#startupidea #healthcare #innovation
Hey guys, so I came up with this idea while sitting in a hospital waiting room and thought, “what if healthcare professionals could come to you instead?”🏥💭
Here’s the concept: “Doordashing” nurse practitioners and doctors to your doorstep. A convenient way to access medical care without the hassle of waiting rooms and long appointment times.🚗💉
Here are some key points about the idea:
– Medical professionals would partner with the company to provide in-home services
– Patients can choose the professional they want based on reviews and availability
– Professionals can set their own rates, giving them autonomy over their income
This idea aims to provide accessible and personalized healthcare while also empowering medical professionals to run their own mini-practices. What do you think? Could this be a game-changer for the healthcare industry? Let’s discuss!👩⚕️👨⚕️ #healthtech #entrepreneurship
Insurance needs to cover it
Whew lots of liability here endorsing medical staff that aren’t vetted. Plus in home abuse potential.
Then there’s the intricate insurance + state laws that are all different.
The software to deal with all those local laws, insurance would need about 25-100 engineers and a legal team with a rep in each state you want to deal with just to get off the ground. Plus the fact that people who would use in home care the most are likely on medicaid/medicare already so we’re talking low margins.
Maaaaaybe if you started super local and could get liability insurance.
I like this idea a lot. Nurses and NPs specifically are becoming more and more entrepeneurial, and there’s a lot of competition for these traveling positions.
Turning doctors into plumbers?
I don’t know if it’s exactly what you’re describing, but take a look at Dispatch Health. Insurance puts them in network for urgent care. The challenge on the mobile side is achieving route density. And the challenge on the pricing side is that doctors willing to make house calls typically expect a premium for such a high level of service (aka concierge medicine). To make this work, you would need to convince patients to be less ‘monogamous’ with their PCP, which we haven’t seen happening at scale.
have you asked Chatgpt? What does it have to say?
You’ll still need to navigate the US healthcare insurance system, which is deep in red tape that makes no sense (somewhat intentionally). This could be a service potentially for the wealthy but not the common person, and there are already doctors offering that kind of priority care directly to anyone willing to pay enough.
To me that sounds a lot like “oh it’d be nice if the whole industry worked in a different way” kind of idea. Sure, you can disrupt entire industries, and they’ll start working differently as a result. But it’s naive to think that it doesn’t work like that already without some kind of a deeply rooted reason. The market forces aren’t stupid; rarely of ever there is an untapped efficiency opportunity that just sits there, especially at scale, especially in the industries that have a lot of money flowing like medical.
I’m not saying it won’t work or can’t be done; I’m saying that this isn’t really an idea yet. An actual idea also needs to contain a clear insight, likely very non obvious, why this hasn’t happened before, and why it became possible now. Because if nothing changed, it either would’ve be already done, or it doesn’t work. Genuine at scale opportunities don’t just sit there for long waiting for you to have a brilliant idea.
To complete the idea, you need to be able to articulate the opportunity not in the context of the end result, but in the context of “why now”. Why did it just become possible? What is the thing you know about the industry that most don’t realise yet? Perhaps some regulation changed, or some kind of technology became available?
Good ideas all have the property of having seemingly trivial answers to theses questions, it’s seems obvious as soon as the idea is spelled out. Conversely, if you are struggling to find answers to these questions, the idea likely needs more work.
Interesting idea but dealing in the medical realm comes with its own regulatory barriers.
My advice before you move further is to figure out the primary stakeholders and users and talk to 5-10 of each stakeholders and listen to their problems, discuss your idea abstractly and confirm if your solution makes their life easier.
I wish you all the best!
PS I know someone who could help you build your vision
There is a movie of the same idea. I forgot the name. Ended up badly 😅
They’re doing this in Florida already – I had my blood drawn twice by a “come to you” NP. – it was convenient but there was a lot of drama around insurance and payment which made it annoying.
Mike Maples was on the Equity podcast this week pitching his new book. Part of what he talked about was fore-casting vs back-casting. Forecasting is envisioning how markets will change and creating a tech to intercept the evolution. Backcasting is seeing a market inflection, a significant shift in how an industry works, and then working backwards to take advantage of the change in the early stages. Forecasting favors incumbents. Backcasting favors disruptors.
You’re talking about a very disruptive change in a market. It may be happening. Certainly, COVID made telehealth much more prevalent and, importantly, covered by insurers.
The question to ask is how can you take your idea and match it to the inflection in healthcare.
I don’t fully understand the healthcare industry outside the US, but it seems that this may work well where there is a private health insurance market, in densely populated area (cities or small countries) where there are folks who will pay extra for this sort of service. As someone else pointed out, in the US, telehealth is the emerging trend.
I would start by looking at the high-end healthcare, One Medical, Circle, Iora, who are in adjacent swimlanes to this idea and may provoke some thoughts about how to adjust your business.
We have a startup here in India that does it. It’s really beneficial for the elderly. https://www.portea.com/
Idea doesn’t matter much you should be able to execute this now.
Flamingspew hit the nail on the head with liability and potential abuse concerns. A possible way to address that could be using providers who have already been vetted by insurance companies. They have nurse hotlines 24/7 so expanding on that and providing personal care isn’t that far off. However nurses can’t write prescriptions unless they have the ARNP degree ( I believe ).
I have been in healthcare for 20 years. The concept it not new but you’d bring further technology to it. Like someone else said, companies like Dispatch Health already do this but its not high tech. The difference is dispatch health has the providers on payroll and not a gig worker like this idea is.
I think I’d talk to a lot of healthcare providers before you put anymore thought into this. You’ll likely find you’re not going to find providers willing to do this. Going to people’s houses is a nightmare. I did some ride outs with EMS prior to becoming a nurse and people’s houses are disgusting. Cockroaches everywhere, hoarders, etc.
Getting paid is going to be a nightmare.
Look up sollis health. It has potential but would require huge amounts of starting capital to get going