Summary
Hey Healthcare was a Y Combinator backed billing service for healthcare providers. It combined medical billers and technology to help private practices maximize collections and minimize hassle.
*All data presented is dummy data
Role
Co-founder, Product Designer 2018 - 2022
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My co-founder and I started Hey Healthcare after finding out how hard it was for healthcare providers to verify patient health insurance. After building an insurance benefit checking app, we realized it was just the tip of the iceberg of the problems plaguing revenue cycle management (RCM).
In the United States, healthcare providers spend hundreds of billions of dollars on billing and insurance-related costs. Smaller providers face greater challenges because they lack the economies of scale to manage these costs. Hey Healthcare was founded to help providers stay independent by improving their cash flow with technology, design, and a better service model.
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Improving cash flow with better design
My co-founder and I met at Flexport in 2014 as early employees, where we helped build the company from a seedling startup to a multi-billion dollar unicorn. We worked closely together to design and develop internal and client-facing software that helped automate parts of international logistics. We saw firsthand how technology combined with industry experts could create dramatic efficiency gains. We applied these learnings to drive innovation in RCM.
After much deliberation, I decided to quit my job at Google and launch Hey Healthcare with my co-founder to address the problems we found in healthcare administration.
Responsibilities
• Research, product design, and strategy
• Hiring and managing a small team
• Client, partner, and investor relationships
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My co-founder and I interviewed countless medical billing specialists to learn their workflows and issues. We even began taking community college night classes on medical billing and coding. After learning about the technological and service pitfalls of claims processing, we hired a professional medical biller and expanded Hey Healthcare's offering.
We pitched our company to Y Combinator and were accepted into the summer 2019 batch.
At the time, existing medical billing and EHR systems had terrible user interfaces and a poor user experience. We aimed to dramatically improve the UI and user experience.
We started with a simple benefit checking app for private practices to verify patient coverage compliantly. After gaining initial traction, users wanted more from the platform.
We employed expert medical billers to help manage clients as we built software around them to help automate their work. The platform evolved to help private practice managers visualize data, make decisions, and communicate with RCM experts.
Our strategy focused on integrating multiple APIs and EDIs to improve data quality, building productivity tools for our specialists to increase efficiency, and creating a delightful user experience for private practice managers.
[ Fig 4 ]
At the time, existing medical billing and EHR systems had terrible user interfaces and poor user experiences. We aimed to dramatically improve the UI and UX.
I build the visual design system and branding to convey clarity and calm to change the confusing and nerve-racking reality of medical billing.
Building Hey Healthcare enabled me to develop a product, operations, management, and GTM strategy in unison.
The strategy hinged around acquiring private practices that were beginning to take insurance by offering eligibility lookup and credentialing services. From there, we aimed to provide software to manage and visualize their revenue cycle along with providing professional billing services administered by our industry experts. We then built software around the medical billers' workflow to improve service delivery.
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Insurance companies had many variabilities, but the biggest obstacle was streamlining client operations. If a private practice forgot to update their EDI enrollment with a payer, it could cause cash flow bottlenecks outside our control. So we built a messaging system to manage exceptions, provide updates, and enable clients to take actions to address these variables.
We built a compliant user-friendly messaging system directly tied to the claims management app. We took a mobile-first approach to ensure flexibility and ease-of-use in accommodating variable schedules. We wanted the user experience to feel like a modern, intuitive experience, not like the old-fashioned EHR apps that plague the industry. Independent practice owners are used to beautiful and user friendly apps in their personal lives but are confronted with the opposite in their work lives.
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After initial success, we weren't seeing continued high growth and the business became more and more service based, making it harder to justify further investment. After a few pivots and many hard years of work, I decided to dissolve the business and return capital to investors. Although Hey Healthcare wasn't the success we hoped for, it was one of the most valuable experiences of my career.
