Angela and Kandice welcome healthcare innovator Kara Trott, founder and former CEO of Quantum Health. In this inspiring episode, Kara shares insights from her incredible journey of transforming consumer healthcare navigation into a billion-dollar business.
Kara’s new book, No One Alone: Humanizing Healthcare as an Outsider, explores how empathy, consumer-centric approaches, and strategic innovation can profoundly impact healthcare. Listen in to discover how embracing the consumer experience, leveraging outsider perspectives, and building mission-driven companies can effectively disrupt the chaos of healthcare.
You can click here to purchase your copy of No One Alone!
Episode chapter guide:
03:12 A Journey from Law to Healthcare
05:16 The Motivation Behind Writing ‘No One Alone’
08:38 Foundations of Quantum Health: Data and Patient Journey
09:37 Understanding Consumer Behavior in Healthcare
20:24 Navigating the Chaos of Healthcare
23:18 Keys to Success in a Chaotic Environment
Full Transcript
AI-generated transcript. Accuracy may vary; please excuse any transcription errors.
Kara Trott
And human beings as people have a…
a similar reaction to anything that’s thrust upon us that’s dangerous or scary and that is it puts us into a very primal emotional state and our executive functions diminish and even if you’re a neurosurgeon but you find out you have cancer your experience is the same because you’re a brilliant person but all of sudden
it’s you or it’s your wife and you
Kandice Garcia, RN
Yeah.
Kara
your emotions take over
Angela Adams, RN
Welcome to Success in Chaos, a healthcare podcast where each episode is dedicated to unlocking success amid rapid change and uncertainty. I’m Angela Adams, the CEO at Inflo Health.
Kandice
And I’m Candace Garcia Tomkins, owner of Tungsten QI Partners and a long time performance improvement specialist.
Angela
We are so excited to have our guest today, Kara Trott. Kara Trott is the founder and former CEO of Quantum Health, the first company really to pioneer consumer healthcare navigation and care coordination. A former corporate attorney and strategic marketing consultant, Kara really brought a fresh outsider’s perspective to healthcare and transformed it, frankly.
She built Quantum Health from Bootstrap to now a billion dollar company and serves millions of members. They call them members on that side. We call them patients a lot of time, but they are one in the same. All staying rooted in empathy, data, and really purpose, which I think we all know is such a tough challenge over that 25 year journey. Kara thankfully wrote us a book.
Kandice
It’s
Angela
about that journey. And she is the author of a new book and bestseller, I might add, called No One Alone, Humanizing Healthcare as an Outsider. It is an amazing read. ⁓ Both Candace and I have read it. My little synopsis on the book is if you want to read a book
Kandice
difficult.
Angela
about a woman, female entrepreneur who really saw a problem before anybody else was recognizing that problem.
took a huge risk by leaving her very nice, wonderful job as an attorney and stepping into the healthcare arena and transformed that into a billion dollar company, then this is the book for you. And this is the book that you’ll want to read. ⁓ Kara is ⁓ the OG, if you will, in recognizing and solving chaos in the patient journey. No one alone really explores ⁓
Kandice
You
Angela
Kara’s path as what she calls accidental entrepreneur in the book, which I think is ⁓ adorable. And the lessons learned ⁓ while building this mission-driven organization in one of the most frankly complex ⁓ industries in the world, which is healthcare. So welcome Kara and thank you for being here.
Kara
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Angela
Very good. We start with a little fun icebreaker and it’s called Two Truths and a Lie. So you’re going to give us two truths and a lie and we’re going to pick out which one we think is the lie. We have been tricked a lot so we’re not going to go that bit. So I’ll let you go ahead and kick us off.
Kandice
so
Kara
My creativity
has been at an all time low because I’ve been slammed with other things. So let’s see. One is that I enjoy cleaning for relaxation. That’s one. Two is that I always dreamed of working in healthcare. And three is that people are usually surprised when they meet me at my stature is what I would say.
Kandice
That’s my favorite one. I was going say that’s my favorite one being on Zoom. You have no idea how tall anybody is, how short anybody is.
Angela
Candace, I’m let you go first.
Kandice
I meet people in person and I’m like, ⁓ my gosh, you’re six feet tall. I had no idea. It’s always such a surprise. But I’m going to go with you did not have a dream of working in healthcare. I think that’s the lie. Yeah. Yeah.
Kara
huh.
Um, yeah, it is why, yes.
