The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Andrew Morton, CEO of Bloom Health Partners

Episode Date: December 21, 2021

Bloomhealthpartners.com About Bloom: Bloom Health Partners, the national occupational health and health-technology company that’s had a huge hand in helping Fortune 500 companies, schools, Hollywood productions, and sporting events, safely reopen. To date, Bloom has built custom covid testing programs for the likes of PepsiCo, Six Flags (all 22 parks in North America), American Airlines, Amazon Studios, Netflix, Apple Studios, Viacom, Live Nation, and many others. With a new wave of pandemic uncertainty brought about by the Omicron variant, discussions around vaccine and testing mandates, an abundance of new home Covid testing options, I wanted to offer up interviews with Bloom’s CEO, Andrew Morton. He can help shed light on what the future of work, school, and entertainment might look like, based on Bloom’s proven track record. He can also discuss the importance of implementing ongoing testing programs across industries, as new variants continue to surface. Morton was formerly CEO of Maitri Health Technologies—a global healthcare supply platform out of Canada—and oversaw the acquisition of Bloom Health by Maitri in July 2021. The $20 million deal, which brought together Maitri’s innovative cloud strategy for safe workplaces and Bloom Health’s occupational health system, has proven successful in helping organizations of all types return to work intelligently and maintain long-term operations. Bloom’s founder and CEO Andrew Morton launched the company at the onset of the pandemic when covid testing was scarce and inconvenient, and the outlook for the economy was incredibly bleak. The company now has the resources to scale their development of pop-up modular testing laboratories, which gives them the control and flexibility necessary to carry out workable covid plans for clients across a range of industries. Additionally, in November, they announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with Montgomery Public Schools, the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH), the Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE), and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Public Health, to offer free and voluntary COVID-19 testing for students, faculty and staff.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The chrisvossshow.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly, certainly appreciate you guys. Now, can you guys believe it? It's Christmas week. Now, you might be hearing this 10 years from now, the way our videos go and our content. But it's actually Monday of Christmas week 2021. I almost said 2022. I'm trying to get out of myself here.

But, guys, I hope you're all set up for Christmas. I hope you're staying warm and wonderful. And you have a lot of gratitude for what you have in life, no matter where you're at. Appreciate the holidays. Appreciate what you have. And in the meantime, appreciate my YouTube channel at youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss. What a segue. Hit that bell notification button. Also go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss. You can see all the wonderful books you're reading and everything over there. My two books as well. You can also go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. You can see all the wonderful books you're reading and everything over there. My two books as well. You can also go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those different places. It's crazy all those places the kids are at, we're at, except for Snapchat, for the most obvious of reasons.

I always lose the Snapchat crowd with that joke, but that's okay. Anyway, guys, also go see the big LinkedIn newsletter we got. We got access to their newsletter about three weeks ago. Holy crap, we're killing it. Like every day we put out this massive newsletter, and people on LinkedIn are just subscribing and getting in their emails. It's like thousands of people. It just keeps growing.

So we're just loving what's going on there. So make sure you subscribe to that. It's pretty fun. Anyway, guys, we have another amazing CEO on the show today. We're going to be talking to him about his company, what he does, and how it works, and it's in the series of COVID and health and everything. His name is Andrew Morton. He is the CEO of Bloom Health Partners and Matri Health.

Do I have that pronounced right, Andrew? Matri, that's right. Matri Health. Boy, a good guess there. Andrew is a seasoned global technology executive with a track record of successfully building and running innovative companies. Warren was an SVP global sales for Zodiac Interactive, a private equity-held software company focused on advanced software for tier one cable. I'm sorry if I got that right there. Tier one cable and telecom providers.

He headed up broadband TV for Entone, where he launched successful operations on multiple continents. Entone was acquired by Amino Communications, L-O-N-A-M-O, where he worked for several years post-transaction on the senior executive team. He co-launched global operations for Comtrend Corporation and a leader in telecom hardware and software. Early in his career, he held growth roles at 3Com. I think I was stuck in that when it came out,.coms. And at IBM spinoff company Lexmark. Welcome to the show, Andrew. How are you?

Hey, great. Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. Was 3Com one of the companies I bought in the dot-com boom era? We were very popular in the dot-com boom era. Yeah, I think it was one of those companies like Earthlink that I made a bunch of money on, just my first day. You probably remember a product called the Palm Pilot way, way back. You have enough gray hairs to remember this product. So no offense, because I have a few too. So 3Com was a combination of U.S. robotics, which in its day, we're talking late 90s, to date myself right away for your viewers,

is we had modems, big data networking. The founders of 3Com actually invented UConnect. So this was Silicon Valley earlier days. We'll call it Generation 2 because there was a whole generation before me that came in the 80s. So this is the 90s. And then we eventually acquired U.S. Robotics. And then U.S. Robotics had the Palm Pilot. Eventually they called it Palm because they couldn't call it Pilot anymore.

The Pilot pen company didn't like that very much. There's a big copyright thing that happened there. And then in 2000, let's see, 2001 is when I resigned to launch a company. Oh, wow. And then my friend, Annie Grignone, who built the iPhone, went to Palm for their phones, I think it was. I still have a bag of my Palm Pilot and the modem and the charger, and it still works. Amazing. Is that insane?

It's got the pen and everything else. It means our marketing department was telling the truth. That's the good part. That's crazy. So now you're working with this company, Bloom. Let me make sure I get the title right, Bloom Health Partners. Give us your.com. I guess people should be able to look you up on the interwebs and find out more about you as we're talking.

