322 - Neshmeen Faatimah | Nuzzle Technologies

You're listening to the Veterinary Innovation Podcast. My name is Sean Wilkie, and along with my awesome co-host, we interview the innovators in this space every week. Ivan, please kick us off. Hey, I'm Ivan Zach, and I'm excited to have Nash main Fatima. Nash is the founder and CEO of Nuzel, a veterinary ed tech company using AI-powered simulations to train vets and techs in hard-to-teach topics like client communication, anesthesia, and complex case management. She started Nuzel while getting her MBA at Harvard Business School after losing her cat to a preventable communication breakdown. Previously, she worked in investing and operating across life sciences and education technology. Nash, welcome to the show. Thank you for finding the time. Yeah, thank you for having me. So sorry to hear about your cat. Why don't you give us that story and how it evolved into Nuzel? Yeah, you know, I like to joke that like any good founder, my origin story is one born out of trauma. But when my cat had got sick, it was my first exposure to a complex chronic care journey from a pedo nurse perspective. So before that, I had a good understanding of the business side of things of the industry from my time in private equity. I was the go-to for all things I'm already related at our fund, but conceptualizing revenue retention as just things on a spreadsheet can kind of distance you from the human experiences underneath and being able to feel it viscerally, the stress, the confusion, the loss of trust, visit after visit, the heartbreak, helplessness, you name it. I started talking to people all over the industry to kind of understand what's going on. And I saw that there was a huge gap in client communication where it was a thing that everyone understands is a problem that it's important to delivering care, but it's under taught, it's under trained, and it's kind of there's a lack of a systematic understanding of something that is a systemic problem. And that's what we've been trying to do is building that understanding and training communication alongside things like clinical reasoning at a scale and urgency that it's needed. So cool. One of the first really unique ideas we've had on the show in a while. So really, really interesting to see the pain of losing your animal, turn into an opportunity for more training. Now we've had other conversations with people that are trying to train veterinary professionals, but it feels very technology heavy. So tell us about the technology. Yeah. So before I get into the product or the tech, I want to start with kind of just what we're trying to accomplish and that kind of leads in. So what we're doing really at the first state of it is measuring and analyzing what DVMs are doing today, how they're approaching communication today, and figuring out like what are the most common success and failure patterns so that we could build training that's targeted, relevant and evidence-based. A lot of the time what I see in this industry is treating as synonymous to content. And it's more of like what I want to tell you than what is relevant for you and what's happening for you. So we're starting with like what is actually going on today with vets across different career stages. And then we build a simulation tool that both measures what they're doing so I can go into that a little bit more and then building training that gets at the very specific failure patterns if that makes sense. So can you unpack it for us because we're starting to build this sort of the audio. What it is visually is it is software? What does it look like as a product? How do we interact with it? What does it look like in a day-to-day life? Yeah. So it's very simple. It's a case simulation tool. You we get hundreds of vets to tackle standardized cases interacting with AI simulated clients. So these clients and case facts they're the same across vets. So what happens is we can see the strategies and patterns in what they say when they say and the outcomes that they get to in terms of client trust, visit friction, in terms of plan completeness, acceptance. So if you imagine 200 early career vets they're tackling a standardized case on-derm talking to an AI client and we're seeing how they're framing diagnostic and treatment recommendations, how effectively efficiently they're building trust, how are they talking about costs, how are they responding to resistance. And as this measurement is happening the doctors themselves are getting practice talking to clients in different settings and training around having difficult conversations in a low stakes environment. Does that make sense? It does. So and I think it's not only the new grads but I face to very interesting issue recently. We're converting one of our urgent care hospitals into general practice and I've been doing precisely 20 years medicine in urgent care and critical care. So when I get into the exam room for a vaccination I'm speechless. I don't have anything to say. I'm like, so you're fine and can I just poke you with the vaccines and leave? No value, no articulation off, you know, like what do I need? I don't have a talk track. That's what I always talk about. Like for any sick pet, I have a talk track. I don't have a talk track for GP. So I can see the application of it. What is your ideal customer profile? Where's your market with that to sort of more go into a business model on this? Where do you see a market and who is it applicable to out of our listeners? It would be like, oh my god, that's me. I should go get this. Yeah. So right now we're currently deployed at large practice groups that have thousands of early career vets and it's kind of built into their in-house early career training and mentorship programs. We've also launched at a few schools and where we're at scale and volume are important so that we can get more