Exploring Price Transparency and Healthcare Solutions with Dr. Jonathan Kaplan

Jonathan Wiik:
Hello, I'm Jonathan Wiik, Vice President of Health Insights at FinThrive, and I'm here with the Healthcare Rethink Podcast with Dr. Jonathan Kaplan. You can see he's in his attire today, saving lives and delivering care, and I'm very excited to have him at our podcast. He's got some exciting things to talk to us about for price transparency, for his website and his services that he is providing to communities around him. And I've quoted him in my first book, I believe, just in terms of pioneer, if you will, in price transparency for some of the work he's done in plastics. And welcome Dr. Kaplan.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Thank you so much for having me, and thanks for the shout out in your book.

Jonathan Wiik:
Yeah, no worries. It was exciting. I think I saw you speak at a HIMSS and I was inspired. I worked at a hospital as a chief revenue officer, started as a transporter, worked my way up kind of as a unit clerk and was in the MRI department of all places and working in imaging. And we were talking about patients that wanted to pay us cash and how absurd it was that we couldn't figure that out. And we did, we ended up duct taping pieces of paper the size of the monitors, instead of people want to pay cash, here's the rates. And we were off. Pretty soon, we were collecting from all the self-paid patients and anybody that wanted to kind of opt out of their insurance. And I remember at the hospital I think is when I went to that HIMSS conference, I saw you.

I'm like, "Hey, I just saw this doc and he's talking about it. They're doing it with plastics, we should be able to do it with our surgeries." And we slowly expanded it. So I think it's awesome. You started in plastic surgery, I assume it looks like you still practice too. Can you talk about your career path and just where you were and where you are and where you think you're going to go?

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Yeah, you're right. I'm still a practicing plastic surgeon. I'm originally from Louisiana, did my med school and general surgery residency at LSU in New Orleans, and then I went to Cleveland Clinic for my plastic surgery training. And then my first job out of training was in 2007. I became an employed physician at a hospital in Louisiana. Go back to 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, excuse me, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, flooded 80% of the city. They were not able to continue the LSU or Tulane plastic surgery fellowship programs. There just weren't enough hospitals to work there. So they shifted those patients and then fellowship programs to Baton Rouge. And so by the time I finished two years later in 2007, the hospital there needed help with training those fellows with the LSU-Tulane program. So that's how I got my first job at that hospital in Baton Rouge to help take care of those fellowship programs. So one day I'm a plastic surgery fellow, the next day I'm in charge of plastic surgery fellows, as a program director.

Jonathan Wiik:
Right into the fire.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Exactly. So that's where I was from 2007 to 2013 before my wife and I moved out here to San Francisco. But during that time I was at the hospital, I noticed patients always calling in about plastic surgery. "How much does this cost? How much does that cost, whether insurance will cover it or not?" And I noticed that one of the things that there was only two ways that the front desk could answer. They could either spend 15, 20 minutes on the call, try and explain all the pricing and all the things that go into the cost of different various procedures. And then after you gave them the price after that 10 to 15 minute phone call, the patient would hang up and you would get nothing out of it. Or the way you would do it is you would say, "Oh, well we can't give you an estimate over the phone. You got to come in for a consultation." And that just irritated the patient.

So I realized it had to be a better way. And so that's how I first got into price transparency and I started my company Build My Bod at the time. That allowed us to put a price estimator onto various providers websites where it could be aesthetics and they would just check pricing, but it could also be for insurance-based services where we had the ability for real-time eligibility checks. And so the consumer would go to the doctor's website, use the price estimator that our company put on their website, and they would add the different things to their wish list of what they wanted. And before they saw the price, the patient had to put in their contact information. So it ended up being a lead generation for the provider, price transparency, instant gratification for the patient.

And that's how we started. And that's where you saw me talking about that at the HIMSS conference. But then that was the natural evolution from that was, well, if they can check pricing on certain non-surgical services, maybe they can purchase it. Like they can purchase the MRI if they already know what MRI study they need because their provider told them, they could purchase that through our platform. So that's how we got into e-commerce. But then that evolved from e-commerce to certain aesthetic providers wanted to set up subscriptions so the patient could sign up for a subscription for Botox, for example, where the patient's charged $100 every month and then they're able to go in every three months to get their Botox and they don't have to pay anything out of pocket at that time because they had paid it over the course of those three months previously.

