Less Spiels, More Doctoring - David Canes, MD, Urologist

Eva Sheie (00:03):
This is patient obsessed, the Aesthetic Practice marketing podcast that explores what makes people choose one doctor or provider over another. In a word, the conversion, the magic moment. I'm Eva Sheie, your host and scrappy problem solver. Hello and welcome to Patient Obsessed Podcast where I try to see the world through the eyes of the aesthetic patient in order to improve the patient experience. I am Eva Sheie and on this podcast we explore the elements which drive conversions to help aesthetic professionals and everyone else see more of the patients they want, grow their own audience and spend less on paid advertising and paid social. My guest today is David Canes. He's from the Boston area and he is not an aesthetic surgeon. Welcome Dr. Canes. Can you tell us what you are? 

Dr. Canes (00:57):
Thanks, Eva. I'm a urologist. Probably the furthest thing from an aesthetic surgeon as could possibly be. 

Eva Sheie (01:05):
It probably is, and I actually don't think I've ever met a urologist, to be honest with you.

Dr. Canes (01:11):
Although apparently scrotox is a thing, so maybe, you know, well we put Botox in the bladder. That's probably the better connection. 

Eva Sheie (01:20):
Who benefits from those two things? What kind of conditions does that treat? 

Dr. Canes (01:24):
I think Scrotox is probably a fringe application of Botox, but patients with overactive bladder could get Botox injections in the detrusor muscle of the bladder and cuts down on frequency of urination. It actually works well. 

Eva Sheie (01:41):
Is it for men and women? 

Dr. Canes (01:44):
It can be for men and women. I think it's more commonly for women. And then as we leave the room, we get to make the joke. Your bladder looks 30 years younger. 

Eva Sheie (01:53):
Oh no. How does that one go over?

Dr. Canes (01:55):
I think it goes over well. 

Eva Sheie (02:01):
Okay. So we met through another doctor who I had never an interventional radiologist, another specialty which I had never met before, which is wild considering how long I've been around. But that was Dr. Aaron Fritz and he makes incredible podcasts for vascular urology, interventional radiology, which now I know why they call it IR because I'm constantly tripping on the word. 

Dr. Canes (02:25):
Exactly. 

Eva Sheie (02:26):
But have you been on any of his podcasts? 

Dr. Canes (02:29):
Yeah, I was on his podcast called Back Table Innovation. 

Eva Sheie (02:34):
Because you're an innovator?

Dr. Canes (02:35):
Well, it's in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

Eva Sheie (02:40):
It is. I actually have written here that you are a reluctant entrepreneur. 

Dr. Canes (02:45):
I think that's true. I fell into it quite by accident. 

Eva Sheie (02:50):
Like many things I actually set out to be a professional musician and fell into plastic surgery marketing by accident. So you're a reluctant entrepreneur. I think sometimes these are the best entrepreneurs because they're problem solvers and I already know what problem you solved, but I want you to, for our audience, describe kind of what was happening to you every day that led you to say, I've had enough, I'm going to solve this problem. 

Dr. Canes (03:18):
So around 2015, 20 16, apparently one out of every two doctors I was feeling burnt out and I'm a surgeon as a urologist and I thankfully managed to stay fully engaged in the operating room, which is part of my life that I always enjoy and has never become stale. But in the clinic setting, I found myself somewhat disengaged, which is a hallmark of burnout. And I zeroed in on one aspect for me that was causing most of the problem and that was repetitive explanations. So just for example, I do a lot of prostate cancer work and I was sitting in an exam room with a 68 year old engineer and I was explaining his new diagnosis of prostate cancer and under the microscope we give prostate cancer a grade called a Gleason score and I was giving my Gleason score spiel and I went into autopilot like I started to do and I got to the end of the explanation, didn't remember giving it, and it was probably an okay explanation, but it really bothered me. 

(04:31)
And it's a certain point that you reach in your career that you don't imagine when you're a medical student because your practice is probably exactly the way you wanted it to be, and then you find yourself doing a lot of things over and over again, and that feeling of being removed from the moment was a really bad feeling. I think a lot of doctors are attracted to being a doctor because we really enjoy making real connections with other human beings. And when I was in those moments of repetitive explanations, I felt the opposite of that. 

