As virtual medical care became a crucial resource during the Covid-19 pandemic, Denver-based telemedicine company CirrusMD stepped up to meet the demand.
The company, which offers chat-based medical conversations with physicians, was seeing a boom in interest on its platform, hovering around a 400% increase in its typical action. The company’s ability to scale its doctors up and down allowed it to never get above 60 seconds waiting time to see a doctor.
President and COO Scott Johnson chatted with Colorado Inno to talk CirrusMD, winner of the Inno on Fire Crisis Innovators category.
This Q&A was edited for style, clarity and brevity.
As Covid-19 hit, CirrusMD stepped up to meet patient demand. How was the company able to quickly scale up? CirrusMD and our clients saw the impact of Covid-19 immediately. Our platform was already there — we started with a highly scalable model, but we immediately expanded the CirrusMD provider network. Based on what patients were presenting with, we added new speciality areas, including behavioral health, to help people get all types of care based on their needs.
We also wanted to keep the patient experience streamlined, so one of the things we did was create an online symptom checker to quickly assess the symptoms a patient was experiencing and identify what was driving their encounter. Their responses generated an instant result that rated their risk as low, medium or high, and would get them straight into a chat with a doctor if they were at higher risk. This checker is also now being used by employers to help them provide a safe work environment for employees in all types of facilities and roles.
What’s the No. 1 lesson you’ve learned during the current pandemic? Shifting from an in-person, office-based work environment to 100% remote can be done seamlessly. The day before the office was closed for Covid, we had a virtual practice day to test our systems. Once we closed our office, we wanted to be sure we had great communication and connectivity with our employees. We increased communication across the entire company, departments and teams to ensure inclusion and keep up productivity, which has worked extremely well.
What's the top advice you have for startups or growth companies trying to find their footing today? The best advice I’ve ever been given is that you have to remain focused. It’s even more important now, because during events such as those we’ve had in 2020, it’s clear that many companies have had to shift gears and respond to changes in their environment, which can easily result in losing focus. An early stage company needs to remain true to its strengths and vision — that core problem you’re trying to solve. It’s easy to become distracted, so put your blinders on and stay focused.
Tell us about a bright spot during the pandemic. The bright spot has definitely been the response from the CirrusMD team. Everyone came together to ensure we were able to deliver care to all patients. We saw a 4X spike in volume without an impact in service. We had no increase in response times and no change in patient satisfaction, which remains around 95%. The entire team worked together to make this happen.
What does the future hold for CirrusMD? We keep breaking down the barriers of traditional healthcare and changing the way people access care. We focus on the user experience to deliver a fully integrated care model staffed by live physicians that is simple, easy and instantly accessible for patients. CirrusMD continues to grow and hire, and we’re excited to be based in Denver, where there’s a great talent pool and so many opportunities to network with other business leaders.
CirrusMD
Location: Denver
Top execs: Andrew Altorfer, co-founder, CEO; Blake McKinney, co-founder, CMO; Scott Johnson, president, chief operating officer
Category: Crisis Innovators
