Dr. Blake McKinney | CirrusMD
DR. BLAKE MCKINNEY
Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer of CirrusMD, a market leader in text-first virtual care solutions that deliver simpler access, personal connection and unbeatable care navigation.
What Is CirrusMD? Tell Us About What You Do And What Your Mission Is.
CirrusMD is a telemedicine provider, but probably not the kind that first comes to mind.
For starters, our board-certified physicians deliver care primarily over chat. Text messaging is the go-to mode of communication for most Americans. We decided to lean into that.
We also provide our service exclusively through employers, brokers and health plans rather than directly to consumers. That way, our service can be bundled into employee and member benefits that are often partially or fully subsidized.
Our mission is to strengthen connections between doctors and patients by offering an always-on benefit that removes every administrative or triage barrier between patients and doctors, or other experts who can help.
What Is Your Background? Tell Us About Your Journey To Starting A Company In The Healthcare Space.
I began my career as a Communications Intelligence Officer in the United States Marine Corps. I later went to medical school and became an emergency physician. I still work in the ER of a big, busy Northern California trauma center. These two life-defining experiences have taught me first, to think about the way humans communicate electronically, and second, about the barriers patients face when trying to access care.
Barriers define the experience of accessing a doctor for many people. This is why, in 2012, after realizing how easy it was for my friends and family to simply text me whenever they had a medical question, I set out with my co-founder, Andrew Altorfer, to provide that level of access to everyone.
Our mission has always been to improve the healthcare experience by making communication easy and immediate.
What Have Been Both Your Favorite And Least-liked Parts Of Your Entrepreneurial Journey? What Have Been Your Most Challenging And Most Exciting Moments For You And The Company?
My favorite part is how rewarding it is for doctors who work on our platform. We have never abandoned our values; doctors working on our platform are free from the perverse incentives that influence management decisions in much of fee-for-service medicine.
When I hear another physician talking about how much they enjoy taking care of patients on CirrusMD, it confirms that we continue to be on the right track with this mission.
The biggest challenge we have faced is convincing people that doctors actually love helping patients in this direct, freely accessible way. People assume that doctors prefer their patients pre-screened, so that they can make a quick assessment and then rush off to their next patient. That’s not the case. It never has been. Physicians know what questions to ask and know how to really listen to their patients to arrive at quality care that is satisfying to both the patient and the doctor.
To this day, the most exciting thing that has happened for me was in early 2015 when we received our first payment for services from an insurance company. We believed that employers and insurance companies would be willing to pay for their employees and members to have free, instant access to doctors. But we had run out of seed capital waiting on the slow pace of the sales process, and later the contracting processes.
That first check guaranteed the future of our work, and was the first actual proof of the willingness to pay that our business is based upon.
What Was The Fundraising Process Like For You? Tell Us About Your Investors And What You Use The Money You’ve Raised For.
Like most companies, we started off with a small investment from each of the founders. This represented about enough money to launch a website, contract with a designer, and to wireframe a minimum viable product, as well as covering legal and administrative necessities. We later raised just over $1 million of friends and family money, followed by angel investments from New York Angels, Rockies Venture Club, and Sand Hill Angels, along with a couple of family offices. Our series A closed in the summer of 2017, followed by a series B in early 2019 for a total of around $26 million.
Who Are Your Co-Founders Or People Who You Work Very Closely With? How Do Their Skills Supplement Yours?
My Co-Founder, Andrew Altorfer, grew up on a farm in Illinois, was a collegiate athlete, studied engineering and then began his career in finance on Wall Street with Goldman Sachs, and later became interested in technology startups. When we met, we found that our personalities and interests overlapped in all the right ways, while maintaining separate personas, interests and skill sets. I am a subject matter expert regarding the doctor-patient relationship, and in human communication. I tend to be more creative and right-brained, while Andy is more analytical and left-brained. Together we make an excellent pair of co-founders because of our complementary skills. I would share with anybody thinking of founding a company that the most important thing any co-founders must share is trust. Starting a company is the hardest thing that I have ever done, and having somebody alongside me whom I trust with everything is the most important thing.
How Has Growth Been Over The Last Year Or Two?
We’ve grown to around 70 full-time employees, not including the network of doctors who staff our various services. Nearly 10 million people have direct access to a doctor on our platform. Our average response time is under 30 seconds to connect directly with a doctor. We have raised $26 million in seed and venture-capital to date. We operate in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, 24/7.
How Has COVID-19 Impacted CirrusMD’s Growth And Operation Over The Last Year? Also, Tell Us About Your COVID-19 Rapid Response Solution.
As a telemedicine company, we were uniquely positioned to address COVID-19, both in terms of acquiring new customers and caring for our own employees. Had the pandemic hit a year earlier, we would not yet have had enough physicians licensed in all 50 states, which would have precluded us from servicing some larger customers. Because we had a two-year head start in building our provider network, we never fell off our response times of under 30 seconds. In fact we were able to rapidly staff up, given our existing team of doctors were more eager to work on our platform than others. And as demand for in person visits dried up early in the pandemic, our doctors were able to help more and more patients remotely.
What Are Your Daily Routines? Walk Us Through Your Typical Workday Schedule.
As Chief Medical Officer, I often begin with an early morning telemedicine shift. I enjoy texting with patients while I sip coffee, often from my back porch where I have a favorite chair and a beautiful view of the garden; even as the normal morning ruckus of the kids and breakfast ensues.
I oversee a robust clinical team with a focus on quality, peer review, credentialing, physician licensure, creation of best practices, and recruitment and management of a national network of multi specialty physicians.