Eva Sheie (05:09):
So something about that encounter with that patient, did you actually go back and talk to him about it or does he have any idea that you were,

Dr. Canes (05:17):
No, he has no idea. This was like my internal monologue going, I can't do this anymore. And I don't want to make it sound like it's all about us because we really need to be focused on the patient. It is about the patient, but something's also happening to the physician workforce that is creating burnout and causing some physicians to decide to hang it up. So it is a problem that needs to be solved. So at that moment, it was not an entrepreneurial moment. I just thought, God, there must be some easier way. And so as it turns out, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, the NCCN, that organizational body makes these beautiful PDF patient handbooks. And so I told my secretary, listen, here's the PDF. I uploaded it on, I can't remember Google Drive or something, and I said, listen, if you see somebody on my schedule for prostate cancer, can you please email them this PDF beforehand and ask them if they would read it. 

(06:22)
And it's a bit of a lift, like 80 pages and not everybody read it, but the patients who read that guide before they came in that visit was a lot better. I didn't go into my spiels because the patients had already consumed a lot of the basic information and we got to talk about whatever the patient's questions were and whatever was specific to that patient, which I really enjoyed. So this went on for a few years and I started layering on top of this, I recorded a couple of videos of me explaining robotic prostate removal, which is a very common surgery for me to do. And again, my secretary who is wonderful and obliged to these crazy requests when a patient comes in with prostate cancer, send them this video and this PDF and this video also, and it became a little bit onerous for her, but patients would consume this information and those conversations were no longer repetitive. They were much more meaningful, they were much more personal. And so that was the little, as you say, problem solving. And it wasn't at that moment entrepreneurial, it was, let me try to fix this for myself. 

Eva Sheie (07:42):
In content marketing, sort of generally speaking, what you were doing was developing a product, but you didn't know you were developing a product while you were doing it. And for many years now, we've sort of scratched our heads and wondered why if there's no shortage of content on the internet about anything and everything you could possibly want to know. So if everything is out there, why are so many people still not able to educate themselves about what they're about to go through? What's the missing piece there do you think? 

Dr. Canes (08:15):
Yeah, so I think the keyword is everything now. Everything is out there and it's just completely daunting. There's too much noise, there's too much information and nobody knows what's reliable or where to start. So if you're a patient and if you've got some kind of problem or condition, it's stressful to try and figure out where do I go? What's trustworthy, what's not? So I think that's the issue. Now we have good information, but it's sprinkled around there mixed with terrible information and patients are left without a guide. 

Eva Sheie (08:52):
So you decided to become their guide? 

Dr. Canes (08:54):
Yeah. So there is one little tie here. If there ever was a light bulb moment, your aesthetic audience will immediately understand what I'm talking about here. The whole LinkedIn bio phenomenon started to proliferate and I'm sure aesthetic providers have got either Link Tree or shorbe or now there's a hundred of 'em, but there's only one bio link allowed. So a whole industry grew around giving you a whole stack of buttons on your LinkedIn bio page. So that started to happen. Meanwhile, my secretary is telling me this is getting to be too much because I said, oh by the way, if they have kidney cancer, send them to this link and if they have kidney stones, send them to this link and if they're having a vasectomy, this. So the LinkedIn bio thing popped on my radar and I thought, my god, this is perfect. Now I can organize all my patient education resources, still not thinking I'm going to start a company around this. So I made myself a little prototype on one of these third party link in bio sites and now my secretary could finally take a deep breath and send only one link and patients loved it. That moment a light bulb started to go off. I thought, alright, maybe there's something here. 

Eva Sheie (10:17):
Was the LinkedIn bio giving you data on which items people clicked on? Could you actually use that to figure out what was most interesting to them? 

