Complicating matters is that there’s a growing shortage of clinicians in the United States.

“There has been a widening gap between the demand for healthcare services and the supply of clinicians to deliver that care,” Alexi Nazem, co-founder and CEO at Nomad Health, tells PYMNTS for the “Matchmakers” series.

“There are many causes of this, but it primarily boils down to demographics. We have an aging population in the United States, and people who are over 65 consume three times as much healthcare as people under the age of 65. People over the age of 75 consume four times as much healthcare,” Nazem said.

The care delivery shortage crisis has only intensified over the years, with the need for skilled employees growing substantially. The COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated this tension.

“Meanwhile, on the supply side, there aren’t enough nurses and doctors and other healthcare professionals to deliver all of that increased need of care,” Nazem said.

“They are also subject to demographics. A huge portion are expected to retire within the next couple of years, about 20%. There’s an increasing burnout crisis. So, the need for this contingent labor services to help cover gaps has grown substantially,” he added.

To help meet this growing need, the traditional offline model of people-powered recruiting agencies has given way to a more efficient and scalable online marketplace approach.

Navigating the Healthcare Staffing Crisis

In an industry historically characterized by information asymmetry, Nazem emphasized the importance of aggregating data about clinicians, their qualifications, availability and job preferences, as well as details about job opportunities, pay packages and facility requirements.

This wealth of information helps informs the creation of truly transparent marketplaces, revolutionizing the way clinicians connect with job opportunities.

“There’s a lot of smart operators, and more and more smart money in the space,” Nazem said.

Transitioning from traditional telephone-based recruiting to a self-service online experience, today’s platforms, like Nomad Health, align with the expectations of users accustomed to seamless online interactions in various aspects of their lives, he added, noting that “when you combine self-service, technology driven processes and transparency and data, you’re actually able to create a really scaled marketplace,” enabling clinicians and employers to find each other more effectively.

And as with digitally driven businesses, competitive edges lie in the amount of quality proprietary data organizations have at their disposal. 

“If you’ve played your cards right and set things up properly, you’re also collecting a tremendous amount of very useful data,” Nazem said.

The continuous accumulation of data enhances algorithms, contributing to competitive advantages and driving differentiation by using data science to drive better matches, build improved features and enhance overall efficiency.

“As the algorithms get smarter, the competitive separation increases,” Nazem said.

The Role of Generative AI in Healthcare’s Future 

The rapid evolution of the healthcare industry poses both exciting opportunities and significant challenges. The volatile nature of the market, characterized by both massive growth and contraction, demands continuous adaptation.

Within this context, the integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI), specifically large language models (LLMs), has been a game changer for organizations operating within the healthcare space.

“Why people come to a marketplace is to transact… much of our journey, both from a self-service and automation standpoint, and from a data collection and optimization standpoint, has been about serving that goal. And so being able to better identify the functional matches, who is going to be a great person to fill this job? What is a great job for this person? Who is more likely to take this job? Who is more likely to get an offer for this job?” Nazem said.

“We’ve built a very flexible modular modern technology platform. And what that has allowed us to do is to be ready to engage with the newest cutting-edge technology and take advantage of those things,” he added.

Removing obstacles between providers and patients remains a driving force, and Nazem said that because Nomad Health has been able to collect “a lot of really high-quality data,” when LLMs are commercialized, his platform is ready take advantage of them.

“We have a number of [AI] products in production,” he added.

And as the healthcare industry continues to undergo significant transformations, the future of healthcare staffing is poised to shaped by those who tap technology, data and a user-centric approach.

The post Modern Healthcare Marketplaces Use Data and Digital to Match Provider and Patient Demand appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

News came this month that housing costs have skyrocketed so much in California that bunk beds (and toiletries) can be rented in communal homes for that high price.

Privacy falls by the wayside, then, setting down roots in tech’s Wild West and finding the perfect place to live — or any place to live for that matter — proves to be an elusive goal.

So, a new program is offering employee perks and benefits of a different sort.

Bundle Select helps companies get their employees settled as they buy and sell homes in new towns and cities via relocation. The company has said Visa and Salesforce have joined its client roster in the wake of signing Guardant Health, Adobe and other companies onto its online platform.

In an interview with Karen Webster, Founder Joe Cucchiara said the overarching goal is to reduce the cost of finding, buying and settling into a new home or apartment (or renting one). The company states it can save employees of Bundle’s corporate partners as much as 25 percent on a slew of services tied to real estate, spanning realtors, title companies and relocation services.

Indirect Platform Model

The platform model through Bundle Select gives employees of Bundle’s partner firms a dedicated concierge across buying and selling, which Cucchiara said comes at no cost to the client or its workers. As a result, this bundles a typically fragmented process where stakeholders in the process rarely talk to one another, and certainly do not work together to speed up the property buying process or to bring costs down.

That’s especially true of relocation when time is of the essence, Cucchiara said. Employees may have only a few weeks to find a place to live, seal the deal and move, often with family in tow. He noted that relocation services can be expensive, time-consuming and confusing for employers and employees alike.

“Even if they are relocating and not buying, we can help them, too,” he said.

In Bundle’s quest to, well, bundle far-flung activities that get people settled in new locales, Cucchiara said there is opportunity to combine services across a platform where, as it stands now, “everybody works independently, and when I say everybody, that means the lender, the real estate title company — everyone is fighting for their commission, and no one works together to say ‘how can we simplify this, and … save the consumer money?’”

The desire is there, too, on the part of would-be consumers; Cucchiara said surveys show about 90 percent of individuals would prefer to use a real estate professional during the course of a transaction.

“These decisions are emotional ones,” he said, and they require high levels of service from vendors.

Matchmaker Concept

Against that backdrop, Cucchiara used the matchmaker concept as representing a “great analogy” of what the company is attempting to do. He said Bundle has created a platform that can be customized as employees navigate the site, offering bundled services across the aforementioned buying and/or relocation processes.

The platform calculates discounts as the employees pick and choose among the services on offer. They can then contact the concierge service and build a profile, “really drilling down and finding out what their needs and timelines are,” Cucchiara noted.

Bundle then assigns professionals, such as real estate agents and moving companies, to the transaction, building a dedicated team that works with the employee.

“The benefit is that everybody on this team knows the discount they have to give,” he told Webster of the in-place Bundle network. “They know the service requirements, and then we work alongside them from start to finish to make sure the service components are taken care of.”

As Cucchiara pointed out, employees of Bundle’s client firms can bring their own real estate agents and other providers into the process, if those providers are willing to give the relocating employee the expected discount and also pay Bundle the flat fees mandated by the contracts.

