In this episode, we talk with Joe Baffone, Co-Founder and CEO of Annexus Health. Joe talks about the strategic partnership between Annexus Health and WeInfuse where they’ve integrated technology to streamline the patient financial assistance enrollment process. With the integration, patients can start their intended therapy without delay and stay on it for as long as clinically appropriate. In addition to the clear benefit for patients, the integration reduces the financial and administrative burden on the infusion provider team, so they can focus on what they love – delivering quality care to patients.
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Transcript: How to Use Technology to Expand Patient Access
Amanda Brummitt: We Infuse podcast, episode number 64. Welcome to the We Infuse podcast. My name is Amanda Brummett. 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 Joe Buffone, co founder and CEO of Anexis Health. Joe will share about the strategic partnership between Anexis Health and We Views, where they’ve integrated technology to work up patients for financial assistance so they can start on their intended therapy without delay and stay on it for as long as clinically appropriate. In addition to the clear benefit for patients, it is also reducing the financial and administrative burden on the infusion team so they can focus on what they love, delivering quality care to patients. Well, Joe, thank you so much for being here on the show today. We really appreciate you. I would love it if you could start by telling our guests about your background.
Joe Baffone: Sure. Well, thanks for having me, Amanda. I really appreciate it. So I’ll give a global, background on Brad Frazier and I, my co founder and just feels better because he and I are the ones that started this thing. it’s our baby. So collectively we have. A lot of experience in the life science world and we did a bunch of different things in the life science world that informed and educated us. We had experiences in finance, we had experiences in sales, we had experience in access services, patient advocacy, reimbursement, payer dynamics, payer responsibility, the lab world we have experience in. And then, I personally stepped out and was an operator in a company that focused on reimbursement and really improving the profile of reimbursement for providers and for patients to make sure that ultimately we can get care to the patient as it should be in a viable way. Brad spent a lot of time at a healthcare tech company on the EHR side. And so the, background is almost, as much of a story about two folks coming together as it is about our, individual backgrounds. So the experience that we had separately, I think informed a powerful, collaborative, professional relationship as we came together. So at two prior companies, we had the opportunity to work together. And so that gave us years. Literally years of conversation and whiteboarding to get to the place where we said, all right, let’s jump in. Let’s create an MVP and let’s see if the market’s ready for us. And so background is really diverse between the two co founders. two very different people, but two very aligned people that ultimately I think has been a really important part of what we’ve done as an organization and where we’re going. Not very different than how I see the WeInfuse experience with Brian and Reese, right?
Amanda Brummitt: Yes. That’s what I was thinking as you were describing that.
Joe Baffone: It’s so cool to, to watch and meet. and I think as we talk, there’s certain things that are going to come out of the conversation as it relates to what a nexus health feels is a tremendous opportunity for our two organizations to work together. And I think, I guess I’ll just say one thing and we can spin off on it later, but to be able to work with like minded people. Have a very similar desire to really improve and make change in areas that sometimes aren’t easy and, and stay committed to it. And I’ve loved listening to the journey that Reese and Brian have been through, and it really does relate very well to the journey that Brad and I.
Amanda Brummitt: Fantastic. Okay, well I have one personal question before we dive into the actual infusion industry. I, I saw somewhere, I think maybe on LinkedIn that you had played college. Baseball.
Joe Baffone: Yes.
Amanda Brummitt: Probably one of the coolest things that has popped up for one of our guests. Can you tell us about it?
Joe Baffone: Hey, you’ve got a bunch of boring guests then I’m kidding. So, and I haven’t seen the other guests. So anybody that’s listening, that’s a prior guest. I’m sure you’re much more interesting than me and to express the things that you do. So it’s funny. And I’m glad you asked about it because at 58. Sometimes it’s, a little weird talking about something that, I did in college, but it foundationally was so important to what I’m doing here professionally and what I’m doing as an operator and a co founder. And it was a wonderful experience. And I tell folks. Often that I majored in baseball and I minored in accounting because I was that I might have had a shot to play, beyond college, but it was a wonderful experience. I, developed, friendships, with people that if I don’t see them in five years, that it’s like, I w I’ve been with them all day for, my entire life. And then. I think professionally and personally, it gave me the ability to, because at the time we were a D one school and it’s long enough to go where the NCAA didn’t put in rules or have significant limitations on the number of games that you could play throughout the year. So it was a super rigorous, heavy schedule. And I learned balance. I learned prioritization. I learned how to really work through as a young man. Adversity, right? Or failures or to not let successes, inflate me to the place where it You know, cause me to not be focused and not work really hard to hone my craft or my skill or develop something more out of the experience. So thanks for asking. It is a really important part of my life and something that, I think enriched me significantly.
