TELEMEDICINE PLATFORM FACILITATES VIRTUAL CARE COORDINATION

Hippo Health: Working to restore joy to the modern day health care experience Kevin McGarvey, MD, MBA, Co-founder and CEO, Hippo Health

Please let me tell you about Hippo Health, a practice started by myself and a team of seven other physicians all working together clinically for over a decade. Born from our experience in a frustrating health care system, we have built a new way to deliver virtual care coordination that helps patients and clinicians truly feel cared for. Hippo Health seeks to transform care delivery to work for patients and clinicians, and we are excited about our potential shared journey with you ahead.

Our team is passionate about supporting innovative and dedicated community physicians and we are busting our tails every day to create a superior integrated community care experience. To understand why we are so stoked about the future of health care in Colorado, let me share a story of a patient I got to take care of on our new care network platform last month. Trying to successfully change health care for the better is the craziest, hardest thing I have ever tried to do. Many times I have felt overwhelmed and uncertain whether our tiny new business would survive, let alone successfully help patients. Similar to being on call for the first time in residency and facing your first critically ill patient without a clear treatment path forward, I have learned so much and been humbled with every major milestone we have achieved.

As an mid-career emergency physician turned rookie entrepreneur, I had dipped my toe in the water of startups for about 15 years, but had never gone “all in.” The work transition felt like going from casually climbing a well known flatiron in the Front Range to spending the last three years fighting up an unclimbed, remote big wall in a foreign land. While every day has been stimulating and different with my new line of work, going all in on a startup has been incredibly difficult.

An older gentleman and longtime smoker without an established primary care physician had hurt his neck at work. It got worse for over two weeks and then he started to get vertigo. He was afraid to go to the emergency room and didn’t want to get a huge bill with his high-deductible plan. So he reached out to our care team on our platform. After being able to assess him virtually, I was worried he could have a vascular injury like a vertebral artery dissection and that he needed an in-person exam right away. While assessing the patient, I was able to talk with a primary care physician whom I know, trust and had invited to our

platform. His care team was able to then reach out the patient directly and get him in that morning. The patient got the care he needed and loved his doctor, who got a new established patient from the referral. Without our clinician-centric care network functionality, I would have had to recommend the patient go to the ER, and he potentially would have gotten a CT angiogram of the head and neck, and then been stuck with a $10,000 bill.

Getting to that simple use case has taken our company three years to achieve. The problem we were working to solve seemed simple enough: connect patients and local care teams virtually better than other solutions in the market. We just needed to build a new business model and new software network architecture that providers loved. Simple, right? With every setback and failure, I felt compelled to keep going because I knew we could give patients better care at a lower cost with a superior care experience.

As a physician and son of a physician, I have spent the majority of my life around medicine. In my opinion, camaraderie, empathy for our patients, and trust between colleagues is the life-blood of our professional culture. This “life-blood” is why I love medicine and part of what makes our work so special. It’s also why I left medicine to try to start our company, Hippo Health.

Let me tell you about a guy we all know – Hippocrates. We all took an oath. Unfortunately, health care has gotten complicated, leaving patients and physicians often disconnected. Sadly, the sacred care relationship has become more and more commoditized. We named our company Hippo to try to remind the care professionals we seek to serve to connect on a more human level.

After working on multiple telehealth platforms, our three emergency physician co-founders started Hippo Health to address a strange void we found in the market.

There were no telemedicine platforms that easily allowed us – as the physicians – to connect with our trusted colleagues in the Colorado community for better clinical collaboration, easier referrals and seamless real-time care coordination.

After more than two years of intense learning and nonstop hard work, we built and finally launched our care networks platform this last summer. With an exciting word-of-mouth local network effect starting to unfold, we are now seeing 26 percent month-over-month user growth since this summer in Colorado. As more top independent groups get on the care network platform, we think the model will ultimately enable those interconnected groups to deliver better care at a lower cost, relative to other options in the market today. Our goal in 2020 is to enable a “flywheel” that helps unite top independent practices in Colorado, as seen in Figure A.

Early Adopters Kickstart Network

More Provider Interest in Network Better Communication

Top Independent Medical Groups

More Referrals

Figure A

The age-old values of trust, respect, commitment and excellent communication between care professionals are what often save lives and prevent poor health outcomes.

As we all know, there is an incredible amount of waste that is happening in our

More Market Share

health care system today – almost $1 trillion according to the last JAMA health economics article I stumbled across this October – but I am an optimist. Personally, I believe the health care delivery models of the future that will disrupt our current status quo will likely look very different than the incumbent fixed models that

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To understand why we are excited about the potential for Hippo is relatively simple. Not only do we give patients an easy way to talk to their doctor and care team, we also give care teams the ability to talk with other care teams, whether they are in the same practice and whether they are on the same EMR.

By layering on a new service model we call integrated virtual urgent care, we seek to enable independent established practices the ability to give their patients walk-in capabilities 24/7 with doctors who know them to avoid having them go to unaffiliated urgent cares or convenience clinics. We are also seeking to offer on-demand integrated emergency physician services to paramedics seeing patients at home.

continue to drive up costs without seriously improving health outcomes.

One trend the last 10 years has been care group consolidation. Only one in three physicians are still independent. Many independent outpatient practices are losing two or more patient visits a day to unaffiliated urgent cares and convenience clinics, as they are busy as hell. Care coordination is often fragmented between local independent practices, despite there being excellent relationships in place between colleagues. While many health care experts believe this trend will get worse, I think we are ready for top practices to connect in a new way and demonstrate disruptive value in our local health care market.

Patients often feel it is challenging to get easy, convenient access to a physician who knows them. With this frustration borne by patients and physicians alike that seemed to gnaw at my soul, I personally decided to leave medical practice to try to build a unique solution to this problem. After practicing emergency medicine here in Colorado for 10 years and now having spent three years building our care network platform, I can tell you one thing with 100 percent confidence – implementing brand new health care delivery models takes time.

We are always looking to partner

with forward-thinking physicians in

Colorado. Feel free to email me at

kevin@hippohealth.com with any

questions or interest you have in

Hippo Health.