Yeah, did not. Actually, did not know what happened.
Angela
I know Kara and her stature.
She is what we call small and mighty. ⁓ small but mighty. Yep.
Kandice
My favorite kind of leaders, yes. Well, let’s start with…
Kara
Yeah.
Yeah, I don’t
break five feet. I’m 4’11 and three quarters. So it’s an opportunity.
Kandice
That is so funny. know, I
have a sister who’s just five feet tall also, which I think is a stretch. So I’m used to being around just little powerful women, which is… Let’s dive into your book because, you know, writing a book in itself is an incredible feat. And can you tell us, you know, what drove you to get all this down and share it with the world?
Kara
Okay.
I
Yeah, and I’m normally a very private person, but there’s a lot of people that kind of are aware of the quantum health journey. But ⁓ last year, our company was 25 years old. And it’s really unusual, I think, to have somebody like me, who is an outsider to the health care industry, start a company that was truly bootstrapped. I I didn’t go get big PE investment or anything like that. It was all friends and family.
I was so fortunate that I had some great mentors who were willing to contribute to that. ⁓ it was truly bootstrapped in an industry I didn’t know anything about, but I did understand consumers and the consumer experience. ⁓ after 25 years, you’ve got a company that’s worth well over a billion dollars. mean, that valuation was in 2020. So it’s almost three times the
Kandice
Mm.
Kara
The business itself is almost three times that size now. So, you know, the company has continued to grow and I started to realize at about the 25 year
point and I already knew from my private equity firm partners that, you know, it’s one is it’s hard for anyone to get a business there. Two, the number of women who have done this is a very small number.
and women who’ve done it in an industry that’s unfriendly and that’s not their expertise and created a business that disrupted an industry, well there you’re done in single digits. And I guess I felt like not so much as a woman, but as a person who’s done this and ⁓ really went through a lot of challenges along the way, just breaking into an industry that you don’t have any experience with. But I also think that that was the asset that I brought to the industry.
said to me that it’s probably a good story to be told. I hope that it’s inspiring to people and I hope for my company that, you know, it secures the legacy. We’ve grown a lot. There’s a lot, lot of people who’ve worked here, who are new here and, you know, we’re adding ever more clients and people that we serve and things like that. So it’s just a good way to kind of secure the foundation because the foundations that started the company are still the
Kandice
Hello.
Kara
the architecture of the company. mean, healthcare has changed, humans haven’t changed, but the ways that we work with them and where we intercept them,
those things haven’t changed. The tools that we use and ⁓ the conversations that you have and things like that and the way you interact with people has changed dramatically over the years, but I felt like it was probably important at a 25-year point to sort of secure that story.
Because if I didn’t tell this story, it would be told and I don’t know if it would have been accurate. And to me, it’s a good story to tell.
Kandice
Yeah.
Angela
It’s an incredible story
Kandice
Yeah.
Angela
and a great legacy. And I’m so glad that you wrote the book. I got a ton out of it as a newer CEO and entrepreneur. ⁓ It’s of like both a story and a guidebook, if you will. And in fact, it changed several of my kind of core fundamental foundations, which goes to your point of I hope that’s inspiring. It is absolutely inspiring. So I encourage
Kara
Bye.
Angela
the audience to go out there and read this book,
especially if you are working in the healthcare field and you want to understand like how to disrupt and how to transform. I think it’s funny because so many people are like into creating these fast companies. And that is a really tough thing to do in healthcare where there’s so much complexity. There’s so much, what did Dr. Larson call it? ⁓ Complex adaptive systems. ⁓
Kandice
Yeah.
Angela
to your point, ⁓ these foundations that you laid early in the company have stood the test of time. So talk to us a little bit about those foundations. I was really intrigued and impressed with you guys started hard into the data and making sure that you understood that patient journey, understood the complexities, understood the behavioral change. Like talk to us about that and how you realized that that was really the crux of everything.
Kandice
No.
Kara
So, you
know, the idea for the company came, I had started my career in consumer behavior. So I worked with a large international consulting firm, kind of understanding how do consumers experience a journey, whether it’s buying a car or shopping a store. And then, ⁓ you know, I led research, I moved up through the organization ⁓ over a series of steps. But my original job was figuring out
How do people actually do things? Because it’s very hard to change human behavior ⁓ unless you’re intercepting them. So how do they do things? And how does it work for them? And where do things disconnect for them? And how do you make that a better experience and in a way that advantages your business? And every time we deploy the knowledge from the learnings that we did from research into a store design or
distribution strategies or things like that, it had a tremendous impact, positive impact on consumer retention, consumer ⁓ market share, same store sales, all those kinds of things, because you made it work for the consumer that you’re relying on to make your business successful. And of course, in consumer goods and services and retail, it’s a one-to-one relationship, right? You’re dealing directly with the consumer.
