Eric Reimer, CEO of Healthmap Solutions, on VatorNews podcast

Healthmap Solutions is a kidney population health management company

Steven Loeb and Bambi Francisco Roizen speak with Eric Reimer, CEO of Healthmap Solutions, a kidney population health management company.

Our goal is to understand how technology is radically changing healthcare: the way we screen, treat and measure progress and outcomes. Whether tech is helping or hurting our well-being physically and mentally. And whether we’re creating productivity that drives economic costs down while improving are overall health.

Highlights from the interview:

• There were four things that accelerated the interest in Healthmap Solutions: first that COVID has a big impact on people with underlying kidney disease, so it highlighted the fact that a lot of payers and providers didn't have a great solution for how to manage those patients. Then there was the Cures Act, which required payers to take responsibility for these members and that really increased interest. Third, everybody is much more cognizant of health equity and kidney disease certainly is more crippling to people of color: the prevalence is higher, and the treatments often are not equal. The last thing is the competitive landscape: because there were a number of competitors coming into the market, that drummed up interest, made people understand the need, and lifted the whole industry.
• Healthmap’s differentiation includes being extremely data driven. The company combines the best clinical practices with pharmacy data, claims data, lab data, and data directly from its members. Because it's invested so much in its technology platform, the company is able to run algorithms to find people that aren't getting treated or who are not going to have optimal outcomes. So, it's using all that data, it then connects to the provider ecosystem.
• When Healthmap gets its data, it comes up with a customized care plan based on everything it knows about them. That’s important because, unlike some areas of healthcare, there's a lot of differentiation between one person's stage 3 versus another's stage 3: some have hypertension and diabetes, while some don't; some have a very active lifestyle, some don't; some haven't even detected that they have kidney disease, and some are very well aware.
• In stage 3 and 4, a lot of members have diseases that take preference over kidney disease in the eyes of the doctors, including hypertension and diabetes. They're often looking past kidney disease, and Healthmap brings that attention to the forefront, making sure that the drugs patients are taking are kind on their kidneys. The company also stresses the importance of adherence because in stage 3 and 4, it may not be a debilitating disease yet and people may not really understand the importance of adherence. 
• Reimer doesn't believe every person in the US should get a screening for kidney disease, no more than every person should get a screening for different types of cancer. The system always makes those decisions: you don't get a colonoscopy every month, you get one every X number of years based on your medical history and age. If you're in a high risk group, and that's based on your history, your other disease states, etc, then you absolutely should be getting that test. 
• With Healthmap, doctor visits will stay the same or actually increase, so the doctor visits will go up in cost, the number of labs and the lab costs will go up cost, and the cost of the pharmaceuticals will go up as well. The savings that offsets that many, many times over is on unplanned inpatient visits: for people who aren't staying in front of their disease state, they wind up needing to show up at an ER or inpatient stay. In this particular disease state, there's under utilization of preventive services and maintenance services and there's an over utilization of these acute episodes. So, savings comes from eliminating facility inpatient stays.

Thank you to our sponsors: Advsr; a boutique M&A advisory firm. They wrote the book on startup M&A called "Magic Box Paradigm: A framework for startup acquisitions." Go to Amazon.com to get your copy. Also thanks to Stratpoint, an outsourced engineering firm and Scrubbed, an online bookkeeping firm. If you need affordable and quality engineering and bookkeeping, check them out. We highly recommend them!

Subscribe to our podcasts to get our interviews and shows as soon as they're published!