Throw that at us, if you would, please. BloomHealthPartners.com. There you go. There you go. So what exactly is Bloom Health Partners? So Bloom Health Partners is an operational health company. So we have a series of labs and we have clinical staff across the United States and now Canada. I'm actually in our Vancouver office at the moment, but we are primarily based in Dallas

for the most of our operations. And then we've got folks in Atlanta, folks in Los Angeles. There are new locations coming and there's a lot of activity happening. We were born out of 2020, early 2020, we started. Originally, like many looked at the pandemic as something that really underscored a real issue. And there were some real needs for services. The initial founders of Bloom Health, and you mentioned Matri, we were really coming together two companies. So back in July, we merged businesses, CEO of the organization. Primarily our business is made up of health software and clinics and testing. And there's a bit of all of that.

Testing is really a function of operational health. And that's why companies seem to hire us quite a bit. And so you do COVID testing? COVID testing today. That's right. And really as a function of operational health. And what we found is a lot of companies, especially really big ones, they've seen us in crisis mode and they've turned to us and really started to hire us for things like occupational health. When I say operational health, that really means keeping the company functioning or keeping the organization functioning. And what COVID testing is now doing is pivoting towards other kinds of tests. So what's a good example? We just did a bunch of flu shots for some law offices in the Dallas area. And the reason why I wanted that is they said, look, you're really good on the medical side.

We need somebody we can trust. So operational health made a lot of sense for them to come to hire us and start doing services like that. And that's really outside of COVID. Because long-term, the business is really more about operational health and for bringing health services to businesses and organizations. COVID just gave us the opportunity to prove ourselves in crisis mode for a lot of these people.

And you guys, if I recall, I think we had your executives on the, some of your executives on the show, I think, and you guys really scaled fast, like incredibly fast. Absolutely. So Cole and Abbas, they had some, Cole, I saw it, and Abbas Khan were on, I think about three months ago, two months ago, something like that. And they did talk a bit about some of the altruistic background of the company, which is genuine. Really, they did start in a parking lot, which and it really was that. And it really filled the need. I remember this really well. When they were sitting in that parking lot, I remember this story really well because we all came together. We met each other. We all knew this was going to work as partners. There's a lot of what we call Bloom

Health Partners. And we are a corporate structure. We have leadership and a pretty serious board and all that. But we really run this really as peers in a lot of ways because everybody has to bring something to the table especially as you build out a system a business like ours as quickly as we're growing yeah you know cole and abbas they started a parking lot yeah they were doing testing across the street from one of the largest health care centers in the world in houston that's the first place they did covid testing and what i recognized around the same time when we launched the original business that really merged with Bloom Health Partners and became the master company is that there were inadequacies in the healthcare system. Not that there's something wrong, but there was a real need. And if nothing, COVID has told

individuals that they better get serious about their health. And companies are recognizing that as well, which I'll get into in a minute. But what that means is health is definitely the future. And as an employee of a larger company, if I'm sitting there looking at my options, because as an employee nowadays, if I were somebody looking for a job, I have many options nowadays. Everybody knows about the challenges with employment. It's hard to find good people. Always has been. Now it's even tougher. I'm going to go for the company that has better health care.

Because the second question I ask is, okay, first question always is, how much are you going to pay me? Second question is always, and what are the benefits? What does health care look like? Well, companies now are starting to offer health care to their employees as a benefit. More than a benefit. It's always been there, but as a perk. And if there's health care on site where there's a clinic, if I don't feel well, I just go to the clinic at the factory floor. That's a better employer than the ones where I have to go off site and put it on my PPO or my HMO.

And that's what you guys do. You guys go out and set up, you guys have these, I think, mobile units if I recall correctly? Originally, that's right. So originally there were mobile labs that we set up originally for COVID testing. But what's happened now is we're taking that same nimble mentality and doing essentially these pop-up clinics for companies. And what they won't see, but for them, this is a long-haul thing. And I'll give you a kind of example of where it came from.

So we have a very serious science clinical staff. We have a very serious medical background on the team, our board advisory. They're a pretty solid bunch. But with all of that, they all have the experience that we need to really show us, hey, look, this is what a clinic looks like. These are medical services. But companies are now looking for better ways to attract employees. And the big question they have to us is, okay, we understand you have testing, you do labs and all that. They know that we're all brick and mortar labs now because we're no longer in trailers, which were, we started way, way back. We're taking that same nimble mentality to bringing towards companies to bring

occupational health there. So if an employee is hurt or employee doesn't feel well, they don't have to leave the factory. If there's something that's a little bit more serious and clearly we're not doing open heart surgery in a factory floor and then crazy like that. But we are doing is offering health services for companies to give their employees. It's pretty smart.

It's not a new concept, but it's a concept that's needed a little bit of a kick for a little while. And the reason why is there are traditional ways healthcare is laid out. We've identified as if we innovate and layer different kinds of services together, employers can save money. Employees feel a little bit happier about being there. If we do things like help them manage the data that comes out of those clinics, we clearly have to keep the data anonymous. Individuals' personal health information is private.

A company can know how many diabetics do we have? How many people have been tested for cancer lately? These early screening you can do without having to do anything invasive. It's all lab-based and we have labs that support that. What about drug testing? This is a big deal. So why don't we have all those services in the same clinic? That's a new concept. And then the bigger part of the data side is now they can start figuring out risk assessment as an employer to figure out longevity of the workforce. And

the bigger one is what their insurance is going to cost them. That's the really big one. I've had those conversations with my companies where the insurance company shows up and goes, we need to talk about a couple of your employees. And I'm like, what's going on? And they have the histories and stuff.

