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AI Driving Primary Care at the Palm of Your Hand with Allon Bloch, Co-founder & CEO at K Health was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best way to convert your audio to text in 2020.
Welcome to the Outcomes Rocket podcast, where we inspire collaborative thinking, improved outcomes and business success with today’s most successful and inspiring health care leaders and influencers. And now your host, Saul Marquez.
Saul Marquez:
Welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket, Saul Marquez here. Today I have the privilege of hosting Allon Bloch. He’s the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of K Health. Along with this role, Allon is a board member and former Co-CEO of Wix and has served as a CEO of Vroom.com and mySuperMarket. Allon was a Partner at JVP and spent time as a Consultant at McKinsey and Company. He received his Master’s of Business Administration from Columbia Business School and is based out of New York City. He’s has a lot of fun with technology and taking a look at different areas where, let’s just say could use innovation to make things fundamentally better. He doesn’t believe in inter of innovation. He believes that you get it. You got to do things right from the beginning. And so that’s what started his journey with K Health. And today, we’re gonna be diving into K Health and Allon’s thoughts on health care and just having fun at today’s podcast. So so with that, I want to open up the microphone to you, Allon, and welcome you. Thanks for joining us.
Allon Bloch:
Hi Saul. Thanks for having me.
Saul Marquez:
It’s a true privilege, my friend. So loved the work that you’ve done, Allon. But before we move into the meeting bones of the of the podcast that I’d love if you could just give the listeners a bit more on you that you may have that I may have left out of your intro to share.
Allon Bloch:
Well, I’m originally from Israel. I came here about 20 years ago and I work a lot. Was Israeli technology as well as U.S. technology. And I look at what we do very globally. So we’re not building great new products just for the US. We’re building stuff globally. So you know that aside from that, I think you covered it all or a lot of it.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah. Not the thing. That’s an important point. We could get pretty myopic as far as what’s happening in the US and miss the broader picture. So why did you decide to get into health care? I mean, you’ve not been in health care for long. What is it that makes you interested in this space?
Allon Bloch:
I think I’ve always had a fascination around health and health care. If you live life long enough and you interact with was doctors around big or small issues, you realize that doctors are humans as well. And they also sometimes make mistakes. And we started K around the idea of providing people with information that is super relevant to their health and allows them to understand three basic questions that people have. What do I have, what else it can be, and what are different ways to treat it? Now, if you think about that question, whether it’s biggest, small, acute or chronic, those, that’s a question. And someone and often people ask when they’re not feeling well, the health is this is weird thing. You know, we’re constantly feeling how we you know, how we are. And hopefully we most the time we’re feeling well. But if we you know, when you don’t really think about you, how from one minute to next. But if there is a health concern, a pain, a concern, if something’s bothering you, something in the back of your mind, some curiosity becomes very important very quickly. So it’s it’s a weird slice of life that we have. And I just fundamentally thought that we need to create a different way to enable people to consume their health information and act on it. And it probably needs to be built in a really, really different way than the current health care system is built, whether in America or Europe or other countries. So that’s kind of as an overview. I was intrigued by the possibilities of if you actually use data and technology in a robust way from the ground up, what you could do. How should healthcare and health look.
Saul Marquez:
And why K?
Allon Bloch:
You were the company or the name.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah or yeah. Like why the letter K K and why you decide then as the name.
Allon Bloch:
So I’m a geography buff and.
Saul Marquez:
You are. Okay.
Allon Bloch:
Yeah. And I was looking for a name of the company which is really might be the toughest thing ever. It’s easier company than trying to figure out a name. So many great new.
Saul Marquez:
Right name, right.
