High Quality, Low Cost HealthCare Video Interview Series: David Wong and SnapHealth

Last week we spoke with Neel Shah, Founder and CEO of CostsOfCare in Boston.  This week, we speak to another doctor – an Emergency Department Physician in Houston Texas.

David Wong is CEO and Founder of SnapHealth, a website where people can shop for medical care like they shop for anything and everything else at Amazon.com.  No waiting, no paperwork, no insurance forms to fill out.  Just shop, visit the doctor and pay. 

As David’s website says:

To see other videos in this series, please go to this page.  And if you have a story to tell that can reduce healthcare costs and raise quality of care, please comment below or email me at joan@socialmediatoday.com  Thanks!

Video transcript (by TranscriptionStar)

Joan:  Hello.  This is Joan Justice of HealthWorks Collective, and I’m here today with David Wong a practicing emergency department physician and founder and CEO of SnapHealth.  And David tell us how and why you started SnapHealth?

David:  Sure.  So as an ER physician we saw a lot of patients coming to ER who were actually paying their bills and they do have emergencies and they knew they did have emergency.  So I actually asked my patients what is that brought you here and they’re really like well, I don’t have insurance, so where else shall I go?  And so there was an obvious knowledge disconnect where they clearly and I know maybe they were just trying to cash at the doctor’s office and when you actually try and do that and call it doctor-to-doctor its actually a very slow and kind of haphazard process and its actually difficult to get the information on what cash prices [Phonetic] [0:00:56] for the doctors visits are.

Joan:  Right.

David:  So we thought that this is a good you know solution that a problem that can be easily solved with the one day solution 21st century and I saw that knowledge [Phonetic] [0:01:07] just had a problem. But it really goes to a bigger problem which is you know the whole healthcare reform to date went on and close without any discussion of what exactly really cost.  And it’s really hard to say how healthcare cost and events when the two big players the patient and the doctor have no idea of what anything cost.  If you would ask a patient right now what its costing, what cost they’re at and they would have no idea, and sadly if you ask a doctor ordering that same test they would probably had no idea either.

So when the acute major players in the healthcare eco system are completely oblivious because we don’t really see how frivolous that they have been to cost care.  So we try to put that information completely transparent and our side give us sort of an Amazon for healthcare field so exactly what you’re going to buy, exactly what you’re going to get and sort of costing there and also looking quality reviews and making informed decision.

Joan:  Yeah it sounds like a really wonderful idea.  What about the doctors though?  Why did they join up with SnapHealth?

David:  Sure so part of it is the generation they want to see more patients.  The other is that quite frankly a lot of physicians are that they’re sick of the current process.  They spend a lot of time filling out charts and paperwork just to focus on reimburse side.  The typical physician practice is a billing company 8% just to get feedback by health insurance.  They’re always facing the client and reimburse and pay them Medicare or commercial insurance.

You know on top of that it takes 60 to a 120 days to just to get paid for your care, so there’s a pretty big accounts to the super bowl [Phonetic] [0:02:37] there whereas our platform is the completely cashed credit cards and payments, efficient pricing so that by the time the doctor and the senior patient they’re paid within the matter of couple of days with absolutely no paperwork they’re going to email that this is verified you take care of Mr. Smith a couple of days ago and that’s it.

Joan:  No paperwork that’s a big plus.  And is do you have a typical patient are they mainly younger patients or older patients or everything?

David:  I have been surprisingly we have a typical patient profile.  I think is a little bit of everything.  The younger patients trying to go for simpler issues.  Older patients some of them are priced out of insurance.  Those are preexisting conditions so insurance right now is unaffordable to them so they can get care at affordable prices because they’ve been “prices” like $800 to $1000 a month for health insurance because they have preexisting lung disease or something like that or if they had cancer, but no there’s not really a typical profile I can’t see there is.

Joan:  Okay and what’s been the reaction so far from the patients’ perspective?

David:  So the patients really like it though.  Once they’ve gone through they say that’s amazingly easy.  We spend a lot of time making sure that we were on the great customer experience.  It’s that sort of what we think is missing from healthcare is this really like wow that was so easier than I thought.  It could be from the point of view of first contact when they were shopping just like on the Amazon, and then they buy and then it goes straight to the Google Calendar.  They get a reminder.  They’ve been at the reminder pops out because [Indiscernible] [0:04:10] and it starts giving them directions to doctor’s office and my clients there’s no bills doing afterwards that there are no bills that they get for weeks and months after were that typically you get from the doctors office.  They’ve already paid so it’s all done.

Joan:  I know the paperwork; the absence of paperwork must be great.  All right well, thank you so much David SnapHealth is certainly a huge step forward in this consumer-driven healthcare and the cost transparency is just what we need, and I think it will do a lot to reduce cost and healthcare and maintain or heightened patient satisfaction.  I think it’s a great idea.

David:  Thank you.

Joan:  Thank you.