But you guys probably have a faster turnaround because, number one, you're on site. Somebody doesn't have to drive across town and wait in some waiting room for 50 million hours and lose whole days of playing around with hospitals and stuff, maybe. Absolutely. It's faster turnaround and it's higher productivity for the employer. There's two big things that happen here. You have workers' compensation where somebody hurts themselves in a factory. So normally, obviously there's EMTs, but often if it's an industrial environment, you have emergency medical folks that are sitting there on site. But in many cases, if somebody's hurt themselves in an environment where it's not necessarily a dire emergency, they generally just get sent off site.

That's a huge cost to a company to send people off site. Oh, yeah. And generally, they don't want to put that on their insurance plan because it's a marker against the insurance. Oh, so it's not a marker to insurance if they use you? If they use us, we're not insurance. We're the company's paying for us as a occupational health clinic. Oh, that's brilliant. So, you know, and they do. Saves money, right?

Yeah. And now you have, and here's the big, let's face it, Gen Z. The next generation that the last generation is beating up on, because that always seems to happen, my parents' generation, they were supposed to be lazy, and that obviously didn't work out. And I'm Gen X and that didn't work out either. But right now, Gen Z is getting into the workforce. How do you attract Gen Z to come work in your company? You got to give them a good environment to work in. You have to pay them market rates and all that. Exactly. Now in the new world of Amazon

opening in multiple cities, you now have frankly a pretty good employer that offers free healthcare. So as an employer that's not Amazon, how do you compete with that? Yeah. The best way to do it is to offer a perk. You can offer a free buffet for 24 hours like Google does, which

is cool. I come from the tech world, so that's a cool thing to offer. But I think it's a lot more interesting to most potential employees to have healthcare. Yeah. Especially now in the age of COVID and all this stuff that's going on. And I think COVID has really taught everybody the importance of health and how just being healthy, it got me in shape. I started working out because I'm like, I get this stuff and it's probably going to take me out. And a lot of the people that sadly either passed away from COVID or had issues, major issues with it, and sometimes they're long haulers, were people that were already preconditioned to different things like diabetes and different things. And certainly being more healthier maybe gave you a better chance to survive.

I'm not sure the exact numbers on that. But health, I think we realize that, hey, man, health is kind of important. Yeah. I hate to say a blessing in disguise because it's awful, the pandemic and the deaths and people that are quite ill from all this. But if nothing, there are some lessons learned from the pandemic. And one of them is without question, get serious about your health. Yeah. And employers also have a couple more challenges. One is that insurance costs are rising.

A couple reasons why. I think there's a lot of risk now in the new workforce and the new normal, whatever that is meant to look like, because none of us really understand that at this point. But as they plow forward trying to run their businesses and be profitable, if insurance costs are rising, that becomes a big issue. At the very least, if you can provide your employees with incentives to get healthier, that's going to be better for the company. It's going to have a longer term, happier employee. And the employer now, their costs reduce. Everybody seems to win in that scenario. Part of that wellness program is a data component of this where the employer now knows how many employees are participating in the wellness program. Whose body mass index or BMI, they always call it medical world, whose BMI is decreasing. In other words, you know, somebody's waist is getting a little smaller and their shoulders are getting a little bigger.

That's usually a good sign that people are getting a little healthier. Start reporting and stuff like that and looking at that. Well, then the employer now only knows, also knows, first of all, that, okay, I've got X number of employees that are participating. This is good news. The risk assessment on my workforce is looking pretty good. At the same time, they can take that same information. It's anonymous, of course, but show it to the insurance companies and say, hey, this is the picture of my company. Have a look.

Yeah. How much are my premiums this year? Because there are going to be fewer claims from all trends. That's pretty darn brilliant, man. That's brilliant. I mean, getting around those insurance claims. I used to go in the doctor and they'd be like, do you have insurance? And I'd be like, yeah, but I'm not telling you because I'm just in here for a flu.

And like, you have to tell us. I'm like, I'm not telling you. And then later I found out that they get the information somehow anyway. Because I'm like, I'm just going to pay $100 for a penicillin and some flu I would have. But I was always trying to circumvent letting my insurance company know that I had little flus. In defense of the insurance, if they carry, if everybody has insurance

and everybody claims at once, there's no more insurance industry. They can't lose money doing this. And the other challenge they've got is because there was essentially a lockdown and people just weren't reporting in. Checkups were being delayed, all that kind of stuff. The entire data model that they have is gone. there was essentially a lockdown and people just weren't reporting in checkups are being delayed, all that kind of stuff. The entire data model that they have is gone.

How are they supposed to know? So we're seeing it ourselves, even from every client we talked to, they're all saying the same thing. Their insurance rates are going up just by default of being the new normal. Rarely there's risk, but the other risk meaning, you know, what happens if we have another COVID outbreak or something crazy like that? Yeah. And the other side of it is the insurance companies just don't have any recent information to start working out the odds.

Because if you consider how insurance works, it's essentially run by actuaries. They sit there in the calculator and figure out probability. And that's how you run that business. If you don't have mock data, then you're going to go with the worst case scenario. This actually helps the insurance industry become a little more competitive and helps them function. And I think there's a symbiotic relationship that's a potential between employers and insurance carriers if the data is shared back and forth versus the usual data. So there's a female between 35 and 45, typical case. Probability is if they live in the Midwest, they might have heart disease. By the time they're 55, they're safe now.

