Your Medical Ally

OVERVIEW

Your Medical Ally was a startup created by myself and  former colleague and head of machine learning at PitchBook, Tyler Martinez.  Tyler and I were brought together through adversity  after we both  experienced major health crises around the same time. Through our recovery process we emerged with a shared need to make it better for those like us who were dealing with major health issues. So we formed Your Medical Ally. Taking what we know how to do, define, design and bring new products to market (me) machine learning and software development (Tyler) we set out to create a platform that supports people through their healthcare crisis.

From Zero to Beta in 6 Months
When bringing new  products or solutions to market, I roughly follow the below process.

The few first steps may be repeated as you refine you strategy and  are not strictly sequential. You iterate through them quickly in order to refine your concept until it's time to focus and prioritize.

Defining  Problems Guiding Principles

Though we both had a desire to make managing a health crisis easier for people, before we could start, we first had to get real clear on the problems we wanted to tackle. In order to solve a problem you need to identify what it is first. We brainstormed all the problems we felt we may be able to help address. These problems became the guiding tenants for our long term product vision and helped us quickly eliminate any ideas that were outside these four areas.  

These became our north star guiding us through the rest of the process. Those guiding principles were:

1. Good health should not mean financial ruin.

2. Making informed decisions about our care should not be hard.

3. There is wisdom to be found from our peers.

4. No one should have to face illness alone.

DREAM BIG

Armed with clarity around the problems we wanted to tackle, we then allowed ourselves to dream big. This meant imagining our ideal solution without constraints. This gave us our long term platform vision from which we could start building a framework around. The dream was lofty and if we tried building it all at once it would be overwhelming. To begin chose a single problem. How do we help people struggling with the financial burden of healthcare costs?

RESEARCH & ANALYSIS

From here, we needed to validate the market need for a solution to this problem. We did this several ways. 

Research

Through research we learned that:

• 56 million adults are currently struggling with health-care-related bills

• 80-90% of all medical bills have billing errors

• 40% of all rejected insurance claims are actually covered by insurance

With the need established, we took our research and brainstormed a solution.

Market Test

Before we committed ourselves to any solution, we needed to test if our proposed solution resonated with potential customers. To do this we created a website for our solution with a prominent CTA to contact us help. Next we placed a small Google Ad Buy. We followed up with everyone that reached out with an invitation to set up a time to talk.

From this experiment we learned several things:

1. The desire for our solution was real. Our ads had a click rate of almost 6%, this was a staggering 3X higher than the industry average. From that 6%, around 45% setup a time to talk. These were very exciting results.

2. Gained direct insight into the most common issues - Through our calls with people we were able to hear first hand about the issues they were facing regarding their medical bills. These conversations allowed us to develop our personas, user journeys and opportunity maps. These further helped us hone in on the most common issues people faced. We created personas and corresponding opportunity maps to better refine ad align our solutions and identify adoption barriers and optimal engagement  points.

3. Learned how problems are currently solved and forged partnerships. Aware that the folks reaching out to us were in crisis and that we weren’t able to help them yet, we wanted to find someone who could. Through the non-profit Patient Advocate Foundation we found an amazing partner. We were able to refer people to the foundation for further support and were  also able to learn from the foundation as well. The partnership was so successful that they agreed to pilot the Beta of our product when it was ready.