Dr. Canes (10:26):
Yeah, that's a great question. It would show me certain links nobody clicked on and others were very popular that I might not have predicted it let me delete things that nobody was clicking on and then double down on the types of content that patients seem to enjoy. So what I did, there's this adage in the world of startups and health technology and entrepreneurship that I've immersed myself in lately, that if you have an idea, you shouldn't go build it, you should test it first. And it's a step that a lot of people skip because, well, there's a lot of reasons why, but one of them is you're going to get a referendum on your, whether you have a good idea or a bad one really fast and people want to avoid that, but really if you have an idea, you want it to fail quickly if it's going to fail. So I mocked up a similar patient education site for about 10 friends of mine, 10 other urology doctors, and I said, Hey, would you mind trying this out? I think it's a cool idea, but maybe you think it's terrible, let me know. So a couple of them tried it and didn't use it much, but a significant number of them got back to me like, oh my god, this has really improved my clinic day. A few of them even printed the QR code of their page on their business card. They were handing it out to as many patients as they possibly could. And so small light bulb moment when I saw what Link tree was all about, big light bulb moment when my friends who tried it out out we're doubling down on it and then it became clear, alright, there's other doctors like me who have a similar pain point who might want to use something like this. 

Eva Sheie (12:26):
Oh, I have so many thoughts. 

Dr. Canes (12:28):
So by the way, for the listeners who don't know it's called WellPrept now and it actually exists. 

Eva Sheie (12:34):
I was going to make them wait until the end of time. 

Dr. Canes (12:36):
You're going to make them wait, right? 

Eva Sheie (12:37):
No, thank you for the 

Dr. Canes (12:38):
Cat's out of the bag. 

Eva Sheie (12:41):
WellPrept, P-R-E-P-T, 

Dr. Canes (12:45):
Right. Exactly. 

Eva Sheie (12:46):
Yes. That's what you want your patients to be. There's a couple things I hear here that are really valuable. One is the idea that you had enough humility to ask your colleagues to try it before you decided whether it was something you should keep going with as a business or even as an idea. And that kind of where we are right now with technology, there's another huge movement called no code and you can build entire companies without a developer now, and this is a really good thing for all of us, myself included, because developers are expensive.

Dr. Canes (13:22):
Very.

Eva Sheie (13:24):
And if you can make something without one, you should totally do it. You can make podcasts without a developer, which is why I love it among 9,000 other reasons. And then the third thing I heard you say was not everyone was into it, but the ones who were into it really ran with it. And that signal must have been really powerful for you. 

Dr. Canes (13:48):
Yeah, it was a strong signal and for other maybe entrepreneurs in the audience, ideas don't have to be everything to everyone and I was okay with the fact that not everybody used it. There are very few things that if you think about the tools that you enjoy using, not everybody is a carbon copy. So when you show your idea to the world, it's like having a child and it can feel like a real personal insult when somebody says your idea is terrible and they don't use it. But if enough people like it, then the question becomes of just finding more people like that not convincing the people who think your idea is silly to try to use it. 

Eva Sheie (14:34):
There's an interesting parallel here that I want to bring up. In aesthetic surgery, we know that the top two drivers of patient satisfaction are that number one, the patient felt the surgeon listened carefully and that one is by far the most important driver is they're trying to build a relationship and bond with the surgeon and if they feel like the surgeon listened to them, they're much more likely to choose that surgeon. And at aesthetics we get to choose. We don't have to take the doctor that our insurance says we have to. And I think being able to choose is becoming more widespread, especially as people realize that they can make choices for other kinds of surgery, but a lot of people I still think don't know they can do that. And then the other driver is that they felt properly informed about recovery. So really being happy with aesthetic surgery doesn't necessarily mean that you got great results. It starts with having a great experience and being prepared for what's going to happen once you go home and when people are not prepared for what's going to happen when they feel like it was glossed over or it was made out to be easy when it was really very difficult or they didn't know who to call. Anything having to do with that sort of first two to five days post-op can really color the way that they felt about the whole experience even if their results were a hundred percent perfect. 

Dr. Canes (16:00):
That is an incredible statistic because it's not intuitive. I mean I think if you were to ask people to guess what the biggest drivers of satisfaction in aesthetics would be, most people even in aesthetics might guess results. 

Eva Sheie (16:17):
It would.

Dr. Canes (16:18):
Right? But it's also fascinating to me because what it really tells you is that all specialties in medicine and surgery are more alike than they are different, especially when it comes down to the face-to-face interaction with another person, the patient and the provider and the patient and the provider are face-to-face. It doesn't really matter at that point if it's gastroenterology, aesthetics, urology, family medicine, cardiology, there's a person who needs help, who wants to feel some kind of connection to the provider. That's what I take away from what you said. 

