Erica Jain, Healthie, on enabling healthtech companies to support longitudinal care

Subscribe for your weekly fix of health tech stories, wherever you get your news: Substack, Twitter, Apple, or Spotify.

In this episode (and Jing’s last for The Pulse!) we are excited to feature Erica Jain, the Co-Founder & CEO of Healthie. At Healthie, Erica empowers health and wellness organizations to launch and scale their businesses and build long-term relationships with their clients to deliver personalized, preventative care. Previously, Erica was a Healthcare Consultant at Boston Consulting Group and an Analyst at the Clinton Health Access Initiative. She is a graduate of Duke University and finished her first year at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, as part of the Health Care Management Program.

Healthie is an API-forward platform that allows companies to build the back-office infrastructure systems necessary to support patient-centric operations. Healthie uniquely enables companies to effectively dispense longitudinal care. Healthie recently raised $16.5M in Series A funding in a round led by Velvet Sea Ventures with participation from Greymatter Capital, Watershed Capital, and Builders VC.

We discussed:

• Designing a solution to support longitudinal care coordination between patients and their care teams, improving upon the legacy healthcare infrastructure systems geared towards one-time episodic care.
• Healthie’s API-first, out-of-the-box offering enables healthcare companies of any size to focus their resources on developing their core product without sinking resources into creating complex backend systems.
• The importance of operational excellence for healthcare startups and continued interest from venture capital firms and other investors to accelerate innovation across the healthcare industry.

Start to 5:16: Discovering the gap in platforms supporting longitudinal care

• An early interest in healthcare: Erica developed an interest in healthcare after perceiving the gaps in inequality and lack of access to even basic healthcare. In college, Erica crafted her own major on health disparities and infectious diseases to further expand her knowledge of the healthcare industry. This early interest has driven her professional pursuit as a consultant focusing on healthcare cases and an analyst at the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
• Recognizing the gap: Erica met her cofounder, Cavan Klinsky, then an undergraduate at Wharton, at the end of their first semester of school. They initially workshopped an idea to create a preventive health service, and through this process realized that before building a services delivery business, they needed to fix the broken backend technology supporting healthcare companies.

“We realized from talking to prospective therapists, dietitians, and health coaches that technology for healthcare had been designed for one-time, episodic health care that just did not reflect 95% of health care experiences.”

• Pivoting away from tech for one-time episodic care: After speaking with numerous dieticians, health coaches, and other practitioners, Erica and Cavan realized the existing healthcare infrastructure systems were built for one-time episodic care. Often the patient portal was tacked on as an afterthought. The status quo technology leading to a fragmented patient experience was something Erica witnessed with her own parents as they struggled with weight loss. Her parents bounced between various providers without receiving consistent care, which inhibited their weight loss progress. As a result, Erica and Cavan decided to explore options to create a platform to help providers better care for patients.
• On dropping out of business school: Erica did not enter her MBA at Wharton intending to drop out and found a company. However, after Erica and Cavan built the first version of Healthie over winter break during Erica’s first year at Wharton, the product started gaining traction with providers. Customers were interested in paying for the early version of Healthie, and this is what helped Erica make the decision to focus on developing Healthie full-time.

5:16 to 30:45: Deep dive on Healthie

• Growing fast from the beginning: Before 2016 when Healthie was founded, there were not many technology options for providers. Incumbent systems like Epic and Cerner were designed to service one-time appointments instead of supporting longitudinal care between the patient and the provider. As a result, healthcare companies that sought a backend platform with other capabilities had to spend tens of millions of dollars to build this in-house. Healthie entered the space as an alternative to providers building in-house, and the lack of other options combined with the explosion of new healthtech companies during the pandemic helped Healthie grow quickly.
• Journey to early profitability: When launching their product, Erica and her co-founder targeted healthcare and wellness organizations outside of traditional healthcare systems such as gyms, private practices, and medical clinics that typically lacked targeted backend infrastructure designed for longitudinal preventive care. This led to unsustainable growth where the company accumulated tech debt as more customers sought to purchase the product. In response, Heathie underwent a rebuild in 2017–2018 that transformed the Healthie offering into a brandable, API-first platform. This updated version of Healthie’s offering better matched customer demand and enabled the company to grow profitably in a sustainable manner.
• Building out the Healthie offering: Healthie’s API-first model allows healthcare companies to use Healthie’s out-of-the-box offering to build a patient-oriented front-end product without investing in the expensive tech expertise that would otherwise be required. Healthie’s platform solves constructing the tricky aspects of a healthcare backend system, such as a dynamic calendar, EMR, charting, and billing. Users can pull from their own data warehouses to build automations and analytics. In this way, the applications of the Healthie solution are endless. Unlike traditional platforms such as Epic, the Healthie solution was also intentionally developed to integrate with other platforms to promote data flow and create a more seamless overall patient experience. Erica explains Healthie customers prefer this hybrid approach where they can leverage the Healthie API platform when first starting out and over time build differentiating elements such as the patient portal or a proprietary analytics platform.

“The way that I view the value of being an API-first platform is that you can use Healthie very successfully without ever writing a single line of code.”

• Enabling healthcare companies to focus on what makes them unique: Healthie was developed to help healthcare companies invest in what they do best instead of pouring millions into building the backend systems that are essential to running operations but not a key source of differentiation. In this way, Healthie does not only support cash-strapped companies just starting out, but also services healthcare unicorns. The role Healthie plays for its customers is to allow them to prioritize resources for crucial aspects of their offerings such as clinical operations, customer acquisition, patient outcomes, and payer / provider relationships without getting bogged down by the cumbersome and expensive process of developing the backend system.

