Matthew Holt of The Health Care Blog recently interviewed Kyruus Chief Technical Officer Chris Gervais about what Kyruus is doing to improve patient access and help health systems match patients to the right providers.
When asked what Kyruus does, Gervais said, “We’re focused on patient access, and the part of patient access we’re focused on is patient access to providers and opening up provider schedules so patients can self-service … and help patient access centers with huge patient inflow to do that more efficiently.”
Kyruus often finds itself called in when customers are struggling with three things. With the ongoing wave of mergers and acquisitions in the health care industry, sometimes health systems actually don’t know who works for them.
“If they do know who works for them, they don’t know exactly what they do,” Gervais said, which is the second problem.
The third issue is that in these merged health systems, people don’t actually know the capacity that various providers have.
There is a financial incentive for using Kyruus’s products. First, health systems can become more competitive, attract new patients, and prevent “referral leakage,” or people going outside a health system to find a provider who meets their needs. The second incentive involves patient retention. Satisfied patients stay with their providers, which generates more revenue for health systems.
Kyruus currently has about 225,000 providers under management through its apps. With just one customer, the company is doing over 10,000 appointments a month, according to Gervais. Kyruus’s product suite can connect with Google Analytics, so that customers can see patients’ progress through conversion funnels and other tools. It also has about 200 data elements about each provider, so that patients can access the one who will be the best match.
“The data about providers has been out there,” Gervais said, “but it’s never been actionable.” The Kyruus platform also allows providers to promote information about themselves such as languages spoken or understanding of issues facing different communities, which, again, allows patients and providers to find a better match.
Holt asked if Kyruus was also collecting data about which insurance plans doctors take. “We’re not quite in that world yet. It’s something of interest, and something we’re exploring pretty deeply,” Gervais said.
The past two years have not just seen a growth in customers, but in more rapid adoption of Kyruus’s whole platform. “We’re not limited by tech,” Gervais said, “but by change management. It’s about providers getting comfortable opening up their whole schedules to consumers,” for example.
Gervais said that Kyruus is striving to capture as wide a market as possible with its products. It is also striving for data syndication—getting information from providers’ schedules to the patients who are looking to schedule an appointment, for example. Or if a patient is searching Google for providers, allowing them to access the provider’s schedule and make an appointment without leaving Google.
“The question for us is not ‘can we be profitable,’ the question is ‘how much more do we want to keep investing in the business?’” Gervais said. “Right now, we want to keep investing in the business to grow.”
Watch the full interview here.