Amanda Brummitt: Yeah, absolutely. Team sports are good for all of us. They, teach us a ton of great lessons. So then out of college, you eventually made your way into oncology in the early nineties. Joe, is that when you got into the infusion side or did that come later?
Joe Baffone: It’s interesting. Oncology did take us to the infusion world, but it Took a while. So, as I stated, I did a bunch of things and so did Brad, in the pharma world. And most of our time was focused on oncology. And that was a gift because it’s a very complex, sophisticated disease state that is built on buy and bill. It’s built on dispensing. So we learned valuable lessons and, clinical lessons as well as business finance. economic viability lessons. So that was years. I think personally, I spent at least 15 years in pharma focused on oncology. I spent my years after that as a founder at a, as a, operator at a prior company before Nexus Health focused on college on oncology, providing different data tools, consulting services on reimbursement and other things, all oncology. We started Anexis Health with the idea that we were building something that would apply outside of oncology, and we fell into the infusion space. And here’s why. Because ultimately, we were building our platform, our services for oncology. And as we were doing that, and we were digging in, and we were getting a larger and larger footprint, and we’re getting into some of these really large oncology practice. practices that were serving as infusion centers, basically what they were doing, right? In a lot of cases. And so they pushed us and challenged us to expand outside of oncology. And the biggest thing that we needed to do is, as we talk maybe a little bit about our platform, is whatever disease state we step into, It is critically important for us to have the content in a comprehensive way, meaning if we step outside of oncology into rheumatoid arthritis or gastroenterology, immunology, whatever it may be, we have to, in our system, in our application, have every single assistance or access services option. Literally every single one or we don’t launch. So oncology forced us to expand our content to expand our disease footprint. And then we started to learn more about the infusion space. And we started to get a couple of customers. And things started to build, but then we met we infuse, and now we really feel like we’re learning from the experts about the infusion space. The beautiful thing it’s doing for us globally as a business is it’s giving us the ability to do one of the things that we set out to do as an organization. And that is provide. a better way for patient care, agnostically speaking, meaning we want any patient that needs help managing the financial toxicities or the administrative toxicities related to access services. We want to touch as many people as possible. And so by stepping into the infusion space, wow, we immediately got exposure to a whole different, needy patient set and it’s been really fun.
Amanda Brummitt: Yeah, absolutely. So let’s go ahead and get into the Annexus Health platform. I understand you guys use technology to advance health equity by helping more patients access and afford the care that they need, which sounds amazing. I think we can all get behind that. Can you tell us about the platform and how it works? Thanks.
Joe Baffone: Yeah, for sure. So when we launched a nexus health, we launched it as a technology company and our focus was to create a platform that allows for a comprehensive cycle management approach to financial assistance. So I’ll pause there and let you think about that for a second. One. All right. Yeah. All right. So what we’re doing really is taking a very archaic rudimentary kind of revenue cycle management problem and solving for it. And when I say rudimentary archaic, Problem related to managing a component of rep cycle. It’s because financial assistance is an EDI based, right? It’s all manual. It’s all one off portals. It’s one off programs. And so financial assistance, basically the programs are payers. So with our MVP, we created again, a comprehensive, so all content in any disease state is. In our system that we step into so that every single pair, let’s financial assistance as a pair is available in our system. Then we create tools to cycle managing search, enroll, track and analyze. It’s basically revenue cycle management for financial assistance, and that’s what we do, but. You don’t have the pre established payer, right? You don’t have the electronic connectivity, right? Through 80 EDI, we are building that by the way. So really cool stuff that we’re just launching right now. And so our tooling was designed to manage the entire cycle of financial assistance comprehensively. Now we’ve expanded our platform from there, but that was. At its core, the center for our MVP, and we’re going to be expanding our platform to provide help in other administrative and logistical challenging areas. but as we started to launch the MVP, we started to find a, that we were challenged or provider organizations were challenged with optimizing our tools. So we launched a services division and that’s called Edparo. So AssistPoint is the technology platform. Edparo is our services division. And so our services division basically is the financial counselors for the organizations that we work with. They just use our technology and tooling to work everything start to finish. And so that’s what we provide, right now with, really cool visions of the things that we’re going to be providing in the future.
Amanda Brummitt: That is incredible. Both for patients and for infusion centers. It’s amazing.
Joe Baffone: And just so you know, so we, from a comprehensive perspective, whether it be a medical kind of infusion space thing, or even on the medical side, our app, our application in our program and our process is for all therapeutic categories in areas. Amazing.
