Physicians United With Dr Rachel Roth.
Today we speak to Dr Rachel Roth who is a Family Medicine physician with special qualifications in mental health, health access, and biomedical research. She is also Founder and Director or Physicians United, a collaborative effort of physicians to remove the middle man and empower doctors and patients to connect directly.
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Transcript of our talk.
Please note this has not been edited.
Hey everybody. Today we have Dr. Rachel Roth was asked. She is trained as a family medicine practitioner. She is the founder of physicians United, so collaborative effort of positions to remove the middleman and empower doctors and patients to connect directly. So this is why I wanted to have her come on today to speak about what she's doing.
You can find that in the show notes down below physicians, United as well as hill as health. Dr. Roth, thank you very much for being here today. Tell us how you got started, why you wanted to start physicians United. I want to hear more about the group. This is not a group that I was familiar with and it was Dr.
Marianne mass actually, who introduced the concept to me. So let's talk about this. What are you doing with the group? How did this all get started? Thank you so much for the opportunity. I think that a lot of physician entrepreneurs, I consider myself an accidental entrepreneur. I was always very attached to medicine.
Very much love it. And never thought about leaving it or doing anything besides it really. And my personal story actually goes back to when I finished residency, I was very burned out. And my burnout was mostly around the systems. Like I am somebody who always loves my patients and loves my colleagues and.
Feel the moral injury of the systems. So acutely that have a hard time working within it. So I decided to take off some time and kind of regather myself. I had a young son at the time and my husband was also between jobs and we thought let's just Go travel and take a breather for the summer. And we had no money, obviously because we just finished residency.
And so we took all of our miles that we had and we bought a one-way ticket to Spain and then Turkey and then Israel. And we landed in Israel and spent some time here. And I didn't feel like the summer was enough to heal. So I. It was like, let's extend slightly. I'm not ready to go back into that environment and jump into something.
So we stayed a little longer and a little longer, and we've been in Israel now seven years. And I've been working as, an ex-pat physician in a lot of different capacities. I've been, I have my own community practice here and I've worked with refugees and all kinds of different with embassies and just like finding the different niches of the U S X path physician.
And and then COVID came about, and I had a bunch of friends who were asking me how I. Move to be near my parents and use telemedicine. They knew I worked on telemedicine all this time and they said can I move internationally? And what's the rules around that, et cetera. And one good friend of mine from residency, she was thinking about moving to Singapore.
And I said, why don't we just go into practice together? You and I, we'll stop working for $23 a consult on Teladoc and just like dealing with. The corporate stuff and we'll have our own nice little virtual direct practice and she thought, great, but I'm not sure if I'm ready to jump into that with two feet, I'm going to be moving.
Maybe get one more or two more doctors who are also interested in virtual DPC and have them join the practice. And that way we'll have nice coverage. And so I went on Facebook and actually I posted, I don't know if you know a Shreeny the pot, but on the Hippocratic physician. So I posted there as part of that ex-pat physician group, and I said, Hey, is anybody interested in joining this kind of practice where it's just us and we'll have our patients and we'll charge a monthly fee and it'll be pretty low key.
And then I closed my computer and I walked away and came back an hour later. And I had a list of 500 doctors who had responded. It was like, what is this, what do I, what am I supposed to do with this? And each person had their own story about why it was that they needed to do that. Either because of burnout or because they didn't feel like they had work-life balance or because they didn't feel that the system was serving the patients or that the system wasn't serving them and their mental health well, or that they needed to be near aging parents or, there were so many good reasons and I think.
Felt like we spend so much time taking care of people. And yet we ourselves are trapped in this system. And I was like, guys, if we all need this thing, we can all make this thing. There's 500 of us. We can certainly do this. We're smart. We're hardworking people. We can figure it out. And I was like, how hard could it be?
Start up a virtual DPC. And of course those are like the famous last words. So luckily I didn't know what I was getting into, but that was about a year ago. And since that time, the groups really come together, we call ourselves physicians United and we've, we've had, we've had a lot of discussions within the group about what does it look like to have a healthy.
Practice, what are our needs like in 2022, what is, what should medicine look like from the doctor's perspective and from the patient's perspective and what's standing in our way. And so we just had to be very scrappy and resourceful and thoughtful, and we put those things together and we created this platform The platform has rebranded.
