Episode 68: How to Rapidly Grow by Putting Patients First with Ben Neuberg

Transcript: How to Rapidly Grow by Putting Patients First

Amanda Brummitt: WeInfuse Podcast, Episode Number 68. Welcome to the WeInfuse Podcast. My name is Amanda Brummitt. In every episode, we give you a seat at the table as we talk to infusion center owners, operators, and experts so that you can get the insight you need to run a thriving practice. In this episode, we talk with Ben Neuberg, Chief Executive Officer of Thrivewell Infusion. Ben shares how his mother’s own journey inspired them to create an infusion center where they put patients first. This combined with building confidence with prescribers sets an infusion center up for growth.

Ben, thank you so much for being here on the WeInfuse Podcast. I understand Reece has been trying to get you here for years, so, welcome.

Ben Neuberg: It’s an honor. It’s an honor to be here and I can’t wait to get this done for Reece.

Amanda Brummitt: Let’s start out by just giving us your background. Tell us who you are and then how you got into the infusion industry.

Ben Neuberg: My name is Ben Neuberg. I’m originally from Long Island, New York, where I was born and raised; lived in Manhattan, all over the New York area; started, went to school, got a business degree from college, a place called YU up in Washington Heights; started my first jewelry business, I was working for a jewelry business, I learned the business. Then I started my own around 24 years old. Building my business, I had a pretty successful business selling customers like QVC, Walmart, Jared’s, Kay’s, various different major retailers in the United States.

My mom at the time needed an infusion. She went to an endocrinologist. She needed an infusion, which at the time was Reclast. I don’t think they had Zoledronic acidback then, so I think it was actually Reclast. My brother and I were involved in helping her with the infusion. We noticed she was going to the hospital and she came back and she told us, “It’s such a awful setting. It’s such a time waste.” Like she had to go from Long Island to Manhattan, which people, if you don’t know, it’s a long trip with traffic. Bumper to bumper the whole way, then there’s intake, then you have to get the infusion, and there’s discharge, it’s around chemo patients, the chairs are not comfortable.

There were a bunch of different things that she was mentioning to us, and my brother was telling me, “Maybe we should open up one of these infusion centers for Mom.” I don’t know anything about that, so he spoke with a friend of his, a fellow named Garen Festini, and he ventured out to open up an infusion center.

And what happened then was, he was a builder. At the time, my brother was a builder. He was building condos and houses and things like that. One of the projects he had was an urgent care business in New York. And they owed him some money. And instead of giving him the money, they gave him a percentage of ownership in the business because they couldn’t afford to pay him.

So he said, “Okay, this center in Brooklyn is underperforming. I’d like to build my mom–I’d like to build a mini infusion center there.”

Amanda Brummitt: Literally for her.

Ben Neuberg: Yeah. Amazing. And that was all, the whole focus was for her. He builds the infusion center, and the next day, a woman from across the street comes over because there’s a sign in the window. A woman from across the street comes over with a medication. She’s on a medication called Ocrevus and comes to the front desk and says, “You do infusions. I see you guys are open now. I’m on a medication called Ocrevus. I don’t want to go to the city anymore. Can I come to your infusion center for that?”

So my brother goes let me ask Dr. Sengupta, who we linked up with–who their friend made an intro to and we are now extremely close friends with Dr. Sengupta and partners, but mainly we are friends first, always. He’s like a brother to us. And he spoke to Dr. Sengupta was like, “Yeah, we could do this infusion, no problem.” So we set out to do that again–that infusion.

The next thing happened is he had to learn how to purchase these medications and get all this stuff. And my brother just started educating himself on that: how to get proper credentialing and all the necessary background work you need to do to open up an inventory infusion center.

And in doing that, my mom now had an infusion center to go to. Then she went to a rheumatologist. She needed Arencia, which is a common infusible medication by a rheumatologist, we do a bunch of that. And she came in and we had chairs, we had different types of setups so that it looked gorgeous.

My mom didn’t like the chair, she got cold during infusions. We customized the chairs with heat settings, we did different things as my mom being patient zero, patient number one for our centers. We basically built a center she wanted to–she came up with an infusion, she wanted to watch her Netflix. We put in a flat screen so she could watch her Netflix. The next time she was reading a book, we set up ebooks. And again, this is in the back of an urgent care.