Elaborating a bit on those fees, Cucchiara said Bundle is paid by its preferred vendors, where, for instance, the maximum real estate agent fee is roughly $3,950, which is set whether the listing is $1 million or $7 million. Conversely, the fee paid on a $500,000 listing is roughly $1,500 paid out to the company. For the agents and other service professionals, who take about a 30 percent discount, the benefit lies with a steady pipeline of work.

Cucchiara said the company is gaining scale in the wake of a beta test that last year brought on Adobe and Guardant Health. The initial launch in the Bay Area presages goals where the company aims to have 1 million employees on the platform by 2020, up half a million in sight by the fall.

“By 2023, we want to have 5 million,” he told Webster, “while staying in our lane” of offering discounts to employees.

The post How Bundle Turned Employee Relocation Into A Matchmaker Model appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

The chronic churn isn’t new. During his 30 years of working and running venues, he noted, it has been an endemic problem. However, in recent years, particularly with the rise of gig marketplaces, it’s become even more of a drain in the industry.

“I felt that combining technology with this problem could be a real help and a real service to the industry,” McCulloch said.

The technological solution he eventually came up with was Jitjatjo, a platform that offers hospitality industry players — of all shapes and sizes — access to a stable of skilled, vetted, tested and profiled hospitality professionals. They can be booked for as little as one hour and for as long as two months, with all manner of customization in between.

In a sense, McCulloch told Webster, it looks like many gig work platforms out there (the term “Uber for restaurant workers” has come up more than once). While the comparison is apt in some ways, it misses much of what sets Jitjatjo apart, starting with the fact that it doesn’t have gig workers on its platform at all, but employees.

Picking Professionals

To go with 1099 or W-2 workers, McCulloch said, was actually one of the foundational questions the firm had to answer within its first six months. The company was aware that many big things were going on with that 1099 model at the time, but ultimately decided that W-2 workers would be both easier for the firm to manage and important in developing the offer it wanted to make to its hospitality operator clients.

“In the early days,” he explained, “we picked the W-2 model because we knew it was important to look after the whole process of doing temporary work on an ongoing basis. The commitment we make includes the talent and the operator community, and what we can do to empower good work. It is very important for us to have vetted the talent properly so we have productive workers available on the platform when our clients are looking for them.”

Restaurants and hospitality are specialized segments, more than most people know, he said — and there are various skill and operational capacities, like knowing how to use certain machines that are mission-critical to keeping services up and operating.

What Jitjatjo clients most want — whether they are an individual proprietorship coffee shop or a 50,000-seat arena — is staff that can walk in the door (mostly cold, with minimal explanation of local customs and quirks), and get up and running in minutes. If the firm doesn’t offer that, McCulloch told Webster, its offerings aren’t doing these organizations any favors. That means the first layer of vetting is to make sure people are walking in with the right skill set. That is not the only layer, though: The technology must go further.

“Hospitality is a broad sector, and a dish washer who is used to a small space might freak out in a stadium. We also have to develop personas of our staff and operators’ clients so that the skills and the environment are a match. One of the classic errors staffing firms and apps make is they don’t go far enough into the persona of the talent or the client,” he said.

Better matches mean fewer surprises, operationally speaking, and that is strongly preferred by clients — even as their client portrait is shifting.

Meeting The Diverse Needs Of Hospitality

Given that hospitality is such a wide and varied space, Webster wondered if Jitjatjo found a market sweet spot in the industry — in terms of size or vertical — that stood out above the others. McCulloch noted that, though it literally runs the gamut when it comes to operator sizes, the composition of the firms it serves has shifted a lot. In the two and a half years that it’s been in the market, it has seen its lineup of operators shift from 80 percent small businesses (SMBs) and 20 percent enterprise-level firms to the exact opposite: 80 percent enterprise and 20 percent SMBs.

As for the types of orders it sees, again, the firm runs the gamut — though it does vary by size. Situations that would qualify as emergencies would be, for example, if the dish washer called in sick an hour before their shift, or if the head waitress eloped and wouldn’t be back for two weeks. Larger operators, stadiums and corporate functions, on the other hand, tend to be high-volume, high-skill, short-duration events that need large-scale staffing of all kinds.

As a draw to the talent side of the platform, Jitjatjo pays well. Workers can make up to $30 an hour, and those payments are, by and large, offered instantly to workers when their shifts are completed.

“When we first came here, no one was doing [instant payments], including the big guys, and it seemed like such a natural add,” McCulloch told Webster, noting that it was also a complicated offering at the time — an offering that workers, in some sense, need to earn. Instant Pay is only available for workers who show up on time, and who get positive reviews from clients when their jobs are done, he noted.

Jitjatjo offers its clients a variety of ability levels from which to choose, depending on what skill level they need. The firm also offers access to solid, outstanding and epic workers, depending on whether clients need to be assured that their “minds will be blown” or if their sights are set somewhat lower.

“From our point of view, there is also a progression in our platform,” he said, “so that servers can move up, depending on how they do and are reviewed.”

Changing The Hospitality Model

One of the great difficulties of hospitality as an industry is nailing down staffing properly, because the industry is known for having peaks and troughs. The only way to manage that, McCulloch noted, is to be slightly overstaffed, which is inefficient and not even guaranteed to get the job done.

“This opens up a different way of thinking. We have had clients that were actively trimming down their event offerings, because they couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of staffing them, that are now turning up this part of their business,” he explained.

Today, Jitjatjo is open in New York, D.C. and Chicago, with plans for expansion to Philadelphia “very soon.” The challenge, as is the case for most marketplace businesses, is to make sure its supply of talent keeps up with demand, which can be substantial and unpredictable. It has succeeded in that endeavor so far, with a lot of internal referrals bringing new workers to the platform and the savvy use of social media recruiting others. Moreover, he noted, Jitjatjo is the beneficiary of changing trends in the labor market, as workers with skills are preferring greater self-determination.

“There seems to be plenty of people out there to come into a trusted platform, to be offered jobs when they want and are available, which is all logged by the technology itself,” he said.

There is also an expansion of the services coming soon, offered through the platform and “other advances” that are designed to make Jitjatjo an even more attractive platform for talent to come work on, so it can continue growing strong.

Jitjatjo is a slightly unusual platform — down to its unusual name. It’s memorable, though it has heard many pronunciations in its early days. However, different is good, he noted, because different is exactly what it wanted to be.

