Two weeks ago while procrastinating before reviewing some legal docs, I came across a post of Jay Parkinson and his new take on health care practice, called Hello Health.  I thought that his take on the doctor-client relationship was great and as an entrepreneur, admired the way they’re using today’s technology to change what most would agree is an antiquated system.  So I emailed Jay and asked if I could interview him to learn more and share it here.

SM: Thanks for taking the time to talk about your business, Hello Health, (www.hellohealth.com) and how you’re using some basic technologies to take the doctor/patient relationship in a new, or old, direction.

First, let’s learn about your business.  According to your site, the doctors at hellohealth are the neighborhood doctors of the 21st century. Your team focuses on the patient, as a real live person, by bringing back the old-fashioned neighborhood doctor. Not only do you see people at your Hello Health office, but you’ll go and see your members/patients at their home or place of work.  In addition, your doctors also use email, IM, text, and video chat to communicate and keep in touch with patients.

If I understand your site correctly, signing up for and using your service is fairly straight forward.  People can join your site and pay a small monthly membership fee.  When they need to visit one of your doctors, they can go to your site, view your calendar and schedule a time and date that work.  No assistants or admins taking calls.  From there, they select the type of visit and/or method of communication they want to have with the doctors with the options being; office visits, in-home/at-work visits, video/phone/IM visits, or long emails.

This is a great take on using today’s technologies to get back to old school doctor and patient relationships.

My first question is, what are you doing differently that you and your team can actually spend time communicating with and getting to know your patients?  It doesn’t seem like today’s health industry in the US allows for this sort of thing anymore.

Dr. JP: I approach health care delivery as Toyota approaches manufacturing a car. Everything in life is a process that is error prone with unnecessary steps. Toyota has markedly improved their quality by analyzing these steps and reducing error or eliminating the step altogether. Analyzing the steps in health care delivery is a dizzying array of inconveniences and inefficiencies. Sit down and think of all the steps that must happen just to see your doctor and get some labs done. Then think of the time involved. It’s insane. So I analyzed these steps and then used all of the modern communications to streamline this process. This simply means that we’re accessible (an email away), convenient, and communicative. But yes, you are correct, the health care system does not allow much for this kind of service and relationship. Doctors only get paid for office visits and doing procedures on you – not for customer service or communication. But, in fact, if you believe your customers are the ones who pay you, patients aren’t even the real customers of health care. The real customers in our health care system are insurance companies. And doctors bend over backwards to satisfy them and get paid. They hire as many people they can to help them spend as little time with patients as possible so they can churn out doctor visits and get paid as much as possible. Their reimbursement has been decreasing every year for years. So they maintain their salary by doing more office visits. So they hire more and more staff…it’s a vicious circle that we, as patients just wanting to have a relationship with our doctors, pay the price for.

We’ve taken a different approach. What you’re really buying into with Hello Health is a relationship based on good communication. You pay a little extra for quality, but you know it’s genuine. We’re sort of like shopping at an Apple Store, whereas the traditional health care system is sort of like shopping in a general store in 1965.

SM: What technologies do you find your doctors and members using the most to communicate; video, email, IM, or phone?

Dr. JP: The way we communicate meshes perfectly with how people already use the internet to communicate; email, IM, phone, then very occasionally video.

SM: As your business seems to focus on the busy and technology inclined, what percent of your interaction with patients would you say is in-person?

Dr. JP: The first visit with your Hello Health doctor is always in person so we can get to know you. The subsequent visits can then be done via the internet or in person. There is good research to suggest that 50% of traditional office visits are unnecessary but persist because that’s how doctors are paid in America. If doctors were paid to practice quality medicine rather than quantity medicine and communicate well with you to keep you out of their office, we’d halve the number of doctor visits in our country. With Hello Health, we have the ability to charge you within our system for online communication. Therefore, now we get paid for accessibility and good communication. Doctors only have one thing to sell – our time. Just like every profession and service, we can’t really give away our time for free. And with the current traditional reimbursement structure, doctors would be giving away 50% of their value if they did what we do. And that’s simply not fair. I don’t blame them. But now there’s a better way to practice medicine. We’ll be launching our platform nationwide in about 4 months, so health professionals all over the nation can practice this way wherever they are.