Eva Sheie (17:00):
Going back to what you said earlier about your patients now coming in and actually having conversations and questions. To me that's the other half of being heard is that they're not there for a lecture from you now they're not there to be read an article out loud by their surgeon. They're there to actually talk about what they read instead, which to me suggests they would feel a lot more heard. 

Dr. Canes (17:28):
Yeah, there's no question. I mean in my case, I'm talking about men's health issues and urologic cancers, but same is true of a rhinoplasty or dermal fillers if the basic information is available beforehand, have you ever heard of the concept of a flipped classroom? 

Eva Sheie (17:48):
Maybe. 

Dr. Canes (17:50):
So the flipped classroom is this idea of actually giving students the information to learn beforehand and having them come in already have learned the information so that the space in the lesson is opened up for deeper learning. And so what we're talking about here is bringing this idea of a flipped classroom into medical or surgical care. And it's true of aesthetics too, but our patients really are students. We're trying to teach 'em about a procedure. We're trying to teach 'em about a condition. So the question comes up, how do you, for those two items that you highlighted, which are so important, how do we make somebody feel listened to? How do we make somebody feel properly informed, not just feel properly informed, but be properly informed? I don't see how to do it well without having them do some homework beforehand, ideally. 

Eva Sheie (18:47):
When you have a cancer patient and there's also sort of a second layer with this kind of patient, this isn't elective like a vasectomy or something like that, how do you approach getting them to educate themselves while they're also grappling with the idea that they may not live through whatever they're about to go through? 

Dr. Canes (19:08):
You have to give them some sense of what the end of the road is beforehand. Like listen, this is something that we can deal with. We deal with this all the time. We're going to get you through to the other side of this where this is a footnote of what happened to you in 2022, but in order to get there, we got to educate you, give 'em a sense of the punchline so that they can see the big picture. There's some sense of relief. Now mind you, I'm not in my practice dealing generally with terminal cancers, stage four cancers. Most of those patients are interfacing with medical oncologists. So in my practice I am dealing mostly with localized or at most locally advanced cancers where generally the final answer is going to be something good and happy and fortunate. 

Eva Sheie (20:02):
Do you find a lot of cancer yourself with your patient base? You're the first one to find it? 

Dr. Canes (20:08):
Yeah, I work in two different locations, one where there's a lot of referral of already diagnosed cancers and then in another more underserved location. I'm making a lot of the diagnoses at the outset and the way that that's handled in the visit is very different. What I do to try and soften those blows and to make it easier is before the diagnostic procedure, let's just keep it broad before the biopsy, I do a lot of counseling about, okay, the biopsy could show these three outcomes before we even do it, and there's a very good kind of cancer we can find where we might just monitor it. There's a cancer, we'd be happy that we found that needs treatment and then the biopsy can be negative. So patients are given time to digest different categories of outcomes before they're thrust into it. I think because a lot of doctors are maybe time pressed or I'm not sure why may not give that heads up. And then it's like wham, the diagnosis comes with no warning, no preamble, no sense that this could have been one of the things that we found. You see what I'm saying? 

Eva Sheie (21:25):
Certainly I know when I worked for someone who was trying to implement a lot of really difficult changes, they would call this seeding the idea before the change happened. So they would go through and give us a lot of early warning about things that might be coming that maybe weren't going to happen but might happen. And I think about that when you were prepared. It's just like being prepared for recovery if you're prepared for anything and what might happen than when it does happen. It's a little bit easier to deal with than being surprised. 

Dr. Canes (22:02):
Yeah. 

Eva Sheie (22:03):
I picked up on something you said there that you work in two environments. Are those both hospitals? 

Dr. Canes (22:09):
They're both hospital based, but in one community there's more of a need for a general urologist. So I see a lot of conditions from square one and then the others are more of a university setting where there's a lot of referrals. 

Eva Sheie (22:27):
In those hospital settings or the way that you work in those two settings, does the organization send out a patient satisfaction survey and do they use the metrics then to chase you around and make you do things? 

Dr. Canes (22:42):
They both collect the information. In some instances it's loosely tied to compensation in a small way, but generally there's too many physicians and too much data for me to see that that's being used in any specific actionable way, I pay personal attention to it. I'll get a monthly report and I'll try to do what I can to boost the numbers. 

