Yesterday, we at Myca, announced Hello Health at the Health 2.0 conference in San Diego. Hello Health is a consumer brand of neighborhood doctors who use 21st Century technology to communicate and practice medicine. As a member of Hello Health, you log in, tell us what’s wrong in your own words, then schedule an appointment just as easily as making an appointment at the Apple Genius Bar – and then a doctor shows up at your house at your requested time. And it costs about $50 cheaper than your typical office-based physician. Hello Health is a consumer brand – not a healthcare brand, but a consumer brand much like Zipcar, Netflix, or FedEx – it’s the “consumer experience” of having your own accessible neighborhood doctor who communicates the way we all communicate these days via email, IM, video chat, and text messaging. Hello Health are neighborhood-based doctors for a Netflix-priced, monthly subscription fee. We’re modeling ourselves on consumer brands that have changed established industries much like FedEx, Toyota, Whole Foods, Zipcar, Netflix, and Apple. But we’re using our technology and a hyperlocal, neighborhood doctor’s office to change healthcare – to rescue both patients and doctors. We’re taking the pain out of needing healthcare and we’re making it convenient and affordable. We resurrect all the good things of the old-time neighborhood doctor and arm you and your doctor with technology to make healthcare efficient, effective, and affordable. We are creating a new kind of doctor’s practice backed by the power of a perfectly-constructed, industry-changing consumer brand in collaboration with those lovely Barbarians. Hello Health are thorough, accessible, communicative, modern, personal, high-quality, transparent, friendly, neighborhood, professional doctors who partner with members to optimize their health.
Our focus is on you – a human being; a person paying hard-earned money for a service that should rival the value of your money; a person concerned with their health who understands that western medicine cannot provide absolutely everything; a person who wants a knowledgeable, personable doctor who will treat you with respect and dignity; a person who wants to simply feel their best and wants to embrace the most reliable health information on the internet and wants a doctor to interpret it and personalize it specifically for you. We are your doctors. We are your resource for health information. We are your healthcare financial consultants.
Depending upon the nature of your symptoms, you will be able to make an appointment for a house/office call, a video chat, an IM, or simply send us an email. A hello health doctor will then show up at your apartment/office or meet you virtually on the web. We’ll also have an exam room in our office for problems that require a doctor’s office visit. The appointment process will nearly exactly mimic making an appointment at the Apple Store Genius Bar.
Our market is the 47 million people in America without health insurance; the other millions of Americans who are underinsured; and the 40 million Americans over the next four years who will have high deductible health insurance plans. In essence, there will be nearly 100 million people in America in 4 years who have to pay cash for their healthcare. Our other market – considering half of my current patients have insurance and simply pay for accessibility and convenience – are people who value relationships and communication with their own personal doctor.
hello health is concierge service for all.
We will add significant value to the cost of the subscription fee by taking advantage of the weaknesses and insufficiencies of the traditional healthcare system that has left behind the healthcare consumer:
1. The healthcare system is disorganized, confusing, and not consumer friendly. hello health serves as your guide and your doctor to deliver a pleasurable consumer experience found nowhere else in the healthcare industry. We are your first line of defense and administer your primary care transparently, cost-effectively, and with the highest quality. You, as a patient, have complete readable access to your EMR so you can view all of your medical information when you’d like. Since patients only remember about 10 to 15% of all information told to them by their physician, all email, IM, and video visits will be archived in your records (including audio recordings of your in-person doctor visits) so you can simply press play to hear again what your doctor told you. Should you need anything beyond what we provide, we have secured relationships with specialists, radiologists, and labs to get you what you need, from exactly who you need, at the best price (often just 10% over what providers are typically reimbursed by insurance companies). Instead of being price gouged by providers who see that you have no insurance and have to pay cash, we have done the leg work for you as representatives of thousands of cash-paying consumers who offer significant revenue to those specialists who agree to see our patients for a reasonable cost. Those providers we have relationships with are personable, high quality, private practice specialists. They are also simply savvy business people – they understand that hello health members will pay them cash that day for services rendered without having to pay the overhead of dealing with insurance companies. Since we have established this network for you, when you need services we can’t provide for you, the money we save you will pay for your annual subscription fees many times over. We won’t let you go to a radiologist who will charge you $700 for a mammogram we have secured for you for $125. We understand how the healthcare system works. We understand reimbursement and the difference between what doctors will accept from cash paying consumers and what they charge insurance companies. We help you spend your money wisely and protect you from subsidizing the costs of decreasing physician insurance reimbursement. We are your primary care doctors, your guides, and your healthcare financial consultants. We save you money.
2. The pharmacy industry takes advantage of consumers. We provide free generic medications so you don’t have to worry about filling your prescriptions. We get these medications in pre-packaged, typical dose packages for nearly nothing because generic medications cost mere pennies per pill. Typical pharmacies mark up generic medications sometimes thousands of percent and take advantage of the fact that most people do not realize that prices vary widely between pharmacies. We think this is wrong and unfair because, unlike every other industry, prices in healthcare are not posted and searchable on the internet. When hello health physicians order you a prescription, we will automatically send you a text message with the most convenient pharmacy to get your medication at the lowest price. Since medication prices vary so markedly (for example, a Z-pack ranges from $25 to $80 at different pharmacies in a 5 block radius), we make sure you get the best deal. We we save you money on medications.
