INTRO
I had a chance to sit down with one of the Clinton Global Initiative Greenhouse’s Inaugural Class of Social Impact Entrepreneurs and Startups. Erica Plybeah and Nathalie Occean are the CEO and COO of MedHaul. This Memphis-based tech company provides low income and elderly patients a safe and easy way to get to their non-emergency medical appointments.
NATHALIE
I’m Nathalie Occean, I’m the Chief Operating Officer for MedHaul. My background is well, I’m originally from New Jersey, and my family’s been in Memphis for about ten years, which is where I met Erica, when I was in grad school. But my background is in health care management administration with a quality concentration. So, I bring that lens to the company.
RIA
Amazing
ERICA
And I’m Erica Plybeah, Founder and CEO of MedHaul. My background prior to this was in clinical and research informatics, which is essentially building software solutions for hospitals, clinics, academic research institutions. And I’m from Mississippi. The Mississippi Delta, to be exact, and that has impacted a lot of my work.
RIA
That’s amazing, and what—so, you started MedHaul. Can you tell us just what is MedHaul?
ERICA
Yeah. MedHaul is an organization that helps health care providers like hospitals, health systems, pharma organizations, understand and solve transportation barriers for their patients with the most vulnerable needs or their most overlooked populations.
RIA
Okay. Is it maybe for someone who doesn’t have a caregiver at home to take them to doctor’s appointments or care facilities? Is that what it’s for?
ERICA
Yes. So, it could be a multitude of things. We typically say that we’re building transportation solutions for folks with complex physical or social needs. So, those are usually low-income patients, elderly patients, and patients with disabilities, or even folks in rural communities.
RIA
And so where was it in your journey? Because I hear your academia stories. What was it when you were at your work or while you were studying that made you go, where is it? Where is this? I feel like entrepreneurship is you see a problem and you create a solution. What was that problem? And this has happened simultaneously. Did it happen to one of you when you brought someone on? How was that?
NATHALIE
I’ll let you go first and then I’ll go.
RIA
You’ll corroborate the story if she’s telling the truth.
NATHALIE
Exactly. Yeah.
ERICA
There were a few things that with my experience in clinical and research informatics. I spent the, you know, a decade almost helping health care providers implement technology that can make clinical workflow a lot easier, whatever the clinical workflow was, whether that is recruiting a patient for a clinical trial or finding a better way to document medications in an electronic medical record.
And so, I’ve always been obsessed with using technology to make a workflow in health care a lot easier. I fell in love with transportation because my grandmother was a Type 2 diabetic, double leg amputee, and my family struggle tremendously with getting her to all of her doctor’s appointments. My mom was my grandmother’s primary transporter, but my mom is also a full-time teacher.
So, trying to juggle all the doctor’s appointments with her work schedule, we did not have an easy way to find transportation for my grandmother. And she was a double leg amputee. So, she was wheelchair bound. So, it required a little bit more of like a specialized transporter, because this will be someone that will be lifting her in and out of a vehicle and we just it was just so frustrating.
And it was it was weird because it was like this is, you know, this was back in the twenties, early 2010, 2013 or so. And we just thought, like, in this day and age, there would seem like there would be an easy way to do this, especially because Uber and Lyft were around. You know, this was my family and Greenwood, Mississippi.
So, I just thought, hey, this isn’t just a problem they’re having in the Mississippi Delta. Clearly, this happens nowhere else like nobody else across the country is having this issue/
RIA
Definitely not.
ERICA
And it wasn’t until I was working for Health System in Memphis that I saw the problem from the health care providers lens. So, they needed to discharge patients who may have been disabled or a patient that may live in a rural community where that patient didn’t have anyone to pick them up or that person that would be picking them up didn’t have the appropriate vehicle to transport them.
And so, this meant that the patient may even need to stay overnight just because they don’t have a ride. And those are at that cost for the hospitals. Yeah.
And so, I was like, huh? This is kind of like the reverse problem of what my family was having. Like, I didn’t even think about it that way. And then as I started to ask other health care administrators, I have a lot of friends and colleagues that are health care administrators, directors or CEOs, COOs of hospitals or academic or medical facilities. And I just started to ask, like, what issues are you having with transportation?
