Pager founders from left: Philip Eytan, President; Oscar Salazar, CTO; and Gaspard De Dreuzy, CEO.
Pager is a startup that has so far limited its own brand of healthcare on-demand services to the New York metro area. But in an interview with MedCity News last week, Pager CEO and Co-founder Gaspard De Dreuzy said the company has inked a deal with Baylor Scott & White Health Medicine to expand its services to Texas.
He declined to nail down the date for the market expansion or even name the cities where it will have a presence. A Pager spokeswoman later wrote in an email that it would be “in the near future.”
The statement said: “Pager’s technology will allow Baylor Scott & White Health to expand its offerings beyond the walls of its hospitals or clinics and deliver care to patients in an innovative way.”
De Dreuzy explained that the partnership with Baylor Scott and White, the largest not-for profit-health system in Texas, reflects the company’s community-based approach of working with one or more anchor partners in a given market. For New York, that’s Weill Cornell Medicine.
“For us, it’s a great partnership because it’s a big forward thinking system, it’s a big system — they are number one in Texas,” De Dreuzy said. “And we share very much this DNA about …how to create a consumer-centric approach to healthcare delivery.”
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He also discussed Pager’s evolution from a house call-on-demand service into a hybrid business that has the ability to benefit patients, providers and payers. Here’s an edited version of the Q&A.
MedCity: It’s interesting because some companies [such as Honor and KindlyCare] have expanded into Texas lately, especially Dallas-Fort Worth. Can you give some more color on why you’ve chosen this state?
De Dreuzy: “There are two reasons. One is, it is not only a big healthcare market but it’s a forward thinking healthcare market. Health systems and payers there are willing to experiment…and do many things we don’t have in other markets. So for us, it is a good environment to grow because we’re at the stage of a very young company. Number two, it’s somewhat opportunistic. For us, we have to go local…Our success is so based on the quality of the user experience, on the patient experience, and the quality of our partners because we don’t provide care ourselves… When we identify a partner who is not only very forward-thinking but also has the level of quality of a Baylor in terms of providing the care providers, and in terms of the facilities and in terms of all the experiences they devote for those patients, then we go where those partners are.
So it is a combination of we know, ideally, where we would like to be — there are seven markets where we would love to be because they are big and because we think they are open to innovation. OK?
But we trigger those markets when we find at least one anchor partner to kind of attack that market base so Baylor is a good example. It’s in a market that is big and innovative when it comes to healthcare.”
Pager’s business model has evolved since it was founded in 2014. It started off with a direct-to-consumer model offering provider house calls on demand. But in the past year, the company shifted to a business-to-business-to-consumer approach. It diversified its points of access to include virtual care through a collaboration with Envision Healthcare. With a presence in 42 states, Envision will support Pager’s expansion plans. Through the Weill Cornell partnership, Pager added care navigation, including a triage service, care coordination, and post-care follow-up.
MedCity: What separates you from telehealth and house call-on-demand companies?
De Dreuzy: “We have tested the model of going direct to consumer and we have tested the model of building your own network and this is not a business we are interested in being in. It is not a business that we think is valuable and is not a business … that we think works. That is why we decided to align ourselves with payers’ interests and providers’ interests…[Also] we don’t look at telehealth and house calls and virtual care as two different pieces. Let me tell you why.
If you look at virtual care … in theory, it’s all very nice but in reality, there’s no utilization… People don’t use telehealth. And the reason people don’t use telehealth is because providers are not very comfortable using telehealth and patients are not 100 percent comfortable with it yet. Healthcare is about physical/personal relationships. I believe personally there will be more and more adoption there but telehealth is a commoditized business that really suffers from very low utilization. So telehealth is efficient, but not [widely] adopted. When it comes to home care [on demand], it has great adoption but it is very inefficient because you have to move providers all the time for everything… The magic happens when you combine those two together.”
MedCity: How do you envision expanding your healthcare services?
De Dreuzy: “If you think about what we do today we are very much focused on trying to address urgent care needs. We are trying to be fast at directing people to the right mode of care and delivering care quickly. We hope in future to have programs around chronic care, chronic disease management, drug adherence programs. So those programs are things we will be doing with different partners.”
Looking ahead, De Dreuzy believes the value of Pager’s business will grow. Customers can use its care navigation and triage services to reduce unnecessary emergency room visits and other healthcare costs. The company can attract payers that want to improve the way they engage members and encourage them to use providers within their network.
