About the Guest:
Jonathan Kaplan, MD, MPH
Founder and CEO of BuildMyHealth
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, MD, MPH, is a board-certified plastic surgeon, the founder and CEO of BuildMyHealth, and owner of Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery. At 16, Jonathan became fascinated with plastic surgery when he observed a plastic surgeon in his hometown help fix a patient’s neck after some skin cancer was removed. He followed his passion and eventually completed his plastic surgery fellowship at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic. There he was trained by the same team that performed the first US face transplant.
During his first six years in practice, Jonathan built a busy cosmetic practice in Baton Rouge. His area of focus ranged from facial to body cosmetic surgery and cosmetic medicine, including injectables such as BOTOX for wrinkles and fillers for smile lines. While owning his practice, Jonathan noticed many patients struggled finding cost estimates for plastic surgery to know if the surgery was in or out of their budget. The lack of transparency caused many patients to show up to consultations less informed and more likely to see a “sticker shock.”
This realization led Jonathan to start BuildMyHealth which is a a website and iPhone/iPad app with a price estimator to help patients find doctors through obtaining itemized estimates of procedures. During his entrepreneurial journey he moved to San Francisco and now he proudly calls San Francisco his home.
Jonathan is also a speaker and published author across several medical journals like the Journal of the Louisiana State Medical Society, American Surgeon, Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, and suchlike. In addition, he is the recipient of several awards like the Doug Leonovicz Award for Best Resident in Vascular Surgery, Chief Resident, Cleveland Clinic Department of Plastic Surgery, and the Baton Rouge Business Report 40 Under 40 to name a few.
About the Episode:
For Episode 14 of Entrepreneur Rx, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, a plastic surgeon and CEO/Founder of BuildMyHealth®. BuildMyHealth is a unique platform that helps consumers check potential costs for healthcare services.
During this episode we discuss how Jonathan became interested in plastic surgery, the start of BuildMyHealth, the functionality of BuildMyHealth, how he built his team and his advice for entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneur Rx Episode 14:
RX Podcast_Jonathan Kaplan: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
RX Podcast_Jonathan Kaplan: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
John Shufeldt:
Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of Entrepreneur RX, where we help health care professionals own their future.
John Shufeldt:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Entrepreneur Rx. This week, I'm extremely happy to welcome Dr. Jonathan Kaplan. Dr. Kaplan is a board-certified plastic surgeon, he's based on San Francisco and he's the founder and CEO of BuildMyHealth, a price transparency and lead generation platform. Jonathan, welcome to the podcast!
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Thanks for having me.
John Shufeldt:
It's my pleasure. You got a very cool background that we're going to jump into. Ok, so before we start, why plastic surgery? How did you get into that?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Well, I mean, I guess it's not so unusual. My father was a surgeon. He was a general surgeon in Alexandria, Louisiana, where I grew up. I was the youngest of seven kids, and he was a surgeon back in the day when maybe you weren't stuck at the hospital late at night, dealing with the electronic medical record and things like that. You know, he's a surgeon, I think he started, he was in practice for thirty-three years before he passed away. But he was a general surgeon in a small town, so he did everything. He was like vascular surgery, pediatric surgery, plastic surgery before that was really a thing. And a lot of gallbladders. He was the first one to start doing laparoscopic gallbladder cholecystectomy in that area. But what I was getting at is that he was a physician back at the time when you could get home at a reasonable time and he was always home for dinner and he seemed to be happy with his profession. And so we all thought about, you know, medicine is a good thing. I don't know if everybody feels that way now, but I like the idea of being a doctor, and for whatever reason, at the age of four, we were taking the car to get fixed, and the mechanic at the auto mechanic shop said, you know, so what are you going to be when you grow up? And I was four years old and I said, I'm going to be a surgeon before I even knew what that meant. But as I grew up, and as I had the opportunity to start to go watch my dad in the operating room, that was probably about 11 years old, I was able to go watch him in the operating room and I loved it. It was great. It was so much fun watching all these general surgery procedures. And then about the age of 16, I was in the doctor's lounge with him and there was a plastic surgeon there that said, hey, why don't you come watch what