Eva Sheie (23:13):
Well, one thing that crossed my mind around using a system like WellPrept to teach your patients what's going to happen or to prepare them better is that if you were being measured with a patient satisfaction survey that you could not control and aesthetics, the people who use it are deciding that they care enough about their patient's experience to actually gather data about it, but not everyone who works in a hospital has control over what kind of survey or what kind of instruments being used to do that. And I think there's an interesting decision that you made here to control your patient's experience with something that you could do instead of just looking around and saying, someone's got to fix this. 

Dr. Canes (23:58):
Oh my God, I just want to keep pulling on that thread because I think you're absolutely right. This issue of control, I see it all the time as I watch colleagues in multiple practice settings feel a loss of autonomy. I do think this contributes to physician burnout. They'll be told something about patient satisfaction scores or some other aspect of their practice that's broken and there's the sense that they're going to wait for somebody to help. Well, when's the marketing department going to help me with this? And when is the staff going to help me with that? And it seems too daunting and WellPrept in a small way gives some control back. You don't need any help from the web team. You don't need any help from the marketing team. You just go into your dashboard, you make a page on a condition that you see, put some videos on there, put your handouts on there, change it whenever you want, hand it to your patients. 

(24:56)
You got some control back over this little corner of how your patients flow through the process of diagnosis and treatment. And I think that's hugely important. We have a problem with the physician workforce now feeling pain and we need to give them back a little bit of autonomy. The other thing I want to just refer back to that you mentioned before about making sure that the patient's questions are answered so that they feel listened to. I can tell you a switch that flipped just in myself before I started using a system like this. The patient's questions got pushed to the last two minutes of the encounter. Now doctors or really all providers know that at the end of a visit, you're budgeting already for, oh my God, I got to go write the note and I'm late and I got to go see the next patient. 

(25:56)
You're starting to feel removed from the situation, and so a list of questions come out and how does it feel? You start to resent the questions like, oh my God, these questions, how dare they pull out a list of questions, but really the questions are the most important part. So if you can clear space in the visit for those questions, a lot of early users of well prep are saying that the visit starts with the questions because the patient and the doctor are already on the same page about the basics. So you start with the questions and you know what? That's enjoyable. Those questions are enjoyable if you're not pressed and they're not squished into the last few minutes. I enjoy those questions for a few reasons. Number one, I can't predict exactly what they are, although people ask certain questions commonly for the most part, it's a surprise, which is why is that enjoyable? Because when you don't know what's going to happen next, you are listening intently and you're making a real connection with the other person, which is what you enjoy in the first place. That's why you're doing this thing presumably right? And it's very satisfying. And then on the patient side, I mean, I just know if I went to the doctor and spent time to write down or type out a list of questions, that means something to me and I really deserve is the right word. I deserve to have those questions answered. 

Eva Sheie (27:27):
You reminded me of another really important piece of data that we picked up when I spent five years surveying plastic surgery patients before surgery and after surgery. And one of the other patterns that emerged was that, and I think everyone knows no one likes to wait too long. There's a pretty large fixation on how long were they waiting? I had to wait too long. The one that no one ever thinks of is they don't like to be rushed either. And so imagine having to wait and then also being rushed through your appointment and getting that sort of twice as bad experience. 

Dr. Canes (28:08):
So are you saying that they'll forgive the weight as long as when they're finally seen it's nice and calm and not rushed? 

Eva Sheie (28:17):
They definitely will forgive the weight. I think they equally hate being rushed and having to wait. 

Dr. Canes (28:24):
Yeah, the double whammy is not, yeah. 

Eva Sheie (28:27):
Right. That worst of both worlds experience is not something that anyone wants to have. 

