Good to get the context. Yes, legislation will definitely help but we feel that technology can definitely make a large difference in healthcare.

Yes I understand you feel that way; you wouldn't have invested time and sweat and money otherwise. Your company is basically a feature that has been considered (or attempted) at other, bigger, more established, and currently struggling health tech companies in the bay area, and then discarded. There's a reason for that (it's harder than it looks and isn't profitable at scale.

Have you investigated and understood why and what differentiates you from them?

Great question. A lot of early success for us has been through our fully automated and integrated billing approach and our ability to communicate a customized estimate for a patient pre-visit. Also, timing plays a huge roll in success. Never before has there been such an emphasis on creating a retail like experience in healthcare.

This is not a substantive answer to the question you were asked.

At this point the gamble is that Single Payer won't happen. There's a chance but we think it's slim. Our bet is that we're positioned well to take advantage of the recent Executive Order.

I don't see single payer as a likely outcome either (even if Sanders, Warren, or Yang wins). Thanks for the quick response. Even though I wish we didn't need this kind of company I'm glad someone is taking the gamble.

Thank you so much! It's hard to know what's going to happen but something has to happen. The system is broken.

I’m just curious, from a moral perspective, how does it feel to bet against many of the poor being lifted out of death and medical bankruptcies for the sake of your own profit?

Your question is a bit harsh, but it strikes at one of the more insidious truths in this space right now: most if not all these health tech companies' business models simply wouldn't work if we had a functioning health care system, and they end up participating in the negative feedback loop that further entrenches the problems they claim to want to solve.

Whew... Loaded question ;) I understand where you are coming from. One way to look at it is that in the world that we currently live in there is much to be done to increase transparency and affordability. One of the statistics that propelled us to work on this problem was a survey that showed almost half of Americans avoid or delay care despite illness or injury because they don't know the cost. By at least starting that conversation about finances up front we hope to alleviate a lot of those fears, and the good news is that about 5% of patients have responded to our partners with messages saying "I can't afford this." and 100% of the time we have been able to connect them to a payment plan or to charitable funds to help them get the care they need. To us that seems better than not having the conversation and sending people to collections when they could never have afforded the service to begin with.

It's definitely not perfect, and there are many that are suffering, but we do feel strongly that our solution is a force for good in the current environment.

Ultimately more transparency leads to more competition which leads to lower costs.

Not necessarily when the choices are constrained by the health insurer. We (a big VC funded primary care provider) experimented with full transparency pricing. Never moved the needle. But that was 10 years ago so maybe things are different now.

Agreed, insurance companies are typically a big cog in the wheel. We're starting to see things change as high deductible health plans have grown so rapidly. The consumerism of healthcare is starting to create change (i.e. price transparency executive order signed in June).

We'll look into it. Thanks for the heads up.

We are planning on integrating with multiple EMR's to make sure we're able to offer a fully automated, fully integrated approach to practices. I love the steps Epic is taking to open up API's. My hope is that more EMR's will follow suit. Healthcare is fun...and challenging :).

FHIR APIs are definitely becoming more and more broadly deployed, which is awesome! Scaling wise, it might be worth looking into the interoperability partners that specialize in standing up FHIR endpoints for providers like Datica & Redox.

Agree on FHIR APIs are becoming ubiquitous especially with Apple Health pushing its adoption in consumer facing applications, not so much on the legacy enterprise side from what I've seen thus far (I work primarily in the clinical trials side of things) and we prototyped our own integration stack to help with wrangling with different standards (more like the lack thereof). It is worth actually building that ourselves in the early days as we have learned so much about the challenges to integrate with our partners and will at some point looking into interoperability partners as we scale.

Awesome, thanks for the insight!

Good luck! How long did mvp/integration take from idea? Us was long....over a year

Thanks! Idea to MVP/integration was 3 months. I feel your pain on the integrations. Would love any insight you have on streamlining that process.

As mentioned above, redox or other similar systems is your best bet!

But redox is stubbornly expensive.

Thanks! We agree healthcare needs to change. We're excited to be a part of that change.

Thank you! We're looking forward to tackling this head on. Appreciate the support!