I'm doing? And my dad encouraged me to go watch him and he was doing, that plastic surgeon wasn't doing anything glamorous, he wasn't doing like a facelift or a boob job or something like that. The patient had a cancer on their leg. He was going to remove the cancer, but the hole was too big just to close up. So he had to take some skin from the patient's neck to close up the hole. And the thing that I thought was so cool about it was he had this really craggly wrinkly smoker's neck and he was able to remove the skin from her neck so that the final incision was lying right within one of her neck creases. And I just thought that was so cool to be able to take one part of the body to fix another. And so that's when I was hooked on plastic surgery, was the age of 16. And luckily, after going through all the pre-rex and med school and residency and fellowship, I actually ended up still liking plastic surgery because you can imagine how awful that would be to have this glamorized idea of what you wanted to do in your mind, and you get there and you're like, oh, well, this isn't much fun. And actually, the truth is, plastic surgery is the best field you could go into, honestly, if you don't like dealing with the hospital's electronic medical record, you don't like dealing with like a lot of politics and having to wait in line to get your turn to go to the operating room. Because plastic surgery is very conducive to having your own operating room in your office, you're not waiting behind anybody, and you can have electronic medical record that works just for you, doesn't have to work for the internist also and if you're doing a lot of cosmetics, you can totally avoid dealing with the insurance companies. So long answer to your question.
John Shufeldt:
So, what I gathered out of that is, you would do it again in the second?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Absolutely. I love it. Plastic surgery is definitely, for my, I don't know if it's my personality, but the way I don't like wasting a lot of time, plastic surgery, doing a cosmetic plastic surgery practice, and having my own in-office operating room, it's very conducive to my personality.
John Shufeldt:
That's funny. So emergency medicine is conducive to mine and I would love it, and I still practice, love to do it. But it's going to change a lot in the near future because there's going to be a lot of them. Are you in an area that, I just had lunch with a plastic surgeon today actually, and we're in Scottsdale, Arizona, where you can't spit without hitting one, and he said that's true for the routine stop, but if you're doing really specialized plastic surgery, there's still not a lot of them around. Is that, where, in San Francisco, is that the case as well?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Well, I mean, there's certainly specializations in other areas, for example, like if you're doing a lot of transgender surgery, yes, there's that, that's a very specialized field, and maybe there's not a lot of those doctors. There's certainly more now than there were 10, 20 years ago. But transgender surgery, which I don't really have any experience with it, I don't really participate in that. That's certainly a specialization. But one area of specialization that there was kind of always the saying within the plastic surgery when it came to craniofacial surgeons, the surgeons that did the cleft lip and palate, they always would say that there are more craniofacial surgeons than there were craniofacial patients. So that's one area of specialization that it's, I think it's really hard to break into because you really have to be hooked up with a children's hospital. And how many craniofacial surgeons does a children's hospital have to have? Maybe one or two. But you know, there's dozens of those people going through a craniofacial fellowship every year that may not be able to get to do exactly what they want year after year.
John Shufeldt:
Interesting. I had not heard that, but when you just explained that it makes a total sense, there's just not a lot of people with cleft lips walking around. And so you're right, there's probably not a lot of work for them to do.
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
While all of those doctors are going to foreign countries, there's still plenty of work to do in foreign countries with the cleft lip and palate, and that's why a lot of them are having to travel to get the experience they want to have,
John Shufeldt:
Even that's actually right, I never, never would have thought of that. Now, did you do this straight plastics or did you do general plastics?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah. So I did general surgery for five years, and then I went and did a two-year plastic surgery fellowship at Cleveland Clinic.
John Shufeldt:
And so in Cleveland Clinic is where they did the first face transplant?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
That's right. Dr. Siemionow was the one who was doing all the research up until the point when they finally got a chance to have a patient. So that was the first full-face transplant in the United States. That occurred about three or four years after I finished my fellowship, so I wasn't there for it.