Allon Bloch:
Are taken and I’ve been talking about URLs, but I was looking up various geographical sounding names to see if there’s a name that I connect to in terms of sound and meaning. And I stumbled upon a Wikipedia post about definitions of mountain peaks, and apparently there’s a whole debate. I’m not a mountaineer, but there’s a whole debate. What is the definition of a mountain peak? And then what are the tallest mountain peaks that have not been ascended? And the tough ones are in Bhutan and in Asia, where in a couple of the peaks the gods live and humans cannot scale. But there was a mountain in Nepal called Kang La Bush at KMG. Kang is the highest mountain peak in the Himalayas that has not been ascended by humans, at least as of summer 2016, where we’re looking to create the company. So I felt like given the fact that we want to try and teach a machine the language of medicine and help people understand their information and acting on it, such a big project, I want to be able to scale a mountain that nobody scale. So we called the yang and people just assume we’re Chinese or Korean related and casting the name. Yeah, but then my marketing team came and said, actually if you shorten it to K it’s pronounced K, A, Y and K is it’s this intelligent health assistant companion that can help you and K also the silent K knowledge. So that kind of got me in since then we OK. We called the company K Health so it’s a long story short for a name, but.
Saul Marquez:
I like it though.
Allon Bloch:
A few months after that we changed no different from Kang to K, and there we are. But I love the name. I think its people are not concerned about how to spell it. It’s a single letter.
Saul Marquez:
yeah. It’s easy. And another really cool story. So I’m glad we went there. And I’m glad to learn about the mountain and evolution to to change it the way it is today. I think it’s very meaningful. And I think there’s a lot in the name, you know, I mean, whatever you name a child or company. It definitely ties to its identity. So appreciate yet to walking us through that as you have taken a deep dive into the consumer experience, Allon, what would you say is is a topic that needs to be on and health leaders agendas today?
Allon Bloch:
So, look, I learned healthcare and how medicine approaches health care from mostly from people I’ve worked with in the last four years. I did not have a background in healthcare and I’m not a physician. I was surprised how far medicine and health care is from where it should be in 2019, 2020. And it’s built for a different era. It’s built for an era where getting health data was much tougher, but it didn’t have cellphones and wearable devices. You went to a doctor’s office a few hours, a few days, a few weeks after not feeling well after having a concern. It’s built for for, it’s not built for a continuous interaction around your health because it’s too costly, too expensive and too brick and mortar to do it. And I think it should be built completely differently. Health is fundamentally a lot of really interesting, complex information in medicine is a very complicated profession. And there is a reason why we don’t do two courses in university and know enough about medicine to prescribe and diagnose and treat our family members. Nobody says that there is a risk. There is there is a decade of studies and an apprenticeship in this. And it’s a highly medicine is a highly academic profession, but also highly practical. So I have a lot of admiration and respect for doctors and need to be able to make decisions in quick seconds. They need to be able to make decisions under pressure. They need to have a vast general education about medicine. But yet they’re lacking the infrastructure to enable them and their end users to work in a very different way that we can do that we do in all other areas, in all others where it’s you finance and banking or real estate or travel. You have to access information completely different way in medicine because it’s more complicated and because there’s doctors involved and there’s regulation. For some reason, nobody started out at your cellphone wearable and nobody started with the consumer. And that’s what we’re on a mission to change.
Saul Marquez:
Love it. So you want this to be a 20 year project. I mean, you know, in 10 years, where are we? If you guys have had success? What does it look like?
