Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Simplifeye CEO Ryan Hungate (Part 3)

Ryan Hungate: Things that you might work in the consumer world like television ad and pay-per-click ads do not work in the healthcare world. The things that work are more old school. If you sell somebody Shopify for example, that’s intense. That’s like, “Rip out the heart and brain of your business, and replace it with Shopify.” What Shopify did was to replace one piece and said, “Because you have that one piece, you also get the rest and you can deploy that whenever you want.”

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Simplifeye CEO Ryan Hungate (Part 2)

Ryan Hungate: Doctors will tell you that 2020 was one of the best years financially for most practices. That’s because they weren’t just looking at new patients; they were calling the patients back up that they had planned treatment for and they were completing that. We wanted to automate that. We took our direct scheduling. We sent out text and email invites to all of those patients who needed to come back in.

Once again, we were automating a portion of the front desk. The final piece where you’re seeing a lot of people move into now is payments. We wanted to create a payment platform from scratch. Think Square for retail healthcare. Think Shopify for retail healthcare. Now we can actually process payments in a very quick manner. We can host subscriptions and payment plans.

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Simplifeye CEO Ryan Hungate (Part 1)

Ryan talks about the retail healthcare space in this interview.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Simplifeye.

Ryan Hungate: I’m the Founder and CEO of Simplifeye. I’m actually an orthodontist. Prior to that, I was at Apple in Cupertino. I was there from 2007 to 2008. I designed what is now the Apple Retail Workflow. It was a cool time to be at Apple. We had a problem that we were not triaging people as they walked into the retail store.

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Bret Larsen, CEO of eVisit (Part 4)

Bret Larsen: To your second question, it was Gartner that estimated that the penetration of a platform like eVisit was between 5% and 20%. In the pandemic, everyone had something. Enterprise virtual care platforms would still have that similar penetration rate. What’s accelerated is the use of video. We were inundated with opportunities to speak with health systems executives on what we could help them accomplish.

Some of them ended up becoming customers and some of them went towards a Zoom or some other solution. I started calling these decision makers back and said, “You talked to us last year. You didn’t end up moving forward. Help me understand why.”

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Bret Larsen, CEO of eVisit (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where are we now in the telemedicine industry?

Bret Larsen: Today, we call it telemedicine, virtual care, and telehealth. The reality is it needs to become medicine, care, and health. There is no virtual component. The care received remotely should still be the same quality when receiving it in person.

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Bret Larsen, CEO of eVisit (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. You prefaced the comparison with the existing EMRs versus yourself by saying that the old school EMRs were primarily billing systems whereas you are focusing more on the experience. One of the things that is viable in an electronic setting that is not viable in an in-person setting is recording of the session and then transcribing that session automatically. Is that part of what you do?

Bret Larsen: It’s an area we’re looking at and developing actively. When you look at what eVisit is, we’re a care platform. While EMRs are trying to compete in the virtual video element, we see them as partners. When we go in, integration with the EMR is a large component of the use case to make sure that we can push and pull that data back.

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Bret Larsen, CEO of eVisit (Part 1)

Terrific conversation on the future of Telemedicine.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing yourself as well as eVisit to our audience.

Bret Larsen: I’m one of the founders and CEO of eVisit, a market-leading virtual care platform built for enterprise health systems. At this point in the pandemic, we’ve all experienced a telemedicine visit. We build the workflows and technology to enable some of the nation’s largest healthcare providers and health systems deliver their care and advance their care delivery strategy.

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Jeff Richards, COO of SnapNurse (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you look around at the ecosystem, what are the open problems from where you sit? Is this nurse shortage problem something that is escalating or is it getting better because people are getting into nursing?

One of the conversations that we have had with some of our previous guests is that there are professions that are getting slaughtered like retail and hospitality. There are movements from those professions into healthcare. Is that something that you are seeing? What is your assessment of that?