Okay, nowadays they can get real data. That changes the game a little bit. And maybe because the company is being more proactive with the clinics that they have inside with you guys because you're able to get on stuff quicker and address issues maybe where I'm really bad at that. Like a foot will fall off and I'll be like, oh, that looked that, I don't know, next week or something. And I get around. I don't have time to go there. Because most people, I think, actually come to think of it, some of the studies I understand,

most people don't go see the doctor because it's such a, they've got stuff they're doing. It's a pain in the butt to go to do all that. And so this way they can, you know, get a mammogram if they need it right away and all that sort of good stuff. Is that correct? That's right. Here's what I was told by a very large public company CEO, and it's in FlatOut, that it's less expensive for them in their eyes

to take care of their employees than to replace them. Yeah. If you look at just pure economics. So if somebody's 55 plus, inevitably when you start hitting that age, their health markers start to show up. There's just real things that happen. And if you can, as an employer, get five, 10 more years out of that trained machinist, out of that trained carpenter, whatever they do for the company, that's a heck of a lot cheaper than trying to hire a new one and then put them through an apprenticeship and try to get them all the way up because it takes a real long time. There's a real cost to that.

And for that individual that's got 55 plus, if there's immediate care or an immediate incentive for them to go, maybe make a quarterly drop into the clinic or an ambulance, maybe every six months just for a quick checkup. And then as a result, the net benefit for them is their deductibles on their insurance is lower or some other kind of net benefit. Everybody seems to win in that scenario. Yeah. And you might lower like people that are,

what would you call it? Falsely calling in for work sick. I always have those people. Chris, I got a cough. I should probably go home today. The big one is I want to leave. I want to leave for the afternoon to go to the doctor.

And you're like, I saw you on Instagram at the golf course. Yeah, absolutely. We are taking a lot of our experience from the field. And we're doing, on the COVID side, we're still doing a lot of testing. And I think that's always going to be part of life in a factory and life in a casino and whatever other kind of place where you have people gathering in the same places.

When people congregate, unfortunately, because of Omicron, we're seeing is COVID testing or COVID management is going to be one of many. At some point, this pandemic becomes an endemic. It becomes one thing we manage. We had a pretty large ground game that we run in some places, so we took a lot of that experience in how to deploy quickly and take a real clinical approach to things. I think that's why we lend ourselves very well to operational health. Yeah, it's taken me a while to get settled into it,

but from what they say, this is going to be with us for a long time, and hopefully it just won't be as bad, and hopefully we'll get close to, what do you call it, full where everybody gets vaccinated maybe eventually. That's a big word to use here a lot probably. Yeah. Even in New York, my friends in New York, and so I was looking this up, and I think I saw something this morning that they were discussing, maybe canceling the New Year's Eve party that they're doing.

I think it was from the New York Times or the WAPO. And my friends in New York, and so I was looking up how many people are vaccinated there, and they're going through a huge crisis right now. Just like the numbers are off the chart. In fact, I think they're the largest since the initial hit of COVID. They're certainly the largest in the last year, the cases that are having an outbreak. And they're at, I think it was 71% have one shot and 80% have two shots. And even at 80% of vaccination rates, they're having this outbreak. So it's here to stay for a while with us and the craziness of being up and down. More so than I would have

expected. Bloom Health Partners are really building our business around occupational health and what I call operational health and bringing innovative plans. There are questions about COVID daily from our clients now. We're right now doing testing. A couple of weeks ago

we made an announcement. We're right now doing testing. A couple of weeks ago, we made an announcement. We're doing testing for Alabama state schools. So we have, with the exception of this week and next week, because they're all on school holidays, every day, Monday to Friday, we have our staff all around the state, essentially swapping children in various schools of the families that consent in. It's a consenting program.

And that seems to be, the number is definitely increasing, because I think the emphasis is definitely there. Now, under certain, the mandates are coming around testing and vaccinations at the workplace, stuck in the courts. For us, we're really on the right side of all that. We're really all about testing. So if somebody wants to come and do testing, and many of the operational health clients that we have and the people that want to get into other types of things, they're all turning back to us saying, what can you do about COVID testing? We know you came from there. We didn't have labs.

What can you do for us? And with the requirement will be, and again, we're very much react to what our clients want to see that they're facing the potential that they're going to have to test weekly for all employees that are not vaccinated. Wow. So the goal is if we can do it for children and make it simple for children to do it, I think we can do okay on a factory floor or in a chain of retail stores or that kind of thing. I think we'll do a good job there.

Yeah, a bunch of the school systems that we're trying to figure out the right sort of testing, a ton of their teachers got sick and they had huge outbreaks and they had to keep shutting down. Testing is really important. And even we were talking before the show about CES. They've told us at CES show the next three weeks that they're going to give you a testing kit to go with. When they hand you your badge, they're going to give you a testing kit. And they send a strong email today saying, you really want to try and get your COVID test done 24 hours before you go.

