How AIVA is Transforming the American IV Industry | David Light | Ep. 24

Introduction and AVA Media Day Overview 0:00

It's difficult for professional organizations to continue to add value beyond that initial excitement and say, oh, wow, OK, I get group purchasing discounts. I can get some travel discounts, definitely get my money's worth from a free consultation with a health care attorney. But once you kind of utilize some of that as a member, you start saying, okay, wait a second, i've got to pay X amount of dollars per month for what? And immediately, just to address that, Meet David Light, co-founder of Healthcare Accounting Solutions and chief operating officer of the American IV Association.

With over 20 years in healthcare, David's expertise spans clinical management, consulting and innovative program growth. Stay with us as David shares American I-V Association plans for 2025 in the healthcare space. The large majority of that membership dues go towards the promotion of the first initiative, which is us as Ava, the American IV Association, continuing to be the voice of industry. David, I wanna put some emphasis on what you're talking about of things are not cheap. Us as the America IV association, we're not here to just make money.

It's for us to heard, We have to able to spend money on certain platforms and things. They're gonna donate free ads on Facebook for to get our message out there. Welcome to a healthy point of view podcast. I'm your host Sam Sahara today. We have a special edition for Ava's media day. That's the American ID association. And we have, uh, special guests who I work very closely with David light, who's, the chief operating officer. Yeah. Talk about a few different things. Thanks for having me, Sam. Yeah, absolutely.

So why don't we start with talking about what Media Day is? Yeah. I'll unpack that a little bit. One of the initiatives for the American Ivy Association for 2024 was really to become the voice of industry. That was our main mission. And we knew we had a lot of other things behind that, which obviously you as the chairman are involved in. But we felt like if we weren't servicing the main vision of becoming the Voice of Industry, the other thing really didn't matter. You know, that was the leader.

And one of the ways we evaluated the most effective way to do that over the course of year was we did a media day in May, which was our first one, May 17th. It was fantastic. We had tons of people come in, industry leaders from all over country, we had presenters from the world, and we have well over a thousand people that registered and viewed that across the nation.

2024 Leadership and Committee Building 2:25

So things went really well, but also as a first one, as you know, and you learn things from the first, one then you want to do them better the second time. So that was an introduction to the industry as far as the landscape goes. And it was really designed for people that weren't familiar with IV hydration to get familiar. With IV, hydration in a few different categories. What I mean by that is we reached out not only to Ava members, But also non AVA members and people in the history. Then in addition, the press and we targeted a lot of regulators and invited them as well across the country.

We had a lot of people show up. How many did we have? Yeah, we had over a thousand. So it went really well. One of the things we learned, you know, this is kind of funny in hindsight, was we started at nine o'clock in the morning Eastern Standard Time. We basically negated the whole West Coast. As exciting as that first one was, I don't think a lotta people in California woke up at 5.45 to go on a podcast at six. So we learned that. We made some modifications and then this one, we also changed the content layout a lot.

Since May, going into May but also since May there have been a LOT of changes in some of the different battleground states that we've seen that have stepped up the rhetoric with regards to guidelines, opinions or positions on IV hydration as a whole. So the theme of this media day, October 18th, starting at now 11 a.m., Eastern Standard Time instead of nine, gives everybody a little bit longer to get up and get in on the West Coast, is the them of that is regulations. So, the first one had some clinical aspects, had clinicians talking about effectiveness and this and that.

This one is all regulation, which is great. The content is markedly different, and it basically assumes you've either watched the or you're familiar with the industry as a whole, so we can go into a much deeper dive of what the landscape looks like, you know, what it's looked like what, it looks, like now what we feel like it, looks it. It's going forward. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. This is exciting. And obviously today people are listening to us because we're playing this here on October 18th.

I'm happy for everybody joining us for media day and obviously. We're doing this because I can't attend. I have a bachelor, not bachelor party. That was a few weeks ago. Definitely not a bachelorette party, I, have to be part of a wedding. My best friend's getting married and I'm the best man. So you and i decided, you know what, we can go ahead and get the message out by doing just a simple little podcast style information. But yeah, this media day, I'm excited for it, giving more of that information that people are looking for of what's happening in the industry.

So yeah. Let's go through it. Yeah, Sam, just super appreciate you being a part of this. I am very, very thankful. Didn't know you last year and we developed a great friendship and professional relationship over the course of the last years. But it'd be really interesting, as the chairman of leadership advisory board, to tell a quick summary of how 2024 played out. We're nearing the end of it already. That's crazy. Thanksgiving and Halloween right around the corner. So if you don't mind giving the audience a summary of 2024 and then maybe I'll go into a little bit of 2025 and what we think that's going to look like.