SM: Do you find that your patients are comfortable communicating with their doctor via video, IM, or email?

 Dr. JP: Yes. Definitely. It’s normal communication nowadays. It’s how we all do it. So just like when you add a valuable friend to your network of normal communication, your doctor now fits into your normal everyday life.

SM: One of the best things about your business model is that you’re not using any complicated or expensive technology to make this work.  You’re using services that the majority of us have taken for granted over the last few years and using them in an area that has historically shied or flat our ran away from technology.  How is your practice being received by others in your profession as well as the insurance agencies?

Dr. JP: I don’t really pay attention to the insurance companies or to the traditional health care world. The latest batch of doctors graduating from medical school was born in 1982. This is 100% normal for them. We’ve had nearly 1000 doctors contact us and ask to join the platform. And it’s such a good idea, it’s going to spread like wildfire amongst consumers looking for an accessible doctor. Remember, there are 47 million uninsured people in our country. They’re reasonably well off, they often just don’t see the value in spending $800 a month on insurance they rarely use. And having insurance does not guarantee an accessible doctor who communicates like you. The traditional system, say in Massachusetts, has a 52 day wait to see a doctor. If that’s our competition, I’m definitely not worried about attracting consumers, nor about doctors joining our network to satisfy their needs.

But, all in all, I’m not interested in working with the skeptics and the traditionalists within health care. If people aren’t open to new ideas, then they must be thinking that the current system functions well. And we all know that’s wrong and our system is broken. I simply want to empower health professionals who are looking for a better way and not satisfied with the status quo. We’re serving as a magnet to attract them to a better opportunity that translates to a better patient experience and quality customer service, for a reasonable price. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

We want to take the time to thank Jay for sharing his story with us.  It’s very cool and we wish him well when their platform launches later this year. 

Some of you may be asking, “Hey, you’re a business site. Why are you talking about healthcare? For that matter, since when did you start interviewing people?”  Fact is, our team is a group of entrepreneurs so when we see great ideas like this, we like to reach out and learn as much as we can with the hopes of sharing it here. We hope you get as much out of it as we do.

Photo by Zach Hill (Zach the Photo Guy) on flickr

There were a few good conversations going on around B2B on Friday and Saturday.  The first one was around Chris Brogan’s “The B2B vs B2C Thing” blog post.  In the post, Chris talks about the difference in using social media for B2C vs B2B.  There were over thirty comments to go along with what Chris wrote and it was all good.  I tried to contribute to the conversation by pointing out the following,

“It’s interesting that most people still view B2B as selling to the huge corps. Granted, that’s where the big money is but when you look at large corps as a percentage of all businesses out there, it probably is less then 30%. We see a majority of B2B being small businesses and entrepreneurs that are out there looking for a good web hosting site, accountant, IP lawyer, project management software, etc., and we believe a majority of those professionals are touched and reached via social media just as in B2C. Anyone have a take on that?”

Another commenter, Bill, added, “@ Scott Manley – It’s very interesting you bring this up – having been in the VAR/Solution Provider business in the past, one of the most under-served segments was the SMB market. These SMBs are generally looking to compete in highly competitive markets, save money and generally are more apt to embrace new technology much more readily than a larger business or corporation would. I think the SMB market would be key to jump into social media mixing to try and reach them, collaborate with them and find out who these SMBs truly are: their needs, desires, competitive atmosphere and pitfalls they face – in essence gain an understanding of the customer as never before through social media – then when they feel valued, you get your value back.”