Dr. Canes (28:35):
The other thing is, and I just want to bring a video into this, we haven't talked specifically about what people put on their websites or on their well prepped pages, but the best use case is when the provider records an actual video of them talking and explaining something, some concept. Before I did this, I had, let's just take robotic prostatectomy. Again, it's a common procedure that I do. I had about a 20 minute excellent explanation of it, and I had a 10 minute okay explanation of it, and I had a five minute version when I was rushed that was really quite suboptimal and a two minute worthless explanation. And so the question is how do you make sure that a patient experience is uniform? I mean, everybody should get the best explanation, and I really think practically speaking, one of the only ways to do that is to prerecord something. So my patient experiences are now a little bit more uniform. Here's another example, and this comes from another well prepped user who told me they knew that support group information is something that they should be giving all their cancer patients, but they didn't. They forgot or they were rushed, what have you. If it's on their well prep page for that cancer condition, a nice link to a support group, every patient gets it and those who are interested can follow through on it. 

Eva Sheie (30:13):
Do you have examples you can show us? You want to turn the screen on and 

Dr. Canes (30:17):
Yeah, sure. 

Eva Sheie (30:18):
If you're listening and you want to see what he's referring to. You can switch over to YouTube and I'll put the timestamp right in the show notes there so it's easy to switch over. 

Dr. Canes (30:29):
All right, so I'm showing you the well prepped page of one of our users, Dr. Kutikov, he's a oncologist at Fox Chase Cancer Center. This is his main page where at the top there's some convenience features like you can call the office or any of his. He put his direct nursing triage line driving directions to different office locations. It sort of takes the stress off of nuts and bolts issues for patients. Then there's an area where people can meet him and watch a short video clip about him. And in the post covid and Covid era, I think it's not to be underestimated, the power of seeing somebody talking without a mask on, otherwise, patients in my practice never see my face ever. The mask is now a permanent fixture, and I think it's hard to make a connection with somebody without ever having seen their face, their whole face. 

(31:26)
So there's a video from him, some of his profiles from around the web, a quote from him about his treatment philosophy and then all the major conditions he sees. So I'll just give you an example of his bladder cancer page. So if a patient is seeing him with bladder cancer, they're told to go and visit this page before the visit, and he's put in links to bladder cancer guide from the NCCN, another bladder cancer guide from the Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network, something about the special blue light cystoscopy, a podcast he did on bladder cancer. Now this is incredible to me. I don't think a lot of people think about podcasts in terms of let's get this podcast in front of all patients with a certain condition, and this is 2022. I think it should be part of most patient education materials and you never know how patients learn best. Some may learn best by hearing. 

Eva Sheie (32:33):
I will transcribe a video and read the video before you can get me to watch it. I just don't want to watch video. 

Dr. Canes (32:39):
Yeah, there you go. And other people may want video. So on the right, he's got recommended videos from Dr. Kutikov and he's got one explaining bladder tumor removal, another webinar that he did on bladder cancer and on the bottom you have to consider this is the front door for most bladder cancer patients. On the bottom, they get to see this meet Dr. Kutikov section. So patients could spend a lot of time on this in the days leading up to the visit, and then when they show up, they feel like they've already kind of met Dr. Kutikov and they're not starting from a blank slate. 

Eva Sheie (33:20):
I don't think I could reiterate strongly enough the importance of the patient knowing that this is the material he put together for them. 

Dr. Canes (33:30):
Right. Now I'll just show you a quick view. I'm going to share one more time. So the doctor dashboard is what the doctor sees. This is the behind the scenes view of where they can find their QR code to share. They can see how many times patients have visited each of these pages so they know that patients are actually interacting with the content. And if they want to edit something, say on their bladder cancer page, it's all self-service. They can add video links, they can add resource buttons, they can add prescription buttons and then preview the changes on their pages. So 

Eva Sheie (34:09):
It looks like a mobile view, is it? 

Dr. Canes (34:11):
Yeah, it 

Eva Sheie (34:12):
Or a mobile first?

Dr. Canes (34:13):
It's a mobile first view. Yeah, exactly. So it's super easy for people to set this up and then edit it whenever they want. When it comes to the web, it used to be that we really needed web designers and web developers and all this, but Hugh mentioned the no-code movement, and this is sort of like a low-code, no-code way for people to create their own patient education pages. 

Eva Sheie (34:40):
And the people who are using it. What do they tell you about building content? 

Dr. Canes (34:45):
So what we've done is I had this hypothesis that if I welcome doctors and I opened the gates wide and they showed up to blank pages that nobody would use it, and that has turned out to be probably the case. So we've preceded content there so that when they onboard their pages have stuff on it already. 