I'm actually driving in to CES so I don't have to fly. And then I'm just going to wear like a hazmat suit inside of CES. But I think I should be pretty safe. I mean, everyone's testing and they put a big thing. But yeah, we also saw, I think it was 37 players in the NFL come down. And I think it was over that Green Bay Packers guy. No, I'm just kidding. It wasn't. It's a good job. You guys do custom COVID-tested programs. How does that work and how does it help get people safely back to work if you want to touch on that great question so we really work around what our clients needs are because everybody's operations were a little bit differently you have an auto plant movie set we do a lot of stuff in the movie and film and tv

industry as well yeah where there is you can imagine the hours are not it's not a nine-to-five job a movie set they can be in the middle of the night they can be different places so give you a couple good examples we actually put labs we have a nice lab in atlanta there's that there are a ton of studios around there and what we really do is we run shifts based on what the needs are and our collections happen around the needs of the studio so some sets will run at night some sets around the daytime we do the collections and then of course they have different windows they need for response time so our lab is very much on the ready and because we're so efficient in the way our labs are running atlanta and dallas and the other places we run the whole idea behind this is to

work around the needs of the client and run it so that way they get their results timely because if they have first of all they have a delay because they're not getting results that's money because they have no if we are you know poor if we're low if we're low grade of the science we're really planning ourselves out and we're very serious about the scientific part of this. We have false positives or, heaven forbid, false negatives, which are even worse. We get into situations like that. Time is money. I was told by one of the studio heads, a good studio will run the running sets at any given time around the world.

And they can be in the range in costs anywhere between $300,000 and $2 million a day, depending on the size of production. Wow. So a shutdown there or a full fair is very expensive. That's killer. I know Atlanta has, I forget the name of that gentleman who made all the movies, but he's really turned Atlanta into a huge sort of movie business sort of thing going on down there. It's like a second.

Lots of credits. I've got a lot of films made now. You'll see a little state of Georgia logo at the bottom of the credits usually. Oh, really? Working in the state of Georgia. So we've done that. there's one movie we did it's a big big blockbuster movie it's probably one of the biggest of the year we actually did a double-wide trailer we actually erected it up in oklahoma for them we had it running there for six months with the

movie set and we essentially every time they come and swab hours later they get the results wow and what i can say is on our watch, we've never had a shutdown. That is awesome, dude. That is awesome. Pete's, hey, you got to go to that clinic across town and five hours in traffic and you come back. Oh, they said that they think you need to do the bigger test. So you're going to have to go back. And it's great that you have it on site. You guys have worked with PepsiCo, Six Flags, all 22 parks in north america that is american airlines amazon studios netflix apple studios viacom live nation a lot of these companies apple and google and silicon valley companies they've all been like doing this thing where they're like you know we're gonna everyone's gonna come back the office and then you know omnicrom or covid pops up they're like oh yeah

scratch that it's just like a ongoing thing what do do you guys see post-COVID for Bloom? Or is there ever a post-COVID? Well, we've been thinking post-COVID for a long time. But COVID keeps taking us back in. But if you really are an operational health company that does COVID testing, operational health stays. Really, the whole business is about on-site health and extending care. We're not trying to compete with hospital change.

Hospitals really are becoming an extension of that. We're augmenting that. We're making it easier for companies to function. What companies are finding right now, especially, and I will say this at least, especially in the new economy, and the new economy to me is, I'm already thinking in terms of post-COVID economy. Because if you look at the employment situation right now in the United States and other countries as well, it's very much an employee's market. They really have their pick. It's a lot.

It used to be it's hard to find good people. Nowadays, it's just hard to find people. And I mentioned this earlier, big companies are now realizing that they have to offer perks to their employees just to get them to come to work. And we are that health provider to do it. So COVID's part of it, sure.

But much bigger part of it is, like I said earlier, wellness programs, drug testing. Another one, a big one as well, is workplace assessment or work assessment. Meaning somebody is going to have to work in an industrial environment and it's a specific vocation where maybe they have to pick up a lot of heavy boxes,

climb ladders, that kind of thing. There's actually a whole pre-screening thing that they typically send out and they farm that out to a third party to do it. And they send the potential employee out to see if they're even capable of doing it. All that can be now done on site. It's crazy. Out here in Utah where I'm at, they're just everywhere you go, it just signs up. We'll give $300 gift card.

There's one restaurant I go into and they have a sign on the front door that says, we'll give you $100 if you're first somebody. I'm like, I could get free lunch. I just need to go. I need to start being one of those what do they call them the personal employment agencies i'll be like yeah you need a job man i need a hundred bucks from the restaurant kovitz kovitz a real big deal because not only are businesses fighting for employees and i think it was last friday or two fridays ago i went out to two big chains i went out to a denny's, and I think it was Big Bear restaurants. They were a big chain.

I went to the Denny's. It was like 8 or 9 o'clock at night. It was after the gym, so I wanted a nice omelet for the protein. And I walked in, and the waiting room was full. The whole place, the tables were pretty much empty. And they're like, it's going to be an hour. And I'm like, what do you mean an hour? There's seats right there. And they're like, yeah, the cooks didn't show up. It's just the manager running the grill. And I was like, okay, well, thank you very

much. And the poor gal looked just stressed out. We're going through a hard time together. We all got to get along. So I went over to the big bear place, same thing. And these guys are bigger companies that should be able to pay well. And I had to sit up to the bar. I was just by myself. But fortunately, I could go to the bar and just eat there at the thing. And they said, they go, if you want to eat at the bar, you're going to have to wait because we don't have employees coming in. And one of my favorite restaurants recently, they've been struggling with employees and they had to start doing these segmented hours where they're open like four to nine and 10 to 12.

It's like really weird, their setup. But they had one employee get in with COVID and then they're shut down for two weeks. And so you're either getting screwed by trying to get enough employees and offer employee benefits or COVID decides to get you. It's really tough right now in companies. If we can keep companies operating, we've done our job. And COVID is a small part of it. The longer term is just what you described. How do you get that employee to want to come to work? How do you differentiate yourself as an employer?