Allon Bloch:
A billion people using K globally, k learning from all these conversations. And it leads down to a personalized medical protocol for every one of us, not only for highly specialized health journeys such as on college in other areas, but for day to day stuff, for primary care, for prevention, for managing of chronic conditions, for everything that matters. I think, look, this whole worlds, if you think about evidence based medicine, that’s predominately when somebody goes to a doctor either at a primary care setting or Ngiare, they’re having a conversation with a physician typically around the symptoms that they experience right now, let’s assume there are acute symptoms around their medical history and their gender and age, and doctor is likely not going to have your current bloodwork, they might need to order it. They certainly don’t have your genetic information. It’s unlikely they have it. And there’s a whole worlds of house information that they need. It could be influence in your neighborhood. Two hours ago, it could be your genetic or epigenetic or biome information. It might be relevant for this. It could be your specific mental condition. It could be highly specialized medical history. You know, we just have not built a data set that enables myself to understand what I have or the physician to use it. Of course, it happens in highly specialized areas, in certain areas of oncology, such as immunotherapy, it happens it happens probably around what’s called that multimorbidity, the ability to deal with multiple dangerous chronic conditions in places like Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic. But for the vast majority of health care, things are like the 1950s. It’s built for a different era. You’re not feeling well. And you go to a doctor and the doctor has an amnesty conversation around your house to complain about your head injuries or coming hurts or it’s a rash. And you and the doctor is trying to prove what you have, right? differential diagnosis in the case of a headache, tries to prove that you might have a tension headache or sinusitis or migraine based on again, general age medical history and symptoms and try and rule out other dangerous or rare or sinister conditions. And that’s where they might prefer you to do imaging or labs. But again, it’s built for a different era and we haven’t created just learning system that learns from all of this when you go to the doctor. In that hypothetical example that I gave you and you have a headache, the and, you know, the doctor thinks it might be a sinus infection and prescribes you medicine and you have slight side effects unless you go back to doctor with something very specific. That doctor won’t know how your treatment occurred. You might not go back to that same physician. And there’s no general learning. We don’t learn from all this information. So, K, we took a very, very different approach. We took an approach that says we need to be able to interact with millions and billions of people and we need to be able to build this ongoing healthy dialogue around your health. Again, a small, acute or chronic and help you understand what you might have and make it very actionable, but also learn from the data. If you have a side effect from a drug, it’s very, very specific. We want to be able to learn about it. We’d like to say at K that you’re probably not patient zero. You’re probably not the first person in the world that experienced that specific condition for your gender and age and medical history. Other people have experienced probably very similar conditions. Yet you’re different from them, right? all along with one. Question is how do I provide you that relevant information so you can understand what you have and learned from it and how doctors can use it to diagnose and treat.
Saul Marquez:
So as the technology sits today and the people listening, wondering, OK, what well, How do I interface with this? What is it? How can people find out more about it? Is it an app? Do they do they go to a Web site?
Allon Bloch:
So it case, an app on both Google and an Apple. And it’s, you know, depending on the day we rank number one or two on the app store. So we’re a popular app right now. We’re available in the US and in Israel. And we do plan to do a global expansion next year. But you can download the app right now. The app.
Saul Marquez:
What we search for? So, yeah, a lot of people right now are on their cell phones. So, hey. Now base health.
Allon Bloch:
No, just K, letter and health. That’s all.
Saul Marquez:
Okay.
Allon Bloch:
And if you download the app, the app focuses on acute conditions right now, primary care related acute conditions. That could be also hospital conditions, of course, like appendicitis or gallbladder The K allows you to. Putting your chief complaint is I give you this example is your rash, get a rash of back pain or stomach pain or vertigo. And it has a very, very specific conversation taking to account your gender and age and your medical history. For example, if you’re a smoker or diabetic or not and then you’re very, very specific symptoms, both negative and positive. So, we trying to mimic what a fantastic physician is doing. And we did this based on learning from a very large and rich datasets of toobut in-house events that were able to license and non-UN mines and extract these valuable insight. And so it’s a jumping stock I of a conversation, but it’s not one of these many of these symptom checkers out there on what people call Doctor Google that people can go and it’s kind of just randomly guessing what you might have. And it’s not based on real data. This is this is very specific and relevant to what you might have.
Saul Marquez:
Fascinating. Yeah, I just downloaded it, by the way. And very intuitive. I like the lab. I like it.