Tim Walker also jumped in by saying, “@Scott Manley – You make a very good point. Most of the jobs in the United States are created by small businesses (not even medium-sized), and the SMB sector represents a huge chunk of the economy. Of course, these companies also have different needs, and they can’t afford the mondo-sized products / service packages that the big dogs can. In other words, selling to SMBs (which, by the by, has been a specialty of my employer for many years) can be un-sexy, but the value there can be huge…”

Also on Friday, we took the time to introduce ourselves to Tom Pick, author of a great B2B lead generation and marketing tools blog called WebMarketCentral. Tom not only took the time to look at our site and reply to us (Believe me, you don’t always get replies when you’re a startup.) but put us to task by asking some great questions which resulted in a very good discussion.  To paraphrase one of Tom’s questions, he asked how we planned on getting people to provide reviews on B2B solutions when most companies have policies against employees speaking in a public forum.  Again, the point I tried to make is that B2B isn’t all large companies. “…when we looked at the market of who is actually buying and looking for business apps and services, it’s over 70% small businesses, many of which do not have the same rules.  They don’t have a purchasing department, executive hierarchy, vendor management, or IT review group…”  As a small business ourselves, we realize that we are pretty much always representing our company and we think that it’s critical to our success to participate in social media just as much on behalf of FYIndOut as we do in our personal lives.  We also respond and interact pretty much the same in both roles.  We’re the decision makers and we’re the ones connecting online.

To wrap this up, I believe that in this economy, there are going to be even more small businesses out there and we’re going to be looking to buy and sell business applications and services while large companies continue to merge and downsize.  For those companies out there looking at B2B as selling strictly to large corps, you’re going to find yourself missing out on a lot of great opportunities.

When we meet with other entrepreneurs and small businesses, one of the biggest challenges we all face is getting the word out.  We have some customers and they love our service or product.  They’re even willing to tell others about us or be referrals for us and we appreciate it.

But what happens with word of mouth from there?  Who hears it?  Especially when you sell to businesses. Yes, hopefully it slowly grows and grows until the tipping point where it suddenly spreads like wildfire and the next thing you know, you’re the latest rage.  It’s every entrepreneur’s dream.

But how do you get from point A to Huge Success?  Yes, you write your blog. You join social media groups where your customers interact on various platforms.  You go to various association and group events to network as much as you can.  You contact journals and blogs to get some coverage.  You email and ask for business until you can’t see straight.  All of that.

But one of the biggest ways for word of mouth to make an impact is through reviews and ratings.

If you sell to consumers, one way or another people are reviewing your product or service on a number of sites.  If what you’re selling is good and people like it, social review and ratings platforms are your best friends. In no time, more people are hearing about your service or product better then any ad you could have bought because when they go to these sites, they’re looking for what you have to offer and sorting by rating.  Whether they’ve heard of your company or not, they’re finding your restaurant, product, books, song, salon, club, etc because you’ve built up a great reputation for your product or service on one or multiple platforms. It literally amplifies your word of mouth for your business!

What happens if you sell your product or service to businesses?  Up until now, there wasn’t anything.  The closest people come to fair reviews in business is either referrals on the company site, referrals the company provides you (I have yet to have a company provide contact information for those that haven’t had such a great experience.), or research reports from high end analyst firms that have never actually used the product or service they’re advising on. While we now use customer reviews in almost every major (or even minor) purchase in our consumer lives, the business world is years behind. 

That’s why we created FYIndOut.  We want to take the same power of amplifying word of mouth that the consumer market has into the commercial world.

Today is a big day for Americans.  We swore in a new President and ushered in a new era for the U.S.  We experienced an inauguration unlike any other where people watched the event and shared the experience in real time over multiple platforms like Twitter, Flickr,  and Facebook.  January 20^th will definitely be a point in time remembered throughout the ages.

But for our team here at FYIndOut, today will also be a great day to remember because we implemented our new design and went into production!  After a productive beta and a lot of work, we’re finally ready to roll.

With FYIndOut, companies will now be able to find and promote business applications and services the same way we do in our consumer lives.  We believe that the process for finding and marketing b-to-b solutions is pretty messed up and highly biased towards those with the largest advertising budget and we’re here to change that.  Our goal is to greatly improve the interaction between buyers and sellers of business applications and services so that both parties can have a more efficient and informed experience. 

So if you’re a professional that’s looking for a solution for your business or a great solution provider that can add value, join FYIndOut!  If you’re not sure yet, take our tour to learn more.

Thanks and we look forward to working with you!

All of Us at FYIndOut

We just wanted to let you know that we’ll have our site down this weekend to implement the new and improved FYIndOut!  Beta is done.

We’ll be back up on Monday and ready to go.

Have a great weekend,

Scott