Healthie offers infrastructure for digital health organizations that provide virtual-first care
Steven Loeb and Bambi Francisco Roizen speak with Erica Jain, CEO and co-founder of Healthie, a company that offers infrastructure for next generation digital health organizations that provide virtual-first care.
Our goal is to understand tech breakthroughs radically changing healthcare: the way we screen, diagnose and treat conditions and measure outcomes. And whether tech is helping or hurting our well-being physically and mentally.
Highlights from the interview:
- The inspiration for Healthie came from Jain watching her parents struggle with weight loss. Both of her parents lost 35 pounds over the course of about a year, which theyd did through the process of working with a coordinated care team who helped them go through the process of changing habits, focusing on accountability, and lifestyle. She realized is that, unfortunately, our healthcare system had been built on optimizing medical billing and procedure codes, and far less on really engaging clients as part of their healthcare and preventing chronic disease versus just treating it.
- Coming out of COVID, there is unparalleled momentum in the healthcare industry from both the incumbents, meaning healthcare systems, payers, clinics, as well as so many new, up and coming startups and companies. Jain is very optimistic that we are at this moment in time of innovation, where you've got some of the brilliant minds in this industry really rethinking what it means to provide those longitudinal, virtual first, ongoing healthcare experiences.
- Healthie is powering innovation in virtual care. Its customers, whether they be in behavioral health, women's health, health coaching and functional medicine, or primary care, are paving the way for how healthcare should be delivered. It's customers are experimenting with different care models, with different go-to-markets, with relationships with payers and health plans, working within the healthcare system to launch innovative programs.
- Before Healthie, it customers had to build this infrastructure in-house. Very much in the same way that we all use Stripe, because it doesn't make sense for a company to build a payment processor in-house, and AWS, because companies don't need to maintain servers, it's pretty non-differentiated to have an API-first EMR, scheduling, or engagement platform that its customers can just build on top of as they need to. As a result, they save millions of dollars, as well as increase time and focus.
- Jain believes that we're at the top of the first inning on healthcare innovation coming out of COVID. If you speak to the incumbents in the industry, as well as CEOs who are leading innovative industries, everyone is very optimistic that people are ready, consumers are expecting something better and different. Everyone has Zoom downloaded on their phone, so they know what telehealth is, and that's just the beginning of what we'll be seeing in the next three to five years because people are recognizing that the way that healthcare has been delivered is just not optimal. All of us collectively are saying we need to change the system for the better and now there is money in the best and brilliant minds in this space really working on it, which is some of the first signals of lasting change.
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Steven Loeb