San Francisco-based company Solv has been focused on giving patients access to same-day appointments since it was founded in 2016. Its main objective has always been to increase the number of Americans who receive care, as many patients defer care when they don’t have a convenient option.
To advance that mission, Solv announced on Thursday that it has added direct real-time booking to Solv Connect, its marketplace for same-day and next-day healthcare appointments.
This announcement decouples Solv Connect from the company’s other software offering, Solv Experience, which is its practice management platform. Now, the company provides two distinct SaaS solutions, which can operate in combination with or independent of one another.
Solv Connect, which can be accessed online and or via an app, provides bookings for six million consumers monthly, according to CEO and Co-founder Heather Fernandez. In an interview, she said the platform answers three questions for users: Where should I go? When can I be seen? How much does it cost?
Solv’s technology identifies bookable capacity for urgent care centers, health systems and other convenient care providers. This allows patients to view their available options — including times, locations and costs — when they need a same-day or next-day healthcare appointment for themself or their loved one.
“We use software to unlock the latent capacity that exists across the country,” Fernandez said. “On the one hand, urgent care practices, physicians offices and hospital systems have physician capacity but are locked into these older software systems. And consumers, on the other hand, are picking up the phone and calling, not able to get a doctor’s appointment for 24 days or multiple weeks.”
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.
Solv Connect is interoperable with most major EHRs — including Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, NextGen and athenahealth — which allows providers to easily receive patients’ data and paperwork.
Because Solv is focused on access to speedy care, it sells its software mainly to primary care practices, urgent care centers and provider startups that offer convenient care, Fernandez said. The first customer the company is announcing for its new-and-improved Solv Connect offering is Carbon Health, a network of primary care and urgent care clinics.
“By working seamlessly with our existing, custom-built EHR and booking systems, Solv Connect allows us to accelerate our path to growth and better serve our communities,” Caesar Djavaherian, Carbon’s co-founder and chief clinical innovation officer, said in a statement.
While Fernandez acknowledged that there are other platforms for healthcare appointment booking — such as ZocDoc and Kyruus — she contends that no other booking platform is focused on unlocking providers’ immediate capacity.
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