So that's how we got into subscriptions. Then once I was in my practice here for several years in San Francisco, we had patients coming in for tummy tucks and other body contouring procedures, we have our own operating room here in the office, and they weren't good candidates for surgery. Their weight was too high, their BMI was too high. So our nurse and nurse practitioner suggested we start a weight management program and we were doing like phentermine and coaching, but then all of these big fancy GLP-1s like Ozempic and Mounjaro, they all went on an FDA shortage lists, which allowed the compounding pharmacies to make a duplicate legally of semaglutide and tirzepatide, the active in Ozempic and Mounjaro respectively. So then we had an explosion of patients reaching out to us for those meds. And those patients are on these medications as subscriptions typically because a once per week injection, every four weeks you get charged, we ship out the next higher dose.

And because that was a subscription, we needed my platform, which is by this time is Build My Health to help support those subscriptions. So that's how it all comes together. And now that we've expanded outside of just weight management, we're offering any type of medication from compounding pharmacies, whether it's NAD or sermorelin or B-12 injections, whatever compound, like hair loss injections, not hair loss injections, but hair loss treatments, treatments for erectile dysfunction, anything that a compounding pharmacy offers, our platform can support that. And so now we're Dr. Well by Build My Health, since we really expanded outside of just aesthetics, it's not about building your body anymore only. We still do all the price transparency and everything, and the way I like to explain what we do now is that if you think about a patient and they go to a website like a Roe or a Hims or a Hers that's direct to consumer platform, the benefit to that is it's really easy for the consumer to sign up for some weight loss or hair treatment medication where they're charged each month and they can sign up easily.

They're charged each month and they get their meds. The only problem is the patient has a relationship with a website. They don't actually have a relationship with a provider. So we've taken all that technology that makes it easy for the consumer to sign up and interact and get the medications they want without having to take time off of work and go in for an appointment. We've taken that technology from the direct consumer platform and put it into what we call a provider to consumer platform. So going from DTC to PTC, giving that technological ability to providers to make it easy for their patients to sign up with them for subscriptions for whatever medication it is. And now the patient obviously has that relationship with a provider, which it may have already been their existing provider, but that that's kind of where we are now.

And because of that technology that we've built out, we now are syncing up with compounding pharmacies all across the country because if anybody knows about an EMR, you can submit a prescription to like a CVS or a Rite Aid, but not necessarily a compounding pharmacy. And so we've built out this tech stack to where we can submit prescriptions to any compounding pharmacy depending on what kind of sync up that compounding pharmacy requires, whether it's secure email or whether it's an API or it's something through a different platform. We've been able to support all that. So that was a long-winded answer, but it just kind of shows how we've expanded from just price transparency.

Jonathan Wiik:
Yeah, I think that's great. Thanks for sharing that Dr. Kaplan, I think that's the key to healthcare. When I'm out speaking and when I heard you speak as well, it's getting that patient converted to more of a consumer behavior, if that makes sense, and allowing them to be more part of the process. That it's this kind of an analogy I like to give, is you're pushing a grocery store cart in a dark grocery store and there's a physician throwing all this stuff in your cart and you don't know what any of it is, but it looks expensive. And then you get to the register and the lights come on and the checker there says, "Well, no, we'll bill your insurance and we'll tell you what it is later."

It has to be better than that. And I imagine a day, even when you're practicing at the hospital or others where you're waving your phone like you do at these Apple stores or you're swiping your card to where the bill at least should be 80, 90% known by the time you're out. I get that there's variability, but I'm excited for stuff like this. I think it helps healthcare become more normal, for lack of a better word, in terms of a business. It's the most abnormal one when it comes to prices and charges and coverage and payments and transparency, for that matter. So I applaud you and your efforts and I hope you add more things to BuildMyHealth.com

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
No, thank you. That's a great analogy about being in a dark grocery store and then you don't really find out the cost even when you go to checkout. Yeah, that obviously is not going to work anymore. And people are critical of direct to consumer because it does lead to the fragmentation of healthcare. But they've made it easy for patients. So we need to take from that and learn from that and say, "Okay, let's make it easy for patients, but yes, let's put it back in the hands of that provider, that doctor patient relationship." And that's what we're aiming to do with our provider to consumer platform is give the provider those tools to make it easy for the patient, but then of course, give the patient that access to a provider.

Because especially with weight loss, even though we offer more than just weight loss meds, the weight loss meds do have side effects, and on average they're mild, treatable and time-limited, but they still need somebody to talk to and they're really not going to get that with that DTC company. Whereas if they're, I know I also own the company or whatever, but as a provider, it's great for our patients when we sign them up, they can call the office, they can text the office, they can talk to the front desk, they can talk to the weight manager program coordinator, they can talk to the nurse practitioner who can offer them coaching, they can talk to me. And that's just not something a DTC company will ever be able to emulate because it's not their business model. They can't afford to do that.