So that was towards the end of 2018. That was mid-2018, sorry. Early-to-mid-2018 she started. Then toward the middle of 2019, I was helping them with my graphics team from the jewelry business, creating logos and different things like that, helping with some documentation–

Amanda Brummitt: Pause really quick. So at this point, you’re actively attracting patients and referral sources, not just neighbors coming and knocking on the door?

Ben Neuberg: Correct.

Amanda Brummitt: Okay, nice.

Ben Neuberg: At this point, we’re targeting to actively get patients. So we started a marketing campaign, which the truth is, my brother and I did no sales.

Patients are just coming on their own.

Amanda Brummitt: Wow.

Ben Neuberg: Because they heard we were doing it. My mom said to the doctor we’re doing it. So the doctor started sending us, then another doctor said, “Can you take our patient?” Another doctor said, “Can you take our patients in Brooklyn?” And all of a sudden it started to get out there by word of mouth that we’re doing these biologics and you don’t have to do it in a cancer center anymore or in a hospital for that matter. It’s less expensive.

So we started getting a lot of referrals. And again, we weren’t doing sales. We then in 2019 decided, I told my brother, I’m like, “Listen. This thing, after looking it over,”–and I started to wind my jewelry business down in 2019. I told Dr. Sengupta, Vic, and my brother Ira, I said, “Listen, by January 2020, I’m full-time committed to doing this business. But when we go there, I’m going to wind it down as we wind it down, I’m going to set up the business in ’19. And towards the end of ’19, I started to wind down and we started to target opening up standalone AIC infusion centers.

So we wanted to do two right away. One in Long Island, which is closer to Omaha, and one in Brooklyn to facilitate the already patient population where we have in Brooklyn, which was a lot. And we set out to do that. And by January 1, my brother had built those two locations in Manhasset and Brooklyn.

Amanda Brummitt: And how many competitors did you have back then? Or were there any? It feels early.

Ben Neuberg: We were early. Back then, in New York, we may have had one competitor, but I don’t even think they were doing it at the level we were doing it. There was home infusion was being provided. But as, like, an infusion center, they were really not–as a standalone infusion center, there really was no one doing it as a standalone infusion center. Not like a hybrid urgent care infusion center or infusion in an office. Standalone targeting only biologic infusions? No.

Amanda Brummitt: Okay. Wow.

Ben Neuberg: None. Maybe one. Maybe one. It came early also, I just don’t know when they came up, but sometime around us, we had one competitor.

And then basically what ended up happening was we opened the two locations and we started to attract referrals in Long Island right away because that’s where we grew up. And my mom went there and we started to attract referrals. It started to increase. Now it’s January ’20, January of 2020. And then as everybody knows, COVID hit.

And what happened during COVID in 2020, we had already planned on opening up two or three more locations for the year. But once COVID hit we started seeing an increase in referrals. Patients didn’t want to go to the hospital. Hospitals really didn’t want the patients because they were inundated with COVID patients and they really didn’t have the staff. We were getting a lot of patients. So we started to open up a lot more centers at a rapid pace. So by the end of 2020, we went from two–we went from literally opening two centers in January ’20–so literally in the year of 2020, we opened six locations.

Amanda Brummitt: Wow.

Ben Neuberg: And we had only hired three staff members. So we were understaffed with the volume we were getting in because what happened was that COVID was taking all the staff. We were only open a couple of days a week so the nurses can get to each of the locations, and Dr. Sengupta can get to each of the locations.

So we were, we’re scheduling only certain days in certain areas. And then after COVID started to simmer down, we started to get enough staff for each location. So now we’re staffed at every single location and we also opened a lot more as we continued to go. We started to open up in other areas in New York, started to use our knowledge of the geographic footprint to start to develop where we want to open up centers. And we’re strategic about where we’re opening to help patients that are outside the city first.

Amanda Brummitt: Right.

Ben Neuberg: So we started all the way out east near the Hamptons area in Riverhead; and then we opened one in Holbrook; we opened one in Westbury; in Manhasset; in Rockville Center; in Long Beach, which is a barrier island; in the Five Towns; and in Cedarhurst; and then we have one, we opened one immediately in Queens, Forest Hills; we opened three locations in Westchester.