⁓ When I started working in healthcare, which came after I did a whole lot of different work in mergers and acquisitions and things for a large firm, I was brought into the healthcare team to do strategy work because they had 80 % of the hospitals, health systems, which were hospitals at the time, in a very large region. And managed care had happened. Hillary Clinton had started to redesign healthcare. So there was mass panic.
And there was this big thing called managed care that was going to transform the industry. And they didn’t know how to respond. And the firm thought that it would be a good idea to have a consulting entity that would kind of be the front runner to transactional work. And they looked around the firm and said, who has any experience with this? And yeah, I was. And ⁓ so I didn’t actually have health care knowledge. But when
Kandice
You
Kara
I was tasked, my first task was to come up with a reason, kind of a purpose for this entity. Obviously the purpose was to feed the firm’s billable hours and things, but it was like, what’s gonna be the content of it? And I was spending a lot of time in collaborative meetings with hospital administrators and physicians. And I was hearing all the, what I call the bad patient stories about how people…
you know, show up in the wrong place. They don’t follow through this, that, and the other. And I kept asking the question, like, who’s looking out for these people? I mean, who knows? Who’s, is, aren’t the, the insurance companies had functions like case management, utilization management, those kinds of things. I was like, who’s, who’s helping them? I mean, and the answer was very clear, nobody. Nobody had visibility on the journey. Nobody had any.
continuous contact and no one was responsible for this guidance. And it just sounded to me like, you know, I always describe it as being like a ball dropped into a pinball machine and the levers pulled and you’re hitting all these bumpers and dollar signs are going up, but you have no idea where your next move is, right? It’s luck or none of us are the pinball wizards. And ⁓ I thought, you know, as I looked at it, was like, this is a very classic consumer pathway challenge.
that has been solved in other industries. Healthcare never looks outside itself for solutions. And I thought, you know, if you could understand the journey and if you could package the right set of support and if you could connect it with the end users, the consumers at precisely the right point.
you could not only create a much better experience for people, but you could actually probably change the trajectory of the cost and improve the outcomes, because all of this was not good for people. ⁓ But not being a healthcare person, I didn’t really understand it. And my way of understanding historically had been to do deep research from the consumer.
just step into the consumer’s shoes and walk with them and see where things go wrong, where the disconnects happen, and how do they evolve their decision-making or their understanding of what they’re doing. so before, I really wasn’t sure where it was going to go. The firm had no interest in it, and I was very close to partnership, but I thought it was a really interesting problem. And then I had a lens on it and a way to understand it.
Kandice
Okay.
Kara
and the understanding of it would then
tell you what to do about it. I didn’t know what the outcome would be. And so I had to leave the firm because they wanted it to lead to transactions or they wanted me to use lawyers to do things. And I felt like I was never going to be less valuable as a lawyer if this didn’t go anywhere. But I thought it was a curious question. It was very interesting. And I’m a very curious person. And so
Kandice
Yeah.
Angela
you
Kara
I formulated a research study that tracked 3,200 people over a two-year period. That’s a really good study. A national study is usually valid at 750 people. But because I didn’t know health care, I assumed that there could be a variety of reasons and a variety of behaviors that would manifest, and that you needed to break it into basically five different reasons that people might be on a journey. And I wanted to have
Kandice
Mm-hmm.
Kara
know, data credibility at like the fourth branching level of a question ⁓ to be able to have credibility to the research because to me this was a really, really big important study. And it basically revealed how people, know, how they experience it, where they get stuck and helped me understand like, what’s the authority that you have to have? What is, what’s the package of support that they need?
Kandice
Mm-hmm.
Kara
When do you
activate that? I originally thought it would, and where’s the place that you have the maximum visibility on what’s happening? And I thought originally because of my only lens in healthcare had been through provider side ⁓ as a lawyer. And you always hear that doctors are the most trusted in the healthcare journey. And the truth is, is they are trusted for their competency, their ability to diagnose and treat.