“We didn’t want to get pigeon-holed into a shift company or a gig company,” he said. “We wanted to stay away from that, and create an environment and an ecosystem that lays a foundation so that people on both sides of the platform can trust what is going to happen.”

Plus, Jitjatjo is a fun name to say. Any other explanation of how it picked the name, he noted, is a strict company secret.

The post Can Platforms And Payments Solve Restaurants’ 73 Percent Turnover Problem? appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

In the case of HoneyBook Co-Founder Oz Alon, his specific problem was that he was turning into his father.

Oz Alon and his wife Naama Alon were both small business owners — Naama designed websites and Oz ran a bar. Oz Alon also had the distinction of being a second-generation entrepreneur with distinct childhood memories of invoices and paper proposals being everywhere. Yes, invoices were supposed to be “at the office,” but as Alon told Karen Webster in the latest PYMNTS Matchmakers podcast, they found their way from the office to the dining room table, living room, kitchen, car and everyplace else in the house. And when he grew up, got married and lived in an entrepreneurial household all his own — the invoices were back.

“My house was the same, just like my father’s — everything was everywhere and nothing made sense and when we realized that in today’s world we still had to accept checks, or worse, take cash, and send out agreements in the mail — we couldn’t believe all of this was still happening, so we decided to fix it.”

HoneyBook, built from the ground up by Naama Alon, was that solution — an all-in-one platform for solo entrepreneurs that linked every step of the business process: from the proposal development to invoice to payments, all digitally. Founded five years ago, HoneyBook currently has tens of thousands of customers and booked over a $1 billion in business transactions through its platform. Late last month the firm announced it had raised $28 million in Series C funding led by Citi Ventures, bringing its total fundraising to $72 million.

“Our plan for the additional funds is to launch more products and specifically financial products,” Alon said. “What we have seen is that today banks know how to serve consumers, they know how to serve enterprises — but they still don’t really know how to serve this solopreneur who falls in between.”

1-2-3 Invoicing

After apologizing to Webster for “bragging” about his brilliant wife, he noted their early big insight was despite the fact that 80 percent of businesses don’t actually like paper-based processes for generating proposals, generating invoices and getting paid, they used them because they were the path of least resistance. There were solutions out there, but they required too much time and too steep a learning curve to combine and leverage usefully. That, he said, was the birth of the HoneyBook 1-2-3 process. The proposal with a price goes out, the customer or client can review it and send back adjustments, the new proposal goes out and when all is settled, the buyer can hit pay and send funds to the SMB. Every step that happens is triggered by the step that comes before it, he explained, so that when a document is sent the system starts auto-filling the next document so it can be instantly ready to send. And, most critically, there is no opting out for the buyer and no other option given. This is the only way to pay for services — and the system makes sure they move through the process correctly.

It wasn’t an easy sale at first, he said, but it was a product that proved its utility quickly.

“What we saw at first was businesses didn’t buy into it. So my wife went back and made it very pretty and when businesses started to use it, we found out really fast that they had never had online payments before and they really liked it,” Alon told Webster. “We saw companies moving from no business online to 80 percent online.”

The firm’s first chosen vertical, he said, was photographers. From there, it ventured forth into wedding-related services, web designers and eventually the wider world that Alon calls “solopreneurs” — single proprietorships that are either full-time professional ventures, or part-time ventures run by people who very much want them to become full time.

What’s Next

The next frontier for HoneyBook with this latest swatch of funding under its belt, Alon told Webster, is in building additional financial services tools and products for its customers.

Solopreneurs are a challenging market to serve, he noted — they are hard to reach out to, hard to recruit to a platform and hard to keep. And that difficulty, he said, isn’t really due to churn. HoneyBook’s churn rate is about 1.5 percent — a fact that never fails to endure the firm to investors. But, Alon notes, it does lose clients, and when it does it is because a client has gone out of business.

And that, he said, is almost always a function of access to capital and/or cash flow management.

“Our battle at HoneyBook is to make sure they can maintain their business and that they will not burn out. As we are having this conversation, we are hoping the tenure of businesses will grow and grow because we will help them stay in business longer.”

The post One-Stop Digital Procure-To-Pay For One-Person Shops appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

The year 2019 has been no exception, Homelight COO Sumant Sridharan told Karen Webster in the latest Matchmakers podcast. That’s doubly good news for the real estate marketplace this year — since, as of late 2018, things in the market were looking a bit “uncertain.”

Interest rates are down and prices are stabilizing across the board, though there will always be outlier markets, such as the San Francisco Bay Area.

A good year in real estate is, by nature, a good year for Homelight — a digital platform that uses data to pair consumers looking to buy or sell a house with a fully vetted, professional real estate agent to help them make the transaction happen. The company was born out of an especially bad experience by the firm’s CEO as he was trying to buy a house, realizing that he was undertaking the most expensive purchase of his life guided by an agent whose quality he had absolutely no way of evaluating.

In the year since Webster last checked in with Homelight, the company has seen its platform expand quite a bit — it now covers 85 percent of the U.S. It has been actively opening up in New York City, a real estate market that is famously difficult to penetrate, and adding considerably to its agent roster — and, on the whole, is “feeling really good about the business.”

Good, he noted, but still like there’s much more to do. That is why, as of last month, Homelight opened an entirely new dimension to its platform.

The Simple Sale Expansion

Homelight’s Simple Sale feature lets sellers list their homes on the marketplace, accept or reject cash offers (to be paid within seven days) and wrap up the entire process — without using a real estate agent.

That feature, he noted, is supported by a network of iBuyers that Homelight has recruited thus far — and will continue to recruit until it has achieved nationwide coverage. The Simple Sale service lets potential buyers see the most competitive offers from multiple buyers, and compares those offers with the price a seller could expect, then they can decide what they want to do.

Now, Sridharan and Homelight both firmly believe that consumers are best served by working with agents. A house, he noted, is a consumer’s largest lifetime purchase (and asset to monetize), which means they absolutely want to maximize its value in nine out of 10 cases — and a good real estate agent is the best way to do that. However, he added, there is that one out of the 10 cases.

“There are cases where a consumer values the ease and certainty of selling their house to a cash buyer, and getting paid in seven days. This is the person who is maybe selling a parent’s house from out-of-state — they don’t have time to fly home multiple times or try to manage the process. And, in those cases, they might be willing to say they want to take 20 percent off fair market value to just be done with it,” Sridharan explained.

This might look like a tool that competes with Homelight’s agents, he noted. However, those agents largely use this as an arrow in the quiver when they are talking with customers about the best ways to sell their homes.

