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Apply HN: NextAppointment – automated scheduling of preventive healthcare

6 points by aman-thakral ↗ HN
“There is no greater imperative in…healthcare than switching from a treatment-oriented society to a prevention-oriented society. Right now we’ve got it backwards. We wait for years and years, doing nothing…until people get sick. Then we spend billions of dollars on costly treaments, often when it is already too late to make meaningful improvements to their quality of life or lifespan.” – Richard Carmona, 17th Surgeon General of the United States

NextAppointment will integrate patient and doctor calendars to automatically book timely appointments based on established medical guidelines and mutual availability. We help you find time to make your health a priority. No more phone calls, or searching for appointments online.

Initially, we will be targeting new and expecting parents to promote preventive checkups throughout their children’s lives. We believe the current mindset of seeing a doctor only when you feel sick is difficult to change; a life event such as the birth of a child may be a sufficient catalyst to initiate and perpetuate this change in behavior, now and in future generations.

The idea was very well received based on cold calls made to 50 primary care and pediatric clinics in Toronto, with some generating referrals to other clinics on the first call.

3 comments

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> Initially, we will be targeting new and expecting parents to promote preventive checkups throughout their children’s lives.

This strikes me as a particularly good first userbase. In my experience working at Counsyl, new parents are eager to do everything available to ensure their child is healthy. It's a great way to enter the healthcare market since there's lots of money and openness to new ideas.

What do you need to do to succeed? Do you need to build a network of doctors? Will that require a large sales staff (typical of healthcare related companies)? How are you going to use technology better than competitors?

Does zocdoc do something similar? I feel like I've gotten emails reminding me to make an appointment before.

I imagine many people are just going to ignore their appointment reminders. How will you incentivize them to follow through? Does your service actually schedule the appointment on their behalf, and the user just needs to be somewhere at a particular time? If so, do you know that people will actually be receptive to that or will they feel like it's an invasion into their personal time?

How will you make money?

aman-thakral
> This strikes me as a particularly good first userbase. In my experience working at Counsyl, new parents are eager to do everything available to ensure their child is healthy. It's a great way to enter the healthcare market since there's lots of money and openness to new ideas.

Great data point, thanks for that :)

> What do you need to do to succeed? Do you need to build a network of doctors? Will that require a large sales staff (typical of healthcare related companies)?

We need to be able to book timely and convenient appointments for patients with their doctors, but we won’t need a network of doctors or a large sales staff. While integration with physician calendars would be ideal, we can get around this by “doing things that don’t scale” ;). If we only have access to patient calendars and their doctor’s contact info, we can still ensure appointments are made by calling their doctors ourselves. This opens more doors to us, and solves a serious chicken and egg problem: a patient whose doctor isn’t online would see little use for our app, and we’ve spoken with clinics who still use paper calendars! Added benefit: patients are also identifying doctors of interest for our sales team, which we believe is better than the shotgun approach of trying to convert random clinics.

> How are you going to use technology better than competitors? Does zocdoc do something similar?

Our competitors (ex. ZocDoc) require patients to request the appointment, for preventive care or otherwise. Patients aren’t doing that now (unless sick!), and we don’t think they’ll start doing it out of the blue.

>Does your service actually schedule the appointment on their behalf, and the user just needs to be somewhere at a particular time? If so, do you know that people will actually be receptive to that or will they feel like it's an invasion into their personal time?

Yes, we actually schedule the appointment. We believe that patients are more likely to follow through with their appointments if the time is convenient, the reason is justified, and there is zero booking related friction. We don’t think people will see this as an invasion of their personal time; if they signed up for this and we explain it clearly, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when we suggest a check-up. Since the number of preventive care appointments have a maximum cadence of about 1 per month (in the case of expecting parents), the user will not be overwhelmed with notifications, and we’ll make it easy to cancel appointments at the click of a button.

> How will you make money?

We have a couple thoughts we are exploring. One is a transaction model based on attended appointments, or a SaaS model with a subscription fee.

Aside: per https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits..., “Most health plans must cover a set of preventive services at no cost...”, so patients will incur little to no financial burden for attending these appointments.

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