But the challenges that people have on the attorneys are very broad and that’s just one piece. It can define their health outcomes if you’re at the wrong kind of doctor or whatever. But still, even if you’re at the right doctor, your health outcomes can be bad because of a whole lot of intervening things that don’t work for you. And it gave me the map that it had to be at the plan level because all the data, all the claim data,
Kandice
Yeah.
Kara
And by the way, the most repeatable thing that happens on a regular basis is that tells you someone’s on a journey, because I was looking for where’s the kind of entry point? How do you know someone’s on a journey? And that answer is, in every kind of industry, there’s repeatable behavior patterns that happen without fail that you can rely on. In our industry, to this day, 26 years later, nobody uses this. But every time a provider sees a patient,
they do a benefits and eligibility check. If they’re gonna do a procedure or something, they submit a pre-authorization. All that’s used for just administrative work. And I found out, my God, you don’t have to change anybody’s behavior, just route those to us and we can see what’s happening and then we can engage and we can be the experts. And you can’t rely on the members to reach out because they’re overwhelmed, bewildered, confused, scared, everything.
Kandice
Yeah. Yeah.
Kara
They will reach out, but they’ll reach out with a very simple question to what? The number on their ID card.
And they’ll call and they’ll say, I need an ID card, or is this doctor in my network? It always starts with a very simple transactional question that if answered and off the phone, you missed that opportunity. So it created a map for us. And it was very clear that there were functions that were being done in insurance companies in particular.
Kandice
Yeah.
Kara
that were being used for administrative services, but weren’t really adding values, so to speak. They were being used to say, do I pay or don’t I pay for this? And if the answer was, well, I don’t know, because the data is incomplete, I’m going to send it back and not answer it. And then the person’s left without knowing if their surgery is going to be done. And I was like, OK, all of those have to come to one place. And all the data has to come to one place. And all the contacts.
Kandice
Yeah.
Kara
has to come to one place to have that consistency. really, the research really provided the map of what quantum health still is today.
Kandice
It’s so incredible. And I’m just thinking about it. I do a lot of like frontline process improvement where we’re really working on a program or a process or a specific outcome. And I think what you’re describing here is what in healthcare, we actually don’t even get an opportunity to see or understand this kind of system level ⁓ perspective that our patients absolutely experience every day and
Angela
That’s incredible. I love that.
Kandice
Who’s responsible for system level problem solving? Like you said, like if you don’t have an ID card, is it me, the nurse that answered the phone for your pre-op, you know, prep call? Like I don’t even know what that is. Like what would I do? How would I do it? There isn’t really this kind of organizational resource at a lot of institutions to say, this is how you navigate. This is who you would talk to with that kind of question.
let me help you navigate the system that we expect you to kind of flow through, yet none of our processes are designed with that level of intent. ⁓ I just, it speaks so deeply to our hearts, like as healthcare providers, because I think we often feel very stuck or very lost or very helpless trying to help our patients navigate from where we stand.
Kara
Right, and that’s kind of in the zone of what’s covered in their plan and what’s happening with them. And the biggest issue for consumers is that their challenges don’t sort neatly into, this is something I should call the entrance, ⁓ this is something I should ask my doctor about. It’s this intermingled mess of…
Kandice
animal.
Kara
literally all these issues come together at one time at one point and repeatedly. And by the way, nobody gets good, even if you have diabetes, each time you present, it’s a whole different set of things. it’s, you know, no one gets good at it. And the one thing I learned in our research,
Kandice
Yeah.
Kara
is the state of mind of the consumer is very different. There’s a defining characteristic to a healthcare journey that does not exist with other journeys. And that is the fact that it’s unchosen. A chosen journey, you know, if you’re going to go shoe shopping, buy electronics, whatever it is, it’s chosen. There’s a degree of pleasure in it. You express your preferences, you know, very…
Angela
Hmm.
Kandice
Yeah.
Kara
you know, and you can segment consumers and deal with them that way. And healthcare, because the equalizing factor of healthcare is that it’s 100 % untrosen.
Kandice
So
Kara
And human beings as people have a…
a similar reaction to anything that’s thrust upon us that’s dangerous or scary and that is it puts us into a very primal emotional state and our executive functions diminish and even if you’re a neurosurgeon but you find out you have cancer your experience is the same because you’re a brilliant person but all of sudden
it’s you or it’s your wife and you
Kandice
Yeah.
