Productivity, innovation, and experience are just three adjectives to describe the creative practicality of Dr. Joshua Reischer and his team at Health Note. Their ability to prioritize both the patient, Doctor, and the Clinic’s needs demonstrates the empowering and dynamic direction that Health Note has taken patient information processing.
Founder and CEO Dr. Joshua Reishcher served the community as an internal medicine physician at Iora Health and provided primary care at the facility. His time at Iora provided deep insight into the tedious and correctable operation of collecting patient information. The idle ordeal of documenting and organizing was inefficient and wasteful, and he knew there had to be a way to speed up the process.
At YC startup School, Dr. Reishcher met his future co-founder Aaron Rau, an entrepreneur with a knack for software development and a thirst for creating. They combined forces and created Health Note as a means to not only to assist patient visit efficiency for clinics all over the world, but to elevate the field as a whole.
Q: What is your professional background and what coinciding events led up to the establishment of Health Note?
I was working as an internal medicine physician in Tuscan, Arizona when the idea for Health Note was initially born. My patients were awesome, they were Medicare patients meaning they were over 65 which meant that the standard recall of their problems often resulted in a gradual manner of having to jog their memory via calls to family members and fiddling through medication bags. These experiences in the clinic were the primary factors that led me to go forward with the idea for the company in that I regularly was operating under a specific system that I knew could be improved upon. After getting this itch to start building upon a seed of a concept I met Aaron my co-founder and friend who offered his help in propelling this thought into action.
Q: Can you explain how Health Note has sped up the preemptive patient information allocation process for clinics using the platform?
Because of the natural communicative ease that the platform provides, the efficiency of patient visits are exponentially shortened because of the readied notes already being available prior to their visit. As a team, we’ve also found that there’s a direct correlation when a patient completes the entire questionnaire they almost 100% of the time show up to the visit, indicating a decline in no-show rates.
Q: Are there any differences from a clinical observation that comes with using the platform versus not?
We’ve found that with the short preliminary questionnaire, clinics are learning information that they otherwise would not have collected simply because there wasn’t time to gather it if it were done in person at the visit. This notion yields excellent responses from the clinics using in that they are able to completely reduce the visitation times while getting all the same information they needed plus more.
Q: Why did you and your team decide to go forward with Health Note as a sent SMS link to the prospective patient’s phone opposed to a downloaded app?
Our goal has been to make the entirety of the questionnaire process as smooth and intuitive as possible. So there has been a colossal amount of time spent on analyzing different demographics and their usage of the platform in an effort to gain a better idea of what works and doesn’t. The decision regarding the SMS link came when watching a group of two-hundred over sixty-five year olds and their interaction with the platform. It was quickly apparent that downloading an app or any sort of sign-in requirement was immediately unappealing and ineffective which is what led us to the link. The link is sent to these patients one week before their visit and the direct streamline to the straightforward questionnaire has proved completely successful. User friendliness was at the utmost priority for us, so the steps following these close examinations of the different demographics was wildly helpful in settling on this form.
Q: Could you give us some insight on what happens after the link to the platform is sent out to patients before it ends up in the physician’s hands?
We send out the link to patients and read from the electronic medical records who is coming in as well as why they are coming in. The inquiries asked on the platform are standard corresponsive questions that a physician would ask if in person and the notes drawn from the patients’ responses are translated as they would be in a doctor’s notes. These common questions include scales for the patients to rate their pain as well as the progression of their current symptoms. This system allows for there to be little change in workflow as the user feedback fills in an EMR as a physician would do in person. We’re not trying to replace the role of a doctor with AI but instead better the productivity of the process so that prior to their visit, a physician can more quickly and efficiently do what needs to be done without preemptive questioning. Health Note is simply connecting the dots.
Q: What is the revenue model for a company like this?
We charge per provider per month for our single-specialty groups, and for multi-specialty groups we have volume based pricing. The current status of the platform has been nothing but fortuitous for us. We’re currently being used in fifty plus locations, have a 0% churn rate, and a 100% pilot to contract rate.