Amanda Brummitt: I love it. So Joe, you talk openly about the toxic nature of expenses and payment structures in the industry for both patients and practices, which I couldn’t agree more. I’m just not used to people being so bold about it, and I appreciate your approach to that. Can you share how the work that you’re doing is impacting patients and caregivers and maybe making things a little less toxic?
Joe Baffone: Yeah. So if you think about what we’re solving for, ultimately, we’re making it easier to find financial assistance. So alternatives to maxing out your credit cards, taking out a second on your home, filing bankruptcy, choosing not to get therapy, choosing Those all sound terrible. It’s all terrible, right? Choosing to discontinue your therapy, or say, I’m going to get, one infusion set of three infusions, right? We know that’s going to have a negative impact on care. So what we’re solving for ultimately is this crazy burden on the patient when the responsibility is such that they just can’t afford it, right? And then from the provider’s side, listen, I’m a capitalist, Brad and I run a business and you can be a capitalist for a bunch of different reasons, right? But we’re capitalists to make a difference, right? And so we need to make money to make a difference because I’m not at raising money, right? Well, yes, we hope we were a startup. So, but we still, we have to make money and we have to create a business in a way that we can viably continue to provide the solution. Well, guess what? To speak candidly and transparently, there’s flaws in our healthcare system, but. It’s not flawed to suggest that our providers or our infusion centers need to make money. Yes, they do. They need to make money to provide quality health care. So ultimately that’s what we help with. There’s a massive revenue opportunity when financial assistance management and even free drug management, we, optimize how it’s supposed to be utilized. There’s significant financial implications to that. And by working with us, you’re becoming more viable because you’re Maximizing that pair, that financial assistance pair, and then ultimately the, the burden that impacts care for patients or impacts their lifestyle. And when we were talking, when you mentioned disparities and equities, right, equities of care or disparities. or circumstances. Everybody has circumstances. You could be making a lot of money and not budgeted correctly for a cancer or a diagnosis, and it’s still gonna mess you up, right? But that kind of mess up is totally different than somebody that does not have means to eat versus Pay for their medication. So I think that, there’s, certainly the economic component to all of this, that financial toxicity thing that we’re eliminating, but we’re carving it up, I think, in a really interesting way, because. Often it’s the administrative toxicity that we see we infuses solving for over and over again, taking these crazy, disparate, fragmented processes and creating technology and workflow around it. That’s what we did with financial assistance. So because The system wasn’t set up for providers or infusion centers to manage financial assistance, wholly and completely. It’s really difficult to do that. We call that an administrative toxicity. So we knock that out and we allow for the optimization of financial assistance.
Amanda Brummitt: Fantastic. Well, I think we can all agree that’s good for patients and, I don’t think you have to apologize for being a capitalist. Well, people often forget that if medical entities don’t make money, the doors won’t stay open and there will not be care. So there’s a line you can be a, you can be a good capitalist without exploiting patients or caregivers. And it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing. So I understand that a nexus health and we infuse have formed a strategic partnership to further expand that patient access and affordability for both specialty and biologic medications. Can you tell us about the partnership?
Joe Baffone: Yeah, so I think simply put, as I mentioned early on, we’re like minded or maybe I mentioned it outside of, before we started the podcast, but, Brad and I are completely aligned with how we infuse, Brian Reese and our teams are focusing on solving things in the market, right? Ultimately, you know how we’re expressing this administrative toxicity. it’s all over what we infuse does right to make it more efficient to treat patients. through the infusion centers to get the care they deserve. How do we do that? Well, there’s things that we infused are focused on, and there’s things that in access health are focused on to bust through this administrative challenge, create technology workflow that announced that enables a better way. one of the things that, I, in a longer career that I want to admit is that I watched over the years is the idea that healthcare was so late to the game in utilizing wholly and completely technology. And we know there’s a lot of issues and reasons why that occurs, but I thank God that we’re at a place now where we have the federal government and everyone aligned around, we need to make our healthcare system more effective and more efficient. And so our alliance, our strategic partnership, I think, Boils down to that, right? How do we look at the core of what we infuse provides? What a nexus health provides and how do we make it a multiplier versus, just an additional an addition thing. And I think our mindset, right, going into, what we want to do as two separate organizations is the first thing. And then I think secondarily, it’s not competitive, right? We infuse the solving for different things. That a nexus health is solving for. So we’re going to integrate how we do things. We’re going to be integrated right into the we infused platform. And we’re going to be speaking directly to the, we infused platform. That’s going to make actually our work in optimizing, making more efficient, much easier to help you guys make the work that you do more optimal and more efficient. So, the early parts of this, partnership are super exciting. as it relates to, engaging with customers, but I think more importantly, how we as an organization are going to prioritize. Simplify in a way that our end user, our end customer, the infusion centers, the patients feel the value of the partnership. So super excited about, collaborating and working together, but also having fun. We’ve had an opportunity to spend time with the team and it’s, just, it’s cool to work with like minded people, but it’s even cooler to work with people you have fun with.