Eva Sheie (35:08):
You ever have any controversy with what you've preloaded for them? Like, I disagree. 

Dr. Canes (35:12):
Yeah, occasionally people are like, I don't like this resource, but people are better at being editors than authors, so they are happy to delete a couple that they don't like and add their own than to start from nothing. So users are saying that they really appreciate the fact that they show up and there's stuff already there. Full disclosure, I don't have that situation set up for every specialty yet, although we're working towards that. 

Eva Sheie (35:39):
Which specialties do you have built out right now? 

Dr. Canes (35:42):
Right now I have urology fully built out and almost fully for the branches that are very adjacent to urology. So gynecology, radiation oncology, almost interventional radiology, things that branch very adjacent to urology, medical oncology as well. Those are almost ready. And then there've been some early adopters in other specialties who have been ravenous about creating their own pages from scratch. I think there won't be too many users like that, but there are some doctors who see this and instantly kind of get it like, oh yeah, I could use this. And that's been my experience so far that doctors have a very strong radar. If you tell a doctor, I have something that's going to help you and make you more efficient, they can tell right away if it's BS or if there's actually something helpful. So for example, if you tell a doctor, I have a scribe and they're going to do all your notes for you, clearly beneficial, or in your medical record software, I'm going to create a bunch of templates and dot phrases for you. Clearly helpful, we're going to send you to a resilience seminar, possibly helpful, but people's, the hair on the back of their neck starts to stand up. I'm not sure if that's going to help me so far. Well prepped has been thankfully in a category where people look at it and say, okay, that's probably going to help. 

Eva Sheie (37:23):
20 years ago, 2023 will be my 20th year working in internet marketing, and I'm pretty sure I built my first website in 1995 or 96. 

Dr. Canes (37:35):
By coding HT ML yourself?

Eva Sheie (37:37):
Yes. I liked figuring out the puzzle. I had a good time tinkering with it, and I remember getting hired at the Campus computer center where I did my undergrad and maybe two months in I was like, ah, this is boring. I'm never going to need this for anything. I was learning Unix. I was like 

Dr. Canes (38:00):
Wow. 

Eva Sheie (38:00):
doing all this really cool stuff and I decided it didn't want to do it. 

Dr. Canes (38:05):
It's incredible. 

Eva Sheie (38:06):
Such a dumb move on my part. But over the years we started helping doctors because there was no way they could figure it out on their own and with enough time, time was always, you're all obviously smart enough to write code and build stuff, but time is always the issue. But I think that we're really seeing the end of that sort of difficulty and there's another product I've just seen that was built from inside of a plastic surgery office that is beautiful and it so organically follows the way that medicine is practiced in both yours and the other product. I'm thinking of that. I think there's a huge advantage there now, and even 10 years ago, I would see stuff built by doctors and think, this is not quite going to work. Never had enough time, but I think we're really coming into a new era where you're going to be able to continue building products from inside the practice that will really have a huge impact on the patient experience. I love it. Yeah, no code. Okay, last question. Your wife happens to be in aesthetics. 

Dr. Canes (39:25):
Yes. 

Eva Sheie (39:26):
And I wonder how you discuss business around the dinner table and help each other. Do you pick things up from each other? 

Dr. Canes (39:33):
Yeah, we do. I think we're both, 20 years ago if you'd asked either of us, are you an entrepreneur? We both would've said no. And we each discovered an entrepreneurial side. So she has her own medical aesthetics practice, and she opened it up in 2018 and has really created quite an incredible following. She has an incredible strategic vision that comes to her without any effort, I know that this is what I need to offer and this is how it needs to happen, and this is what the patient experience should be. That part comes very easy to her. So we end up discussing a lot of the business side of things because the projects that we're each working on overlap in that way. I mean, if you want to spread a message about a good idea, no matter what it is, there's always going to be some commonalities. We don't talk too much about actual patients, but we have five boys, and so it's mostly fart jokes and penis jokes. 

Eva Sheie (40:40):
Oh, I bet you have an interesting take on those jokes. Bring myself to say the word on a podcast. 

Dr. Canes (40:47):
Right. 

Eva Sheie (40:49):
<laugh> That's awesome. Okay. 

Dr. Canes (40:51):
That dominates the dinner conversation. 

