FredTalk With Raul Ruiz, COO

For our second FredTalk, we sat down with Raul Ruiz, COO at Essential Radiology, to explore what brought him to Essential and what fresh thinking he expects the company to bring to the radiology market as it exists today.

Tell us about your role on the team at Essential.

I’ve been Chief Operating Officer at Essential since September 2022, and joined the cofounders to build our team. My responsibilities are broad, and include management of staff, overseeing all aspects of recruitment of radiologists — hiring, onboarding, training, staffing, and forecasting — and also managing the technical aspects of implementation and integration. In addition, I work with the teams in other critical areas of the business, including radiologist licensures, credentialing, and sales support. Beyond the operational facets of my COO role, I help lead our strategic planning that serves as a roadmap for Essential’s growth. 

What drew you to Essential? 

What attracted me to Essential was the company’s vision, which addresses massive shortcomings in the current state of radiology. Practitioners are experiencing burnout and the commoditization of their services, a state of affairs that is also reflected in how poorly patient care in general is handled today. So having an opportunity to build a new, radiologist-centric model where we partner with hospitals, health systems and radiology practices based on their needs — really resonated with me. Having witnessed the negative changes in the radiology marketplace over the past decade, it’s exciting to be part of a team that is seizing the opportunity to put patients and radiologists first for a better clinical outcome. What we’ve set out to do, quite honestly, is reinvent how radiology services are provided and how teleradiology is delivered today with an emphasis on patient care.

How do you see Essential’s position as a new player in the radiology space?

Essential is stepping into a market environment that’s defined by an insatiable hunger for expansion and growth with little regard to quality. Ultimately, this insatiable appetite leads companies that are building teleradiology practices to make promises they simply can’t keep — to both the radiologists they employ and to the customers they serve. Essential, on the other hand, is honest and pragmatic about where and how we can build lasting relationships as well as deliver exemplary solutions that are tailored to customers’ needs. That allows us to “get it right” from the outset. We’re concise, very precise, and disciplined about the customers with whom we work, and this simple principle is driving our success. 

Where do you see opportunity?

We’re already experiencing organic growth with existing customers as we continue to make a positive impact. This is leading to expanded hours of coverage and support for additional facilities within a hospital system. Our successes are also attracting attention from prospective customers who are working with competitors that are encountering challenges with turnaround time performance and quality issues. Together, we’re growing carefully and with intention.

Essential is a unique and boutique company, but rapidly growing, that is very agile. We have business leadership, clinical expertise and operations management with decades of experience across the teleradiology ecosystem, running the gamut from sales, business development, technology integration, licensing and credentialing. That’s tremendous horsepower for a small company. We’re able to pivot quickly, which is a major difference between us and some of the larger companies that simply can’t adapt or adjust to changes in the marketplace the way Essential can. 

What great impact do you expect Essential to have on the field of radiology?

With our right-size model and team of radiologists, we’re going to be a performance leader, primarily focused on turnaround times and how quickly radiologists can deliver reports back to hospitals. Our new benchmarks for performance, in turn, are going to raise the bar across the industry.

I’m confident we’ll see the quality of reports dramatically improving, as well. It’s driven by consistency, technology, and operational excellence. And we all know that higher quality reports will immediately translate into improved patient care, which is what Essential cares about above all else.

We also have our sights set on positive impact through our visionary approach to integrating AI into our delivery model. We’ll save that topic for another day!

What have you learned about the Essential culture that resonates with your personal values and professional aims?

I love where I work; I can’t express that enough. I have been around this industry for quite a while, and for me, Essential has an incredibly team-oriented culture. The entire team is committed to the best outcomes for our customers and our patients, which is amazing. Our unwavering focus on patient care is one of the values that resonates with me most, which I believe is often overlooked in the radiology space.

Focusing on investing in our people, our team, and our radiologists, that’s the culture that we’re building, so that everything else develops organically. We champion transparency, we have empathy, and we bring our integrity to the job every single day. I see evidence of these values day in and day out, in interactions with the team, in conversations with our radiologists, and in how we communicate with our customers. These values are part of our DNA, which makes it a unique environment in this day and age. I’m really proud to be part of this Essential team and look forward to the road ahead.

What systemic and historical shortcomings/constraints are you addressing?

One of the reasons hospitals or health systems reach out and want to work with us is due to shortages albeit for shift coverage, limited in their sub-specialty services leading to restrictions in what radiology interpretations they can provide. That’s one of the issues that we’re able to define our customer needs by ensuring we have the right radiologist(s) available to read. We focus on a right-size customer model and ensuring we have the radiologists staffed and leading to quality service. 

The second thing is addressing radiologists’ burnout. There’s a shortage at either hospitals or practices where radiologists are working multiple hours and excess shifts to cover the gaps. Our goal is to leverage our right-size model to ensure we’re not asking radiologists to work excessive hours, which has been an area of concern in radiology.

Another aspect we plan to address constraints is through our technologies and looking at infrastructure to provide radiologists with the best in practice tools. Staying up to date with technology in the marketplace is a must. AI is one technological tool that we’ll be able to incorporate into our model in the near future. We’re actively researching new tools to enhance the radiologists’ experience.