John Shufeldt:
Now, let me just ask you this a little bit off-topic. How groundbreaking, and I'm an EM doc, so, you know, what do I know about this? So how groundbreaking was that to pull off? Is that a huge leap ahead? One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind, sort of thing?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
It was in the sense that, you know, obviously, a lot of the fundamentals of doing that operation maybe were things that had already been done. But when you bring it all together to actually perform that successfully, you're bringing in so many different aspects of medicine and surgery. So, for example, to get a full face to live after transplanting it, you obviously have to hook it up to its own blood supply like an artery in a vein. Well, that's a glorified free flap, is what that is, where we hook up an artery in a vein for its own blood supply. But when it comes to a face, you know that's a little bit different cause you really want to preserve all of the musculature of the face, you want to preserve the nerves of the face, to try and hook all that up. So even though those are building on fundamentals that have already been done for decades, like hooking up an artery and a vein, to do that with a face is definitely a leap ahead. I mean, as far as, it's a very complex piece of tissue because it's not just bone, it's not just muscle, it's not just skin, it's all of those things. And not only is the surgical aspect complicated, but there's also the medical aspect post-operatively, you've got to put this person on a certain types of immunosuppressant medications, not to immunosuppressed them so much, but enough to that they won't reject that tissue that they have in that, for that. And also the other thing about it is think about when you're doing a transplant for like a liver, this is all inside the body. It's not really interfacing with any kind of bacteria or anything because everything's a sterile environment on the inside. When you're dealing with a face, you're dealing with the mouth, potentially a tongue, or at least the lips. So you're having an interface between bacteria and a sterile environment. So you really can't immunocompromise the patient too much, because then obviously they're set up for getting a severe infection because of that natural interface with the outside world. So it is very complex from beginning to end, the surgical and the medical aspect of it.
John Shufeldt:
So when they transplant the face, I thought before this goes like, oh, it's just the skin, but it sounds like it was skin, muscle, and bone.
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Oh, absolutely. They were absolutely doing like partly sinuses, because some of these patients that they were treating had shotgun blast to the face. Not self-inflicted. I think the first patient, Connie Culp, was, her husband did it. So she had bone missing from her sinuses and the anterior aspect of her maxilla. So no, there was bone transplant involved in that, nerves, muscle, skin, yeah, it was a very complex, free flap.
John Shufeldt:
Wow, that is. I had no idea. Okay, so your first six years of practice, you're doing the general busy cosmetic practice. When did you decide, the thing, to go down this entrepreneurial path? Because what I've learned is there's a lot of entrepreneurial plastic surgeons out there, I think you almost have to be, because you're building a following in a business. When did that beam up to you to do something different?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
It was just an experience that I had in the office, so I was an employed physician at Our Lady of the Lake Hospital's, the biggest private hospital in the state of Louisiana. I was an employed physician there for the first six years of practice after I left Cleveland Clinic, and I was just noticing, and even though I didn't run my own practice, the hospital owned the practice. But I'd noticed that every day, day in and day out that patients were always calling, asking about how much something costs and they were talking about, you know, cosmetic procedure. If it was a medically necessary procedure, they'd want to know how much was there out of pocket, you know, before their insurance kicked in. So everyday patients were calling asking how much things cost. And I realize, you know, there's got to be a better way of answering that question over the phone. Because if you go through the whole process of trying to explain the price to them, it takes a long time. And then they're like, okay, thanks. And then they hang up and like, like, you get nothing out of it. The other option is to say, oh, well, you know, you have to come in to see for a consultation with the doctor, and that kind of just aggravates the hell out of the patient because they want a ballpark figure. So I was thinking, there's got to be a better way to answer that, and I thought, oh, maybe there's something online. Well, there was nothing online. And then I started thinking about the fact that when the patient does come in for a consultation, the office manager or the patient care coordinator sits down with him and goes over the pricing with them because