For meetings I prefer voice over video. I live out in the country in California where it’s almost always beautiful. Voice calls allow me to walk-and-talk, rather than be stationary behind a computer.
What Advice Do You Have For Entrepreneurs In The Healthcare Industry?
The best analogy for an entrepreneur in healthcare is that it’s better to be a camel than a unicorn. Camels are able to travel over distance for a long period of time on very little food or water. If you intend to start a company and your customer is in healthcare, you need to be a camel.
How Do You Think Your Industry Will Change Post-COVID?
The adoption of telehealth during the pandemic has created lasting new behaviors. Patients have learned that healthcare can be more convenient, more efficient and more patient-centric than they had initially thought. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, it will be very difficult to convince patients to go back to those frustrating appointment scheduling phone trees, long stints in waiting rooms, and visits that require people to miss work – just to get a prescription refilled or have a consultation with a doctor.
Patients also learned that those “I should get this checked out” visits to the ER, the troubling coughs or the weird rashes, can be handled by telehealth visits that are as reassuring as they are instantaneous.
COVID-19 shifted the power in healthcare away from the provider and firmly into the hands – or, more specifically, the smartphone-tapping thumbs – of the patient.
With any disaster, there are winners and losers, and not all telehealth companies will emerge victorious from COVID-19. Legacy telehealth companies that rely on scheduled video appointments create many of the same barriers to care as in-person visits, such as long wait times, inconvenient appointments and visits based on a doctor’s schedule, rather than the patient’s needs.
Also, some of the health systems that are scrambling to put together telehealth systems of their own are just adding technical issues to their already flawed fee-for-service model, creating an experience that is unpleasant for the patient and the physician alike.
And while we absolutely need hospitals, hospitals will need to shift to this new consumer-centric reality in ways it never has before. At their core, hospitals will need to pivot from their old fee-for-service ways to provide patients with access to care that is instantaneous and pleasing. We are seeing the weakness of relying too heavily on physician groups to court referrals for hospitals. Those health systems that provide seamless access to pleasing telehealth experiences – even at cost – will build the loyalty hospitals need for attract patients for “hips and hearts,” those surgical procedures upon which hospitals rely for revenue.
Unfortunately, what I am seeing now is that hospitals are making two fundamental mistakes. One, they are reaching for ineffective legacy telehealth companies or cobbling together poorly planned ones of their own, and two, they are not shaking their addiction to the fee-for-service model.
Tell Us A Story Of Something That Happened To You, Something You Heard, Or Something You Saw, That Either Made You Laugh Or Taught You An Important Lesson.
One day I was texting with a patient at a nice conversational pace when out of nowhere she stopped responding. It was fine, I had other conversations going. About thirty minutes later I messaged, “still there?” She responded, “Yes … sorry … I’m in a meeting right now. Can we continue this in about 45 minutes?” I laughed, “Of course we can! I’m here until 3 p.m..” She said that would be great and when she was finished with what she needed to do, she came back and we finished up. Where else in medicine could that have happened? I learned something about my own product that left an indelible mark on my perspective for our work. By the very nature of the asynchronous chat modality, we put doctors at the convenience of patients. Not the other way around.
If You Can Have A One-Hour Meeting With Someone Famous Who Is Alive, Who Would It Be And Why?
I’ll risk being a little obvious but it would have to be Elon Musk. As an entrepreneur, I have great admiration for somebody who can take an incredibly complex subject — from payments to transportation, to space exploration or drilling — and describe it using what he calls simplism. Even in this written interview, I catch myself using lots of industry jargon to describe what we do, and yet it’s so elemental, so basic. We make it easy for a person to connect directly to a doctor. If I could have dinner with Elon Musk, I would try to tell him what I do in five minutes and spend the rest of the time listening to how he would describe it, which parts he’d get rid of, and how he would grow it as CEO.
What Do You Do In Your Free Time?
I live in Northern California, in wine country, where there’s lots of sunshine to make things grow. My passions are food and beautiful surroundings, and I am very fortunate to live in a place where we have both. In my free time I harvest and cure olives, and work to cultivate food grown from the dirt we live on.
Increasingly, I find myself listening into and participating in Clubhouse rooms. I enjoy communing with other interested people from around the world. My particular areas of interest on Clubhouse are MedTech, digital health, and innovation in Health/care.
What Is Your Favorite Quote And Why Does It Resonate With You?
“People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” -Steve Jobs
I admire Steve Jobs because he saw what people needed, and he overcame the obstacles of the status quo to deliver human-centered design in the form of a computer, and later the iPhone. He did this by gaining end-to-end control over every product at Apple on his return as CEO. As a singular visionary, Steve Jobs changed the world of human communication by designing technology with an understanding of the human mind and body.
What Does Success Mean To You?
Success for me is every person in the United States being able to touch their phone and communicate directly with a doctor, when needed. It’s that simple.
Dr. Blake McKinney’s Favorites Stack:
Brands:
1. My family and I are clothed head to toe in The North Face right now, The North Face is a Denver-based company near and dear to my heart. During the pandemic they gave healthcare workers 50% off, and in acknowledgment of that I am proud to wear their brand. Their gear is also super comfy!
2. Hoka … yes, the sometimes not-considered-fashionable running shoe, has been a life changer because I’m on my feet all day. I wear the running shoes in the hospital, and the flip-flop, or “recovery shoe”, at home.
Newsletters & Podcasts:
I’ll throw Clubhouse into this, it’s my new addiction, I can’t fully describe why it works so well, but it does. Let’s hope it stays that way.
