly under the leadership of you guys and others in the State of Arkansas. We appreciate you all for being with us today. It’s been a pleasure talking with you. This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkie’s Podcast. Thank you for joining us.
Jeff Amerine: Hey folks, this is Jeff Amerine. We want to thank you for tuning in. We sincerely appreciate your time. If you’re enjoying the Innovation Junkie’s Podcast, please do us a huge favor. Click the subscribe button right now and please leave us a review. It would mean the world to both of us, and don’t forget to share us on social media.