And they’re like, oh, my God, let me tell you about all the issues we’re having. You know, it takes too long to find a transportation provider. You know, we’re spending time on the phone even when we book the ride. You know, there’s so many errors. They show up at the wrong time. They show up at the wrong place.
They don’t bring the appropriate vehicle in, like, well, how are you booking the riser? Like, we’re just calling, you know? So, the booker, which is usually like a nurse or a clinical social worker, they’re looking at a different set of data than the transportation company. There was no there was no mutual portal that the two parties were looking at.
And so that is one area there that creates, you know, manual air is our thing when humans with humans and it’s perfectly fine. But at my will started telling me and I’m like, how can we make this a lot easier? So that’s a long story. But it started off as a personal, a personal issue that my family had.
I was very familiar with building technology for health care providers. I understand how health care providers think, understand the workflow to understand the challenges of implementing technology. And in healthcare settings. And this was something I wanted to build for my family. And then I learned that hundreds of millions of folks also face the same problem across the country.
And so, I’ll go ahead and let Nathalie here.
NATHALIE
Yeah. So, with all of that, I was always on board with Erica’s idea before the company even got started. But with my background in the Academic Medical Center, invited, because that’s typically where I was able to practice. I’m not a clinician, but I perform my work as a hospital administrator, and I saw a lot, especially working in the quality sector where we talk about patient safety and risk and how do we kind of manage and make more efficient the discharge plans like Erica was speaking to, we saw a lot that transportation kept coming up.
And I also worked for an organization that provided transportation for their patients through Medicaid benefit that the patients have. So again, seeing what already exists and seeing about learning about the problem, to the extent of I didn’t realize how many millions of families like Erica’s were dealing with this issue, what that meant for the organization and what that meant for the patient, clinically and financially, as far as what they’d have to contribute to kind of addressing this barrier.
So, I’ve always been a component, a proponent and an advocate of access to care. And how do we eliminate disparities, address disparities and call them what they are, and provide solutions that fix them? And this is just one it’s feels like such a big piece, but it really is just one small facet that we’re hoping to make a ripple.
RIA
And how—what was your meet cue. What? What was your little meeting story? How did you two meet? Yeah.
NATHALIE
So, when I was in grad school, we both were part of healthcare work associations and National Association of Health Service Executives. NAHSE is the acronym, and Erica was already on the committee, but I was still in grad school, so I was I was coming in from the perspective of a student. I did a case competition annually. They have a conference and a case competition as part of that conference.
And I competed and the team at Memphis and Erica was like, oh, whenever I get a team, I want you to be on it. Now I know what you’re talking about. I know what kind of team–
RIA
It’s called identifying talent. Right? You’re like, she’s got it right. I need her. And that’s how it’s going to work.
ERICA
Yeah. And we served through this organization, NAHSE. We served on a committee for scholarships. We have a partner that provides scholarships to minority students pursuing a career in healthcare. And just Nathalie’s work ethic. I was just like, you know, she was just so committed to getting things done. And those are the folks that that I work well with.
This is hard work. You know, it is you know, it’s for the greater good. But this is very hard work. And we meet folks who are very high performance. And I was just always, always obsessed with Nathalie’s work ethic. And at that time, I had no idea I would ever start a company. I was thinking like, oh, if I have a team at a hospital, like I would like you, I would want her on my team.
This was like eight years ago. So, way before the company even started.
RIA
I could feel the trust between you.
ERICA
Oh, yeah?
RIA
Can you, like. Can you guys. We’re each other’s minds without talking?
ERICA
Anyways, thank you so much. That was like, just like a little snippet, but I want to continue this conversation.
NATHALIE
Yeah.
OUTRO
At Global Partners for Development, our mission is to advance community led initiatives that improve education and public health in East Africa. We envision a world in which every East African community has the capacity to implement dynamic, sustainable solutions to the challenges they face. To learn more, visit gpfd.org.
