Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Art Papier, CEO of VisualDx (Part 3)

Art Papier: Doctors learn that patients always come into the office with atypical symptoms. An example would be a myocardial infarction or heart attack. If I said that the patient had crushing chest pain, was sweating, was fatigued, and had pain down the left arm, you probably know that they are having a heart attack.

Anyone who has watched television knows what the signs of a heart attack are. But if I said that the patient had a toothache, was tired, and is female, there is a good chance that somebody would make a snap judgment that it is not a heart attack because there is a bias that women don’t get heart attacks. This is not true.

Women do get heart attacks, but it occurs more frequently in men. Why a toothache? Some people have these atypical presentations of the common. What we do is we catalog the variation and we create a visual display.

The concept is that diagnosis is a process and it switches back and forth between using the system one of our brain and system two where we have to think about things. You have to design your information system in a way that the information system is augmenting both system one and two. 

Sramana Mitra: How are you going to market? Is this set up like a Software-as-a-Service that is purchased by physician’s offices? How does it work?

Art Papier: We are a profitable B2B company on the professional side. We are also B2B2C on the consumer side. On the professional side, it’s a SaaS model business. You can license our software with your credit card as an individual through the App Store or Google Play, or an institution might license it for all the medical professionals.

We currently have over 2,300 hospitals and clinics using it. These clinics span around the world, but mostly in the US. We have now translated the interface of our software to Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, and Mandarin. 

Sramana Mitra: What do you charge?

Art Papier: For an individual, you pay $399 a year as a practicing doctor. If you are a student or resident, it’s heavily discounted. If you are an institution, there is a volume discount that is calculated on the type of institution you are and what country you are in.

There are countries in the world that don’t have the funds to pay what we pay here in the US. We received a large contract with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create a version of our software for low-income countries where our system will be accessible through the internet, which is important in countries that have low bandwidth.

Currently, our apps and our desktop version of our software need to be connected to the internet. A tremendous problem in delivering care overseas in low income countries is bandwidth and data costs.

We have created a version in which you could download it through WiFi and sync it periodically. This allows you to use it off your cell service and not use your cellular data plan.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Art Papier, CEO of VisualDx
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