After we did all that, then we went into the city. We went into 70th Street, it was our first on the east side, now we’re on 72nd on the west side. What we like to–our target is to have an infusion center available for a patient within a 15 minute commute in the state of New York, right.

Amanda Brummitt: And then how many centers are you up to today?

Ben Neuberg: Within the next two months, cause they’re in leasing, and approval, and stuff like that, and legal, and all that stuff, I think we’ll have about 32 locations or a little over 30 locations probably by September.

But the track we took isn’t a normal track, right? Opening those centers and doing what we did, I left so much out in that quick transfer to like, how many locations we have.

When we had those first locations, I was basically managing the whole back end of the business. And that means all the prior auths, and the billing, and the collections, and all that stuff was done by me and managed by me and two other people that work with us. And we were really working it. It started to accelerate very fast, like everything else when you have a business model that’s proven and you start to accelerate.

I think one of the areas that we excelled at was customer service or making sure the patients–and I think a lot of that has to do with my jewelry background. We really focused on our motto as patient first. So we take every single patient, and we put them first and foremost over anything else. Their needs are priority in our location, in our center. So we really look to take care of the patient first and foremost. And everything ancillary to that, whether they have Medicaid or Medicare, we find a way that a patient can get help whether it’s in our sector or triaging a patient to a location that’s their insurance or they can be treated. We will make sure that patient gets treated.

Amanda Brummitt: Oh, wow. And I’m sure your referral sources love that because all they have to do is send the patient to Thrivewell. They’ll figure it out.

Ben Neuberg: That’s pretty much what happened, but once that started to happen, the referral sources increased at a rapid pace.

And yeah, it’s not easy. It’s a very hard thing to do because there are a lot of costs involved. We just continued on taking care of the patient first and foremost, creating an environment that is comfortable, that has caring, that’s compassionate towards the patient, that creates the convenient side for the patient, and then obviously cost is important and it keeps the cost down for the patient so they don’t have any of those facility fees that you would see coming out of a hospital medical or a cancer infusion center adjacent to a hospital.

And that was one of the areas that we saw in New York specifically that a lot of patients were going to and they were treated at a cancer center and those traditional centers of a nurse in the middle and then they have big round rooms.

Yeah. And then we just continued doing it. My mom was getting her treatments. And then my mom needed a surgery on her back. She needed these rods put in her back and it was like a 14 hour difficult surgery. She got the surgery, she recovered a year later, and then she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, stage 4, and she passed away about 19 months ago.

That was a tough thing for all of us. My nephew works in the company. He’s actually really good at what he does. He runs our specialty division.

So, we really go by Thrivewell. It’s not a company. It’s a family because everyone who works for us has our cell phones and we’re available 24/7 for anything they need. We have now probably over 100 employees in that short timeframe and we’re still hiring.

Amanda Brummitt: You’re doing a great pitch to come to work for you, by the way,

Ben Neuberg: We keep hiring and we keep growing and I’m trying to like, keep up, but it’s interesting. Starting a business, being an entrepreneur in the jewelry business, and then being entrepreneurial in this business, there are a lot of words that are thrown around that in business people throw them around, but they don’t really know what entails to get there, right?

There’s growth, there’s scale, there’s all these different words, but there’s a lot of things: the systems and processes that go around it, and how you implement them, and how you make the transition out of an entrepreneurial view into those strategies, and all of that stuff was very complex throughout that time frame to institute into our systems.

One of the things that I see that we, we do really well is that we have that great connection with our staff because we really look at them as very important and vital to each part. Each person that works for us has a major vital part to making that patient’s journey successful. And outcomes are the most important thing, so keeping patients adherent to their treatment cycle, everything along those lines is really important.

Amanda Brummitt: Yeah. Do you feel like your origin story and your mom’s experience, do you feel like that you’ve been able to pull that into all 32 centers you’re opening and that same culture of putting the patient first?

Ben Neuberg: Yeah, so we definitely have that.  It runs through every single person and every single location. A lot of the patients know our stories. I sit down with patients. I don’t really go into all the centers because I can’t be in all centers at all times. But early on, I used to deal with a couple of patients and help them fight insurance or help them understand their insurance benefits. Like a lot of the times, Medicare Advantage patients, those are the most complex patients to talk to because they really don’t even know what they signed up for.

