We all know the drill: wake up with a sore throat, slump over to the closest Urgent Care or to your primary care doctor and sit in a waiting room for hours, surrounded by sneezing and coughing, just to be prescribed some medicine.
It’s frustrating, and you might even leave sicker than you came.
So, a Denver startup wants to speed up the process and get people their answers faster (and sans germ sharing): CirrusMD lets you text your doctors your symptoms, snap a picture or two, and in real time, get a prescription and be on your way.
The biggest perk? You don’t even have to leave your couch, says Kellerey Lohman, the vice president of marketing for the company.
“We call it webside manner,” she added.
The company, which started in 2012, has raised $12.6 million in funding according to Crunchbase, and has about 30 employees in its Denver headquarters, with offices in California, Texas and Georgia. Its currently housed in Catalyst, a healthcare innovation-focused office space in RiNo, that helps bring government, academic and nonprofit organizations together with healthcare providers.
Its product works a like this: using your primary health insurance caregiver’s app, you can use CirrusMD’s HIPAA-compliant chat service, which means it meets privacy standards to protect your medical information, and message a doctor.
Via the app, you can snap a picture of your throat, describe a rash or turn on video chat for a couple minutes so a doctor can see if you have concussion-like symptoms. The doctors, either staffed by CirrusMD or the insurance company themselves, are dedicated to the app like they would be committed to a shift in an emergency room. Because of this, CirrusMD doctors answer in an average time of about 54 seconds, and alternate between patients depending on severity of cases.
So far, CirrusMD has about 15 healthcare systems it works with that helps it generate revenue, including Aetna, UnitedHealthcare and Kaiser Permanente. Anyone who is signed up for these healthcare plans is able to use CirrusMD’s chat services free of charge.
The company offers around-the-clock service so a user can get medical attention whenever they want, says Lohman, but insurance providers soon learn that 24 hour chat services aren’t needed.
“They have learned in the deep night, if there’s a person who wants to chat with a doctor, it’s probably quite serious,” said Lohman. “And those majority of people need to go to the ER, not chat.”
Doctors are able to address about 60 to 80 requests a shift, says Lohman. That’s 60 to 80 people not clogging up the line at their local urgent care.
Users are anywhere from 18 to 89 years old, and there’s a spike in millennial woman using the app.
In terms of severity of cases, Lohman says they see both the big and small: from someone with HIV that is having respiratory problems, to someone travelling for business that has an urinary tract infection, to an individual who isn’t sure whether they have a concussion or just a bad headache.
And while the company does offer prescriptions through chat, they do not prescribe any opioids.
Unlike other telemedicine services, which focus on video chatting, Lohman feels that CirrusMD differentiates itself by being the only HIPPA-certified chat service.
“There’s psychological reasons that video chatting doesn’t work,” said Lohman. “When you’re not face to face, you tell your doctor more, you’ll express things and communicate more.”