3. We provide free or highly subsidized healthcare to neighborhood business owners in exchange for discounts or other perks at their businesses for hello health members. We are “inventing” creative new perks for our members every day to add significant value to the subscription fees. Since many of you will not use healthcare services more than a few times a year, we’re working with neighborhood business partners to help you lead a healthier lifestyle every day of your life.
4. Insurance and healthcare is ridiculously too expensive because (of course I’m missing a lot) of high overhead, inefficient processes, lack of coherent communication, lack of centralized repositories of information, practice of defensive medicine because of the breakdown of the doctor-patient relationship, and oligopolization of local healthcare delivery systems and health insurance companies. If you cannot afford the ridiculously expensive insurance premiums in your local area, we provide the next best thing – your own personal accessible doctor who you can communicate with however you’d like who treats your medical conditions at a reasonable price, and who helps you spend your money wisely. We are not a replacement for insurance. We, at hello health, are simply your best healthcare resource for the vast majority of people who do not get hit by a bus in a given year. We save you money.
The US Healthcare system has let you, the healthcare consumer, down. On July 15th, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, you will have your own personal “concierge for all” doctor from a streamlined, high-quality, cost-conscious, trustable brand of convenient, accessible healthcare delivery called hello health. Say hello to a new brand and a new concept – hello health – healthcare delivery as it should be in 2008, just patients and doctors communicating effectively both armed with the best tools to optimize the patient’s health and the doctor’s practice, dignity, income, lifestyle, freedom, and professional satisfaction.
We at Myca are developing a robust web platform that allows patients to tell us what’s wrong with them and schedule their own appointment. It is an online scheduling system, a practice management system, and an electronic medical record. The interface looks much more like this than this.
We understand there are two consumers in healthcare – patients and doctors. hello health offers physicians freedom, more money, efficiency, and opportunities to deliver quality care and develop personal relationships with your patients.
1. Freedom. Insurance companies can no longer enslave physicians. Physician salary has been decreasing relative to inflation for years. Doctors are tired of working harder to help others more profitable. We are highly educated professionals with a vital responsibility in society. Our services will not be cheapened and diminished to a $5 copay. hello health physicians can make as much money as they want because there are millions of Americans who either have to pay cash or want to pay cash for healthcare. Our personalized, reasonably priced, accessible service; word of mouth; reputation; and direct to consumer ads and marketing supply the patients. hello health physicians fill that demand. A house visit actually costs less than the average office visit in NYC. Physicians do not have to join an established practice as the junior attending working to subsidize the senior attendings’ golf memberships. We provide the patients, you, as a physician, provide the skills. You have no restrictions from insurance companies, large healthcare institutions, etc. You simply see patients and get paid for your hard work and work as much as you’d like.
2. More money. The average general physician in NYC makes about $165,000 working over 55 hours a week. The average overhead for a general physician is nearly 60%. Since we are a “virtual” company without costly staff and office space, we have damn near no overhead and physicians can make significantly higher salaries seeing much fewer patients in person but handling about the same amount of patients due to proper communication over the internet. We’ve used technology to eliminate costly staff and facilities. The hello health business model benefits physicians, patients, and Myca. Myca and hello health physicians share the revenue from both doctor visits and the subscription fees. Patients will rate the visit (because it is tied to the transaction much like eBay with their very simple one question survey) and Myca will take a certain percentage of the revenue depending on that physician’s average monthly satisfaction score. Myca will take less from that physician’s revenue, the better the physician’s score. Of course, this builds the hello health brand and ensures doctors focus on the consumer experience rather than volume. Even while traveling to and from patients, we enable you with mobile applications to get paid by answering emails, IMs, and giving your professional opinions.
3. More efficiency. We at Myca are developing a platform that streamlines documentation significantly with heavy doses of artificial intelligence built in to the backend. My goal is to design a system that enables physicians to document 90% of patient interactions with less than 10 clicks of a mouse. Our interface is revolutionary as evidenced by the reaction of the crowd at the Health 2.0 conference. I will have a guided tour of the demo up online as soon as possible. For now, forget about all the other EMRs you’ve seen that look like they were designed by the military with tabs, lists, and drop-down menus showing unnecessary amounts of useless information. No matter how much “Web 2.0” style sheets you apply to your EMR, it’s still an unintuitive way to organize voluminous, complex data. Our interface looks and functions like no other application you’ve ever seen.
4. More quality. The Myca platform ensures prevention and best practices based on evidence, expert guidelines, and consensus opinion. We also encourage that you spend as much time with the patient as you see fit. We do not pay for volume, we pay for consumer satisfaction scores. You, as the physician, at the point of ordering prescriptions, tests, and services will be armed with cost information. Every order you type will have an associated price tag so you can help your patients spend their money wisely. Information will also be given to you that will enable you to make a more informed decision about lab tests. You will be able to know if the combination of two $50 tests will have a higher positive predictive value than the $600 lab test you are about to order.