Outsourcing: Jason Beans, Founder and CEO of Rising Medical Solutions (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When you look around in the healthcare IT space, what do you see in the landscape that is competitive to you, that you’re going to have to be aware of and counter?

Jason Beans: I see that it is very competitive. A lot of people trying to solve the same problems as I am. They’re trying to figure out how to get healthcare in the most cost-effective way or pay doctors based on outcomes. I’m watching for those ideas. I don’t want to give away my secret sauce until it launches, but what I do think they’re doing is they’re sticking with the same flawed models that people have been [using] forever. I’m trying to take a different tack and have it be something my grandmother could figure out – just very, very simple – and think in terms of the way people shop for everything else in life, not always treated like a complicated insurance product. We’re just taking a different path. But we have competitors everywhere. It’ll depend on our marketing and the execution of the product.

What we’ve done differently from others is build products such as the medical bill review or the utilization review that gives us our own trials. We can [try out] our own new products on ourselves, and they pay for the development. We have a profitable business that funds our new ideas, if that makes sense. I think that gives us more stability than other companies that are trying to go into the [same] new spaces that we are.

SM: So, basically, you have enough cash, enough profits, and the systems to come up with new products in related or adjacent areas where you see opportunities, and those could become larger opportunities as well. You could pursue larger opportunities through that model.

JB: That’s right. You said it perfectly.

SM: This is a very good strategy, actually, to have some sort of cash cow business, which then lets you experiment with other, bigger opportunities. There’s a company that I often talk about in One Million by One Million. It’s a company called Zoho. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them.

JB: I am not.

SM: They did a network solutions business and grew to about $15 million or something like that, and it was very profitable. Today, they’re at over $100 million, and they basically took on Microsoft Office, Salesforce.com, and other CRM products. All of that has now snowballed into a much bigger, more exciting company. The original business was a low key, niche business but it gave them a lot of cash to do this other stuff with.

JB: If you study a lot of the great companies throughout history, like Walmart, I think, did 14 or 15 years with one store. And Starbucks had perhaps four stores at that time. It usually takes about 12 to 14 years for companies to build their patterns to be able to grow rapidly.

SM: In terms of large opportunities out there, tell me what’s on your radar in terms of areas that you are planning to go into to the extent that you feel comfortable. Also, point to some opportunities that you are maybe not going into, but you see as opportunities for entrepreneurs to go into.

JB: Okay. I can answer the second one with one of our opportunities. We have our traditional business, and we’re getting into much larger insurance companies as we get a reputation. So, we have a lot in the pipeline with our existing business. One area that we are targeting aggressively and putting a lot of money into is business intelligence and data analytics. Everyone needs to make more effective and clearer decisions. We have a ton of data and medical expertise on staff. If we can think of a way to do it all in the background and make it easy to make a decision, we think we can help insurance companies, individual doctors, everyone, make more effective, cost-effective decisions and be more profitable and healthier. We’ve got a lot going on on that side, that I think will blow away the market.

One other thing we’re trying to do is, on the service side, it’s that always difficult for us to scale our bodies and train them. We have good training and recruiting programs, but I would like to take our technology and treat our service arm almost like a client of our technology arm. That is, open it up so that other people could start working from home or start their own businesses or sell their products through our portals that are bridged to tons of payers or tons of doctors. It would almost open up a healthcare Amazon for services. We offer the tools to help people manage their businesses, but a lot of people just start their own businesses. That’s one of the things we’re working on right now.

We would be one of our clients. We would have a service arm, but we wouldn’t have to be everything. We would almost be the incubator for the product, and then we’d open it up to the market. We’re about to launch that with our first couple of services that allow people to do second opinion examinations and schedule them. Individuals can do that work through our portal, and we’ll be the sales arm for them and bring them business.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Outsourcing: Jason Beans, Founder and CEO of Rising Medical Solutions
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