Eva Sheie (40:54):
Oh no. I bet your wife is like, I can't wait for this part of this to be over. 

Dr. Canes (41:00):
Yeah, definitely. 

Eva Sheie (41:02):
Okay, two things. One app from your phone that you cannot live without and a podcast that you love. 

Dr. Canes (41:10):
All right. The app from my phone that I cannot live without is Notion. Are you familiar with Notion? 

Eva Sheie (41:18):
I have tried it and given up several times and it's on that very short list of things I need to master. 

Dr. Canes (41:26):
Yeah, so Notion is so much about everything that it's hard to encapsulate, but it's basically like having a CRM for your life. I think that's how I would describe it. The user interface is being copied by a lot of different apps now, but it's a blank slate. It's like a blank page. You hit forward slash and it brings up a menu, and so you can customize it for to-do list, to manage projects, to create Company wikis. You can use Zapier to interface with any other app out there that you can possibly imagine. It's worth going on Notions YouTube page and watching their first three basic videos. It'll click and you can borrow other people's templates to get going. It's worth taking a dive. 

Eva Sheie (42:15):
I will. Thank you for reminding me. And a podcast that you love?

Dr. Canes (42:21):
Podcast that I love. The podcast that I am most consumed with right now is called Lenny's Podcast. Lenny Rachitsky is a very good interviewer who himself has been involved with a lot of software companies and he now interviews world-class experts, marketers, project managers, computer developers who've worked with some of the most iconic companies, Google, Asana, the list goes on, and in these interviews, he uncovers best practices that allow these companies to have successful growth stories. So I'm consumed with the podcast. He has a way of taking deep dives into conversations. You and he have a lot in common. The conversations go very much under the surface, and so they're fascinating. 

Eva Sheie (43:21):
This looks great. I can't wait to listen to it. I'm obsessed with the Founder's Podcast right now. 

Dr. Canes (43:28):
I don't know that one. 

Eva Sheie (43:29):
He's got a list of 1100 biographies and autobiographies of very, very successful entrepreneurs, founders, and so he basically reads the books for us and then discusses by himself sometimes for an hour and a half what we need to take away from the books. So I just drove from Austin to Dallas and back, and I listened to six episodes, and when I got home, I was just bursting with stuff I had to tell my husband that I heard on this show. So good. 

Dr. Canes (44:00):
The other one that I'm listening to right now is called Startups for the Rest of Us, and it is a very long running podcast. I think they're on episode 600 and something. It talks specifically about software as a service, applications for founders who have bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped their companies, and it talks about everything from taking an idea, a software idea to market and beyond. It's very done kind of a niche podcast, but 

Eva Sheie (44:34):
Yeah, I'll put all of these links in the show notes. Yeah, thank you for the recommendations. Those look great. Okay. What is the future of WellPrept? 

Dr. Canes (44:44):
Yeah, so it's a very exciting moment right now because we have a few hundred urologists who are early adopters and with very strong signals. I mean, people are so happy they're sending me emails with the main message being, thank you, which is incredibly heartwarming, but also kind of incredible that people are thanking someone to do with a software product. Right now the goal for 2023 is to try and run with that growth in urology and then start adding specialties on top of it one by one, and that's going to involve actually building out a team to make this happen. It's going to be a great year. Looking forward to it. 

Eva Sheie (45:28):
I'm very excited for you and I will help you as much as I can. 

Dr. Canes (45:33):
Thank you so much. 

Eva Sheie (45:36):
Thanks for listening to Patient Obsessed from inquiry to appointment and appointment to surgery. The obsession has always been and always will be conversions. For more resources and middle of funnel marketing advice, go to patient obsessed podcast.com. If you're doing something innovative to improve or disrupt the patient experience, we want to hear from you. If you're a doctor or an aesthetic professional and have ever thought about doing your own podcast, you can try podcasting for free. On our Meet the Doctor podcast. Schedule your free recording session at Meet the doctor podcast.com, and listen to Meet the Doctor on YouTube, apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. I'm Eva Sheie, your host and executive producer. Production Support comes from Mary Ellen Clarkson and Hannah Burkhart. Our engineer is Daniel Croeser. Patient Obsessed is a production of The Axis, T H E A X I S. I O.