Allon Bloch:
I would add that we’re right now in 38 of U.S. states. And in the coming months and all U.S. states, you can take that information. That interaction that you had this K. And again, my my simple example and gave earlier, you have a headache and it might be based on people like you with similar health experience, it might be sinusitis or tension headache. Of course, K doesn’t diagnose and treat. This is not what we do. We just provide a way to understand your potential health situation based on people like you and based on your input. But you can now press a button and someone in the health care system, that means you can press a button. And if you choose to identify yourself and and you can now have a a medical check with the physician in all these states. This includes all the major states, including Illinois, that you’re based in, New York and Texas and Florida and California. And again, we’re in 38 states. We’re kind of just, medicine is a state by state regulated, but you can have a remote text based conversation with the physician, but it’s based on the baseline information that K collects. Of course, our physician might decide to ask additional information and they need to decide if they can establish care and diagnose and treat. But our physicians can diagnose, they can prescribe, they can send you to a lab, they can send you can refer you to an expert or to the ah all. And they can just do watchful waiting because that’s what they think that they can do. So in that respect, we’re kind of creating a very, very efficient way for physicians to look at information after the consumer had this conversation. Was that we our machine. Sorry, I. And then the doctor can come in if the patient chooses to, and continue that conversation and do the diagnosis and treatment that they can do it much faster and much more efficient. And we think we can cut the costs of primary care by 90%, 9 0 percent, because we can make this process much more efficient and even doctors to treat you remotely.
Saul Marquez:
That is fascinating. Folks, if you add I was just poking at the at the app. You’ve got to check it out. I mean, there’s really the easiest way to to understand what Allon is talking about is to check it out. It’s K Health. And, you know, I was just typing in symptoms, Allon. I was like a headache or abdominal pain. And then it gives you suggestions, which makes it really easy. And then it gives you a sample size of how many people are actually experiencing that. And then. So very cool layout, folks. Check it out if you get a chance. I mean, if you if you’re curious about this type of stuff, how do you improve your own health or how do you help people improve their health that are close to you? Something to check out. I’m going to keep poking at this. Appreciate you sharing it, Allon. And so on the back end of this, do you guys employ physicians or are you in physician partnerships? How does that work?
Allon Bloch:
So a bit of it is work in progress. This K, the three year old company, physicians and the services lab at the K primary care about 60 physicians, some of them freelances, some of them are full time that work at that service layer. We also employ a fair amount of physicians. Some of them are specific domain experts. Some of them are physicians that are also data scientists in order to make sure we build our models correctly based on data. And to do a medical audits and to work on the product. Because fundamentally, we need we need to do two things. We need to create a model that people can interact was with a machine that will be highly accurate. And then we needed to take that model and turn it into something that users can understand. So a model might be correct, but I need the average person anywhere in America to be able to interact and understand the question so we don’t use big medical jargon or big Latin words. If there are there, we explain what they are. And remind we built this so you can understand what do I have? My head hurts my stomach or what I have. What else could it be? So migrane and sinusitis, you know, maybe it’s more than one or more of the other. Are there other things that, you know, I should consider? And then what are all the ways to treat it? And from my perspective, you can use it and go to the doctor outside of K and stay free. You can decide to use it on came to you just because it’s easier, faster and cheaper. And to me that, you know, that’s an interesting thing if you enable people to have relevant, interesting conversation around their health. And then press a button and within a matter of minutes, have a conversation with a book board-certified physician. Right, and then get get a prescription or diagnosis or treatment. You know, I think that’s incredibly powerful. The fact that the fact that especially to people that are on high deductible plans or people that are on insure, we actually charge a lower amount than the co-pay, you know, to do it. So, yeah, so we can lower costs dramatically, which in turn creates more access because we don’t want anybody to be able to use it, whether for free or worse, are different products and services.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah. You know, and that’s a good cotlon, right? I mean deductible plans are high and e a lot of times it costs more through insurance than if you pay for it yourself. And if you’re responsible for the first 5, 6, 7 grand sum to think about.
Allon Bloch:
I know. And by the way, that’s that’s I think 50, 60 million people because everything’s been being pushed to there. And the sad fact is it just people avoid care. People on a high deductible plan. And the doctor says, you know, you need to buy this expensive drug or go to an extraneous and such a hundred dollars and people don’t have it. That’s how things get more complicated. Right. is diabetic or not diabetic. They just avoiding care is not going to abolish the disease. So, you know, from my perspective, making it really easy to do it is important. But even if you’re an affluent person living in a big city and you do have a primary care physician, it’s now 10:00 p.m. or you’re in the middle of a busy workday. What are the chances that you’re available to go to your doctor or what’s the chances your doctor’s available to see you right now?