Yeah, so just brief summary. One of our goals initially, and we started talking about this back in December of 2023, was really bringing all of these different leadership roles throughout the industry together so we do create that one strong voice. After we had our talks in in december of 2023, 2024 came through January and you guys on the Ava side appointed the leadership advisory board, which consisted of myself as the chairman, Ben Crosby with Drip Bar, and then Sarah Lomas with Revive. People saw that where now it's not something that's biased to a certain company.

It was impartial with all of these different minds from different companies. And then we started developing the different committees to represent the areas that we want to address. Everything from marketing, from standardization. We put the scientific advisory board together with a lot of the chief medical officers that make up a whole lot the companies in the industry. We put the position statement in place as well, too.

2025 Membership Value and Education Plans 6:30

So a lot of great things are being built. 2024 has been more of creating that infrastructure and the foundation of Ava for the industry. And I think now we're in a place, after having our first Media Day and now having today's Media day, we are in position for 2025 to start offering some more classes and things that people can benefit from. One of the things that I'd like to see as the chairman of The Association and what I've been working on is being able to offer courses on IV nutrition, how to treat your patients with certain protocols and some of best practices.

Also us certifying facilities so people know that this is an American IV Association certified facility and people feel comfortable participating there with a lot of things happening in the industry where people are cutting corners. We want to make sure that there's a reputable stratification process that consumers can relate to and feel very comfortable going to these facilities that are members with the American Idea Association. And then some of the other things that we saw with Vibe at the ViBe conference, that was a hit.

We had over 500 participants come and attend, some great speakers, a lot of experts in the industry talking about nutrition, talking And we got a lot of requests of more of some of the marketing and then also business management side of IV industry. So those are things that we're actively putting together a curriculum to offer a course to be able to get this out to the industry, so. Yeah, that's excellent. And that really plays into our strategic plan that we've outlined now. We haven't finalized, but we have outlined.

Now the third tier of that is building membership value, right? It's it's difficult for professional organizations to continue to add value beyond that initial excitement and say, oh, wow, OK, I get, you know, group purchasing discounts. I can get some travel discounts, so I definitely get my money's worth from a free consultation with a health care attorney. et cetera, right? There's a lot of value there. But once you utilize some of that as a member, which we're aware of, you start saying, okay, wait a second, I've got to pay X amount of dollars per month for what?

And immediately, just to address that, the large majority of the membership dues, not a whole lot, but go towards the promotion of first initiative, us as Ava, American IV Association, continuing to be the voice of the industry, which is not cheap. It does cost money. Facebook ads, Google ads. LinkedIn ads promotional material, media days, et cetera, etc. Cost money to do. We've got that and we keep our overhead very low and respectable, but it's still there's costs to it, hard costs. And then the third piece of that is to continue to enhance membership value.

Member value, as I was talking about, will build that out from a curriculum standpoint and continue focus on those initiatives as well. Yeah, and David, I want to put some emphasis on what you're talking about of things are not cheap. Us as the American ID Association, we're not here to just make money, right? It's for us to be heard. We have to able to spend money on certain platforms and things that They're not going to donate free ads on Facebook for us to get our message out there. Obviously, the money has to come from somewhere.

That's all the dues that the founding members are putting in. People have to understand, me as a chairman, I don't get paid to be the chairman. I volunteer my time. And as matter of fact, LiquiVida contributes X amount of dollars every single month to Ava. And that's what coming together as an industry is all about, is us being able to not just contribute financially, but also contribute our time and basically volunteer our to be able get the end result that we're looking for. Oh, absolutely. And that was the most exciting part of what I saw from a transformation of AVEN 2023 to Aven 2024 was once we integrated the Leadership Advisory Board and we integrate the key leaders with regards to founding members and key vendors.

So that's that core inner circle group of AVA contributors of time, effort, energy, money, right? We also mandated that one representative from each organization would serve on a committee. So we built out this volunteer force and it's not tremendous amount of time to serve on a committee, but it's a couple hours a month away from their job

Standardization, Safety, and Data Initiatives 10:50

or away, from they're fun or way from there. Family that individuals across the country have obligated themselves to in order to promote this mission. And that was really fulfilling for me to see that we then empowered all these people. One of the neat things about 2025 that were going to roll out is for 2024, we had those committee positions only filled by key vendors and founding members. We've got such a good membership following and requests all year long for people to join members to joint committees that we're gonna We're going to roll that out not unlimited But you know hey three members per committee or something like that to then build that force up better And that's and then have a better presence and more production let's say from that committee because we do focus on deliverables and So that's an exciting thing that we're rolling out in 2025 as well as some regional directors again volunteer But if anybody's licensed like both of us have been in our lives and the large majority of eva members are either in some capacity they're familiar with professional organizations that have Volunteer leadership roles, right and they take on different regions So we'll break the country up a little bit and break that out a bit more So We can get some more local kind of grassroots and that'll allow us to have more boots on the ground nationwide And one thing that I heard a few times, David, is people always asking, what kind of value am I gonna get out of the American Ivy Association?

