Earshot's Founding Problem
At Earshot, we believe medical providers deserve to get paid for the care they provide, and we believe patients should have access to the care that they need.
The US Healthcare landscape has evolved (or devolved) from one where doctors get paid for taking care of patients to one where they get paid for taking care of payers.
Starting in the 1970's with the advent of managed care plans, payers have been given increasing amounts of power to attempt to stem how much we spend on healthcare. The theory was that payers could create competition in the healthcare market, reducing costs and spurning innovation.
It didn't work out that way.
THE Problem
Instead, the US spends the most money per-capita on healthcare, by a significant margin. (1)
For all of that spend, we also don't get better outcomes - 37th in the world according to the WHO (2).
When one looks to explain the rampant growth in per-capita healthcare spend in the US, a few key factors seem to get a lot of airtime:
- Increased wages
- Expensive medication
- Social & welfare programs
At Earshot, we contend that there's a factor that deserves equal discussion: the growth of administrative burden in healthcare. In 1970, the US healthcare system averaged 1 administrator for every provider in the system. Today, that ratio is closer to 10:1.
This is what we, at Earshot, call THE problem.
This administrative burden has grown slowly but steadily over the years - morphing from a system where we reward quality care to one where we reward quality documentation. There's documentation involved before, during, and after the care process.
The advent of these administrative steps tend to conveniently align themselves with the motivations of payers, often at the expense of those who provide and receive care. 9 in 10 providers report patients not getting care they need as a result of administrative hurdles (3) and 1 in 4 patients have reported delaying necessary healthcare as a result of healthcare expense (4).
Fighting through all of this red tape puts strain on providers, as administrative tasks have become the greatest contributor to burnout amongst medical providers (5).
A Solution
At Earshot, we believe that reducing & eliminating administrative tasks is one of the greatest ways to make healthcare more accessible to the average American and improve the lives of our hard-working healthcare professionals.
At Earshot, we're focused on a particular slice of this problem - removing the administrative burden from Virtual Care Management programs. The Care Managers, Care Coordinators, and Social Workers on whom patients rely to manage their care plans are our chief customers.
In talking to these professionals and their organizations, we've heard 2 key refrains:
- Care Management professionals are motivated by providing quality patient care, not creating quality documentation
- Administrative tasks currently keep teams from caring for as many patients as they otherwise could be.
In other words, Earshot serves as an opportunity to give these caregivers' attention back to their patients. This is because there are many tasks in these professionals' day-to-days for which people in general tend to be bad at. In fact, our AI documentation modules consistently outperform Care Coordinators at creating high-quality, accurate documentation.
Rather than an indictment on the people manning this process, we see this as an opportunity for AI to step in and serve as a rising tide that lifts all boats. There are other tasks for which we think AI is poorly suited - AI cannot empathize with patients, for example.
The Earshot platform, therefore, gives our customers the opportunity to practice at the top of their license, and we allow for the companies providing their services to increase the number of patients they can support without increasing their staffing burdens.
Finally, we know that we're only a drop in the bucket. While we hope to expand our mission to impact more and more areas of healthcare, our core focus is on delivering with quality, and even our grandest visions for Earshot still represent one of the thousands of cuts it will take to slice this problem down to size.
If you're providing care management services and want to figure out how to give your care management function back to your patients, we want to talk to you. If you're an innovator in the healthcare space, we want to talk to you too.
Sources:
- KFF - Healthcare spend per capita (link)
- WHO Health outcomes study (link)
- AMA prior authorization survey (link)
- Healthsystemtracker.org survey - How does cost affect access to healthcare? (link)
- Pubmed: Factors Related to Physician Burnout and Its Consequences: A Review (link)
Cover photo by nikko macaspac on Unsplash