they have the price on a fee schedule. Everybody's got a fee sketch. Whether you're a surgery center, doctor, whatever, everybody's got a fee schedule. So it's like, well, what if we digitize that fee schedule and allow the consumer to check pricing on our website, but instead of just letting them check the price like a static menu, how about I get something in return? How about I get their contact information? And so that's when I BuildMyHealth was born, that we had this interface, this price estimator on the doctor's website, where the consumer can check pricing and but only, they only see the price, after they put in their contact information, they get an estimate emailed to them automatically. It's not one of these things where we say, okay, thanks for your information, we'll get back to you. No, no, no. It's much more instant gratification for the patient. They get the email with the breakdown of the cost. We get the same email with their contact information. And so that's when it all started. And I asked the hospital as like, you know, do you all want to help me develop this? I was like, because I'm under contract with you all. You all own this technically, and they're like, no, and if you think about this is back in like 2011, when I was asking a hospital about, hey, do you all want to be a part of price transparency? And just January 1st, 2021, there, the hospitals are being forced to post prices and they're not really being compliant with that. So you can imagine if they're not complying with it in 2021, they weren't particularly interested in doing this back in 2011, so they had no interest. And I just ask is like, well, do you all mind signing over the intellectual property rights to me because, you know, y'all do own it. And they did, it was part of my contract renewal. They signed over the intellectual property of this idea of this platform. And so I'm very happy that BuildMyHealth is now mine and not theirs.
John Shufeldt:
No. So you did this with your brother-in-law, Dr. Mark Houseman. What does he play in this? What role does he? What kind of physician is he or what does he play?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Well, actually, I did do with my brother-in-law, Mark Houseman. He is a, he's a bariatric surgeon, he's married to my sister and he is a bariatric surgeon in, at Our Lady of the Lake Hospital. And so I did work with him a lot there. But as far as the idea of BuildMyHealth and the price transparency and lead generation, my brother David actually did invest in the company. And so he's one of the minority investors in the company. But we've since grown from just cosmetics to now allowing consumers to check their negotiated rates, their out-of-pocket expense for a negotiated rate for medically necessary service, we even allow them to be able to check their real-time eligibility. So we've expanded out of cosmetics to surgery centers and bariatric surgeons and things like that. So we, pretty much anybody that's getting a service that is going to be an outpatient service, we're here to help and even inpatient, we can help with the hospitals too.
John Shufeldt:
So how did you obtain that information? Did you use a health wallet sort of app?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
So as far as the pricing information, the doctor's office, they provide that to us. So when it comes to cosmetic surgery, as I mentioned, every doctor's got an excel spreadsheet with a fee schedule. So we upload, we have a prietary bulk upload tool. We upload all of that pricing information to our database and then we give a line of code to the doctor's web developer and they put that price estimate on their website. So all the pricing that's in our database shows up for the consumer when they select different procedures they're interested in. Same thing for the medically necessary services. The doctor's office, the surgery center, a hospital, we get their excel spreadsheet of negotiated rates, so all the different procedures they want to highlight, cross-referenced with the different payers, and we upload that to our database, and then the consumer can choose their insurance plan, choose the procedure, put in their name, date of birth, their membered group number for their insurance plan and then with, within real-time, we can show them what their eligibility is and what their co-insurance is, and we do all the mathematics on our end. But we can let them know what their co-insurance is, how much they've paid towards their deductible, their out-of-pocket maximum. We crunch those numbers with what we know to be the negotiated rates that the office has provided us, and then we can show the patient what they're estimated out-of-pocket cost is in real-time, so it's very, very convenient.
John Shufeldt:
That's awesome, how close are you generally? What, you know, I mean, 90-95 percent, 80 percent?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Well, I mean, we're 100 percent assuming the doctor is giving us the correct negotiated rates, so it's 100 percent accurate.
John Shufeldt:
That's awesome. So is the business model, you're charging the physicians to be on your, okay, so that's that's how economics works...