“It lets the agents be part of the iBuyer trend,” Sridharan told Webster, and while there are agents who may hold out and refuse to even look at this tool, he doesn’t think that is the right business move. The agent’s job is being transformed by the digital age, and the ones who will succeed, he said, are the ones who will make the transition to be advisors of the sales process, who lay out all the options and help the customers make the best final decision.

It’s a big job, he noted, but Homelight remains committed to recruiting good agents.

Building The Platform For The Future

The good news about the agent end of the platform, he noted, is that Homelight doesn’t have trouble recruiting because it is a channel for sales without a lot of downside. Homelight often establishes if the potential buyer or seller is serious and in a position to make a deal, and the better they perform, the more referrals they get. Agents don’t pay a fee for the service, but pay only when a transaction happens, as is industry standard in broker referral fees.

The bigger problem, he noted, often involves turning folks away because they won’t be able to get traction in their areas, due to so many highly rated agents on the platform. While the company is highly satisfied with the agents it is recruiting, the algorithm still needs tweaking. Right now, it does well in picking out the best among established agents.

However, it is not easy for newcomers who don’t have the years of sales experience, or enough transactions, to generate referrals.

“We are taking steps algorithmically to identify up-and-coming agents. They are folks [who] have recently [picked up] a lot of transaction[s] and are performing well, but don’t have 400 transactions over five years. We want to be able to look at them as serious entrants to the market,” he said.

The firm fundamentally believes, Sridharan said, that the “the agent is the quarterback of the transaction” and, as in football, a good one is the difference between a great home-buying experience and something that ends up on a list of real estate horror stories on Buzzfeed. That means, from Homelight’s perspective, the big-picture question to answer is how to support and enhance the agent’s work across the various areas ripe for optimization that litter real estate, especially when it is done in a logical way that helps the consumer — who, at the end of the day, is the party Homelight is thinking about.

“Our real mission is to help sellers and buyers make better decisions. This is one of life’s more stressful choices, because this is a huge financial asset with big consequences. We look at our job, and we are an advisor that wants to connect the consumer to the best outcome. Whatever mechanisms we can do that by, we are committed to building the products that help,” he said.

The post How Platforms Turn Agents Into Digital Real Estate Quarterbacks appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

To that end, U.K. marketplace Labour Xchange, launched in February, is “trying to turn the entire market on its head,” according to Co-founder and CEO Jonathan Key in the latest PYMNTS Matchmakers podcast. One wrinkle: In a world where venture capitalists (VCs) and funding rounds dominate startup headlines, Labour Xchange has some financial backing from Community, a U.K. trade union, and has committed to make sure workers are paid a living wage.

Key said the traditional job-seeking model is one where a business has a need for staff, filling that need with employees culled through, say, advertising or a recruiter. Similarly, those workers must be in the process of applying or among the pool of candidates at the recruiters’ disposal.

In the U.K., though, Key told Karen Webster, there are “millions and millions of people excluded from the labor market. They can only work certain hours each week.”

Consider the part-time supermarket employee who works 15 hours a week, as mandated by a unionized labor contract. Yet, depending on the supermarket’s needs, that 15 hours can be scheduled in a somewhat erratic fashion, changing from week to week. The desire to supplement that 15-hour supermarket job with other jobs is thrown into disarray amid scheduling conflicts that can arise at the last minute.

As a result, said Key, “that worker must go on some sort of benefit from the government, but they desperately need more work.” The same might be said for parents or caregivers who look after the elderly, and who may be frequently tethered to close-to-home commitments, as well as have unpredictable demands that can and do intrude upon traditional work schedules. The demands of those family commitments mean that geographic constraints can limit employment options.

“These people are genuinely excluded from most [employment] platforms and most recruiters,” he said. “I have seen how devastating the effects of underemployment can be.”

The Platform Model

The Labour Xchange model, offered via app and now operating in London, he said, focuses on the supply side of the equation: the “ad hoc” workers who need only show they are employable in the U.K., select the hours they desire to work in an upcoming week and state the skills they possess. Through the app, they can specify where they live, what type of work they want, and the days and times they would like to work.

On the employer side, Labour Xchange combines all the work available across a range of businesses and verticals within that time span — effectively matching supply and demand for 24/7 shift coverage. The employees pay nothing to use the service, and the cost is borne by the firms seeking to fill positions.

He told Webster that the Labour Xchange model lends itself well to the needs of smaller businesses in the U.K., where 66 percent of those firms won’t use recruitment agencies or other types of platform offerings. He said, “We are actually bypassing that trust deficit because the business can choose the people they like. What we’re finding is a lot of small businesses select someone for two hours, just to see what they’re like, and they’ve lost virtually nothing.”

Matching businesses with the labor they need — and matching those who want to work with jobs, for the hours they want — can make a local economy markedly more efficient, said Key. He added that, ideally, Labour Xchange can “expand between four to 10 times the number of people in the labor market by reaching those who are excluded.”

The Mechanics Of The Model

Offering an example of the site’s mechanics, Key noted a commercial cleaning company that may have a 20 percent to 30 percent “no turn up” rate due to illness or other events.

“It’s hard to find someone who will show up for two hours on a Friday night to clean an office,” he said. In the event that the same commercial cleaning company can find a worker for that two-hour shift, the upfront cost may run in the hundreds of pounds to sign them up, say, through an agency.

Addressing the Labour Xchange platform, Key explained, “Here, within three clicks, they can book a member to be on staff” for that short-term gig. The individual has already confirmed they can do the job because they have advertised their availability and skills. Conversely, the employer is assured of filling its immediate need, as the platform automatically reaches out to three people for any one job — and the first one to accept gets the slot. He noted that the platform’s “uptake” ratio stands at about 99 percent.

When asked about the payment process, he said that smaller firms pay Labour Xchange up front via credit card, and the platform holds the money in an escrow account. When the engagement is finished, the funds are paid out to the individual.

He added that the firm’s platform offers Pathways, a program through which workers can gain expertise in other verticals via some online training. Picture, then, the pizza delivery person who moves into caregiving in a home setting.

The Union Effect

According to Key, Labour Xchange wrote to every trade union in Britain and linked up with one: Community, which offers training and guidance to workers. Employers commit to paying a living wage, which, in the U.K. is one level higher than minimum wage. The partnership with Community — which reportedly invested about £40,000 ($52,338 USD) in the app — offers support and guidance, and, over the longer term, will be critical to Labour Xchange, as the firm aims to be nationwide by the end of the year, he said.

