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Comment by anonymouse008 | Hacker News Reader

I may be a customer if the price is right -- but I'm wondering how this actually fits as a standalone product. My customer cost and your profit are hard to mentally balance in my mind. And maybe I've been wrong in evaluating these markets, but recruiting for a Telehealth offering is tablestakes, and a core competitive advantage to this space.

Also to echo Jommi's comment, these aren't plug-n-play relationships from what I've seen. Especially from the Apps that try the text based therapy route to get around the 1:1 relationship

This also sounds like its about to run into the classic problem with hair stylists in the US. You're going to end up having clients want to see their therapist on their schedule - making the load balancing a super tough problem, because you can't just hot swap a new therapist in. You're going to have to run predictive modeling on the demand side to know when to have your supplier free.

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Thank you for the interest. You're right that there are many providers interested in telehealth, but filtering for quality folks and keeping them from churning is a non-trivial problem. In addition, it is a very supply-constrained vertical in medicine, so these problems are especially pressing. Part of the reason our current partners use our solution is because we do the upfront filtering, and we de-risk churn to a large extent. If you only want to use 20 hours a month from a great provider in NM, you don't have to worry that they're going to run off for a better offer, because we use their other time with other partners – and they remain satisfied.

Regarding continuity of care: these providers mostly have recurring availability, which makes it very easy to schedule them in advance for CBT or other types of recurring visits. We lean into continuity, rather than trying to avoid it with async approaches.

Regarding folks going around our platform to see our providers: frankly, that would more a liability to our customers than it would be to us, because they are the ones trying to maintain patient stickiness. Oftentimes, these services are employee benefits, so there's less problem here with patients trying to go around the platform. But the long term answer is we want to make it SO much easier for providers to see patients via our channels that they don't have any reason to go around us (and have to deal with malpractice insurance, payments, scheduling, and video infrastructure on their own).

Very cool and good luck!

I poorly rephrased the continuity of care in the third paragraph... I highly doubt someone is going to circumvent an EMR/scheduling platform to go see the provider direct, but I've been wrong about worse things. The comment was just to say I believe you'll want to invest in those predictive analytics down the road to make sure continuity is paramount.

What is more interesting in what I'm seeing you guys write is maybe you're going for acute and crisis care... which is smart.

Totally agree about having to get good at demand forecasting. Good thing we have Daniel; his college thesis involved creating revenue forecasting model for BMW North America that they still use!

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