Kara
your emotions take over
⁓ your ability to be able to deal with the complexity of what’s coming
at you is so limited. And you may even understand like which doctors to go to, but you don’t have any clue about how to get this claim paid.
or how to arrange for all these services or the disconnects among the services. Somebody didn’t show up and they were supposed to do this service or whatever. All of that is foreign to you. So you really need somebody that has total responsibility for curating that entire journey.
Kandice
Yeah.
Mm. ⁓
Angela
Yeah, absolutely. So you know, this podcast is about success in chaos, which I think you have well proven that you can be successful in the midst of an extremely chaotic environment in healthcare.
I would love to hear kind of your key things that you feel like led to success. There’s so many that feel like they use it as an excuse, like, well, healthcare is so chaotic that I can’t have success or I can’t do this or I can’t have
Kandice
yeah.
Angela
success or this success. You, coming from an outside perspective, not knowing healthcare, starting a company that sits outside of the health system, have found a way to have success within the chaos. Tell us what you
think those, there’s a lot of leaders as listeners, there’s a lot of executives that work for health systems, there’s a lot of people that are vendors listening to this. Give them your couple bullet points. I know we don’t have a ton of time, but.
Give us a couple bullet points for them to think through as far as what led to your success in this very chaotic environment.
Kara
I think it’s very simple. It’s manic adherence to understanding the consumer. And if you truly love and you embrace the reality, and that’s one of the things I’ve had to say all along, embrace the inconvenient truth of the consumer experience. People are not going to get good at healthcare. They are not going to go to an app and figure it all out from an app.
Kandice
Yeah. ⁓
Kara
because they have second, third, fourth layer questions that are very complex. understand their emotional state. And
any time we get confronted with something and we’re thinking about it, it’s like, how does this work for the consumer?
What is the best way to accomplish this? There’s so many great things out there, but if they don’t connect to the consumer, they don’t. in our world, there’s a lot of what we call point solutions. So they’re, you know, highly structured, ⁓ usually digital solutions, digital health solutions that are very beneficial to members at a specific point in time. But
Kandice
So,
Kara
that
person is not thinking about that. They’ve just gotten diagnosed with serious back issues and they aren’t thinking about, my employer has this app that I could use to figure out. They’re like, I can’t take my kids to school. I can’t do X, Y, Z. I’m in pain. What meds am I taking? I mean, if you embrace the consumer reality, the answer is always there. And I think that’s true even if you’re selling like we are B2B2C.
We have to also embrace the CHROs reality. We’re selling to CHROs and CFOs in large companies. And we have to understand what are they trying to accomplish for their employees? These are their biggest assets, right? This is their biggest line item behind ⁓ equipment. It’s huge. Health insurance is huge. And ⁓ how do we help them?
Kandice
Yeah. Yeah.
Kara
do this in a way that supports their culture, that supports people feeling loved and cared for, and like this really is a benefit as opposed to something that’s getting denied. And how do we also help our clients understand, you know, what lovers can you move that will help create a better experience or better outcomes or lower costs for your employees that won’t also inflict a tremendous amount of pain on them. And I just think if you’re a B2B, if you’re selling a
something that you’re selling to hospitals, when you’re in consumer, if you’re in healthcare, it’s always going to be the patient, right? So you always have to kind think through how does this piece of equipment work for the patient? What’s going to happen to them when they use it? And then the user experience of the nurses or the doctors that are using it. So you never lose by focusing on the end user. And for us, we also think about it’s consumer first,
Kandice
Yeah.
Kara
client, second, and providers. And we have to think about how does this all work for everybody? Because at some point in health care, the provider is also a consumer because they’re giving the directions. And they don’t know what the plan covers. They don’t know what providers are in the network. They don’t know that the patient has access to a center of excellence program. They don’t know any of those kinds of things.
Kandice
And then we’ll…
Angela
Great advice. Thank you. I know that we haven’t had a ton of time with you, which ⁓ I always want more time with you, Kara. So hopefully this was for the audience, a teaser in what’s in the book. And you guys can get kind of more in depth with Kara’s knowledge and how she was able to achieve success and chaos within that book. So Kandice, I’ll turn it over to you to wrap this up.
Kandice
All right, and thank you so much for joining us, Kara.
And thank you audience for joining us on Success in Chaos. Please be sure to like, follow, and share today’s episode on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And a special thanks to Info Health team for their production support.