There’s another impact here — one that leads to the possibility of even steadier work and income.

When an employer taps the same individual through Labour Xchange to fill its need several times, the marketplace steps in and “we say, ‘That’s fine, but you’ve got to move them on to a worker contract because the platform is not geared to getting around employment law.’ …We’ve been amazed by the number businesses that do actually offer a full contract to the workers … we charge such a small fee for it. We charge £150 to take someone permanently.”

In these instances, he noted, businesses, in fact, change their work practices to fit in the worker.

“We are making work more local, more relevant or more convenient for people,” he told Webster.

The post Strange Bedfellows? Trade Unions And Gig Marketplaces appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

It’s a reasonable concern.

As wearables become more popular (and, no doubt, the New Year has brought many more sightings of fitness trackers around the wrists of relatives, pals, co-workers, fellow commuters and those nice people at the gym or yoga studio), it’s also become clear that wrists are carrying more than their fair weight for this payments and commerce trend. That makes sense, of course.

Bracelets have resided on wrists since Old Testament times. Wristwatches, as a concept at least, date back to at least Elizabethan times (the first Elizabeth, the one who breathed the same air as Shakespeare). Historians generally trace the mass adaptation of that functional jewelry to World War I (thanks, in part, to the need for a relatively affordable device able to synchronize mass attacks that involved well-separated artillery and infantry).

Yet, as wearables take on more digital tasks, a fair question arises: What about other form factors? What about other parts of the body? Might they work better — or, at least, be more comfortable — physically, emotionally or both for consumers?

Rings As Wearables

In the latest edition of the PYMNTS “Matchmakers” podcast series, Karen Webster spoke with Tejash Unadkat, CEO at Motiv, a company that is trying to make a greater place for rings — yes, simple rings for fingers — as dominate wearable devices that can enable near-field communication (NFC) payments, purchases and consumer authentication.

“The wrist is not necessarily the ideal place for a device,” Unadkat said, telling of one of the company’s founders who had trouble sleeping, but was bothered by a wrist-worn device meant to help with that issue. “Rings are prevalent all over the place, and it’s something that both old and young [consumers] understand.”

The discussion between the two also served as a view of the future of wearables as they take on more payment and commerce roles, as well as mature and branch out from their common roles as fitness trackers, coaches and trainers for users to work toward their own personal health plans (and as insurers and medical service providers eye the data that comes from those trackers).

In fact, global shipments of wearable devices will reach 125.3 million units in 2018, an 8.5 percent increase from the previous year, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker. In addition, the five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is expected to hit 11 percent, with shipments reaching 189.9 million units in 2022.

More Comfort?

Rings can be part of that growth, according to Unadkat, who described them as the “most comfortable form factor” when it comes to wearables. That may be, but the use of rings for fitness tracking, payments, commerce and authentication does present challenges.

Obviously, rings are small, and that means no readable screens at which consumers can look. For now, that mostly means fitness tracking information — those numbers, metrics and even congratulatory milestones that can keep some users running when they want to give up, or inspire them to walk those extra blocks to the other entrance of the train station after work.

That said, not every consumer “wants to announce to the world that ‘I want to use weights and get fit,’” he said. “A ring is very subtle.” Consumers who desire rings as their form factor for wearables are more likely to not need constant updates on their fitness progress throughout the day, but tend to check in the morning, afternoon and before bed.

Beyond Fitness

Such data appears not on the ring (as stated, it has no room for a screen), but via a mobile app on the user’s smartphone or tablet. However, for any wearable to win over consumers (win them for years, not months, and take a sold place in consumers’ daily lives), they will need to go beyond fitness, and in ways that don’t necessarily feel experimental. In short, there needs to be good use cases.

In the case of rings, that could mean contactless NFC payments. More specifically, it means using “active” NFC so that consumers can wave their hands (ring finger and all) in the near proximity of a payment terminal to complete a transaction via a payment method for which the consumer has already signed up.

“You just wave your hand over the terminal as you would do naturally,” Unadkat said.

Rings as wearables will likely depend on so-called “behavioral biometrics” for security and authentication. Such biometrics use consumer body movements instead of voice, fingerprint, iris or other static data to authenticate consumers. In the case of the Motiv rings, a consumer’s gait is the prime biometric.

“It recognizes how you walk,”  Unadkat said. “If you take off the ring, that authentication goes away,” though, he added, a consumer could still then use the wearable for certain tasks.

Different Preferences

In Unadkat’s telling, wearable rings can serve as “second-factor authentication” devices, with “simple gestures” from consumers to facilitate transactions. He identified the role such wearables can play, saying that consumers tend to use their credit cards three or four times per day, and that a wearable ring can offer a “safer option” that, for many consumers, will feel more comfortable on their bodies than wrist devices.

Not all consumers are the same, though. U.S. and European consumers tend to prefer lightweight rings when used for wearables (Motiv rings are titanium), he said. Consumers in the Middle East and Asia generally prefer heavier rings. He said the company’s customer base is, more or less, evenly split between male and female consumers — early expectations had more men than women buying these rings.

As for buying, the rings are sold in 27 countries, Unadkat said, and 2019 will see more selling of those wearables at retail chains — the company already sells on Amazon and via QVC, he said. More uses for those rings — beyond fitness — could bring that valued “consumer stickiness” to the device, making it hard for users to give it up easily. That’s the goal of these rings and all other wearables, of course.

Wearables will keep gaining a higher profile in the coming months, according to most predictions and retail observers. However, now, they need to take up more payment, commerce and authentication tasks. Will comfort and subtlety drive more fans of wearables to rings? It doesn’t seem implausible, at least, given the long history of that jewelry, but it’s all in the use cases for now.

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As Karen Webster pointed out, the first commerce intermediary to operate at scale was Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, which opened for business 558 years ago.

But in the era of near ubiquitous smartphone ownership — and in the shadows of such mega-matchmaking platforms like Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Lyft, The App/Play Store, eBay, Square, and more — one can reasonably argue we are living in the platinum age of the platform. It is even easier than ever to slap down $400 for a pre-made “Uber of X” template and be up and running with one’s own matchmaking platform in less than 48 hours.

Unfortunately, though it might be easier than ever to found a matchmaking platform, actually getting it to ignite in any meaningful way is still has hard as it has ever been, which is to say extremely. For a platform to succeed, David Evans and Dick Schmalensee wrote in their book “Matchmakers have find two groups of shareholders they can attract to each other, find a way to operate at scale, find a way to make money from making the match and constantly keep reiterating their platform to keep up with the evolving demands of the two groups of shareholders it is connect.”