Now it's called helix health because after a while of using it, we realize that physicians United was a little bit inward looking like that was us. But now in a service capacity, we have to look outward at the healing of our patients. And so we rebranded it as he lists. And the idea of he lists is that it's going to just connect patients directly with a personal physician.
And that looks different depending on the doctor, depending on the patient's need. I'm a believer that there's a doctor out there for every patient, right? There's every type of patient, every patient need. And there are some people who are looking for integrative medicine. There's some people who are looking for a very niche specialty and they don't have it in their state.
And there are some people who just need a primary care doctor. They can talk to and not be on a waiting list for. Months on end trying to get in with somebody. So we're just, we're really about breaking down the barriers that have cropped up in medicine, between doctors and between doctors and patients.
And just trying to create something, a space where doctors can create whatever practice they want and successfully reach the patients who. Are needing that service. So that's what we're in the middle of. That's what we're working on. Couple of questions, Rachel, do you I know that state barriers are an issue with licensing with telemedicine.
Do you see that going away anytime soon or what would need to be done in order to get rid of that? I would be amiss if I posed as an expert on any of this policy, I'm really like a grassroots. Physician organizer. And that's how I think of myself. And so I don't want to, I could postulate as much as you probably could.
I think that to your point, there are some things in medicine that we all think need to go away, both for the patients. Wellness and benefit and for our own. And we could probably sit and have an entire conversation about what are those things that need to go away. But right now, we're just trying to be really practical about it and where, people ask me, do it, should I get more state licenses or should I like, how should I manage this?
And my perspective is let's work with what we have because we already have a license at least. Most doctors on the platform have many more than one. And we have communities, the communities of people around us. We have our neighbors, we have the people who we work with. We have the people who work for us.
We have people in our children's daycares and schools and athletic teams. We have a reach as individual people beyond what we realize. And what we're trying to do is really do this grassroots thing where we're embedded in our communities, where we know the therapists in our communities, and we know the, the social workers and then the patients understand that.
We're connected with them in a, that really deep way where like we understand where they're coming from and we can help direct them in their and their health. It wasn't our intention to be this like behemoths 50 state, thing. It's just, it just so happens that we are, and we do because that's the number of doctors who are interested in being part of.
If a physician listening to this, is there more room on your company on your board like to get? There's always room. I think that this is something that needs to reach every doctor in the country, because if nothing else, it gives people options. Like I think as physicians, we often feel like we don't have options because.
We're just so powerless in a system of we have to get hired and we have to be credentialed. And there can't be like two days, which we took off and we can't explain what we did with them and the credentialing process. And, there can't be any marks on our records and we always have to be, paying for our certifications and making sure that these things are in place.
And it's just this wheel. We actually have the power to get off. If we, as physicians come together and regardless, we're all going to disagree on things, it's a big, it's a big 10 physicians, but just knowing that there is a place that if you need to go part-time, if you want to try something new, if you want to Moonlight and make some extra money, if whatever it is that you want, we're trying to create a space where you can just come and do that thing.
We don't have any. Expectations of you or requirements besides the fact that you practice good solid medicine and you keep up your licensing and the things that are really fundamental to making a good doctor at the marketing. It's how are you marketing if you don't mind me asking? Yes, no, that's been a huge challenge.
The other telemedicine companies out there, the way, the route that they go, the way that they work is that. $2 million as a seed round and then 5 million, 10 million, 45 million, 450 million, et cetera. I could name certain ones, but I won't that have really just mega money from. Corporations and VCs and things like that.
We have been very much trying to avoid that. We've had offers to buy the company, to buy the doctors. We've had offers for investments from non-physicians and we're trying to hold out as long as possible because once you bring in outside interests, then that already like the person who runs the money, runs the company and.
We want the physicians to be in charge of the company. This will get back to your question about marketing. I promise. So the way that we began this, as we raised just an internal round from the doctors, everybody put in whatever they could, and they got a piece of the company, like a co-operative and that was our seed money, but it's far from enough to get us to a place where we can.
Hire salespeople and marketing people and, user interface, experts at create a funnel and all of the things that we actually do need to do and probably will need to do in order to compete in what's a pretty intense marketplace. So I would say, you know what we're doing right now? Our strategy has again, come from being resourceful.
We're like, what do we have? We don't have, we don't have big money, but we do have. Really integrated physicians, people who are part of their communities. And so to begin, we've done just a word of mouth campaign, just, people putting it out there. This is what I'm doing. If anybody needs, it's been moderately successful.