Saul Marquez:
This is great. I’m curious. So where’s the. How does a payment happen? So let’s just say, you know, I typed in stomach ache and took me through that. Before I talked to the physician, do you ask me for my HSA card or my credit card? Has that work?
Allon Bloch:
So first you have to go through this. This health plan lock, which on average is twenty two questions and takes three or four minutes. But it’s rigorous.
Saul Marquez:
And it’s super easy. Like I was looking through it and it gives you a little maps of where the pain is. I mean
Allon Bloch:
Make it to make sure you understand the questions. But the questions are data driven, personalized, based on your answer. You know, the next question comes with defined baselines. So this is artificial intelligence is it’s not there’s not there’s no doctors behind the scenes. It’s not rules. Once you get the results page, which says you’re, hey, based on people like you saw five thousand people like you, you might have a tension headache or it might be in migraine. Now, if you can decide just to look at at different treatment options and kind of what to watch out for next, like the TAVR. So just imagine somebody got flu like symptoms and want to know what to want to watch out for. Like, you know, low chance of developing of pneumonia or bronchitis or stuff like that. But also, you might want to consult a doctor then. And there, of course, is your decision in our direct to consumer offering, we have about 2 million people and growing quickly that are using K just to interact with physicians then and there. What you need to do is you need to identify yourself using driver’s license. You need to put in your credit card information and choose, you know, what planet you want to.
Saul Marquez:
How about an HSA card?
Allon Bloch:
So that’s something we’re gonna be adding in as well.
Saul Marquez:
That’s an upcoming innovation.
Allon Bloch:
Yeah. But we also have right now the shift we announced in July was Anthem Blue Cross, an app.
Saul Marquez:
Congratulations.
Allon Bloch:
Thank you. We are planning to work with the 41 million members to enable them to get faster and better care and give them much more control around the sun and I can talk more about what they’re planning to do. But I think they’re pretty excited because they bind to the simple view that health care should start always wear wherever you are. So it needs to be kind of remote and intelligent. And then if you need to be seen in person for various reasons or you need to do a physical test, by all means, let’s start from where we are. You none at the doctor’s office. When you say you’re at work or at home or hopefully having fun and then you have a question, big or small, there’s no more natural place and decided based on a text based conversation. I was the smart information layer, and then, you know, you decide I want to see a doctor. The doctor thinks I need a prescription. All good. You know, that’s, it just completely different. I mean, what is your alternative? At 10 p.m.? To go to the air and biome you might or you might encounter. Some people might need to go to the yard. But it’s such a big, tough decision and also very expensive. I think it’s great. It’s a different way to be, you know, from technology language rooted, you know, much faster.
Saul Marquez:
For sure. So what if what if there’s somebody and that is thinking about this from a provider standpoint. Say a leader at a provider institution saying, Man, I wonder if like with white glove this, that’s something you guys offer?
Allon Bloch:
Probably.
Saul Marquez:
White. White label. Not not like white White label. Sorry.
Allon Bloch:
So in terms of functionality, absolutely. I don’t think will private label at K. I think it’s important that it’s used in a way that’s helpful for people. Bear in mind, in the US, healthcare system is not always pro-consumer and I want to make sure people see doctors for the right reasons. But we have many, many providers who plan to worship service. Laren kicking in again cases technology company will keep a team of services so we can innovate. We’re adding paediatrics later this year. We’re going to add or sleepy docs. We’re going to add different areas of coverage like dermatology. We’re going to add the ability to manage chronic conditions. So there’s many, many areas we plan to go into. And we’ve already been approached quite a lot of quite a few providers. Many of them need a solution either during office hours or off hours. Right. Right. Doctors more and more get texts from patients. Hey, I came to see you. I’ve got this. I’ve got that. They want a more sustainable way to to manage these things. So I have no doubt we’ll be there as well. Bear in mind that when you press a button and decide to share your information with the physician, it’s a hip, a secure way, and that information gets populated and doctors sparkle. So essentially we built this really sophisticated EMR, but it’s not built for billing like all other EMR, it’s built for health. It’s very easy. Intuitive screen for doctors. Select the information and decide what additional information they need to collect and whether they can diagnose and treat the person remotely. So again, it’s back to the core thesis that if you build these things from the ground up and you build them in a way that you use data and you learn from the data and you can build systems that get better over time and you try and strip costs out of the system and start from scratch, you can build systems that are both provide superior care at order of magnitude lower cost. There’s not going to be a 5 or 10 percent cost reduction. This will be significant.
