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Interview In Action: Breaking Down the World of Healthcare Consulting with Eric Utzinger

[00:00:00] Revuud as the healthcare IT talent platform built for speed and control that give your team direct access to over 3,700 pre-vetted consultants. Epic Cloud, cybersecurity, you name it. Without the delays and overhead of traditional staffing firms, you don't contract with individuals.

Revuud does. So it's fast and compliant and low risk. Your team saves time. Your budget goes further and you stay in control. Learn more@revuud.com. R-E-V-U-U -D.com.

Bill Russell: Welcome to This Week Health. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health, where we are dedicated to transforming healthcare, one connection at a time.

Now, onto our interview

Bill Russell: (Interview 1) All right, here we are for an executive interview, and today I'm joined by Eric Utzinger, the Chief Client Officer for ReVuud, [00:01:00] R-E-V-U-U-D I assume that the domain reviewed was already taken, so you had to be creative.

Eric Utzinger: I kind of got creative with it about five or six years ago, just thinking out loud, white paper and out what we're thinking about with technology and what we can change here in the industry.

I like the idea of being reviewed. There were too many people jumping from one company to the other, and we wanted the best talent that's been reviewed by multiple different companies and firms or healthcare organizations to be available to our clients. And it's hard to pick out a name that hasn't been taken before.

So

Bill Russell: I wanna go into your concept a little bit because I love it. I got to see the technology, I got to see the business model, whatnot. And as A CIO I had to work with all these firms, and it just felt to me like it was I don't know, for lack of a better term, like a race to the bottom.

It's like, Hey, you know, here's some resumes, here's some resumes, here's some resumes. And sometimes I'd get the same resume from two different companies. It was a weird model, but I do know every healthcare organization has contractors working for [00:02:00] them right now.

Eric Utzinger: Correct. And some people do it as it's a necessary evil. Some people look at it as a very critical part of their organization and a lot of our clients are looking at it that way. And Bill, I had that same experience. I worked for some of the largest healthcare consulting companies, implementation consulting firms.

Back in 2010, 2011, I just saw a shift. They did work for us. They worked for us as full-time. We had company benefits. We had company trips that bench time. So if you wanted to engage that resource, you had to engage with our company. That started to shift about two-thousand thirteen, fourteen. They wanted to be paid more, which obviously just shifted the cost onto the health system, unfortunately because the supply and demand there at that time.

But what it did is it left them available for every. Consulting organization. So those consulting organizations would reach out to the available resources when a need would be sent out by a CIO or a director there at the hospital. And unfortunately, we would sometimes get the same resume and we would put our letterhead on it.

And then honestly, it just didn't feel like we were adding as much value [00:03:00] as we could. Which is, you know, one of the key reasons that we started Revuud.

Bill Russell: So give us an idea of the business model. Why is it different and what has enabled it to be different? You guys come from a long history of doing this, let's call it the old fashioned way.

Eric Utzinger: I think technology enablement 15 years ago, I don't think this would've worked. You didn't have all the tenured consultants. They were coming out and they were getting their feet wet in consulting. Now, fast forward 15 years to 2025 or even 2020 when we started multiple people, we know the people coming into the platform.

We trust them. We've got huge database of resources we know and trust. Which again, is just that shift in how they wanted to get paid and how consulting organizations basically just wanted to pay you while you were on the project. And as soon as that project's over, if they didn't have anything else, you are gone and you moved on to the next health system or to the next consulting firm or implementation firm that needed you for three months or six months and whatnot.

When that shift started to happen, and it was as soon as the project's over year gone, [00:04:00] it led the ability to say, okay, we can build a platform. We can build technology that doesn't just connect people. We're not a consulting firm, but we do know the people and trust the people in our platform to be approved and vetted so that our clients can see them more transparently.

They can message them directly, they can ask them any questions they want. They can negotiate their rates. They know exactly what the talent's making, they know exactly what they're paying us in a fair way. They know the talent's making generally more money. They're okay with that because the money's going in their pocket.

And so it's really because of the way technology is in marketplaces like Uber. Instacart, netflix, you name it. It basically has just molded itself to this point in 2025, where hospitals can start to see that what we're bringing is true value, great talent, trusted talent at reasonable transparent rates.

Bill Russell: So you have a two-sided market, which is well we all have two-sided markets, but you have to have a stable of people that people can run. Mm-hmm. And [00:05:00] then you have to have clients on the other side generally what questions are the clients asking? What are they looking for?

What problem are they looking for you to solve? Is it a cost problem? Is it a quality problem?

Eric Utzinger: You know, everyone talks about costs, but what you find out is really when it comes to a project, which is very critical to our clients whether it's an implementation or whether it's just an acquisition of a hospital that one of our clients did and.

Utilized our platform to bring in about 17 people for that project. They gotta trust that the resources are good. So the thing that we get the most is where do you get your people? We love the technology. We've got all the timekeeping, we've got all the status notes. We've got grouping of your contractors so that you can build your own.

Network of consultants that you can pull in and out as your needs change at a healthcare organization. But they gotta trust that the talent is good. So they always ask, where do you get your people? And what I can tell them wholeheartedly is we get them from the same place everybody else does.

They're out on [00:06:00] LinkedIn, they're in our database. They're just like out there. And when they're ready to work, they're able to be in revuud, see our job postings, and directly apply to those jobs.

Bill Russell: Do you guys focus specifically on healthcare? Only

Eric Utzinger: in healthcare? That's correct.

