Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Simplifeye CEO Ryan Hungate (Part 2)

Ryan Hungate: Doctors will tell you that 2020 was one of the best years financially for most practices. That’s because they weren’t just looking at new patients; they were calling the patients back up that they had planned treatment for and they were completing that. We wanted to automate that. We took our direct scheduling. We sent out text and email invites to all of those patients who needed to come back in.

Once again, we were automating a portion of the front desk. The final piece where you’re seeing a lot of people move into now is payments. We wanted to create a payment platform from scratch. Think Square for retail healthcare. Think Shopify for retail healthcare. Now we can actually process payments in a very quick manner. We can host subscriptions and payment plans.

We can send text and email invoices because we integrate directly with the electronic health records that we can read and write. We’ve taken about 60% of the tasks that the entire front desk team works on. That’s what Simplifeye does. We’re starting to move into other retail healthcare professions like podiatry and optometry. 

Sramana Mitra: You did a nice job of synthesizing your positioning by saying that you’re a combination of Shopify and Square for dental health and small practices to begin with.

Ryan Hungate: If you look at the healthcare community now, it’s all about consolidation. Healthcare makes money. If you put them together, they are worth more. That is what private equity is doing. The true power in these practices are the systems they put in place. What’s cool about Simplifeye is that these one to three-location practices could never even dream about affording the infrastructure of a thousand-location practice.

Simplifeye can give those one to three-location practices that technology overnight. You find out that these thousand-location practices are bad at technology. They’re relying on this other crappy technology that hasn’t been updated since 2001. They’re still running healthcare. We can get them their infrastructure as well. Simplifeye started with one to three-location practices. Then we’ve moved upstream to the enterprise and we’re growing exponentially.

Sramana Mitra: What do you see in adoption? One of the things that happened with both Shopify and Square is because they were going to market in a very fragmented customer base, it cost tremendous venture capital for them to make that journey. What have you learned by way of adoption? Is the market more ready? 

Ryan Hungate: If you want to think where people lay on that curve of adopting technology, you can probably see where the laggards might be in the consumer world. The doctors are about 20 miles away on the adoption of technology. Simplifeye fights a couple of battles. One is, we have to tell doctors that they have a problem. At the same time, you also have to tell them how to fix it. Doctors are growth hackers extraordinaire.

Adoption-wise, it depends on how you go to market. We came at it from outside the box. In healthcare, you go to tradeshows and do a ton of marketing. You wait for word-of-mouth. You get distribution partners. We did it with inside sales. We’ve developed an FDRAE model. We are dialing for dollars. They’re making 120 calls a day, setting six meetings. From those meetings, you get 40% hold rate. From those, you get 60% close. After that, you get 80% conversion off of free trial.

All of those things happen in a very predictable manner where I can say, “Hey Mr. VC, I would love to take your money. Here’s what I’m going to do with it.” 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Simplifeye CEO Ryan Hungate
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