A Medicare Advantage patient, a lot of the times, I wouldn’t say misled, but they’re offered opportunities that they think are beneficial for their treatment, for their health care and their financial needs, but their maybe joining something that’s not advantageous for their current health care situation and maybe advantageous for what the overall population is looking for.

If a Medicare Advantage advertises free dental and free vision but your out-of-pocket expense could be upwards of $25,000 to $20,000 and it doesn’t cover your biologics or infusions, the admins–you’re going to get stuck with a large part of that bill. I feel like patients sometimes don’t read the fine print or don’t ask those difficult questions because not that they don’t, they just aren’t aware of it.

Amanda Brummitt: Right.

Ben Neuberg: And I think that’s one of the areas I see where we have an education department for patients so we go over their benefits with them so they understand it a little better.

Amanda Brummitt: That’s awesome.

Ben Neuberg: That was one of the areas that I dealt with patients a lot on the phone.

Amanda Brummitt: Yeah. What about on–you guys have grown so fast. You’re an industry leader in what? Five, six years in practice.

Ben Neuberg: So Reece says.

Amanda Brummitt: Reece said that. He said it. And I think Reece is able to make that statement. 

Ben Neuberg: Listen, I’ll tell you right now. Ira and I, we grew up with no titals. All the businesses we did, we never really sought after or searched for a title. We never had a title. Our titles were given to us by Dr. Sengupta when we walked into a meeting with a hospital network and he started handing out our cards saying this is our CEO Ben and this is our COO Ira. We didn’t even know we didn’t even know we had titles.

Amanda Brummitt: That’s the best way. So I’ve got a good feel for how it works with patients and I can see why patients pick you over and over again. What about your referring physicians and providers? What advice would you give for attracting those people and then nurturing those relationships?

Ben Neuberg: I think the attraction of a doctor is really about confidence. Practices, doctors, they’re–look, our motto of patient first resonates with anybody we speak to. When we talk to anybody, it just comes out in our conversations. You can see it in our face how we care so much about patients from top to bottom. And a doctor recognizes that on their own. Their staff recognizes that on their own. So I believe that it’s mainly about one thing and one thing only. If you can create that confidence, then that confident feeling the doctor has about sending this patient to our center–that confident feeling they have, it stays with them.

That’s one area and probably the most important area that I could say when it comes to dealing with the prescribers and then sending referrals, you have to build that confidence and it won’t come overnight. It comes through working with patients and taking the burden off of the doctor’s office and their administrative staff.

It’s a very complicated answer. It’s more of how do you do it and what kind of situations you’re dealing with individually on a day to day basis.

Amanda Brummitt: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And I also think that if you do that well, you create that confidence, those word of mouth referrals are going to happen because these prescribers all talk to each other. They’re nurses move offices, the referral coordinators and their patients talk to them, you don’t even have to market it.

Ben Neuberg:  Absolutely. I’ll tell you right now, we have patients from other patients, a lot of them. We have patients from other patients, we have providers from other providers. Absolutely. Because you’re dealing with multi-specialty, each of these specialties in each individual state, the bigger states have more because the population is more dense. So if we take New York, there’s a lot more multi-specialty infusions than there are probably in most of the Northeast, maybe in the country with the exception of California.

There are a lot of infusions done every day. Here, I think that network just like our infusion network that we have that Reece and Bryan, WeInfuse, this infusion network that’s building is kind of close knit where, I kind of know other people who run infusion centers. We know each other. We’ve spoken. We speak about industry-related things that might be beneficial for us as a group and mainly for the patient and how we can provide better care for the patient, what things we can do together as a group, maybe to help on policy and different things like that. I have my own thoughts on that whole thing.

If you have a pool of rheumatologists. They talk because they’re talking about their craft, their space, their specialty. Maybe there’s a new treatment for a patient. Maybe there’s a new place doing infusions and we send it to Thrivewell and they do it this way and they did this for us and they did this for us.

We want the same thing that you did for that doctor. I can’t tell you how many times we hear that. We want the same thing you’re doing for that doctor. To answer your question, it’s like that every space has their kind of provider word of mouth.

Amanda Brummitt: Yeah, beautiful. Let’s jump into operations. And you had mentioned, within the industry, we all talk to each other, talk about vendors a lot. And I know that you guys partner with both WeInfuse and the RxToolkit platform. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Ben Neuberg: So my introduction to WeInfuse was unbelievable. I had the best experience ever. And Reece will love that I’m talking about it.