“No matter how many resources you have at your disposal, it’s really important to focus on what makes you unique and special, versus rebuilding your infrastructure. Otherwise, you’re going to end up spending tens of millions of dollars in something that’s non-differentiated.”

• Building a solution between multiple stakeholders: The Healthie team collaborates with various stakeholders on customer teams to customize their solution. The three primary stakeholders for Healthie are the clinicians, product teams, and software developers. Cultivating clinician buy-in is critical since practitioners utilize the platform daily. Clinicians who can easily engage with the Healthie platform also enable product teams and developers to spend time improving the solution instead of convincing clinicians to use the offering or troubleshooting systematic issues.
• Healthie’s secondary stakeholder group are patients. Healthie aims to build a beautiful front-end customer experience to further support the ultimate goal of their healthcare company clients in enhancing the patient journey beyond one-time episodic care.
• The tide that raises all boats: Erica views the proliferation of health tech companies, including those who are also building backend platform solutions, as a good thing. She says, “We need to empower every other innovative healthcare founder to focus on what makes their company successful, because that means that healthcare in America will be better off.” Within the industry, Healthie’s niche has been its focus on building solutions to support longitudinal care with multiple touchpoints between the patient and members of their care team.
• On Healthie’s commercialization strategy: Healthie relies on referrals from customers as well as clinicians who advocate for Healthie’s offering. Leveraging existing customers to connect with new customers helps Healthie consistently orient on delivering true value to its customer base by creating what customers seek. Getting support from clinicians who have used the Healthie platform before and who want to bring Healthie into their new healthcare company is also important in gaining clinician buy-in from the beginning, a critical component of ensuring the Healthie solution is adopted successfully.
• Priorities for Series A funding: Healthie recently raised $16.5M in Series A funding in a round led by Velvet Sea Ventures. Erica reveals she and her co-founder view raising venture capital financing as helpful when the company is equipped for the growth metrics venture capital firms seek in portfolio companies. The recent rise of innovation and interest in digital health investments spurred the timing of Healthie’s funding round. With this new financing, the Healthie team will invest and accelerate their product roadmap, build out their developers, and hire more team members to support Healthie’s growth. During this round, the Healthie team also brought in customers who wanted to invest in Healthie. Their involvement in Healthie further highlights the strong relationship Healthie has with its customer base.

30:45 to 37:10: More innovation in healthtech benefits patients and improves healthcare overall

• On innovations in the space: Erica is excited about the innovation happening across the health tech industry catalyzed in part by the support of financing from venture capital firms and other investors. Advancements in healthcare are broad, including improvements in women’s health, behavioral healthcare, health / nutrition / weight loss, musculoskeletal care, pediatric autism, and more. The push COVID made to accelerate developments in healthcare has benefitted patients broadly in an industry that has historically been slow to change. More enhancements in the health tech industry are on the horizon, and it will take some time to fully appreciate the impact of these innovations.
• Ingredients for success: From working with various customers, Erica noticed the most successful healthcare companies display remarkable operational excellence. This entails executing consistently in a high quality manner. While not unique to the healthcare industry, operational excellence is crucial to startup success. For healthcare companies specifically, it is critical to collaborate between various stakeholders seamlessly. Companies that can effectively manage workflows between payers, different clinicians on the patient’s care team, the patient, and others are more likely to perform well.

“Digital health innovation is just getting started, we are still at the top of the first inning in the impact that all of these venture dollars, all this innovation, and all these talented minds coming to work in digital health will showcase. And it’s going to take three to five years for that to really play out.”

• Healthcare companies must remember: The stakes are uniquely high in healthcare compared to other sectors since healthcare companies directly handle patient lives. Honoring the huge responsibility healthcare companies have to their patients is a crucial orienting principle and will help separate the strong healthcare companies from the ones that may be in business for the wrong reasons.
• Is the health tech sector overvalued?: While a significant amount of funding has been allocated to health tech companies, Erica states this is largely beneficial for patients and the healthcare industry at large. In general, healthcare founders have positive intentions and genuinely want to improve the status quo. There may be overvaluations and misallocations of funding on an individual company basis, but this is par for the course in any industry receiving financing. Healthcare is an industry that touches all lives and more financing and the natural evolution of business cycles will help separate the winning companies from the underperforming ones.

37:10 to End: Entrepreneurship advice

• On juggling her roles as a CEO and mother: Erica reveals becoming a mother has made her a stronger CEO. Motherhood forced her to prioritize her time, delegate tasks, make important decisions, and empower her team to operate independently. This in turn has made Erica more efficient with her time and Healthie a stronger company. In addition, having a mother in a visible leadership role within the company has enhanced company culture. Having a company leader be transparent about needing to call in sick because of fatigue or nausea or scheduling doctor appointments throughout the day demonstrates to team members that work / life balance is important and they don’t need to hide important elements of their lives to succeed on the job.
• On the importance of the mission: Working for a cause that mattered is important for Erica. In her role at Healthie, she believes in the mission of the company and the positive impact Healthie is making on the healthcare industry and patient lives. This helps her stay motivated and reduce burnout. This emphasis of creating positive impact extends to how Erica runs the company, where she ensures team members are set up for long-term success through policies such as generous maternity leave.
• Start your own company: Erica encourages everyone who thinks about starting a company to try it out. You don’t need to immediately quit your job and go all in on the startup — there are ways to explore the business idea while working another job. Also, don’t be discouraged by rejections. Healthie was rejected from every business pitch competition at Wharton before it succeeded. Startups require years of work, and it’s critical to keep going especially in the early years of the startup journey.

“If you have an inkling to start a company, you should go for it and do it. There is never going to be a perfect time, there’s never going to be a perfect career, milestone or stage. And if you have this desire or passion to explore a problem, try it out.”