Saul Marquez:
Fascinating. And Allon, you know, I think about what you’re doing and your team is doing that at K Health. And I’m just thinking, man, you guys are building a new gateway like a new access point to health.
Allon Bloch:
Yeah, I mean, but if you ask me how things will look in 5 or 10 years, just imagine in the future somebody says, you remember the good old days, you weren’t feeling well and was now 10 p.m. and you need to decide to go to ER or you’d call your doctor first thing in the morning and try to get in because you’re you’re feeling really bad. Maybe they saw you the next day or maybe they didn’t. And maybe they referred you then to specialists. It took weeks or even months to be there, as opposed to having your information at your fingertips and being able to very quickly send in minutes, being in front of a physician who can now manage you proactively, essentially in a 24/7 way. I mean, your health is the temporal aspect of health is important. Nobody has the worst headache of their life and says, okay, let me take an apple and go to sleep, people are nervous, people are concerned. Being on a healthy, scary, it’s lonely. And going to doctor Google, which is what most people do, is. You know, just there’s a lot of irrelevant information. It’s a lot of scary information. And I don’t think that’s a good place to diagnose you. To say the least. I think it’s a very bad place to get clues about your health. It’s a good place to understand what a migraine is. It’s not a good place to know. You have a migraine or something else. So people constantly scare themselves, especially late at nights because they don’t have access to they they can’t just call up their doctor. Even rich people in big cities don’t have their doctor available at their beck and call. They are more likely to have a physician and have a great health insurance plan. But again, you know, the ability to to make this friction free and as low cost as possible completely changes since how many questions you have around your health that if you had an intelligent way of understanding it, you would ask? That wasn’t the whole trip to the doctor and a co-pay and waking and days. And, you know, if you had a, you know, a slight rash, you might want to check it out. If your ankle was hurting you, you might want to check it out then and there. I think that’s what we need to able to do. We need to get rid of these physical limitations wherever possible and just make that action as close as possible to zero.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah. I love this, Allon. You’re obviously a big thinker, but one of the one of the biggest obstacles that I think any company faces when trying to make these types of innovations is that the that the incentive systems are really kind of be to be Right. and insurance company employers paying. It seems to me like you’ve said, hey, you know what? It doesn’t matter. I’m still gonna go be to see. What are your thoughts on that?
Allon Bloch:
I think there’s many issues around the incentive system. I think the health system incentivized to have you to come in because they make money that way and they incentivized to send you to do certain tests that you might not need. I think the US health care system is probably three or four times a price where it should be. And I think there’s a lot of misdiagnosis and over treatment at the same time.
Saul Marquez:
Yes.