It’s not easy work — and that is why there are far more “Uber of X’s” consigned to the scrap help of innovation history than there are successful Ubers in the market.

There is no one magical, silver-bullet secret that ensures a matchmaker’s success or failure. But over the course of 2018 — and literally dozens of conversations with the ambitious entrepreneurs who have successfully launched matchmaking platforms — we did hear an awful lot of good ideas on how to make the right match, how to get to scale — and how to make money while doing it.

And since the matchmakers were in at PYMNTS all year, we thought we might offer up some of our favorite ideas, interactions and unexpected words of wisdom they shared with us.

Roadie And Resetting Small Goods Transport

Who They Matchmake For: People or small to medium-side businesses (SMBs) with small goods they need delivered with drivers/gig workers who are going to the location the goods need to get to.

Founding Pain Point: Roadie CEO Marc Gorlin was trying to retile his bathroom when his tile got stuck 90 miles from his home and he speculated that there was at least one person near his tiles who was coming his way anyway who would have been willing to drive his tiles down to him for a fee.

“When I tell the tile story,” Gorlin said, “people always tell it right back to me. Their tile might be a dog, the order they made from the local hardware store, or the ladder they bought from Home Depot and needed to get home, but they only had a Prius. Everybody has a tile story.”

Roadie formed as a “delivery-on-the-way” marketplace to solve for all of those tile stories.

How It Works: Drivers download the iOS and Android app and are sent potential gigs based on their driving habits as understood by an algorithm. Drivers can reject tasks and users can view drivers. Cost of shipping is determined by size and duration of the trip, and drivers keep 80 percent of the delivery fee (Roadie collects 20 percent for matchmaking). All deliveries are insured by the platform — which means in case something arrives broken, the buyer will be compensated.

Most Unexpected Effect:  Romance.

“We had a guy that brought a dog from a lady in California on his way to New York,” Gorlin shared. “He dropped it off in Chicago, met her … they wound up having dinner, he dropped by on his way back through, and they got engaged to be married last Valentine’s Day.”

How Heal Is Bringing Housecalls Back To Medicine

Who They Matchmake For: Patients and doctors who perform house calls.

Founding Pain Point: CEO and Co-Founder Nick Desai found himself in the hospital with his wife and their infant during a holiday weekend. After a seven-hour wait and being matched with an inept medical resident, they decided to disrupt medicine by allowing consumers to dial up a doctor on demand.

“We looked at each other and observed how broken the system is and decided to put our heads together and solve this trillion-dollar problem,” Desai told Webster.

How It Works: Heal doctors are not contract employees like Uber drivers; they are fully vetted and background-checked employees of the service — only about one in 14 doctors who apply to the service are hired. Heal doctors see about 14 patients a day (as opposed to the 30 that are the average in private practice) and accept most major forms of insurance. Patients without insurance, or with an insurance program that isn’t accepted by the platform, can pay a flat $99 fee per visit. Once a consumer dials up a doctor through the app, the doctor is guaranteed to be there within two hours. Doctors who work for Heal are only required to provide medical care — all back office functions from booking to billing are picked up by the platform’s automated software.

Most Unexpected Effect: How little time it takes to persuade people they prefer house calls.

“It takes two hours to get a doctor, they come to your home so you don’t have to be exposed to other germs in an ER, and it costs the same — or in many cases less — than going to an emergency room or urgent care center. That can be a pretty life-changing experience, and we find that very few people walk away from it and say, nah, you know I really want to go back to a doctor’s office when I feel sick again, as opposed to the doctor coming to my couch.”

Papa And Providing Grandkids On Demand

Who They Matchmake For: Senior citizens and college students

Founding Pain Point: Papa Founder and CEO Andrew Parker was at first trying to solve a very personal problem. His grandfather — whom he called Papa — had been diagnosed with early-onset dementia. Before his Papa needed extensive medical care and intervention, Parker discovered he needed a companion, both for his own good and for the good of his full-time caregiver, Parker’s grandmother.

“I was thinking about this one day at work,” Parker said, “and realized that there are so many seniors out there, and so many college students who could use the income. So I started to wonder if maybe there was something I could do to connect them and maybe let something magical happen.”

How It Works:  Papa is a logistics platform that makes is easy for seniors to connect with college students and essentially hire them for an hour or two, for a variety of tasks — usually of the sort people ask their grandchildren to do, such as a ride to the doctor or a lesson on how to set up Netflix. All of the students who sign onto the platform are thoroughly vetted since seniors can be a vulnerable population. The service is also set up so that the senior users can interface with the service via either app or phone. Users can order services a la carte, or subscribe for $15 to $30 a month. According to Papa, most users start out ordering a single service before converting to the subscription.

Most Unexpected Effect: The range of activities that the services seniors and college-aged “Papa Pals” come up with.

“We had a member who was on the campaign trail with Ronald Reagan 30 years ago, and her family hired a Papa Pal to help her transcribe her very interesting life story into a digital format for her family.”

Divvy And Providing A New Path To Homeownership

Who They Matchmake For: Potential homebuyers and home sellers.

Founding Pain Point: According to Divvy Co-Founders, CEO Brian Ma and COO Adena Hefets, a large subset of potentially good, responsible homeowners are being shut out of buying because they aren’t able to save enough cash to make a down payment.

“We are a fractional ownership platform that gives customers the option of [working] with us to put down less, and then work within a specialized rental product that allows them to embark on the path to homeownership via a mortgage,” Ma explained.

How It Works: To join the Divvy platform, consumers fill out a digital application and are screened. Once selected, consumers are then matched with a member of Divvy’s broker network to find a property. Once found,  the agent brings the deal back to Divvy, which evaluates and suggests an offer. If the seller accepts, Divvy buys the home and the customer immediately enters into a three-year lease with Divvy at a fixed monthly amount. Part of that payment goes to Divvy as rent and the other part is saved on the consumer’s behalf as “equity” in the home. At the end of three years, Divvy’s tenant has saved, on average, a 10 percent down payment and can work with a traditional lender to get a mortgage to buy the home.

Most Unexpected Outcome: How much more there is still to take on in the real estate business.

“Our focus now, and very much going forward, is making sure people are on track to buy houses,” Ma said. “There are these much bigger pockets that I think we can take on in the future, particularly as we build out and scale the platform.”

Goodworld And Building A Bridge To Charity

Who They Matchmake For: Nonprofits and potential donors.

