Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: PatientMatters CEO David Shelton (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much penetration does your class of technologies have in the US healthcare system?

David Shelton: We were originally formed by acquiring two healthcare companies. We have 30 years of healthcare experience. We’re serving over 300 hospitals and healthcare providers around the United States. 

Sramana Mitra: But that’s still a very small number compared to the number of hospitals out there. Does that mean that hospitals have not woken up to the fact that they should be doing this and there is substantial ROI involved in implementing such measures?

David Shelton: You’re right. There are 6,500 hospitals in the United States. It’s a very small percentage. What it shows you is, there’re a lot of different canned solutions that organizations are trying to bring to the market.

There are hospitals that are trying to find solutions on their own in an effort to save on their vendor expenses, or it’s just the way they’ve always done it. There are large hospital organizations that have come up with different internal solutions to be able to accomplish what they think gives them successful KPIs.

I think the challenge for the hospital world is this. The healthcare solution is a difficult and challenging business model, and it’s slow-moving in the decision-making process.

As hospitals and healthcare see the patient more and more as a consumer and making spending decisions based on cost and a facility’s ability to help, you’ll see more and more people coming around looking for solutions.

Sramana Mitra: You said you are looking to expand. Have you identified areas where there are open problems you want to expand into?

David Shelton: There is a lot in healthcare that everybody is excited about. There’s a lot of blocking and tackling work that’s still opportunities for organizations. Just a couple of them are the prior authorization piece, being able to help the hospital staff to clear patients for services, and being able to use machine learning to accelerate that.

We have several hospitals we work with that are losing thousands of dollars a year because of the challenges of prior authorization process. We’re looking to bring solutions into that as well as some of the other government program resources that a technology solution would have a nice place to fit in.

Sramana Mitra: The 300 customers have these problems. If you could find the solution, you could potentially bring those in and offer it to your customers?

David Shelton: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: Are there other open problems you’ve seen out there that you would point entrepreneurs towards?

David Shelton: One of the biggest things that we see and that we’re launching is the financial tools that are available to the hospitals regardless of the HIS. They certainly have all the clinical aspects there.

So many hospitals are having to buy bolt-on solutions to be able to complement some of the other technologies they have. That solution doesn’t always work well.

The financial strain that comes from patients – non-adherence and follow up because of that, we see opportunities to bridge the patient and the financial gap so that they can focus solely on health burn and work their way through that challenge. And giving the hospital tools to measure the opportunity that’s there for collections. 

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: PatientMatters CEO David Shelton
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