How do you differentiate yourselves to employees? When big corporate CEOs are telling us, this is a direct quote from a conversation, I can't name names because they're a public company, but their concern is in all the markets they operate across the United States, there's an Amazon down the street, a big Amazon picking facility that pays $18 an hour, free healthcare, and basically they work around the employees' needs

so they can get people. So how do you compete on that basis for people that are just entering the work? If you're a Gen Z, where are you going to go? Go to the place over there that has healthcare. That's where I'm going to go. And even though the parents of Gen Z, you're probably going to push them towards places where that 19, 20, 25, 30 year old that's now off the family healthcare plan, you're going to say, you're going to have support of the parents parents too because you're not you're you're off the payroll time to go over work over there so if we can give them a health plan that you know includes so we have lower insurance rates premiums because it's to compete you have to

compete for employees now if we can give them better health on site now their aging workforce gets to last a little longer which means you're able to retain a few people and retention is a big deal and then you can attract people with that as a perk. And I am convinced that healthcare is the perk of the next decade. All COVID did was underscore the need for health, but longer term, the desire for health is going to be there. Not beyond pandemic.

I think we'll be at an endemic that's going to come. I've heard immunity. At some point, we're going to get there. It takes some time. And I stay away from all that stuff. I just see this real, in general, health being the kind of thing that can differentiate one employer. And the thing I just realized when I was telling you the story about the restaurant industry

is a lot of employees are switching jobs because certain public-facing exposure things, people that work at a grocery store, at a restaurant, they're coming in contact with a lot of people coming in off the street that could potentially have COVID. And I think a lot of people that didn't come back to the job market or change markets or jobs probably looked at that and said, do I want to work in a high-risk environment? Or would I rather work in maybe a warehouse where I'm not being exposed to hundreds of people like I would say in a restaurant setting? And yeah, I didn't really think about that, but that's got to be a huge sort of decision that's on the mind of employees. Without question. If they know that the employer is taking COVID and just the general management

of it seriously, we'll leave vaccines to the side for a minute because that's a separate topic. This is really about testing. At the very least, they know that people are being tested around them and that these co-workers are safe and that there's a management around that. I think that's a win because it's not a controversial test. And I think that solves a lot of problems for employers to do it that way. And in general, the employee at that point, it's employee satisfaction. They start becoming a little more loyal to their employer longer term. About that employee loyalty, I think that's a real challenge.

You mentioned you went to the Denny's and some other places where they're just – Yeah. This is a real thing. And because people have choices, they can leave that job at the check-in counter because anybody will take them. Because right now, like I keep saying this about the employment market, it's a seller's market right now. Yeah. Very much so. Personally, I wouldn't want to be on a front-facing job where hundreds of people are passing by me every day.

I would make that choice if I worked for somebody else. It really didn't occur to me. And I'm like, wow, yeah, this is a really big deal. And, yeah, I wouldn't want to be – I would be like, I want a job. Go get me one of those midnight jobs where you work at night and you're like, I don't know, to guard things or something. But that's really important. And just healthcare in general, people just realize, and then you're going to have a lot of people right now that have long hauler syndrome from COVID. I've got a lot of friends that have had it twice. They've got long hauler symptoms. And I imagine that's a thing for companies that are concerned about the

long-term health or maintaining, I don't know, maybe the quality of health for people that are suffering from long-term health problems from COVID. I think there's a bit of that. We're just starting to see what that looks like now. The research is definitely coming. We definitely, within our team, we've got some pretty good people on our, especially our advisory. One of our advisors is at Yale Medical Center. He does a lot of work with WHO, Dr. James Shepard. He's definitely what I would consider an expert in the area. His feeling, he's quite optimistic about the outcome of COVID at some point for the general pandemic, which is good. But the big question mark, nobody really knows the answer to yet, according to Dr. Shepard and many others that are on our team, is what does

this look like six months, a year from now? Nobody generally knows. So if there is that clinic on site, at the very least, the employer has some place to direct employees if they're in need. And I think it's all about for the employer, they can be a little selfish about this and say, hey, this is just about the numbers, it's a dollar and cents to run the business. There's tangible, which is a really big deal, which is the employee loyalty. They're taking care of me no matter what. This is great. And that's the kind of place I want to work. If an employer can get employees to that place, that's a big win. Yeah, most definitely. I didn't even think about some of these things. It's just been so obvious in front of my face. But yeah, the long hauler thing, the issues with, and then there's come to think of it too,

we've talked about this on the show before, there's a lot of mental health problems that came out of this COVID thing. I probably need a few psychiatrists. Like we've all been through a little bit. I don't know if it's PSTD, maybe some people went through it. There were some people that took some heavy losses, so they may need some help. But I think we all need a national mental health program after COVID. So one of the things you keep mentioning, I'm not sure if we touched on this, so I want to make sure I clarified it. You described Bloom as an operational health company. What does that mean exactly? And how is that different since some of the traditional health companies and what you guys do that they don't? Primarily geared towards keeping organizations running. I mean, I want to say operational health

and where we definitely innovate in that. And that is that, as I mentioned, the clinical approach backed by data and intelligence, which makes us a little different. But we're willing to layer and innovate medical services within compliance and guidelines to make sure that within a clinic, if we run them on site, or if we're doing services for people, whether it be everything from testing all the way to monitoring people's diabetes and that kind of thing, we want to make sure that all of that is itemized and then layered together within the framework of what a company really needs. The needs of a company in Northern California versus a company that's in Tahoe

versus a company in Chicago, they might have very different demographics. You go to Denver, everybody's fit and they're all in the outdoors. You go to some other parts of the United States, not so much. So you have different kinds of demographics. So we really layer services depending on what they need. And the whole goal is to keep that company operating. And as an operational health provider, we also happen to provide COVID testing. But then the bigger component long-term, you asked about what's after COVID, it's really about maintaining health services.

