This is the transcript from my recent podcast with WorldDoc CEO Rahul Singal transcript.
Matthew Holt: Hi. It’s Matthew Holt, at The Health Care Blog, and we’re back with another podcast. This time, I’m talking with the C.E.O. of a very interesting company, which has its fingers in multiple pieces of the health-care system. I’m talking today to Rahul Singal, M.D., who is the president and C.E.O. of WorldDoc. Rahul, how are you today?
Rahul Singal: Doing fine. Thanks, Matt. Good afternoon.
Matthew: WorldDoc is based in Las Vegas, just to let the people listening know. I saw Rahul there at a conference a week or so ago. I’d kept tabs on WorldDoc a little bit in the last couple of years, but I wanted to find out a bit more about what was going on. But a number of interesting health care stories are coming out of Las Vegas. I suspect that both those stories and the roles of WorldDoc are not so well known. Anybody going to your website would see that you’re involved in a bunch of different things: strategy analysis, software, personal health records, pharmacy benefits management. To tell the people listening, what does WorldDoc do and what are your main lines of business?
Rahul: WorldDoc is in its seventh year of operations. We started with 14 board certified specialists. We now have 20. We have the single vision of trying to educate and empower consumer end users about their health before seeing a doctor. So we created a web based software system that helps people understand their acute care problems, things like a cough or red eye or stomach pain, "What’s wrong with me? What can I do to make myself better?" Acute care is one of the things. Preventive health. "Hey, I just turned 40 years old. What tests do I need? How can I maintain a healthy lifestyle? Am I at risk for a heart attack?" Then chronic conditions, things like when you know you have high blood pressure or diabetes or high cholesterol. We teach people about their goals, how to talk to their doctors, how to get to their goal.
We do this all in a software based system, created by the 20 board certified specialists.
Matthew: That’s one part of your business. As you know, there have been plenty of companies over the last decade or so who have created software programs to do some parts of some of that, but you guys seem to have made a real business of it. So what have you been selling, who are your customers, and what kind of services are you selling?
Rahul: Our core customers are self insured employers and their payers. The self insured employers are the true purchasers of health care. Their payers are independent third party administrators or regional health plans, which market to these entities, and then their consumers and end users use them.
Our core web based system comes with a 24 hour nurse line. One of the things that we’ve been able to do is import pharmacy and medical claims into our care engine, so that the pharmacy claims can be done within 24 hours of a claim fill. That means that, if I have diabetes and you have high blood pressure, and we each fill a prescription, then, the next day, the WorldDoc system might message you and say "Hey, for your high blood pressure, do you know what your goals are? Here’s the medication. You may want to talk to your doctor about this alternative, which will save you $1,000 a year."
Matthew: Let’s get down to a more granular example. Let’s say I’m one of your customers who is an employer, and I’m working with a TPA to administer a regional health plan or a TPA to administer my employee benefits. Maybe you want to pick a real example, of one of your employer customers. How does it actually work? What are the pieces that you’re supplying to them? What are the pieces that they’re really looking for?
I understand that a smaller TPA may not have done what some of the larger health plans have done and created their own online consumer health experience, as it were. Perhaps they’re looking to you to provide that. What is the value proposition? What are the reasons for which they will engage WorldDoc?
Rahul: On the health risk assessment side, where organizations profile a population’s risk, there’s a lot of examples in the industry in which an employer or a health plan will incentivize a population to fill out a health risk assessment. We do that as well, it works great.
However, we go a few steps further, so that, if, on the basis of pharmacy claims, we know that 500 people may have diabetes, and we’ve done this with Coast Resorts, a casino here in Las Vegas. These 500 people that were on a diabetes claim file, out of a total population of about 7,000, were sent one letter, which invited them to come to the WorldDoc website and fill out a diabetes report card. About 150 people did that.
What’s fascinating is that these 150 people, whom we taught to know their numbers, put in their cholesterol levels, their hemoglobin A1c, and blood pressures, and we created a profile of "Hey, am I at goal?" Simultaneously, we sent this to the employees’ doctors, and we had that in our database. What we showed, within six months, was that these people that participated, that their blood sugars improved to the same degree as they would have if a nurse had phoned them at home. So, we believe, for working age people, commercial people, "Get on the same page with your doctor, reach your goal." This study was published in the Journal of Managed Care about a year ago, and really empowered end users to take better care of themselves.
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