I called Reece up one day when I started to evaluate my brother’s vendors that he had chosen and his friend guided him–our friend, a good friend of ours, Garen, guided us. I’ll never forget it. I call him up and I’m like, “Listen, Reece, this call is going to be short. I’m evaluating a lot of our vendors. I don’t know if you make the cut, we’ll figure that out.” And that’s literally how the call went. Until today, he’ll probably tell you, I got this call from this guy, Ben. I don’t know what happened.

But in the end, we started working with WeInfuse. I believe, we added a lot of value to WeInfuse early on, and I believe they would say the same thing. But I think WeInfuse is so vital in what they do for infusion services, I think their software is a very well structured software for infusion therapy. Every business as a whole, not just softwares, every business looks to increase output and efficiency, and they’re always looking to increase output and efficiency, even if they try to put it forward.

Sometimes we push them a little harder on something. I would venture to say we brought some ideas their way in the past. I know we’ve been involved in a lot of betas with them growing in the WeInfuse part. And their betas have turned out to be great for us on outputs and developing certain efficiency modeling and things like that that we’re trying to accomplish from the WeInfuse software, which is really a great tool for anybody who is looking to do infusion therapy and is looking at EMRs. I would probably recommend WeInfuse as number one. As a close second, I don’t think there is, so I would probably stick with WeInfuse on that. They have a lot of hard stops within their software that make it safe financially for a provider or an infusion center.

And then the RxToolKit integration was, it was just a fantastic integration. Prior to the RxToolKit integration, I will tell you this, we were using RxToolKit independently.

Amanda Brummitt: Really?

Ben Neuberg: Yes, we were one of the adopters of RxToolKit and WeInfuse as vendors independently, vendor partners independently. And when they did the integration, I was on the phone with Reece right away. And I said, I want to be on the beta.

And I was aggressive with it. Me and my team, Fara and everyone else was on, aggressively trying to be one of the beta testers for it. And we were. And we love it. The integration of RxToolKit creates a safety measure for nurses and all of the work they put in that is far superior to anything in the marketplace right now. It’s real time. It’s at the chair. So if a nurse is documenting and they want to check something on the label and the protocol, it is literally in that patient’s note. That specific. Look up and write to that specific medication based on dosing and everything. It’s a really fantastic addition to the WeInfuse software.

I do think that obviously there are things that are always–Bryan and Reece are always looking to advance their softwares and value to their customer base, including ourselves or partners. And I truly believe that our operation with and our interaction with Reece and Bryan is a partnership. I do call them vendor partnerships because we do pay them as a vendor, but in order for us to do things as efficiently as we do, that systematic approach and efficient software tool is really helpful for what we output to, let’s say, doctors, insurance companies, or anything of that nature. They allow for it to be seamless in that transition.

Amanda Brummitt: Very cool. And that’s so fun to hear that behind the scenes that you’ve been one of the people in their ear pushing them and helping them strive even higher.

Ben Neuberg: I think we are. I think we are. I think they would agree, but I think we are. I never really like to say–there are some things, every now and then. So the truth is, our whole team is really dedicated to what they do, and that’s another thing when you have everybody who works for you is bought into a business, whether it’s infusion, whether it’s jewelry, whether it’s construction, whether it’s glasses, whether it’s plastic, whatever the business is, if everybody is focused on the business, success is inevitable, right?

But in order to get to success, you’re going to identify gaps and fractures. So in our workflow, we’re always looking for gaps and fractures. Some of them are in plain sight, and some of them you go through the workflow to identify. In areas with WeInfuse, we sometimes identify a gap here or a fracture there. Nothing tremendous, but a gap and a fracture that could sometimes be alleviated with correspondence and their team. And their customer service side is, out of all the EMRs I’ve researched, their customer service is bar none top shelf. On the RxToolKit side as well, both top shelf.

Amanda Brummitt: Fantastic. Love to hear that. It sounds like you’re excited about software, but tell us what else you’re most excited about right now in the infusion industry.

Ben Neuberg: In the infusion industry, what I’m really excited about is the advancements of treatments for patients, because the reason we do this is because of our mom.

