If PriceDoc has its way, masses of people will go online to bid for routine medical and dental procedures a lot like airline tickets. Find a doc near your house. Agree on the price for a nose job. Pay the doc in cash.
This is a simple idea with appeal to many doctors and patients, but as best I can tell at this point, it has probably generated more buzz than business. Still, I figured it was worth a closer look and so I spoke recently with Pat Bradley, the company’s president and chief operating officer.
PriceDoc‘s executives are in Solana Beach, CA, (about 22 miles north of San Diego) although its sales and marketing team and most of its customers are in Seattle, Bradley says. The company says it has raised $7.5 million in seed capital, hired a team of 17 employees, and gone to work building a directory of more than 3,100 healthcare providers who are willing to accept straight-up cash payments without any health insurer middleman getting involved. Patients get more transparency, by being able to tell upfront how much a set of, say, new dental braces will cost, and dentists arguably save a lot of time and money by reducing hassles.
Anyone following U.S. politics this year knows that millions of people don’t have health insurance, and the market for all these uninsured people, and more who lack adequate dental insurance, is huge. It’s estimated at about $265 billion a year, a little more than one-tenth of the total $2.5 trillion annual healthcare market, Bradley says. By bringing more transparency to the cash-only side of medicine, PriceDoc figures, it can bring great efficiencies to both doctors and patients, and make money by facilitating the process.
“There’s a huge cash business in healthcare that a lot of people don’t realize is there,” Bradley says.
PriceDoc has certainly generated more than its share of attention for a two-year-old startup. Its website shows how it has been featured on local TV news reports, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal. Where I live in Seattle, the company’s service has been featured locally on Q13, and KING5.
The stories tend to play up all the potential benefits of such a service for consumers, providing a real PR coup. But I was more interested in the PriceDoc business story. The company was co-founded by Glenn Safadago, who was the chief marketing officer until he left the company a few months ago, Bradley says. Bradley is a former vice president of business development at CardioDynamics, which was acquired last year by SonoSite (NASDAQ: [[ticker:SONO]]). William Chadwick, an investment banker, is the company’s chairman and CEO. PriceDoc isn’t naming any of its investors, although there are about 30 of them, who are wealthy individuals “who see the problems in healthcare,” Bradley says.
The idea is that doctors are fed up with spending as much as half of all their expenses begging, fighting and pleading with insurers to get reimbursed. While most people aren’t about to start paying
