I have to admit, talking health care reform can sometimes turn into a snoozefest. But that wasn’t the case when I spoke with Jim Dougherty, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan. Madaket, of which he’s the CEO and one of the co-founders, makes health care administration, or lack thereof, pretty riveting stuff.
What’s Madaket all about? In super simple terms, it helps doctors enroll with insurers. But there’s so much more to it, so keep reading.
Thanks, Obama
The Affordable Care Act has pushed the health care community to make some serious changes, and companies have been looking to technology for solutions.
"We want to remove all of the crap work from them so they can focus on being better doctors, see more patients and do whatever they think is valuable.”
Dougherty and the rest of the founding team saw Obamacare changes as an opening. He had gotten to know two of the other co-founders – CTO Mads Kvalsvik and CPO Ted Achtem – in New York. This duo had met the first night of undergrad at MIT, and they worked with Dougherty at Intralinks, which provides a collaboration platform for businesses. They all agreed health care IT needed to be their next collaboration.
“We looked at the health care industry and saw that massive changes were happening,” Dougherty said. "There are huge disruptions there. For so long, it’s been lagging behind every other industry in terms of tech.”
These guys had limited to no exposure to the health care field, so they had to be careful about entering uncharted territory. They had to stop and think: What could they do without a stitch of medical knowledge that would still revolutionize the health care sector? Administration was their answer.
Madaket zeroed in on regulation in particular: Medical Loss Ratios. Most of the money insurance companies spend has to be on patient health care, not administrative costs. If they spend less than 80 percnet of premium dollars on medical care, they have to give a rebate to subscribers.
Eliminate the paper trail
As you can imagine, efficiency has become a big deal for insurance companies. At the same time, doctors are hardly happy with the amount of admin work they have to do. To be able to accept a certain type of insurance, a doctor has to fill out a form. Doesn’t sound so bad, right?
Wrong. Each insurance provider has a different form that needs to be downloaded, filled out, printed and faxed. Multiple that by 25 or so and you have about four months of work to do – not exaggerating, Dougherty said that’s the enrollment average for health care providers.
Madaket cuts that down to a matter of minutes. The platform acts as a liaison between doctors and insurance companies. Now, a health care provider just has to log in and provide some standard information only once. The program then makes that available to multiple insurers and doctors are instantly enrolled, no pile of paperwork required.
“We’re trying to free up health care providers,” Dougherty said. "Doctors are the frontline of our health care system. We want to remove all of the crap work from them so they can focus on being better doctors, see more patients and do whatever they think is valuable.”
“Without all of that administrative work, they can make cuts and do so much more with that money,” he added. "They can make more strategic hires or invest in new, more sophisticated medical equipment.”
Already 600,000+ doctors strong
In case you had your doubts about this company's success, just look at how they’re killing it already. Madaket announced its launch only last week, and customer acquisition has been child’s play.
Dougherty told me that they started right off the bat with 300,000 doctors. Yesterday, the startup announced a partnership with HealthStream, which is bringing them another 325,000 health care providers. On average, Madaket is adding 3,000 new doctors to their user base each day.
Dougherty explained the company has big plans for the future. Once they get enrollment down pat, the team plans to branch out and simplify other administrative functions.
