Scaling to $500M in Revenue: ModMed CEO Daniel Cane (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I purposely actually picked to highlight the positioning points where you can differentiate it versus areas where you cannot really differentiate. The domain of billing is less of a big differentiation in ModMed. The bigger differentiation is in the specialty specific content, specialty specific workflow and specialty specific treatment, right?

Daniel Cane: Not exactly. Every specialty has unique, nuanced aspects. Orthopedics bill workers’ comp. Ophthalmology bills optical. Each specialty has something specific to it. By focusing deeply, we’ve become adept at handling things like global periods, modifiers, and other highly specialized billing intricacies that I hope your listeners aren’t too familiar with—because it’s very deep, specialty-specific billing knowledge.

But it’s not just billing. Scheduling is also specialty-specific. For instance, the follow-up process in dermatology for a patient presenting with skin cancer is very different from a healthy eye exam in ophthalmology. Clinical documentation, prescriptions, labs, and orders also vary significantly between specialties and you need to understand them well.

Sramana Mitra: When you built the company, it seems like each specialty area almost functions as a completely separate product line.

Daniel Cane: They do, but if we had built it that way, it would have been a mistake. Instead, we designed it as a true single-instance, multi-tenant solution. Each specialty’s medical content and workflows are developed independently by our team of physicians. We’ve hired nearly 30 physicians out of private practice to work at Modernizing Medicine. These practicing otolaryngologists, ophthalmologists, orthopedic surgeons, and others spend part of their time teaching our systems how to write notes, code, and understand workflows.

This approach is unique—I don’t know of other companies that have 30 doctors on staff actively contributing to building the software itself.

Sramana Mitra: When you look back on how you built this company, I recall that you started with dermatology. Is that correct?

Daniel Cane: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You’ve been in business for 15 years. What was the timeline for introducing new specializations into the product roadmap?

Daniel Cane: On average, we introduced a new specialty every year and a half to two years. Most recently, in the past 18 months, we’ve launched OB-GYN, urology, and allergy.

We’re constantly opening up more market share opportunities for the product. While the specialty-specific content touches a few different products, much of the platform itself is reusable and adaptable across specialties. For example, the credit card processing system and patient engagement tools, which are big systems, work seamlessly across all specialties. This reusability gives us true economies of scale.

Today, we support 11 specialties, and for each one, we’ve been rated the number one system by Black Book.

Sramana Mitra: So the medical content is what’s most specific to each specialization?

Daniel Cane: That’s a significant part of it, but there’s more. Our go-to-market strategy is tailored as well. We hire doctors and train them to code. That’s a key aspect of Modernizing Medicine’s approach, enabling us to connect meaningfully with each specialty.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Scaling to $500M in Revenue: ModMed CEO Daniel Cane
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