of an idea of what's happening at a sample at a larger size and get insights about the population level before we go out to individual vets. Individual vets can do participate in our study, which is just go online and do a quick simulation and we're going to capture some details about how you're communicating. Ultimately we want to get to is making this the most scalable and effective modality of training, measuring and training, what are complex performance skills? You know, like that require application, not just knowledge. So communication is like playing tennis. You can't learn tennis from watching lectures on tennis and that's a lot of what CE today is is here's how you communicate but not actually what they do. So that's number one on that gap. And number two is just making this a way for teams to actually get on the same page a little more. So if you think of it as like operational change management, helping people see how they're doing things as a group as a team. So there's a little less industry likes to disagree on a lot of things. So just getting them kind of to see things from the same perspective a little bit more. Yes, very interesting. So we're talking about a web based application. I'm guessing. Correct. Perfect. And you know, this feels like maybe required training. How do you make it not feel like that for somebody that's been told to have to do it? Because it's fun as you know someone that has a little bit of a background in applied behavioral science. If you don't have something that's fun and engaging, you're going to be climbing up a steep hill and that's the number one thing we work towards from a user interface user experience perspective to where I'm really proud to say that early career vets actually asked me to give them more cases. Even when it's part of their school, we're like, can we have more? Which I'm quite proud of because of the effort we put in into like making something that they want and not something that we just want them to digest. So just to unpack again a little bit on the technology side of things. So what is the data that's going in? Are we talking just sentiment analysis of the audio? Is it the visual clues? Is it like eyeball tracking? Like to what depth do you go about the cues of the behavior that is interpreted and creates that feedback loop? Right now I'm really focused on structuring and framing and sequencing of communication. I can give you an example here. So we've seen already with our study that two thirds of vets are solution first in their communication. What that means is they go in, they lead with their solutions very quickly before they try to align with the client on what their concerns are or what they've been want to achieve. And imagine someone comes you for advice and you immediately throw solutions at them even if your solution is the best solution in the world. They don't feel like you have an understanding of their needs enough to have earned the right to provide that solution. So there's a lot of research on premature problem solving in helping professions that actually prevent you from solving the problem quickly. So like how many vets are actually going in trying to understand the client? How many are just going in? Here's your recommended diagnostics and treatments and then we're also looking at perceptions of so solution first vets also they think they feel believe they feel hurt. They're making the client feel heard a lot more than alignment first vets and then how they structure information often is a long monologue rather than structuring information for a brain that's under threat. There's lots of techniques out there on how you get alignment with people when they're cognitively overloaded. because they're considering all these life or that situations. So in negotiation research, there's a lot there on like how to quickly reach get on the same page with people. And a lot of that is about the sequencing of how you're dripping in information and how you're interact. Does that answer your question? So we're not really looking at eyeballs or whatever yet. It's more like tactically, how are you coming in with your information? How are you chunking it, structuring it to get to the best outcome? How did you, I mean we understand the origin story, but how did you come up with an idea to tackle this beyond just feeling the experience that you felt and knowing that it could have been better. And what's your background a little bit deeper than the intro that made you decide that this was the thing that you wanted to spend your time doing? Yeah, two part question. I'll first say how I got here. Part of it was on purpose. Part of it was an accident. So when I was doing research on this space on how to, how I could have gotten to a different outcome, what where the gaps are. Training was a big thing. There's a chasm that's unsurprising that people brought up training a lot as a gap. And we built these case simulations. We were like, hey, I at Harvard, we didn't learn through lectures. We only learned through case-based learning. And we had a lot of simulations. I thought he seems like a similar thing. And when we started rolling these simulations, that's when we saw the data potential that you could quickly see what decisions people are making for different case topics, well, in terms of like the diagnostics they're selecting the treatments, but also how they're going at the case, how they're approaching different aspects of it. So that's how that came about. And then my background is in computer science and economics for my undergrad. And then I worked in private equity kind of in investing operations. And then I was at Harvard. And there we focused a lot on motivation, incentives, behavioral science, alignment, leadership, communications. So kind of all came together into this one very specific niche. So the question about your kind of journey to