When our mom passed away, my brother and I, we got together. We huddled up and said, “We’re going to double down on this. It’s even a bigger mission now.” We really like to stay at the forefront and understand what kind of medications are advancing in the pharma world, which is also, a great opportunity for patients right now to get care that was never available or afforded to them.

And as these pharmaceutical companies advance these medications that have taken years and years to develop, take the new Alzheimer treatments that are out, which is a perfect example. I’m excited about that. Why am I excited about that? It happens to be one of our friends, one of my dad’s best friends growing up, recently passed away from Alzheimer’s. His son grew up with us and he’s been involved with us since we were like little kids. We were friends growing up. We know firsthand the disease state. We’re committed to it.

From an exciting standpoint, I’m excited to see how–and I’ve seen it already because we treat a lot of patients. We see a lot of the patients and their loved ones, mainly the loved ones, and the appreciation of now being able to get it and the seamless way we can create that opportunity for them to get that treatment, because with these treatments come a lot of ancillary prerequisites for them to be available for treatment or a candidate for treatment. I just think there are probably a lot more treatments.

Once something like this, after so many years, there’s now an opportunity for early stage Alzheimer’s patients to have a treatment. I believe that there’s got to be something that these pharmaceutical companies are working on. Even with, Eli Lilly’s announcement of the Donanemab recently, I think as recent as last week or a couple of weeks back. I know I was reading about it. I know they had the conversation early June. Recently, it got approved.

This is all exciting stuff. And I think the pipeline for medications for the infusion space is really vast, and it’s an opportunistic time for us to create office locations and centers for patients to now get treated in an approachable setting where they’re not in a larger facility where there’s 20 or 30 patients in a room and they could be sitting next to somebody who is undergoing chemo.

So I’m really excited about bringing more of those locations in our culture and our motto and our mission to patients in the United States outside of the New York area, and we’ve been pretty aggressive with it. We’re currently opening right now in Pennsylvania, which we’re really excited about. We have two locations opening there.

We have an exciting growth spurt in New Jersey. We just opened that. We’re opening our fourth and we’re planning to open another four more locations in New Jersey within the next three to four months. We have leases out, so we’re looking to really expand our services throughout the country, and that’s exciting.

It’s exciting that our staff wants to work with us, the people want to come on board. All of this is exciting stuff. I’m excited for my Thrivewell family. That’s what most excites me. It’s my staff and the patients that they’re going to get all this care.

Amanda Brummitt: Yeah, that’s definitely. Ben, you’ve shared so much good information. If you had just one last piece of advice for infusion center owners and operators, what would it be?

Ben Neuberg: My main bit of advice is just think about the patient. And understand that that patient was just diagnosed with a very rare disease, and they don’t know much about it, and they’re coming to you for care, and understand what that means. Take care of that patient because that patient is in need of care and there are anxieties outside of their something unbeknownst to them at this point, like finances that can create anxieties for them that they don’t know about. They’re about to get hit pretty hard with a lot of different things on those disease states.

I would just really think about the patient and think about their journey. If it’s a new patient, if it’s an existing patient, either way, they’re in the middle of fighting something that you know, hopefully you can assist them and make it easier. That’s the goal.

Amanda Brummitt: That is great advice. Ben, thank you so much for your time. I’m sad for the way that you found the infusion industry, but I’m really happy that the industry has you and your brother and your passion for patients. And I’m excited to watch Thrivewell Infusion continue to grow.

Ben Neuberg: Thank you, Amanda. It’s a great opportunity to do this. I know it’s been a while for Reece and I’m happy I was able to get around to it.

Amanda Brummitt: I’ve encountered people that were inspired to get into the infusion industry because of a personal experience. But Ben and his brother building an infusion suite for their mom is a whole new level. It’s clear how her journey has informed the culture at Thrivewell Infusion and lives on today.

Between putting the patient first and taking the burden off the prescriber and their administrative team, it makes Thrivewell Infusion an easy choice for clinicians and patients. And Ben really illustrated the power of WeInfuse’s software to keep the center safe financially while RxToolKit makes infusion safe for patients and providers.

If you aren’t already familiar with them, I definitely encourage you to schedule a test drive. As Ben made clear, these tools can save time and money in your practice while making infusions safer. My name is Amanda Brummitt and we’ll catch you in the next episode.

Guest Speaker:

Thrivewell Infusion CEO Ben Neuberg.