And I want people to switch that mindset a little bit because this is about us coming together and creating the value for ourselves. So when we talk about founding members and members of The American I.V. Association, people have to start thinking of what kinda value do I bring to the table? that other people can benefit that are in the industry as well, too. And that's when we're talking about volunteer in our time and all that stuff. That's what's important. It's not about what you can just take out of Ava.

it's, what? You can also give into AVA. So I encourage anyone who's here at the media day or anyone. Who's wondering what kind of value they're going to get out. Of it is really think about how you could contribute into a bus or you. Could be part of the collective team to make this change in. The industry that we are looking for. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And that kind of does also lead to one or the other. We have three key initiatives for 2025 from a strategic plan perspective outlined right now.

Not formalized from tactical perspective, but outlined, right? The first one is continue to be the voice of the industry. The third one that we talked about is enhance the membership value. And the second one is continue to and really focus on promoting a safe and sustainable industry as a whole. And we touched on that throughout this conversation today, but really to unpack that, that breaks down into accreditations, it breaks into certifications, into training curriculums that we want to offer out there.

And it breaks down also into position statements by the scientific advisory board and initiatives to really take a proactive approach on the industry as a whole, especially from a data perspective. So one of the difficulties that we've seen and will continue to see is IV hydration is not necessarily a profession, it's a service. And that service is being performed by multiple different professionals. And so, for example, MDs, DOs DCs RNs APRNs PAs. You've got a variety of different professionals that are really rolling this out.

Strategic Partnerships and Grassroots Growth 14:20

So it's been a challenge to standardize that care somehow because multiple people at multiple different levels of professional training are going into this service line. Our next initiative with the Scientific Advisory Board that'll take us through the next few months is really to standardized that intake And delivery, not necessarily the curriculum of making the decisions of what to do with whom, but standardizing that intake and delivery so we can then aggregate that data because it's all collected in the same way, including adverse effects and those types of things.

And then we do our own sort of internal studies off it. It's been impossible to do that until now and it will be impossible until we roll this out. And have that level of standardization, we can't aggregate that data because it's all different data and its done different ways. So that's a really big initiative. We're putting some time, effort, energy and money behind to get that set up and really roll that out for the public. Which we would encourage anyone, even a non-Ava member, to use just to to just get the uniformity across the board.

Yep, yep, and I love that. And another thing that I want to mention is we're getting a lot of great support from other people in the medical industry. We got one of our sponsors, the Amspa. Alex, a CEO, was supporting what we were doing. They've noticed that in a MedSpa world, IV hydration has become a very serious topic. People are inquiring about more information. Our goal is to strategically work with the AMSPA and be able to provide a lot of the data, education of what people are looking for.

I think that speaks for itself. AMSPA is a very reputable organization, an accredited organization where people go to get their CMEs. And we're working strategically with the industry of medical spas to be to bring all the information about IV hydration to them. Yeah, absolutely. And Sam, as the chairman, are there other strategic relationships that you see the American IV Association going after in this next year of 2025? Yeah, we do have a few other strategic relationships. Some of the other ones that we're in talks with is also the A4M, which is the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, and then a view other, the functional medicine space that focus a lot on IV nutrition.

And then also, The other one is we are working on the liquefied side with a hospital that's based out of New York that is looking to do some of these type of studies and stuff on iv hydration. So that where we gonna plug in Ava into the mix as well too. Yeah, that's awesome and that super exciting. And then from Ava's grassroots perspective, we're also looking as one of our initiatives to leverage the licensed clinicians in AVA that are associated with ABA to really start to build better relationships with their state professional organization.

So for example, the American Nursing Association of Florida, right? They already have lobbyists, and they already relationships with regulators, they have pre-existing structure of communication that we feel like we can piggyback on because these are members of those organizations that are also a member of our organizations. In line with that grassroots empowering the member to do as much as they can to get the value, that's really the way that equation works the best and will as we go into 2024. Yeah.

Now I'm excited about that. I think that 2025 is going to be a great year. Oh, I know you said 2024, but 2025 it's going be. And we got a lot of things in the works and we'll bring it. It's the IV hydration space is just going. To continue to grow. Yeah, and every industry has its hiccups, like us coming together and doing what we're doing with all the different committees, the scientific advisory board, that leadership advisory. But you're going see a big effect globally, not just nationally with what.

We're. Doing. Absolutely. you