Do you Have a Doctor in the Family
This week I am talking to Walter Jin, CEO at Pager (@getpager) a virtual care company that integrates care across different platforms and channels wit the goal of democratizing access of healthcare to the widest possible population, nationally and internationally, as possible.
Walter’s journey started out as an investor in the Carlyle group leading healthcare investments. In his earlier career he would have avoided home healthcare and health technology sectors but over time his view has changed to now where he sees those two areas as the most interesting with biggest opportunities. These formative experiences shaped his view of the market and what it takes to be successful in healthcare. Having a great product, while important, is not as important as a well developed and effective goto market strategy that scales. As he highlights many great ideas never reach scale or success in healthcare
If a product is or services that great but no one uses it then what’s the point?
He has an interesting perspective on some of the changes in healthcare and the impact of the HiTech act, the Accountable Care Act and more recently the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic that have accelerated the industry shift but also introduced the EHR, ‘a necessary evil’ that serves as a planning and resource management tool rather than a clinical tool.
We talk about the Pager solution that is as he describes ‘The Uber for Doctors’ (one of the co-founders was also a co-founder at Uber), that started out with the same simplicity as Uber, instead of calling a car, calling you doctor. But the company has grown past this original concept to help solve the staffing challenges and lack of resources that plague our healthcare system and those around the world.
As we discuss the move to virtual did not help – simply shifting the available resource of doctors from in person to online. The solution seeks to solve the information problem that most people have – accessing good information to help them make critical health decisions, providing everyone with a “Doctor in the Family” resource
Find care, Get care and After Care
Adding multiple communication channels as part of the solution allowed staff to scale with one specialist “talking” with up to four patients concurrently expanding and scaling access. This increased further with the addition of AI technology that helped this increase to 10 sessions while maintaining the human touch and empathy of interactions.
The incremental insight and steps they took were all about scaling the organization and they recognized the big players already owned the market and have focused their attention on these existing channels
Listen in to hear what it takes to be successful in healthcare innovation (hint Incremental steps and changes are central) and how they managed to maintain the empathy and human touch while scaling the resources to interact with multiple patients concurrently
Listen live at 4:00 AM, 12:00 Noon or 8:00 PM ET, Monday through Friday for the next week at HealthcareNOW Radio. After that, you can listen on demand (See podcast information below.) Join the conversation on Twitter at #TheIncrementalist.
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