Amanda Brummitt: For sure. It sounds like a beautiful marriage that is going to definitely help patients, but also take some stress away from caregivers, I hope. Yes. So Joe, tell me what you’re most excited about right now today in the infusion center industry.
Joe Baffone: So from a founder perspective, it’s expansion, right? Where the infusion space is growing. So rapidly, and there’s an opportunity for us to partner with we infused partner with the infusion space, generally speaking, and expand rapidly into other disease states that are sophisticated and challenging. So I think that is probably the thing that we’re most excited about, which gives us the most excitement to reach more patients. So I, I think that is, probably the thing that we’re most excited about.
Amanda Brummitt: Yeah, I can totally see that anytime we improve access to care, we have made the world a better place. Sure. So Joe, you’ve had a amazing career and seen a lot, done a lot, had a lot of successes. what would you say is one piece of advice that you would give to our listeners?
Joe Baffone: I think that What I see from my experience with NICA, what I see in the dialogue with Brian and Reese and other members of the We Infuse space is not just, and I’m going to lean back into my prior life of oncology. I spent a lot of time with advocacy groups. I spent a lot of time working with people that were responsible for policy access to care has been a critically important part of my journey. the business side of oncology, which means a lot of different things, but allowing for viability of, providers. I think the advice that I would give. Related to my experience and what I’m seeing in this space and the parallels of my experiences, stand by, stay involved as it relates to policy, stand by, or get involved as it relates to policy and advocacy and make sure that you understand. That your voice does matter. And even when it doesn’t feel like it matters, I just again, I look at some of the things that Nike has been successful. I know some of the things that are at the core of the we infuse business model and what we infuse wants to help infusion centers and ultimately have patients with if we’re not vigilant about taking a really close, hard look at policy, right? Making sure that we’re doing everything we can to advocate for good decisions, To then we’re not doing our job to make sure that infusion centers remain viable to serve patients in a whole and complete way. So that’d be number one. Number two is. Again, my experience in the healthcare industry is, we haven’t been the best industry at incorporating technology. So commit to technology. And if you’re a WeInfuse partner, you’ve committed to technology. Commit wholly and completely, right? Because I know the service lines. I know what WeInfuse provides. We love how WeInfuse is carving up the opportunity in this space, building out additional solutions, but core solutions right now. Look at the, and this isn’t a commercial for Wampuse. It’s really being excited about our partnership and looking at what the infusion space needs desperately and what we infuse is solving for. So we infuse the nexus health, invest the time into understanding the technology that is available, that is enterprise based, not application based, right? Because if you try to go out and find a piece of technology, that’s app based for every little thing that. You want to solve for and it’s not with an enterprise approach. Like, how does everything connect? How does it relate to my overall workflow? Then you may not be finding the best solution. I think the industry has used services for a while, like RebCycle, right? I think that when you’re making technology decisions. Make technology and services decisions at the same time, because if you’re making really good technology decisions that should be implemented with those you work with from a services perspective, but there’s also really cool companies like us. That are a tech enabled services company and inherently the way we’re built, we’re going to provide you the best technology in the best workflow as it relates to our experience, our expertise related to financial assistance so, You can tell I love giving advice. Hopefully that wasn’t too much.
Amanda Brummitt: No, it was perfect. I love the commitment to tech and, I really like your point on getting involved while the industry is rapidly growing and expanding. It’s still a pretty new industry. So people can have a seat at the table. They can have a voice and, really important that they do that. So I appreciate you pointing that out for sure. Well, Joe, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your passion to improving patient access and for all the information that you shared today. We really appreciate you.
Joe Baffone: Thanks, Amanda. Great spending time with you.
Amanda Brummitt: Well, that was great information from Joe Buffone of Anexis Health about how they are helping streamline the patient assistance process. This clearly helps patients access the care they need, but it also reduces administrative burden on the infusion center team. which we are all about. And if you aren’t already familiar with the WeInfuse software platform and RxToolkit’s web based resources, I’m sure Joe talked you into scheduling a test drive. These tools can save time and money in your practice while making infusion safer for patients and caregivers. My name is Amanda Brummett and we’ll catch you in the next episode.
Guest Speakers:
Joe Baffone is the co-founder and CEO of Annexus Health.