And then what the employer gets out of this, obviously, is a happier employee. I keep talking about that. But then they also get the data behind it. That data gives them really the backdrop for them to start making smart decisions about how to run their business long-term and do risk. Health is really about keeping the company operating. What differentiates us from anybody else that has traditional clinics and that kind of thing is that we really are willing to innovate and change some of the rules.

We definitely have a board that's serious about healthcare. So our chair of our board is former Alexis, Alexis Smith Klein, GSK. We have the former chief digital officer from Bayer on our board. The current chief medical officer at GE is also on our board. And then for good measure, of course,

our corporate person, the former chief marketing officer from Sprint. So we're making sure that compliance and diligence is there for big company, sea level guy, but at the same time surrounded by a bunch of folks that I would definitely call well-lettered in the medical field. Yeah, you have a strategic advisory board. And I was looking over the names that your PR agent sent me. Dr. Shepard, one of the world's most foremost experts in infectious diseases. And these guys are helping you keep your eye on future stuff. And I guess when Omicron pops up or whatever the new variant pops up,

you guys can get on it and be like, okay, what's going on with this? That's pretty smart. Absolutely. We also have former DHHS, that's the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary, Eric Hargens on our advisory as well, and Joe Kurland, another infectious disease expert, and a few others as well like him. The whole idea is this. As this begins to fade, and hopefully we go to endemic soon, I think everybody wants to have

a normal summer, whatever that is. Christmas isn't going to look like a normal Christmas, so let's talk about a normal summer now. If we can really get there, or even a year from now, I think if nothing everybody agrees that we're going to see another kind some kind of pandemic this is this is a bit of a precursor we've had close calls here in the u.s with things like there's a couple viruses a couple years ago it was sars one that really well h1n1 which was pretty serious luckily not nearly as transmissible that's and there's some others. Ebola made its way through a couple times. Remember, there was a big shutdown in

Texas, and they put the tents up and all that. We had some COVID definitely affecting everybody. And I remember when this started to hit and hearing the rumblings about it back in, like, towards the end of 2019, I heard a lot about this. And in my own world, the tech community at the time, some of our trade shows were trying to get canceled.

So you knew something was up. Yeah. And I think it took a mind of someone like myself and some of the executives that we have here, a combination of myself and some people that keep things within the boundaries of compliance and medicine. But for me, I'm willing to be a little bit disruptive in this. Say, hey, challenge the status quo. We'll keep this from happening again.

How do we help companies structure so they don't have to shut down ever again? The supply chains globally are still reeling from all this. So how do we keep shutdowns from ever happening again when we have the next one of these? Dr. Shepard, he said, look, within the next 10 years, our expectation is in the scientific community, we'll see some other kind of event like COVID. Wow.

Which is rough. But I think if our society gets ready for this, I don't think it has to be as bad. I think companies can stay open as long as there's protocols. We seem to be, I don't know if we're getting better, but we seem to be getting better at dealing with COVID. And everyone seems to be settling in and use services like yours and people just realizing. Yeah, I remember there was a bunch of people that were resistant even after COVID-D and then Omicron came up and everyone went, oh, we better go get vaccinated to help get some more people vaccinated in a way. Even some of the mandates, I've had some, there's some people on my Facebook that are

like, uh, mandate, and I'm like, and turns out the mandates, whether or not they move to the courts and get approved, a lot more people go, hey, we should just, we got to start taking this thing seriously and quit joking around. Even some of my friends that thought it was a joke ended up in the hospital and almost got put on vents. And they're like, okay, this is for real. And there's more people are just waking up. I think a lot of people, there's a lot of different reasons people struggle with something that's so catastrophic that they can't bend their brain around it or it's so horrifying or so scary that they minimize it i think that's one of the psychological approaches human nature takes to stuff but i think now we're so far deep in it for so long they're like okay this is for real this isn't like it just a joke and uh yeah i remember 10 or 20 years ago, I remember, I think it was The Who or some body of doctors.

And they're like, and back then there was like a, it was a movie that came out where somewhere in America, a bunch of monkeys had come down with a virus. It was like Ebola and it would kill you. I think it was called Outbreak. It would kill you like right away. And I was like, oh, that's what they're talking about. And we've had biologists on the show that wrote books about COVID that told me right on the show, you can go back and listen to it. They're like, we were really lucky this wasn't like something that spread like COVID, but didn't have an Ebola sort of thing where your insides are

melting or E. coli. Yeah, you just melt and bleed down from the insides out. Have fun with that. So it alarms me what you say where you're like there's probably another one coming they warned us about all this i think mother earth is just sick of us and our crap she's trying to she's out for us i don't know but i certainly hope not chris i think what it comes down to is that just because of the way we travel the way we interact with each other something contagious comes around you know it's then just because you're like it's where the world is round and airplanes made it even smaller. Things move around. I will say that since COVID and since pandemics and kids going back to school, I have a couple of kids in school.

