Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Simplifeye CEO Ryan Hungate (Part 3)

Ryan Hungate: Things that you might work in the consumer world like television ad and pay-per-click ads do not work in the healthcare world. The things that work are more old school. If you sell somebody Shopify for example, that’s intense. That’s like, “Rip out the heart and brain of your business, and replace it with Shopify.” What Shopify did was to replace one piece and said, “Because you have that one piece, you also get the rest and you can deploy that whenever you want.”

We try to focus on the one thing that doesn’t involve a gigantic amount of change. We talk to doctors in simple terms. We say, “Would you like to make more money?” They say yes. After that, it’s a matter of time before you roll out the rest. 

Sramana Mitra: I understand that yours is smoother and easier to sell. It’s not as deep and stacked.

Ryan Hungate: You actually get different pieces where Shopify is like, “I need to replace your website and strategic administration of shipping.” Doctors don’t have that, so we replace that with everything else that we have to do. It’s actually worse. If you take out Simplifeye, you take away 40% of their patient flow. On top of that, you take away all their billing infrastructure. I call it Shopify for retail healthcare for a reason. If I call up a doctor and say, “Let’s replace your payment processing.” All you hear is a click. It’s more so about trust than it is about the technology.

Sramana Mitra: Either way, it’s mission-critical. In a small business, the workflow is deeply-integrated. Talk to me about trends in your world. What are the key trends you are seeing?

Ryan Hungate: The biggest thing you’re seeing is automation. Retail healthcare has been very against automation. One reason is change. Two is they always had the ability to throw people on a problem. There has never been a staffing problem like this. Now you’re screwed. You cannot do anything to hire a person. I was talking to bankers. Bankers can’t write loans fast enough because they can’t hire people to write the loan. Practitioners aren’t exempt from this.

The other thing that happened is, I used to think that practitioners were just against change. They’re not. They like learning new things. They’re going at a hundred miles an hour. All of a sudden, the train stops because of COVID. Everybody was able to look at their business for the first time ever and go, “What is the wrong with this thing? What can I fix?” You saw people trying telehealth for the first time.

The bullet train is going again but because the people didn’t come back, they are once again open to new things. Now you’re seeing this automation piece happen. You’re also seeing trends in the backend. You see artificial intelligence. You see annotation and notetaking in the electronic health record chart. On the dental side, you’re seeing people trying to figure out charting via voice. You’re also seeing AI when it comes to looking at x-rays.

The other trend is, we’re also trying to make patient lives happier. It used to always be about the doctor’s time. Now I can go to Google and get the next doctor down the street that’s open. It’s now about my time as a patient. These practices are having to adapt. If you don’t allow people a direct schedule, they’ll find somebody who does. In the real world, nobody knows the difference between a good and bad doctor by looking at a website. You can fake reviews.

All of these patients don’t understand that. We have to go more into the experience of getting you into the office. If you cannot get that patient into the office, who cares if you’re a doctor. You’re getting a much better experience because of that. All those things are starting to happen automatically.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Simplifeye CEO Ryan Hungate
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