The, I would say most doctors on the platform still don't have a regular flow of patients and we have just a couple who do and I try to be really transparent about this because when doctors join, I tell them the first I tell them this is not, you're not going to be joining here and you're going to sit down.
You're going to have a bunch of patients lined up. Not yet. We will. I think we will get to that point, but for now, this is going to be a you're going out there to your community and spreading the word. So our marketing strategy has been very modest so far, which is just word of mouth, getting it out there.
Now we're actually at this turning point right now where we are thinking about taking on more events. And we'd like to do that from physicians. And that would be mostly probably to pay for marketing because what we're seeing is that it's really hard to market yourself. Like even though we're giving doctors tools and handbooks and we hired consultants and they told us what to tell people to say, we, as a profession are just not.
We don't love that we don't like to sell ourselves. We don't like to talk about ourselves. We generally see ourselves as a service, a service profession and peop I don't know if it's just that by nature. We're not, we don't like that, or we've never been trained. And so we're uncomfortable in that space, but it's been really hard.
That's been a big challenge. Anyway, I could talk more about that. We have talked about all the various ways that, you could get patients on social media and being part of groups and support groups. And really the thing that has been the most successful for us are just people getting out there and tell.
Other professionals, nutritionists and therapists, and all these kind of like satellite helpers that if they see somebody who is disconnected from care, they can get it here. As far as the financial aspect of it. Somebody's interested in joining. You're from the physician's United.
How does this work? As far as if you don't mind the specifics, how much money do they have to lay out of their pocket? I know some companies, they charge three to $5,000 just to get you on the platform. I'm always worried about the return on investment here. I've been burned as far as marketing oh, we'll get you this show that you give them the $5,000 and it doesn't happen.
So if you don't mind, just tell us, for the physicians out there listening, they may want to join your. Your group, tell us how this works. Financial great. Okay. So it's free for physicians to join. There's no gimmick to that. It's just the way that we see it is that this is a very young group and we're all in this together.
We're all experimenting with it together. There are going to be things that work and things that don't work. They're going to be bumps, ebbs, and flows of patients while we're still figuring it out. So for now it's totally free to join. Even when. It's established and it's going that's the intention is to keep it either free or low cost, like a hundred bucks period to join.
Because from my view, what we're really building here is a physician movement. So we want physicians to be involved, to have a voice, to have an option, which is not corporate, which is flexible for them. And so we're structuring the pricing so that it's no risk and they can just come and try. And see what that life is like, and if they like it then great.
And if they don't, they can move on to something else and they didn't lose out. So in terms of how we're funding it, we're very transparent about everything again, because it's a co-operative. So the way we've said it is that the physician sets their own. For their services, it's usually a monthly or an annual subscription.
So people will sign up for the practice and like a DPC would consultants, specialists, and people who want to do a one-time fee can do that. And they'll set a one-time price as well. And then 75% is retained by the physician. And 25% goes into the pool to pay for all of your overhead. Malpractice and the website and admin and all those other things, that they would need legal contracts, whatever the setup stuff is that they need.
Ultimately again, my goal is to shrink that 25%. Once we have a big pool of doctors paying in, then people can take home more. They can take them 80% or, 85% or whatever that is. But for now in order to try to make the business model work, we're just saying, Hey, everybody is doing this thing.
As your practice grows, you're putting more into the pool, but you're also supporting other physicians who are coming on and learning and. At some point they're going to be where you are, hopefully. So that's the structure of it. And as we go along, transparency is like the cornerstone of this, because that's something that's so lacking, I think, in the current healthcare environment.
And as things go and they change, it's just something we discuss together as a group and we make decisions about as. And they don't have to worry about billing at all or anything like that's taken care of. Correct? It's all automated. So like the platform collects the money and then distributes it once a month.
Rachel, it's a pleasure talking with you. I have some context. We're going to be introducing this to female physician entrepreneurs, which is a large Facebook group over 8,000 women. So you'll get some, you'll be in the eyes there, the front of them. And as I mentioned, I have some contacts. I have some good ideas.
I love the fact that you're not taking outside investments from people who are not physicians, because as you said, This would just be like a hospital all over again. Then you become a widget, you become a cog on the wheel. So Dr. Roth is doing everything that she possibly can to avoid that for herself, as well as any of the physicians that are on.
So let's go ahead and let's market this and, we'll bring it around to the different Facebook groups. Thank you again for what you're doing. Thank you so much.