They've all, they've both come down with colds several times. Diseases are still getting their way, making their way around. We forgot what it's like to have a kid with a cold in the house for a little while there. I think everybody forgot about that. So I think we're always going to have people that are going to have to congregate. And as humans, we naturally want to socialize with each other. I think the biggest thing about the biggest fatigue around COVID, I think it's just around the lack of social activity. If we can find ways to get companies to run efficiently so that no matter what happens, they don't have to be shutting down and doing all that. I think that'll help all parts of our society.

Stay open, continue to run. And I think if we all work a little smarter, I think that'll help all parts of our society. Like restrooms, stay open, you know, places to continue to run. And I think if we all work a little smarter, I think we'll be in a much better place, you know, in the decades to come. Yeah. I go to the gym, man. If somebody starts coughing, I don't know what it is about me and coughs, but if I hear a cough, I'm like. That's a natural reaction.

And then there's a couple of times where somebody's been coughing. I'm like, I'm out for the gym today. I'm out of here. And, like, I like eating some greasy foods every now and then. It's hard to tell with my double chin and fat body. But one thing I hate, like, I think I was out getting a really nice burger the other night. I got a reindeer burger. It was good.

And from this great burger place. And I remember going in the bathroom, and I was, was like coughing and trying to clear the the grease from the burger and every time i cough i have to be like that burger was greasy i don't have the cobin but yeah it's really weird anywhere i go man you cough around me like flight or flight fight or flight sort of activation going on but yeah it's really interesting i was settled down but it's great that you guys have companies that are doing this and going on. Anything we haven't touched on that you want to touch on before we go out? I think the only thing we haven't touched on was that if nothing, I would strongly encourage everybody to get serious about their health. You know, that's a big thing. And forget about COVID and all that just in general,

because I think this is an opportunity. If nothing, COVID would really underscore there was a need for a different way to look at our own personal health and to get serious about it. I think there's been a lot of people took, myself included, a little bit of a break from getting an annual checkup just because nobody wanted to go anywhere or a hospital or doctor for a while. Now things are, you know, we're in an unusual place right now. But in general, people get serious about it. I think they're much more productive. I mean, you said it yourself, you're starting to work out more. Certainly, more health conscious than ever. Part of it is

when you hear about it every day, when you think about your health, I think that's the best advice you can give anybody because it's a serious thing. The cool thing about our society is we always bounce back. We always seem to do that. No matter what the crisis is, we always find a way to bounce back, especially in the U.S. We always bounce back. I think

if nothing, we have the opportunity to do that. I think we can come out of this a lot stronger than the way we went in. Yeah. In fact, I just got something that came across from the Washington Post in my pop-up. Fauci says, mask wearing on planes? Maybe here to stay. Maybe it may just be like a permanent... Earlier part of my career, I spent a lot of time

overseas. I was in China, Taiwan. I actually was working in and out of Taiwan around the time of SARS. And before that happened, I always thought the guy in the airport of the airplane with the mask on was a bit of a freak until SARS happened. SARS is a very real thing.

So when COVID hit, the first thing I thought was, I've seen this before. This is not, no. Who could have thought that it would get as big as it did? But I think Fauci's right around that. I think masks are here to stay. I think think in hospitals everybody's gonna wear a mask i'm pretty sure in public places like that i think that stays but you never know i think we're going to get to a place where providing everybody tests everybody takes it seriously we get through where we are i think there's an opportunity for us to have some kind of normalcy by summer my hope yeah

you know we get out of the business of running our companies and businesses and going to the beach and going out to nightclubs and all that kind of fun stuff. Hopefully we get back to that. Yeah. I think as a society we can. Yeah, it'll be nice to have. We had Jennifer Aniston, Dr. Jennifer Aniston of GMA3 on the show for her book, The New Normal, and she was talking to Anthony Fauci directly for a while.

Turns out Anthony Fauci knows how to, he's a emoji texter. We discovered that on the show. So that was interesting to find out. The guy's hip. He's 80 years old or something and he's hip. So I'm not even good at emojis. So good for Anthony Fauci. But yeah, it's interesting. I started wearing masks on a plane this summer. I had gotten really sick after two events getting on planes, and I got really sick. I picked up the flu and got pneumonia. And so I actually had masks that we were using and testing and reviewing before COVID, which turned out to be a lucky stroke for me. But yeah, it's just there at there. Give us your plugs again so people can find you guys on the interwebs. What's the best way for employers that are thinking about using services like yours to reach out to you guys too as well? Come to bloomhealthpartners.com.

We have lots of contact us buttons on our webpage. So please do have a look. There's also multiple channels. If you want more information, you can go to our LinkedIn page, our Twitter account. We're always posting updates and we offer a lot of free advice. We're always, we have a team of researchers. We're always going after whatever data we can find to help it and really make it easier for people to make choices about how to run their businesses. There you go. There you go. Thank you very, very much for coming on the show, Andrew.

We certainly appreciate it. Chris, my pleasure. Thank you. There you go. And guys, be healthy. Get your vaccines and everything else. It sure is nice. And I've seen too many of my friends suffer and, of course, lost.

Be good to each other. Go to YouTube.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. See all the wonderful videos we have done over there. In fact, there's a lot of different videos and interviews and book authors

we've done on COVID. So you can check that out as well. Go to goodreads.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. Also go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. Subscribe to all the stuff we're doing and all those different variants.

Thanks for tuning in. Again, be good to each other and we'll see you guys next time.