Jonathan Wiik:
Yeah, I think accessibility is the other thing. I think there's not too many places that you end up being on hold anymore, but a doctor's office and a hospital are definitely the top of that list. I think I'd probably add an airline if you have to call them, but most of the time it's self-service now. And I appreciate that you've put a structure behind it of your extenders and your clinicians to allow the patient to have those conversations. And I think people are more engaged, I think patients actually heal faster. I'm not a clinician, but I think they have better outcomes when they're involved in as much of the process as possible. And when there's confusion or worry about even bills, I'm sure there's studies out there that show that people that worry about things don't heal as fast as those that don't.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Well, there's certainly data out there. There was like a 2006 Harvard study that showed that if the provider was in their element and they had all their support staff that they were used to having, that that would lead to better outcomes for patients. So for example, the study looked at heart surgeons that if they worked at multiple hospitals, that the hospital that they worked at the most, that those patients had better outcomes because that surgeon was at the hospital the most and so they knew the staff. They had the same scrub tech or nurse in the room or same anesthesiologist. And the analogy I always use is that if you have a CEO that goes into work every day and they have a new executive team every day, well, that company is not going to be very successful. It's not going to be very well run.

That's the same way it is for most surgeons. When they go to a hospital and they go to the operating room, they've got different staff in the operating room all the time. Except for heart surgeons, they tend to make sure that they always have the same staff because it's obviously so critical. And because they have the same staff, they can just focus on the patient. They're not worried that all the staff know what they're doing. And those patients have better outcomes. And that's actually one of the reasons, that's what I like about having my own operating room in my office for the aesthetic procedures. I have the same staff. They know what glove size I wear, they know what instruments I wear so I can focus on the patient. And that's what we're looking at now is that the patients are going to be able to continue going to the same provider, not that fragmentation where they're talking to a different independent contractor with a direct to consumer website.

Jonathan Wiik:
My book talks about focus factories, and I learned that when I was getting my masters and it fascinates me in orthopedic, cardiology, plastic clinics, that that's all they do. And that's where you want to go as a patient, I think too. Nothing against hospitals, I worked in one, but hospitals can be dangerous places too. They've got a lot of distractions. I mean, you remember when you were doing your residency? The priorities shift constantly. I think the resources shift constantly. There's a high probability of error because of the variability in surgeon, in the OR theater, in the presentation of the patient, in the coverage of insurance, all of those things in terms of discharges. And when you've got that repeatability, your quality is able to be sustained. I also think it's a more efficient, I would offer probably a more cost-effective method too. If I ever need my knees replaced, I'm getting there.

I'm starting to get gray, you can see. I'm 90% sure I'm going to go to a place that does day surgeries and bang them both out in the same day day, just hang out or get them done week after the other. And I don't avoid hospitals. I think where they started delivering babies into the world or taking bullets out or doing cardiac bypass surgery, big deal valve replacements, those types of things, there's always going to be a place for them, especially on the medicine side I would argue. But some of these surgeries, these elective surgeries that we're talking about, huge place for us to bend that cost curve. And I think also diversify medicine to allow patients to really be a payer in the market.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
And that's where the conflict is because yes, you need the hospitals for those big operations, but the incentives aren't there for, they don't get paid well enough to keep the lights on them, which is why they need those elective procedures. But as you said, the elective procedures are often done in a better environment, in an outpatient facility where that's all they do. So they're really very much this conflict and the hospitals are trying to find a way to make it work. Because I do love how people say hospitals are so expensive and doctors get paid too much or CEOs get paid too, the hospitals are so expensive. But the only time they don't complain about how much hospitals make or don't make or what their margins are is when somebody's in the hospital. When they're in the hospital, they want them to do everything they can do. And that therein lies the problem that maybe it's not always cost-effective to do everything. Some things are considered futile and maybe you shouldn't do it, but I digress a little bit.

Jonathan Wiik:
Yeah, no, that's great. So where do you see Build My Health going? You've started, I think your success and I'd be interested to hear some of your sources of success, but I think while you've had success and subscribers, we could talk about the business a little bit if you're willing to share, but just you've been very focused, I think. You didn't try to solve world peace, you didn't try to revolutionize healthcare. You're like, "You know what? We're going to play in plastics and make that better. And then we're going to add GLP-1 drugs and we're going to add things that are related." I love the synergy between bariatric things and weight loss programs too, getting a BMI in place to where they can get the procedure they want. Where do you see the success from the program and then where do you see it going? Are you going to keep growing? Are you going to stay in your lane or what's the future?

