As I mentioned in my last post, HIMSS is always great for people watching and stumbling upon great new concepts and products. A chance encounter with Jason Hwang, founder of PolkaDoc, combined the two. Hwang was kind enough to chat with me about his company, which has created the first birth control app of its kind. Call me peculiar, but I wondered afterwards why a man would be interested in starting a business around a product for women. Hwang was kind enough to answer that question and a few more after we both dug out from #HIMSSanity and resumed normal schedules.
Why did you want to start a business around healthcare medication strictly for women?
Women are so often the decision-makers for healthcare in their households that it made sense to create something for them to start with. In turn, once they become comfortable receiving care through their smartphones, they could be some of our strongest advocates in getting others to try it, too.
Honestly, this was really a pleasant coincidence for us, because our overall intent was to create a remote care model around a medical need that was ready for our version of online care and that filled a great social need. Birth control fit our vision perfectly, and the fact that we would therefore serve women primarily was icing on the cake.
Tell me about your team – how many, and are there women involved?
We have five founding team members with a diverse set of experiences and skillsets, including three physicians, one of whom is a woman and an OB/GYN physician leader. Our team also includes the two founders of a remote medical service in the U.K. – one of whom is an OB/GYN physician as well – which delivered care on behalf of multiple health systems, Walmart pharmacies (known as ASDA in the U.K.), and Lloyds Pharmacy. Their model grew to include services in Ireland, Germany and Australia, and we believe that the U.S. is ready for this kind of care.
When do you expect to launch, and how long will beta last?
We expect to launch in late summer. We’ve already begun testing with invited users and volunteers, which I understand is called a “closed beta.” Since our app is something that people will rely on to get professional medical care, we want to do everything possible to ensure usability and reliability before releasing it to the public.
How many beta users do you anticipate having?
I’d estimate less than 100, since it’s not an overly complex app. The main thing we want to ensure is that the app works properly, with various combinations of hardware and software, in different geographies, and with different prescriptions and pharmacies. We also want to ensure that we’re able to manage our patients effectively and safely from a clinical standpoint – that is, treating the ones that are appropriate for our service, while helping those who are not to find the appropriate sources of care.
Your business model is intriguing in that users don’t pay if you can’t help them. How do you plan on avoiding that problem?
If our service determines that it would not be safe to prescribe birth control to a user, we don’t charge them. We’re simply following standard clinical guidelines, so I don’t know if there’s anything we could do to “avoid” those cases where we wouldn’t bill for a visit. We just thought that many patients would be upset to pay for a service, only to find out they didn’t qualify for a prescription. Isn’t that why so many doctors feel compelled to prescribe antibiotics unnecessarily? Nearly all doctors will charge for these visits because they need to cover the cost of their time, their infrastructure, their staff, etc., but we can afford to give away some free advice because our cost structure is so different.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
How will your app attempt to educate consumers on their birth control options?
We’ll offer guidance to our patients to help them select the best form of birth control for them, even if it’s something we can’t provide ourselves, such as an IUD or injection. If our patient wants help selecting a pill, we can offer further guidance in terms of why one pill may be better than another in terms of side effect profile, cost, etc. It’s frightening that there are over 150 different brands of birth control pills available, and most doctors are only comfortable working with a very small fraction of that number. Our software opens up the choices to the entire spectrum of options to ensure that women can get exactly what they’re looking for.
Will you eventually offer secure messaging with participating providers?
Our patients can securely message PolkaDoc’s providers at any time using the app. This highlights a big differentiation between PolkaDoc and many telemedicine providers currently in the market, which is that all care is provided by PolkaDoc’s own employed providers. We don’t contract with outside providers who are only participating part-time.
How many states will you initially offer prescriptions in?
We will launch the service in California, but we are already in the process of surveying other states for further rollout. A lot of factors go into the decision process such as medical need, market size and local partners, but we especially want to enter states where the regulatory and medico-legal environments are receptive to a service like ours.
How do you see this app/service evolving?
Longer term, we do hope to expand our service to other areas of sexual health and even basic primary care, at which point we would obviously start offering care to men as well. We believe it can become a portal for truly affordable care, at a scale unseen in any healthcare model to date. I think an aspirational model would be what LegalZoom has done in the legal world.