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Yes. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, the economics of it is that so at the doctor's office that's doing purely cosmetics, they pay us a subscription fee. You can also purchase non-surgical services through the price estimators. So if like for cosmetics, it's, you know, Botox, fillers, but for medically necessary services, they can purchase nonsurgical services like bariatric supplements or lab tests or X-rays. They can purchase all that through there. So aside from the subscriptions that the doctors and the surgery centers are paying, there's also a percentage that we keep for the merchant services processes if the consumer purchases something. And then also on top of that, every time a consumer does the real-time eligibility, since that costs us a little bit to process that transaction, we charge the doctor in the following month based on how many transactions occurred in the previous month.
John Shufeldt:
If you hooked up with any of the, for the, for the cosmetic cash rate, you hooked up with any of the lenders that lend for that?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Oh yeah, great question. Absolutely. So after the consumer goes through the process of checking pricing and they get their information, then we provide them with a link specifically to care credit. Because with care credit, they provide us a member ID for the doctor so that when the consumer clicks on check financing, it brings them to an application specifically for that doctor's, not just a generalized care credit application. Specific for that doctor, the consumer fills it out and then care credit and notifies that doctor, the person applied for it because, it's such an obvious connection to me in the sense that, you know, every doctor wants patients to come in knowing what they want, knowing about how much it cost and being pre-approved to get that particular service. But how do they know how much to get pre-approved for financing if you don't tell them how much it cost ahead of time? And so that's what our platform does, is it allows the consumer to have a very good ballpark figure of what the cost is and to be financed, have the financing for it. Now, for example, the pushback I always get from a doctor said, well, what if the patient doesn't know what they need like, you know, they say they want a breast augm, but when they come in for the consultation, they really need a breast augmentation and lift, which is more expensive. It's like, well, that happens day in and day out, whether we're providing pricing or not. And so just like you would normally do with the patient, you educate them on why they need this particular procedure, and probably if they did get the financing, well, then they've probably financed 80 percent of the actual procedure they need. So they only have a little bit more to get. But you've definitely made a lot of inroads by educating the patient before they come in.
John Shufeldt:
So it started out with basically for your own practice, and now it's morphed to basically be nationwide, how many practices you have signed up across the country?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
We have over two hundred and fifty of cosmetic, but also medically necessary services, surgery centers, labs, X-ray facilities, radiology facilities and we're still growing. And the other thing is, there's so many other integrations that are possible, we're also integrating with electronic health records so that when a consumer goes to the doctor's website, puts in their information to check pricing, we're able to push all of that contact information to the electronic health record. So if the patient does ultimately decide to schedule a consult for cosmetic or medically necessary service, we've been able to basically prepopulate that patient's record, even if they're not a patient yet, prepopulate their records so that their demographics are in there, their eligibility information is in there for their insurance verification procedures, they're interested and how much they were quoted. We're able to push all of that to the EHR so that when the patient finally comes in, it's much more efficient process for the front office staff.
John Shufeldt:
You know, I started the business a number of years ago called Healthy Bet, and it was a reverse auction, so I want my gallbladder out, it's not an emergency procedure, I want it either within 50 miles of Phoenix, I put it in there and the surgery centers and physicians align with them, bid on it. Now, I never quite got it, but it seems like that would be a very easy next step for you. You know, all of all, the plastic surgeons in San Francisco with, you know, with their own surgery centers, someone wants a nose job on, you say, you know, my O.R. is generally unfilled on Tuesday mornings, so we're going to give you a discount because I've got to cover that overhead anyway. It seems to be a really cool next step for physicians to bid on these cash-paying patients.
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah, there are other doctors, I think that would do that, but I think there's also a lot of plastic surgeons out there and I'm smiling even though everybody can't see me, but I am smiling right now, that I think plastic surgeons have a little bit too much of an ego to feel like that they're going to bid on a procedure. They would feel like, well, my technique is better, so you should pay more. So I definitely understand what you're saying because there's other companies out there that are doing that, not necessarily with cosmetic surgery, but like, you know, things that are more considered a commodity, like an X-ray or a blood test that might as well get the least expensive version of that because the quality is the same no matter what. But I think, yeah, I think plastic surgeons are a little too egocentric for that.