Allon Bloch:
You know, the saying that people who sell you luxury goods always say you get what you paid for. I don’t think the US health care system is you get what you pay for. I think we pay a lot of money. They are, of course, pockets of global excellence. The major academic institutions, the stuff that has been done on oncology, robotic surgery, but 99.5% of healthcare is not that, its primary care, it’s chronic care. It’s the ability to diagnose and treat people. And that’s where it’s just way more expensive than other countries. It’s just not better people live here. I have shorter lifespans and in places like Europe and Japan. And while it’s not an apples to apples comparison, we just haven’t built a superior health system that has shown results and we have a series of issues. Right. We kind of won the war on infectious diseases by and large, right, there at 19th century or early 20th century around bacteria and viruses. It is a much higher chance of people die from infectious diseases in the US. And of course, there’s still a risk of influenza, especially for certain demographics. But by and large, we’ve kind of lost the war on chronic conditions, in part because of lifestyle, in part because, you know, maybe other, maybe just because we live longer. But diabetes and heart and stroke and high blood pressure and cancer. I’m not I’m not shrinking. There is a fascinating that Wall Street Journal article about the fact that people took statins in the late 80s and it dropped the amount of heart attack and deaths from from our conditions. But now they think due to increased obesity and it’s now an increased diabetes, it’s going up again. I’m not quite sure why. And again, these things are really complicated, but I kind of feel like if somebody walks down the street and has a heart attack and dies, somebody has a stroke, and that is in most cases probably avoidable, is probably not avoidable. Then a narrower. Before that, there’s a whole series of things you can do before. And you need to make it highly personalized and highly relevant. And this is where medicine is, is behind. It’s a generation or two generations behind. And again, Anderson, is mid 20th century.
Saul Marquez:
So what do you think about that, though? Like the B-to-C approach? I mean, you got a good business model for that,.
Allon Bloch:
I think so I think, though, you do need to partner with people with specialty insurers. An insurer by the way, in the US is both large companies like Comcast or Horizon that.
Saul Marquez:
Employers. Insurers. Yeah.
Allon Bloch:
So they self-insure above a certain size American. I don’t know how much of your or our listeners. There’s no but about a few thousand employees, typically companies self-insure. So they own the medical risk. And then you’ve got people like Anthem Blue Cross and Signa and then others that also provide insurance. I think these companies, all of these, whether it’s large employers or insurance companies, are natural allies because they try to reduce costs. Yes. You know, around this. So, you know, people like Anthem will benefit both by offering something that is usually beneficial to their to their member base, but also something that is cheaper. Yeah, there’s very few things in sectors that matter that are better and cheaper at the same time. Right.
Saul Marquez:
And you’re. I mean, hell, let me just be honest. I mean, just a little a couple seconds that I spent there on your app. I mean, talk about a total UI improvement or the user experience, you know, that you experience so easy, man.
Allon Bloch:
I mean, that’s the whole idea. You do the non-threatening. There is a reason why we didn’t put the doctor with a stethoscope there and didn’t make it a stir. Sterile and call that a medical lab friend. We wanted to make this in color. We wanted to make it user friendly.
Saul Marquez:
That was very friendly.
Allon Bloch:
We’ll have it in pediatrics. We want kids to be able to use it together with their parents. You know, medicine can be much less scary. It’s scary already, right? But sometimes you got to excruciating pain. You’re scared, you’re nervous.
Saul Marquez:
So. So, Allon, you’re saying make it good enough so that if you do go b-c that you’ll be able to partner with those with those critical partners to help you succeed?
Allon Bloch:
Look, I don’t seem to me be to be versus be to seize market business model and the product. I think the product is the same. Radlick and my products can be called different things. But fundamentally, we will partner with entire value chain chengyu partners, which large health systems will partner with physicians. Physicians are certainly are our users. If you were able to see our doctors part of what they see the information, you would also be impressed by how easy it is for physician to see it compared to other EMR like EPIC or you know, other the other leading America. We just made it much easier. Users are also sorry, doctors are also users in addition to to just, you know, patients.
Saul Marquez:
So that’s a good question.
Allon Bloch:
You want to make the whole thing much easier.
So, yeah, I agreed. So now if physicians are listening to this and maybe they want to moonlight or something. Offer their services in a different way. Try something new. Can they visit K Health and see how they could offer their expertise?