Bill Russell: Only in healthcare technology, or healthcare in general.

Eric Utzinger: Only healthcare technology. So we're not a nursing platform, we're not a physician platform, not a locum the platform has been built very agnostically. So we can get into those areas and we do have hospitals that say, Hey, I've got someone that I need to work with for 20 hours a week. They're not really in IT.

But I'm gonna bring 'em through this platform because we don't take a big markup on that. And we can manage their time. They've got the history and they can just bring them in very easily without a direct contract because we've already got the MSA, BAA, and license agreement with our clients.

Bill Russell: You're almost like a cost plus model.

Let me ask you this. We started with Revuud talk about the review process in order to vet those candidates to make sure that the people they're looking for are the kind of people they're gonna want to have [00:07:00] out at their health system.

Eric Utzinger: That's another question we get the next question, right?

Where do you get them and how do you vet them? So in order for our clients to see them, we call it a review approved check mark on their profile. So now they are visible to our clients. So again, that the reason we've stayed in healthcare, it is like who we're gonna present to our clients is becuase we've been doing this 15 years.

We know the people in here. It's amazing how small a world it is. It's such a big world in the number of contractors out there. But we know these people. We've got recruiters that have been in recruiting these people for years. We do background checks, drug screens, anything else the client requires.

And then we also you know, we vet them for their history. We get their references. Candidly, health systems aren't the same as they were 15 years ago. They can't always respond to positive or negative about somebody, but they at least can confirm that's where they were. And so we do our best on that and we've got a tremendous track record since we've went live in August of 2022 for successful engagements because we know and trust the people in the platform.

Bill Russell: So [00:08:00] who from the health system, who's the ones that are generally contacting you? Do you start with the CIO or do you project with owners?

Eric Utzinger: From a sales perspective, it's generally like when we're getting introduced to a hospital it's a CIO introduction.

One of our current clients, it's just happened a couple months ago to a fellow colleague that is now a CIO at another health system. Or they just take a call with us. So it generally starts with the CIO because they need that buy-in at the top, or we start at a VP of applications, VP of strategy innovation sometimes.

And then that leads us to probably two or three conversations with directors. They see what a great platform it is. They love the flexibility, they love the intuitiveness, they love the history, the reporting, everything they can get outta the platform. And then it's once they can get the contract signed and trust the talent, because it's typically not the CIOs looking for the people, right?

It's usually the director level type that are working on projects. But we've got everything from former CIOs strategic executives from some of the top firms you [00:09:00] see out there that are in our platform and available to help our clients today.

Bill Russell: As a person who has worked in healthcare, why would I want to be in your Revuud system?

Eric Utzinger: So, the top talent want to be in Revuud. Some of them candidly, probably view it as an option. Like, Hey, Revuud got close to 40 clients now they've got jobs. I'm seeing jobs posted in here. I wanna stay in here as a great way to get that job. But they generally make more money and they're in control.

They're not getting pushed by an agency or a VMS to take less money. They're actually, and we see it all the time, we've got a great messaging feature in our platform. And those messages are going directly from the the hiring director to the talent is saying, Hey, look, I see you're wanting $110 an hour.

Can you do this project for 95? It's gotta fit within my budget. They're the ones making the decision. It's not a firm trying to squeeze them down so they can still get their 40 to $50 an hour.

Bill Russell: All right. Let's close with some fun. Biggest mistake you've seen people make in trying to bring contractors into their health system.

[00:10:00] You're filtering right now? I could see. I can, yeah.

Eric Utzinger: I think sometimes, assuming that. More costly means better. They will I think thinking that you have to go to and not, you know, maybe not for these large strategic initiatives, but they'll engage with.

One firm to just get a bunch of resources. And they think that these folks have just a closet full of people. And when the projects come up, they go and pull them out of the closet. They don't understand that it's an open market. There are marketplaces everywhere and we're all just going to get the same talent.

I can't tell you how many times, we've seen people in our platform as we talk to a client and the client said, I just got their resume from someone else. And what's their rate? They look at their rate in our system and they see it 50, $60 dollars an hour difference than what they're looking at on an email. I don't understand how to get that message out more clearly to people.

Yeah.

Bill Russell: I would say for me, as a former CIO and my team and I finally communicated this to my team after a mistake that we made, which is you have to [00:11:00] vet these people the same way that you would vet a new hire. My biggest HR issue was contractor doing something. And it was, at that point, I'm like, all right, I have to make this very clear to people that like, just because you can bring a contractor in quicker.

You still need to vet them at the same level, I guess.

Eric Utzinger: Yeah. I wouldn't say, you gotta ask where do you want to be in five years, which is a pretty good HR question because the consultant looks at 'em and says, I'm not gonna be here in five years. But generally I agree.

We're telling you they were great. From our experience with them and other health systems experience, we feel good about them. Are they right for your project? And that's where a lot of our AI comes in. So we're actually taking AI with the job description, matching it to their skills, and then that AI, you can ask questions to, you can ask customized questions and really help you identify the top one or two people that you should be talking to for a job before you even get into it.

You can ask them questions via messaging. And that way you're not wasting your time in an interview and they're doing exactly what you [00:12:00] mentioned Bill, which has really vet them out even in just a 30 minute interview.

Bill Russell: If they want more information, I assume it's Revuud.com,

Eric Utzinger: Revuud.com's a great place to go.

You can fill out a form there or just eric@revuud.com and look forward to talking to you.

Bill Russell: Fantastic, Eric, thanks for your time. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

Thanks

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