Healthcare consumers consistently try to gather information about not only the pricing and cost of various services, but also the quality of the providers of those services. New York City-based Spreemo, a healthcare platform that helps Fortune 500 companies, insurance carriers and third party administrators manage care for their injured employees, is committed to helping consumers achieve this goal.
Spreemo, which presently focuses its efforts on radiology services for the occupational medicine market, is trying to understand, measure and define from an objective standpoint what quality means with respect to a provider — in other words, it seeks to help payers determine which providers are best suited to treat an employee's illness or injury.
"You go online and there are a lot of subjective reviews of doctors talking about bedside manner, office wait times, etc., but none of those satisfaction measurements really address whether the provider is successful at treating a particular illness — do they have the requisite skills, do they have the track record?" Spreemo CEO and co-founder Ron Vianu says. "We're working in a very innovative way to help figure that out and truly create a currency of quality on behalf of our payer and provider partners in order to benefit patient care and outcomes."
Driven by this mission, Spreemo has rapidly grown to serve payer-partners responsible for tens of millions of workers, including two of the three largest supermarket chains, two of the three largest pharmacy chains and several top 20 insurance carriers.
Mr. Vianu took time to discuss Spreemo's origins, its goals and the impact he hopes it can have on healthcare with Becker's Hospital Review.
Note: Interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: How was the company started?
Ron Vianu: There were initially four founders, all with various backgrounds. One founder had a technology background, one had a payer-centric background and one had (and is) an orthopedic surgeon. While we knew we wanted to build a company that could solve the very real and meaningful challenges in our healthcare system, we needed a starting point.
We ultimately narrowed our scope to occupational medicine. Although it represents a very small segment of the greater healthcare landscape, this niche has some differentiated features which promote an environment supportive of greater innovation. In this setting, payers are uniquely incentivized to encourage good patient outcomes long-term. As an example, if you're an employee of a large hotel chain and you become injured working for that hotel chain, the hotel chain is completely liable or at risk for your entire care (however long and expensive), regardless of if you retire, if you move to a competitor, etc. The infrastructure in place in occupational medicine causes the employer to think: "How do I get this person better, with the best providers now, because otherwise, I'm going to be on the hook for this person for the next 20 to 30 years."
Basically what we've discovered over the last five or six years is that the most critical element lacking in healthcare today is transparency with respect to quality metrics, which frankly wasn't one of our objectives when we founded the company. We originally set out, as many have, to create a healthcare marketplace focused on transparency of price, workflow tools and sharing of EMRs; however, we soon realized that the market was much more interested in understanding quality in order to facilitate and drive improved outcomes. Ultimately, we've had a lot of transformative moments through failure to truly understand what the market needed and as a result, have attempted to create a solution that currently addresses those needs.
Q: What specific need within the industry did you hope to address by founding Spreemo?
RV: We were initially looking to improve efficiency and collaboration among payers and providers. As such, we introduced a platform that essentially allowed very large employers and providers to communicate and manage patient workflows. There were a lot of inefficiencies inherent in the system at the time, and we were really looking to implement a technological solution to bridge the gap between a lot of these legacy infrastructures that were still paper-based — manual, faxes, phone banks — and streamline the whole process. In so doing, we realized that while streamlining processes was fundamentally important, it didn't necessarily address the core issue and problem, which is, why are people not getting better… and what are the pieces missing to help drive better care for patients? Once this realization took hold, we started focusing more on quality, data analytics and clinical research, with technology becoming more of an enabler rather than the end result.
Q: How many employees make up the company?
RV: About 125, and we expect to double within a year.
Q: What is your workplace culture like?
RV: We have an amazing workplace culture. It's something we've learned about extensively throughout the years — what good culture means and what bad culture means. The workplace culture I developed when we first started was centered on hard work; do a good job and that should be a reward in and of itself. Nonetheless, as we developed as a company, I soon realized that team composition — how people get along with one another — core values, and a mission everyone can understand and get behind are all critical elements in creating a great culture. The outstanding culture we have today is a testament to our Director of People and Operations, Matanyah Seguev, who understands how to develop and support employees in a way that enables them to flourish. Relatedly, our interview process has been customized to ensure we obtain broad consensus on anyone who joins the company to make sure they fit in culturally. We have an incredibly motivated group of people who love what they do, love coming to work on Monday and feel very strongly about the impact on healthcare we are having and can have in the future.
Q: What advantages or disadvantages does a startup company have in the healthcare industry today?
RV: Item No. 1 in terms of challenges is that healthcare in general is a risk-averse industry, so there's typically resistance to a scrappy startup trying to implement a new, innovative solution. The question to this effect is — will you be around in six months? A year? The other piece of course is, generally speaking, unless you're coming from the healthcare environment where you're a 30-year executive of managed care, typically people look at you with some sense of skepticism. Still despite those hurdles, I think that our benefits far outweigh the challenges in that we've been able to tackle problems in truly innovative ways. We're very nimble with respect to the approaches we take, and so when we receive feedback from payers and providers and synthesize that feedback, we're able to react quickly and offer tailored solutions in a way that only a startup can.
Q: What kind of expansion or growth do you project in the next couple of years?
RV: We're definitely growing significantly from a headcount perspective. In order to accommodate this rapid growth, we're not only expanding our current office in NYC, but are also opening up an office in Dallas, where we plan to have meaningful operational infrastructure. But more importantly, the critical driver of our growth is that we're experiencing exponential market adoption of our current platform, and we plan to further expand that platform to adjacent medical specialties to drive even better outcomes for patients.
Today, we're inserting ourselves in radiology where a patient requires an MRI for an occupational injury. But once that experience for the patient is over, we withdraw from the process, and the patient continues on with other types of care. What we realized through our success in radiology and through discussions with a lot of our provider partners is that there is real opportunity in other adjacent specialties, so when a patient now requires an evaluation with a rehab specialist post-MRI, we'll be able to not only identify the optimized, most relevant specialist for that patient's particular illness or injury, but also help that specialist collaborate with other physicians over our platform. The hope is that in two years time we'll be able to handle a particular patient from initial onset of symptoms to complete resolution post-discharge.