Founding Pain Point: After  two decades in the military and government service and a long stint in the Department of Defense’s counter-terrorism unit, Goodworld COO and Co-Founder John Gossert wanted to help the world by fighting friction in charitable donations — instead of by actively fighting terrorists.

How It Works: As of today, Goodworld is the only social fundraising platform with hashtag-to-donate technology on both Facebook and Twitter. Consumers who sign up with Goodworld can use the donate hashtag to give to charities. First-time donors receive a reply with a one-time link to sign up, then they can instantly give to thousands of causes anytime, anywhere. And once an  online donor goes through the one time sign-up, that hashtag payment capability is “portable,” and can follow them across social media. For nonprofits that work with Goodworld, the firm takes a 4.8 percent processing fee for card transactions as its cut, with processor Stripe getting 2.2 percent, plus $.30 per transaction

Most Unexpected Outcome: The changing face, and methodology, of giving.

“Older men writing big checks is still the main form of giving but those donors are not being replaced by other older men writing big checks. Social media is a powerful tool to inspire donations — even micro donations. People you know are much more of an authentic ambassador  for a brand or cause than strangers.”

So what is the lesson to take from all this matchmaking?

There are unusual and unexpected pain points all over the place, so long as one is looking close enough to spot them. From older consumers who need a tech lesson, to tiles sitting sadly in a warehouse when they could be on their way to someone who needs them, there are all kinds of places where a matchmaker is needed to … well make a match.

Making that first match, however,  is almost the easy part — it’s making enough of them to build profitably to scale that remains the tricky part for most firms.

But, as our conversations over the last year indicate, it does happen — often in very unexpected ways.

The post How Matchmakers Ignite: 2018 Edition appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

That is, until he decided, in his own words, that “the counter-terrorism world became more of a younger man’s game.” He missed his family, too, but still retained the spark for service, and an entrepreneurial drive. That’s what led him to Goodworld, an online platform that removes the friction from digital donations, making them possible (and secure) by using hashtags.

Now, that work is helping to guide the changes going on in the world of charity and nonprofits, changes that involve payments and the nature of funding, while also offering a glimpse of how commerce and online transactions could be developed in the coming years. Those issues were the main topics during a recent discussion between Gossart and Karen Webster for the latest edition of the PYMNTS Matchmakers podcast series.

Payments Facilitator

When asked to explain the Goodworld model, Gossart told Webster that “we are a social payments platform, but really a payments facilitator.” The firm doesn’t do direct marketing for charities, but instead serves as a “bridge between the nonprofit sector and donors.”

Goodworld uses hashtags and the concept of viral marketing to provide that bridge. In fact, the company, which launched in 2014 and is based in Washington, D.C., is the only social fundraising platform with hashtag-to-donate technology on both Facebook and Twitter. Consumers who sign up with Goodworld can use the donate hashtag to give to charities — nonprofits that might be the subject of a friend’s Facebook post or conversation, for instance, or mentioned in a tweet or Twitter thread. First-time donors receive a reply with a one-time link to sign up, then they can instantly give to thousands of causes anytime, anywhere.

Such a process can lead to online amplification for the charitable cause. Think about it: A person who makes a donation in the public sphere of social media might encourage others to do the same. “Friends and family see you in a conversation” about a charity, and taking action, he said. In addition, human nature teaches us that people — not all of them, but many — enjoy being noticed when doing a positive thing.

This can serve as a powerful force when it comes to online charitable giving via social media. As Gossart put it, “people you know are much more of an authentic ambassador” for a brand or cause than strangers.

Portable Hashtag

Once that online donor goes through the process for the first time, that hashtag payment capability is “portable,” Gossart said. “You can take that with you across all platforms.”

Making payments as easy, quick and seamless as possible, after all, reduces cart and transaction abandonment. According to Gossart, U.S. online shoppers leave behind $1.79 trillion worth of uncompleted transactions every year for various reasons.

Portability and ease of use can both play a major role when it comes to online influencers, too. The Goodworld donate hashtag serves as a call to action, which can be deployed within the Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and other social media presences maintained by celebrities, corporations and others — putting a specific charity on a much bigger online stage.

For nonprofits that work with Goodworld, the firm takes a 4.8 percent processing fee for card transactions as its cut, with processor Stripe getting 2.2 percent, plus $.30 per transaction, according to the Goodworld site. (American Express transactions cost more.)

Contextual Commerce

Goodworld is working within a world that is changing. For starters, of the $410 billion for the U.S. charitable giving market, about $31 billion comes from online donations, with digital payments growing more than other sectors. “Older men writing big checks” is still the main form of giving, Gossart said, but those donors are “not being replaced by other older men writing big checks.” Instead, micro-donations — from a larger base of donors — are gaining popularity, which also works in favor of such platforms as Goodworld.

So does the rise of contextual commerce — a major focus of recent PYMNTS research. Simply put, contextual commerce seeks to meet online consumers where they are, and enable them to make transactions when they discover products or services during the course of their online — and social media — activities.

For example, a blog devoted to parenting advice might offer opportunities to buy relevant products, or a band’s touring blog might offer tickets, merchandising or rare demo tracks that can be streamed after purchase. Consumers might be online with no intention to buy anything, but change their minds after engaging with content and other like-minded people.

Those same factors can play a role in online charitable giving. A social media conversation about a cause or charitable need can easily inspire consumers to donate. Giving them a quick and seamless way to do so lessens the chance of them changing their minds, forgetting about it or being deterred by long payment forms on nonprofits’ websites.

As Gossart explained, 74 percent of consumers make consumption decisions based on what they find via social and mobile channels — fertile ground for contextual commerce. At the same time, the “payments industry is doing cheetah flips to get people from a place where they are inspired to make a consumption choice, to a place where they can have a secure transaction experience.” That, too, gives a potential power to the portable donate hashtag — and signals how secure, trusted payment methods could operate more frequently in the coming years, at least in theory.

“Why can’t people pay right in the spot where they were inspired in the first place?” he said.

Larger charities, according to Gossart, are not always the most progressive when it comes to social media. However, smaller ones— often more nimble and experimental — have more willingness to try new online tools, instead of waiting to play catch-up. That may play a role in the further growth of Goodworld.

The company’s growth, in turn, might guide more payments and commerce activity down the road than just online charitable donations. Call it #buy.

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The problem was that, for the average American patient, 48 hours is much too short of a turnaround time to get in to see a doctor. That meant some people were not getting treatment at all. Worse still, according to Ferguson, and more common were the patients who waited a few days until they felt really sick before going to an ER or urgent care center.