John Shufeldt:
That's a classic answer. And it's funny because we really went roughly far with this business and had some physicians buy into it, and I didn't really think about the psyche of plastic surgeons. But as I look back at it, I don't think any plastic surgeons bought into it, now that was probably the reason why.
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah, yeah, there are a lot unto themselves.
John Shufeldt:
That's absolutely classic. So how long did it take from you to get the aha moment that this will benefit my practice with Lady of the Lake, to, wait a minute, this is, you know, this has some scale, this has some legs to take it or take it out to the basic general public.
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Well, it took about six months for the hospital to start that discussion to get them to sign over the intellectual property to me. So I didn't start on working on this project until I got them to sign it over to me. I didn't want to put any sweat equity into it if it wasn't going to be able to be mine, or at least a majority of it wasn't going to be able to be mine. So that took about six months. And then after that, I reached out to some local computer coders to help me with that. And the way this all started was an iPhone app. This is, you know, 2011 when iPhone app 2010-2011, when iPhone apps were all the rage or like, let's just getting started and the local computer coder that I reached out to make an iPhone app, I told them what my idea was, and he responded, he's like, yeah, that'd probably be about 30K and so thirty thousand dollars. But he really wrote 30K, and it was a very short email. And I'm mean, OK, this jerk, like it doesn't even have the time to like, spell out 30,000, it was just kind of a flip answer. He didn't really seem like he got it. So it was the course, over the course of like the rest of the year that I did not move forward with them. But I asked my wife, well, my girlfriend at the time, about I wonder how I'm going to get this developed because I don't have any coding skills. And she said, well, you know what? I have some friends from high school that are into computers, and I'm thinking these guys are all in the World of Warcraft and maybe don't know anything about computers, at least about coding, and she introduced me to them, and so after about nine months of working with them, they totally got it and they built the iPhone app for me. So going back six months waiting for the intellectual property to be signed over to me, nine months of developing it and making an iPhone app, and then soon after that, over the course of like the following year, that's when we expanded to it being a website, and then we developed it into a price estimated that could be embedded into a doctor's website. And then about nine months ago, we just came out with a chatbot. That's the quick and dirty way for the consumer to check pricing on the home page of the website, so we've continued to expand the functionality ever since that beginning stage.
John Shufeldt:
Wow. What advice do you have for want-to-be or yet-to-be physician entrepreneurs? I mean, you, what you just described was like, you know, it's been a long process and we all get some gray hair as it goes through, but it's been a lot of, it sounds like it's been a lot of fun. What advice do you have for would-be physician entrepreneurs?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Well, I think whenever you realize that once you do all this training and you get into practice, you're going to find that your intellectual curiosity or intellectual stimulation starts to plateau a little bit. You know, it's not as steep as it was when you're in med school and residency, when you're like learning so many new things that once you start to get comfortable in your practice and you, obviously you still have to be focused on what you're doing while you're doing it, but you're going to get to a point where you're going to be looking for other extracurricular activities. And so some people that's going into hospital politics or into citywide politics or statewide politics, that's getting more involved in your medical society, or it's getting more involved in research, or going into becoming an entrepreneur. And I think that doing what you know best, you know, this was an experience that I had that people were always calling, asking about pricing, so I think looking for a pain point, that's either it's a pain point for doctors or for the facility that you're working out or for patients. And if it's something that you're interested in, go for that, but make sure you get the intellectual property in your name. I think that's one bit of advice, but also, you know, doing something that you know well, like, I didn't go into the used car business and try to come up with a new idea for that. I went into something that I knew, and so I'm really pleased with that. And also, it also helps to do something that you're familiar with, something that you can use in your daily life in your practice, because then you can always continue to refine it and improve upon it. You're not relying on somebody else to be your expert, you can be the expert and you can continue to realize, okay, this could be better, this could be better, this will be better for other doctors if it's better for me. So that's why it's so nice to do something that's within, that dovetails nicely with what you're already doing in your professional career.