get here. So being number of years in private equity and saying no to so many companies, which is, you know, what am I experienced? What was the reason capital from private equity? And then flipping to the entrepreneurial side knowing how many times you hear no from investors. How is that transition? Or you knew that this is a clear path? Because I have that experience, this is going to get all the boxes checked in investment round. I guess there's two sides of this. One is I actually didn't want to be very investor first at the outset. I wanted to really focus on customers. And I've successfully managed to be a bootstrapped customer funded company, which I'm slightly proud of not having gone into the venture capital route to early. But also from my time we looked at in PE, we looked at a lot of life sciences, learning and compliance companies and education technology. So I had a sense for kind of the role of workforce development, what, you know, organizational, software, training software can look like and what people are on the lookout for. That makes sense. Sure does. And yeah, congrats. It's a different experience. Being a bootstrapped founder versus a VC founder, having done both. And I don't know that there's one that's better. So it's just different. What's the big vision? So, you know, five years everything went right. And what's the company look like in five years? And that's probably also a really great question to pair with that one, which is why NISL? What's the significance of the name of the company? I'll start with why NISL is felt like my brand personally is someone that is very playful, but also really serious. And NISL kind of played into that. It felt cute and approachable. But then, you know, got down to business. And most of that will be the other question, the vision. Yeah. So my ultimate goal is, you know, help us all get along a little better. We're in tough times. These macroeconomic conditions that's are graduating into, or it's really, really tough. You're having these early career vets that are learning medicine. Also, figure out how to talk about costs that are in, you know, the thousands to then ten thousand dollars. My cat is currently is about to go through radiation therapy. And I got the estimate. And I was like, wow, this is not a small number. And really in these times, I feel like to reduce burnout and to improve trust, you just need people to get along better and understand each other better. And I see this as a way to train the skills that ultimately get us, all to connect as humans and get to our end goals better. So in the next five years, I would hope it, we get to all the schools. We get to the early career training programs and really start there before we branch out to other technician programs and CSRs and other segments. Fascinating story and a very interesting background as an entrepreneur. Where do people find you and where do you find the technology and how can they interact with it and just give it a go and see how that works? Yeah. If you're a vet, I'd love you to participate in the study, encourage your peers and you can do that by going into link dot nozzle dot tech slash study right now since we're in the kind of the enterprise product development stage, it's not publicly available for folks unfortunately to train. Maybe that will change in the recent future. But if you're a technician, that actually is available online just for anesthesia monitoring and management and you can find me on LinkedIn. All right, well we'll connect the link to the show notes. There are two questions that we always ask at the end of the episode. The first one is there a book, TED Talk, any sort of material YouTube video that you recently consumed with whichever way we consume information to these days that inspired you and you would like to share here. Yes, there's a book. It's actually a foundational text. It's called Getting to Yes and it's foundational on how alignment actually happens between two people and I think it kind of shifts the perspective of how that client conversations happen and how breakdowns happen because usually these breakdowns aren't about disagreement on what's best for the pet. They're about these unspoken interests and assumptions and constraints for these humans on both sides and I've had that sweet this book before and they agreed that it helped change how they think about these conversations and made them a little more collaborative and not kind of transactional. So I'd love people to read that book. I never thought about that book as a veterinarian train. I loved the book and there was always like more about like negotiations but it's interesting to apply it from the angle so I would love to review them that angle. Yeah, I worry about using the word negotiation too much in what I'm doing because I feel like I can scare people but there is a lot of negotiation, right? That is what medicine is. So. Oh, in terms of it, never say sales because vets are not selling anything except diagnostics medications and everything else. Well, this exams. The list goes on and on. Neshmean, one last question for you. Another innovator that you think would be a good request for the podcast. Yes, I would love Dr. Lindsay Hedges for Mission Pet Health to be on here. The reason is that she is someone who's been taking a data and behavioral science driven approach to this whole field of early career doctor mentorship and she's created this incredible organizational level mentorship program that doesn't just you know it's not just words on a page. They're living it. They're doing it. So I'd love her to share what she's doing there. Thank you so much for listening to the Vitchinary Innovation Podcast. If you want to hear about our new episodes, please follow us on any social media channel. Also, you can check out our website at VitchinaryInnovationPodcast.com. See you next week.