Healthcare is complicated, I think you would agree with me. It is a highly regulated industry, complicated ecosystem: physician, payers, patients, hospitals etc. To disrupt this industry, one company is not enough, so I actually think popularity of digital health startups is a good thing in general to really push the consumer adoption and the regulation to catch up.
In the cancer space, the quality of the services are super important - save lives. One good example is Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) - where Lily used to work at. MSK treats cancer only and does it super well. Patients from all over the world will come to treat there. We are the first mover and we want to be the "MSK" in digital space.
We are partnering with other parties in the ecosystem, if you are interested, here are more details: https://www.forbes.com/sites/berenicemagistretti/2020/08/05/...
We think our direct to consumer channel really helped the patients, as we already served many patients who would not be able to access the care easily. For example, they are in rural areas, or they live in places that do not have good cancer centers, or they are too busy to go to the hospitals, etc. We see the huge needs there. That is also the original drive why we started this company.
Regarding the product, we are still iterating the product for sure. Cancer is different from flu. It usually involves survey, chemo, radiation and others. It is quite complicated and the treatment could last 6 months to 1 year. Patients have questions all the time during the long period, that is why we think our chat solution could really add value. Thanks for suggestions on payers side collaboration.
Last I checked there are over 500 active telemedicine companies out there.
How do you plan on differentiating yourselves outside of your specialist physician-base? And how will you get the tool in front of users? I feel like SEO will be challenging and you may have to rely on grassroots/guerilla marketing approaches partnering with hospitals/payers to showcase the total cost value saving of using your product.
A similar use case I've seen is in my city a doctor friend just launched her own SMS care service, which acts as a "buffer" before medicare recipients call 911. By getting their less serious questions answered and thus discouraged from "abusing" ambulatory services, the payers (CMS) are very happy paying for this service on a per patient basis. They then market the tool to their patients and even provide financial incentives for using it. Just an idea of how you can spread!