Allon Bloch:
Yeah. Look, we’re adding many physicians and we credential our physicians and it needs to be for physicians that enjoy the pure aspects of diagnosis and treatment and are comfortable with doing that remotely. So the physicians that use say while we love it because it’s interesting, we don’t need to deal with billing. We don’t need to deal with bureaucracy. We can work from the comfort of our home or a clinic depending where they are. And we can focus on treating people. One really, really important thing that we did in case focus on continuity of care. Again, if you make it really easy. People wanted to have follow up questions. People feel slightly better, feel slightly worse. They come back a few times. If you go to a doctor and you get a prescription for that, you know, again, a hypothetical sinusitis thing, and you’ve got to question, how easy is it for you to ask a doctor? Question It’s pretty nearly impossible. You need to call in the receptionist and hopefully somebody will be able to pass on the message of doctor. Doctors are super busy. So being able to have one place just continuity of care is is, you know, to me. Huge is huge. And so some doctors are saying, wow, this is much more fun to do it. And I can focus just on what I was trained. I was trained to diagnose and treat people. And I can do it in this tax base with people are sharing, you know, they’re readily privilege health information. So I think many doctors love it. But we have high standards. We only have board certified physicians. We have a credentialing committee. And this is run separately. This is run by physicians. They run separate entities, is not run based on the business standards of physicians, decide how to diagnose and treat so that the full authority based on, you know, the. Based on the state laws in the state where they’re practice medicine, so we’re certainly hiring many more physicians and, you know, across all states. So you would welcome people to approach it. Approach it.
Saul Marquez:
It’s interesting. Hey, Allon, if you could have lunch with anybody, who would you eat lunch with?
Allon Bloch:
That’s a big question. So, first of all, so many people. It’s not one person. I have life. People have a lot of life experience and then shifted to different things. So people like Bill and Melinda Gates to me are interesting as Bill Gates did one thing and then looked at the world very differently and probably accumulated a lot of different acumen and probably does things differently. So that’s an example of somebody who is, of course, super successful one thing and then super stick and try to apply it, but in a very, very different setting was a different set of challenges. To me, that’s one example that springs to mind. But honestly, there’s so many people and I also just trying to have lunch with my wife from time to time so I can see her.
Saul Marquez:
Hey, man, that’ll get you some kudos here. So make sure she listens. Now, this is great. Allon, look, we were just about out of time here, but man, what an incredible discussion. I appreciate your passion in this space. Folks, the best way for you to actually understand this, to check it out. And K Health look for the app. Don’t even go to the Web. Just get the app and experience health care in a new way. I certainly have been inspired today by by Allon to look at things differently. And I hope you did, too. So with that, Allon, I love if you could just leave us with the closing thought and then could say goodbye.
Allon Bloch:
That’s the big thing. So first of all, really enjoyed the discussion. Saul, I appreciate inviting me here to talk about K and what we’re doing. I just think that health and health care is going to go through big changes, is not going to take a year or two, but in 5, 10, 15 years, you’ll see genetics being used regularly Right. at the primary care level, even stuff like biome that’s early and the discovery will be used. Certainly things like migraine and IBS and things that are much more complicated for medicine to understand I think will be much better. That stuff like back pain. So I think we’re going to see vast changes. And I think you’re going to be much more in control. But that control is going to make people feel less scared and more empowered as opposed to I’m not sure I don’t understand medicine, i don’t undertand big terms. I’m going to just rely on what the doctor. I think the minute that you can ask and touching questions and force your physician to consider things that makes the health system better. And I think, again, measures things that in a matter of 10 years, you’ll see a vastly different health system. And we building this not just for the US, we’re building it for places in Asia and Africa where there’s simply not enough physicians. So this is a matter of necessity. Physicians are rated. You know study for many years and highly educated. We want to make them as effective and efficient as possible and want to provide them information as well. They will be at make it easier for them to to to make decisions around diagnosis and treatment. So I think that’s where we going. It’s just early days. As I as I told you, this is something I think will take us 20 years to develop or more that, you know, we’re three years into it. We’re we’re a young company and would appreciate if people tried the product and tell us we have 2 million users, we’re growing quickly. But, you know, we’d like to have more.
Saul Marquez:
Outstanding. Well, really appreciate your time here, Allon. And folks, check them out, K Health. And with that. Thanks again for spending time with us.
Allon Bloch:
Thank you Saul.
Thanks for listening to the Outcomes Rocket podcast. Be sure to visit us on the web at www.outcomesrocket.com for the show notes, resources, inspiration and so much more.
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