Scaling to $500M in Revenue: ModMed CEO Daniel Cane (Part 1)

I first spoke with Dan a decade back. Here is the story. This conversation offers insights on his scaling strategy with ModMed.

Sramana Mitra: All right, well, it’s great to have you back on the program, Dan. I know we talked a while back, and I was really impressed by the Modernizing Medicine case study.

One aspect of your journey that stood out—and I’ve often referred to it in various case study discussions—is how you raised money from doctors. It was like a form of simulated equity crowdfunding before equity crowdfunding became a phenomenon.

Let’s catch up. A lot has happened since we last spoke. You can decide where to pick up the story. We’ve already covered your early days, so we’ll refer back to that as needed.

Daniel Cane: Absolutely. It’s been an incredible journey.

I co-founded Modernizing Medicine—now branded as ModMed—15 years ago. We shortened the name because it’s more efficient. Fewer letters to type—just M-O-D-M-E-D.

Healthcare is the largest part of the US GDP—about $5 trillion this year. It is an incredibly exciting opportunity for a true SaaS company like ModMed to be able to have an impact. We focus on the private practice aspects of the US healthcare market.

Since we last talked, we’ve made significant progress. Initially, we focused on underserved specialists like dermatologists, gastroenterologists, ophthalmologists, and orthopedic surgeons.

Fast forward to today: we’ve expanded to many other specialties, including otolaryngology, urology, OBGYN, plastic surgery, allergy, and podiatry, among others.

Our application has also become far more comprehensive. Initially centered on practice management and electronic health records (EHR), we’ve added a suite of patient engagement tools—like appointment reminders, self-scheduling, surveys, and mobile check-ins.

We’ve also built an entire payments processing network. Today, we process over $4 billion in transactions annually.

On top of that, we now offer services like revenue cycle management. So, the company has grown substantially from those early days when we relied on the support of our first beta users.

Sramana Mitra: That’s impressive growth. Let’s delve into some insights from your journey. When we last spoke, dermatology was one of your top segments. Now that you’ve expanded and moved into full practice management, how would you position ModMed competitively? Who are your competitors?

Daniel Cane: ModMed competes across several categories because our cloud platform is so comprehensive.

In practice management and EHR, we compete with companies like Allscripts, NextGen, NexTech, and Greenway.

Sramana Mitra: What about Epic? Are they a big competitor in this space?

Daniel Cane: Epic is a significant player, but their focus is different. Epic is a system that offers electronic health records and some practice management, but it also provides lab systems and other features tailored to hospital systems. In contrast, we focus  on private practices. Unlike hospitals, private practices don’t manage in-house pharmacies, on-site labs, or radiology. Epic’s mandate is geared toward large, multi-specialty hospital systems and academic teaching hospitals, whereas our solutions are designed specifically for the needs of private practices.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Scaling to $500M in Revenue: ModMed CEO Daniel Cane
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