John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I think that's really sage advice because I've done things outside of my professional career and they've been uniformly not quite disastrous, but not incredible successes. What was your biggest aha moment? The thing about, man, I didn't see that one coming, I've had a few of those, what's what's been yours so far?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Well, I mean, I think it really is the beginning. When I was sitting getting a haircut and my sister-in-law had called me about a friend of hers that was interested in getting priced for a rhinoplasty, for a nose job, and so I called the office and said, hey, can you all make an estimate for me? Email it to me. I'll email it to this, my sister-in-law, her friend. And it was like a whole process of asking everybody to get you to develop the quote for me and everything. And then, after my sister-in-law sent it to her friend, the friend's like, okay, thanks! And like, didn't come to me or anything. I was like, well, that was a lot of wheels spinning to kind of get that quote. And it's while I was getting my haircut, I was like, you know what? This is what we need to do. We need to digitize these estimates and allow the consumer to get it online and us get a lead in the process. So that was the aha moment.
John Shufeldt:
Mine's are in the shower or while running. Okay, last question, how did you build your team? So it's pretty interesting that you did these ... You called some programmers and literally had the exact same experience. Yeah, that's something about 40 grand. Like, that's it? That's, you know that?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Right.
John Shufeldt:
Crap, of course. How subsequent to that aha moment for, how did you build your team?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
So it started with my then girlfriend, now my wife, introduced me to the coders. Then they've, they've sent to ..., two technical co-founders, and I'm here in San Francisco, my wife's from Connecticut. They're both from the two technical co-founders are in Connecticut. One's got a Ph.D. and they just happen to be really, really smart guys in addition to coding. And so it started with the two of them. And then we've since branched out through posting online. We're all remote. We posted job postings on Craigslist here in San Francisco Bay Area, where there's a lot of. We also posted Jobs on Indeed. And so we've built a remote workforce of coders in addition to those two technical co-founders. We have a senior software engineer. So that's the beautiful thing about this kind of work is, you know, software as a service is that everybody can be remote and we've gone from there. And it's been great because we've been able to work with some really solid coders who've been able to build a really great platform. The one thing I have found is that I have not outsourced any of the programming. Nothing is offshore is kind of the euphemism for it now. We've kept everything in the United States and I feel like the quality of the work has been better because of that.
John Shufeldt:
That's awesome, yeah, I think a lot of people might say, hey, it's a mistake, but it's like, you know, I always hear it's 50 percent of the price and takes you twice as long. So then the day you're paying, you're paying for it anyway.
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
And you're just so much more frustrated throughout the entire process.
John Shufeldt:
Yeah, no, I've, I've heard the exact same thing. Well, Dr. Kaplan, how can people get a hold of you? How can they find you?
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Email me if they have any questions that Jonathan@BuildMyBod.com That's J O N A T H A N @ B U I L D M Y B O D.com And they can also direct message me on Instagram at BuildMyBodHealth. BuildMyBod and H E A L T H.
John Shufeldt:
Very good. Well, thank you very much. A real pleasure. I learned a ton and I'm sure the listeners have also. So thank you.
Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.
John Shufeldt:
Thanks for listening to another great edition of Entrepreneur Rx. To find out how to start a business and help secure your future, go to JohnShufeldtMD.com. Thanks for listening.
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Key Take-Aways:
- Set goals and follow your passion.
- Patients understanding costs can help increase booked procedures for physicians.
- Healthcare entrepreneurs succeed when they hit and solve a pain point in the industry.
- Owning intellectual property rights to the product/service reduces the chance of lawsuits and legal inconveniences.
- Building your team is critical, but keep your mind open to remote workers.
- Look at how you can improve something in your own field is easier than looking to improve something in a field you know little about.
Resources:
- Connect and follow Jonathan on LinkedIn.
- Check your healthcare costs with BuildMyBod.
- If you have any questions for Jonathan, you can reach out to him at Jonathan@BuildMyBod.com or sending a DM to his Instagram.
- See what else Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery is doing to help patients.