“What we learned last season very acutely was that people should not be out in public with viruses spreading them,” he said. “We actually had ERs and urgent care doctors telling people, ‘Please do not come in. Use a telemedicine service,’ just so they could avoid more contamination.”

Telemedicine services like Doctor on Demand — which now operates in 50 states — connect patients with physicians, psychiatrists and mental health workers entirely across digital channels. Instead of going to the doctor’s office, the doctor’s office comes to one’s screen of choice.

Founded in 2012, the telemedicine startup was once a pay-out-of-pocket-only service (insurance didn’t cover those televisits), operating in a few states and simply trying to move out its concept. Today, the platform is launching a nationwide telehealth initiative with Walmart to help put more customers in front of digitally delivered doctors, covered by many insurance plans, with thousands of board-certified physicians ready to treat both urgent and mental healthcare needs.

It’s been a challenging, interesting and educational journey, Ferguson noted, one that is about to begin a new chapter now that the company is pairing up with the nation’s largest retailer. However, it’s a journey guided by a single idea, the same idea that has launched many innovative health startups.

“How do we build a better customer experience — where we could shorten wait times, offer high technical capability and make sure people are working with great doctors?” he said.

Pulling In Both Sides Of The Platform

The average doctor on the platform, Ferguson noted, is not a “kid” fresh out of med school. The earliest adopters were 15-year-plus veterans who were looking to pioneer their way into a better way of practicing medicine. Decades in traditional healthcare in the U.S. had left them burned out.

“They jumped on the boat early as zealots for using technology as a visionary way to provide the future of healthcare,” he explained.

The goal for telemedicine, he said, should be to let doctors to do the thing they want to do: treat their patients. The goal for a telemedicine platform is to manage all the things doctors don’t want to do, like billing, payments, insurance or the other administrative parts of medicine.

Doctors aren’t trained to run small businesses (SMBs), and that is often what is demanded in the traditional private practice model, which is expensive and margin-draining for physicians. As the model has expanded and evolved, Doctor on Demand has become increasingly attractive to established clinicians looking to have greater control of their schedules.

“About two-thirds of the doctors on the platform are women — and many of them are moms who are looking for career flexibility so they can treat patients without having to be out of their home 12 hours a day,” Ferguson said, noting that doctors on the platform are allowed to set their own hours.

Working moms, he added, are also crucial to attracting patients to the platform. They are famously time-pressed and don’t typically have time to schedule medical appointments weeks in advance for the middle of a workday, after the workday or really at any time at all. However, Doctor on Demand appointments can happen anywhere, and the average wait time is about five minutes long (though it can be longer if one is waiting on a specific physician).

“That’s a timeline that works for working moms, who really are the chief medical officers [CMOs] of their households in most cases,” he said. “And the goal is to give them something that makes seeking medical care an experience [that is] very much like ordering up an Uber.”

As their family’s CMO, they refer their children the next time they get sick when the pediatrician’s office is closed — or they send their spouse, who otherwise wouldn’t see a doctor for a medical condition less serious than Anthrax poisoning or a compound fracture. The doctors see patients in all walks of life, Ferguson noted, but a working mom is often the first link in the chain that brings many other patients on board.

In that context, Doctor on Demand’s new partnership with Walmart makes a lot of sense. After all, where better to attract one’s core customer group of working mothers than one of their natural commerce habitats?

Working With Walmart

Walmart and Doctor on Demand have been working together for some time. Initially, Ferguson noted, the company worked with the nation’s largest retailer to provide services for Walmart employees. From there, the two firms worked jointly on a pilot that put — what Ferguson described as — virtual exam rooms in 22 Walmart locations. Those customized locations were designed to help physicians with the detection of issues like diabetes and hypertension, and wired to let the Walmart wellness team “spring into action” with the appropriate prescription or medical equipment.

Through those collaborations, the two began working with health and hygiene product maker RB on the current rollout, which will allow customers who purchase certain RB products from Walmart locations (Mucinex, Delsym, Airborne or Digestive Advantage) to log in for a free consultation with a Doctor on Demand physician.

“So, if a customer tries the medicine, and it doesn’t work or they still have questions, they now have free access to talking with a doctor about their issue,” Ferguson said, noting that the promotion would run exclusively with Walmart online or in-store for the next few months.

The move is one of many that Walmart has made in the last year or so, including a big partnership with TSYS to combat patient non-compliance, a new over-the-counter (OTC) medication deal with Anthem and rumors that the retailer may purchase health insurance provider Humana.

“At Walmart, we are committed to the health and well-being of our consumers,” said Annie Walker, Walmart’s VP of OTC Merchandising. “We believe that this collaboration will be a tremendous step forward in improving access to healthcare, during a time when people face challenges to getting the right treatment at the right time.”

What’s Next

As of today, Ferguson noted, Doctor on Demand cannot take Medicare or Medicaid payments — and won’t be able to until the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) change their rules to allow telemedicine to be a reimbursable expense.

Those rule changes, he said, are coming. There are all kinds of proposals to allow telemedicine to combat the opioid epidemic, provide senior care or help with the management of chronic health conditions. Those rule changes are going to take time, and require a lot of educational effort.

However, as the company has seen in the private markets, firms come around. Two years ago, he noted, insurance companies were among its biggest barriers to entry. Now, they make up 85 percent of the payments for the Doctor on Demand platform.

“Insurance companies are now happy to reimburse us for what we do because we have clinical data that proves we are on par with brick-and-mortar, if not better, and we can make our offering a literal fraction of the cost,” Ferguson said. “We are replacing a $250 or $300 office visit with a $50 visit, or a $1,500 emergency room visit. It’s a better value,” one he believes the market needs.

Today, he explained, there is a physician gap of about 35,000 doctors. By 2030, the estimates put that figure at about 100,000. Healthcare, he added, is sick — and it’s not reasonable to believe that patients already waiting to see a doctor for 18 days are going to be OK with that number doubling or tripling. Moreover, as the economy is changing and more workers are self-employed through gig work, there needs to be affordable out-of-pocket alternatives, and telemedicine offers that.

The challenge going forward, Ferguson said, is both bringing new physicians and patients into the telemedicine fold and building out the offers. For Doctor on Demand, that will mean a bigger focus on chronic and long-term care offerings on the platform, and creating better programs for managing things like high cholesterol or diabetes.

“We started in urgent care and we have spent the last two years building out our mental health services,” Ferguson said. “And we are looking now [at] the broader range of medical services [that telemedicine is] technologically ready to handle, because it is clear that this is something the healthcare market very much needs.”

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