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
No, no. I mean I certainly started in my lane because that's what I knew best, but as we're growing, we're starting to see these other goals, these other voids in the system that need some improvement, they need some help. And one of the things I'm noticing is one of the least expensive places in healthcare to get medication is not the traditional pharmacies like CVS and Rite Aid. It's the compounding pharmacies, they're typically less expensive. And the same skincare cream that you can get from a doctor's office like the Retin-A, that's got a fancy label on it, that's more expensive, you can get it less expensive through a compounding pharmacy. But what we're finding is that the reason compounding pharmacies aren't utilized as much as they could be is because they're so disjointed. There's not this single EMR that can sync up to, again, all the big name traditional pharmacies.

Each compounding pharmacy has their own system. And so it's very hard to bring that all together. And that's what we're realizing that we're doing is that we're going to make it easy. Just for example, what a doctor has to do or provider has to do to order from a compounding pharmacy, they have to reach out to the compounding pharmacy. They have to call, they have to email, they have to hope someone gets back in touch, they have to get the application, they have to fill out the application, they have to send it in, they have to wait for the pharmacy to get them approved or whatever, or get their NPI number. And then the provider has to get login credentials. They have to learn their portal, and then they have to go through and they got to find the medication they want from a drop-down menu.

And that's why people don't want to use compounding pharmacy because it's too much of a hassle. And so that's what we've developed is that when the provider decides they want to offer a particular medication, whether it's a GLP-1 or it's rapamycin for longevity or sermorelin nasal spray for longevity, any of those things, they set up the subscription package in the back end of our platform, they can send the patient a link to sign up for the subscription either via text or email. The patient signs up, we handle the merchant processing, and then when the patient signs up themselves or they enroll, they put in their name, their date of birth, their address, so they're doing all the demographic entry, the office isn't having to do that.

Which means the office isn't having to enter that in to the pharmacy portal. Because when the patient does it, our system auto generates a prescription, pulls all that information in, including the dosage, the medication, the price, the cost. And then the provider just reviews that in the back end of our platform, click submit, and that electronically sends that to whatever pharmacy has a license in that state where it's being sent and also the pharmacy that has the lowest price point for that particular medication. So now the provider isn't having to go in and look at the portal and having to log into some other compounding pharmacy portal. We're doing all that. We've got the bandwidth to send it to the right pharmacy with the right license, with the right price point, for the right medication, the right dose. Our system is already including all the instructions.

So we're really building this new centralized clearinghouse-like hub for all of these compounding pharmacies. It's going to make it for more and more providers to order medications from all these pharmacies, and that's going to drive business to the compounding pharmacies, that's going to make them more viable. And because their cost of goods are less expensive, that means that what the patient is paying for is potentially less expensive. And because again, we're putting all this in the hands of the provider, they have a relationship with the provider. So we're seeing this much bigger than just GLP-1s and hair loss and all the individual representative medications. We're recognizing that we're providing this opportunity to use compounding pharmacies to a greater extent. And because it's less expensive than a traditional pharmacy, it's going to lower those costs for those patients. That's a huge opportunity for patients and for those pharmacies to streamline that whole segment of the healthcare economy.

Jonathan Wiik:
If you can, how many people are enrolled in your programs now? Is it thousands, is it hundreds? And how do you see it growing over time?

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
All right, no, fair enough. So yes, as far as providers, we have almost 200 providers across the country that are using the platform. And when I talk about providers, like it started out as plastic surgery, I'm saying providers, I'm not saying doctors because it's the whole gamut, it's nurse practitioners that have independent practice ability, it's nurse practitioners maybe under a provider or under a doctor. It is doctors, but it's not just plastic surgery anymore. So let's just take GLP-1s for example. So all across America, healthcare providers for decades, for centuries, have essentially been treating, more so now they're treating symptoms, they're not treating underlying conditions. We didn't have great tools to treat the underlying cause of something, which typically now is obesity. That really has, it's like tentacles that are causing all these symptoms. So now quick example. So plastic surgeons might've been doing liposuction to suck out fat rather than treating the underlying obesity.

Dermatologists might've been treating acne rather than the underlying obesity, which causes a lot of acne. Ear, nose, and throat doctors were treating sleep apnea with CPAP rather than the underlying cause, which is often obesity. I'll keep going down just to give you another few examples. But OB-GYN is trying to figure out how to treat fertility when the infertility, when the underlying cause of obesity, urologists treating erectile dysfunction when the underlying cause is obesity. So now all of these providers that we're talking about, they come from every walk of life. They come from their dominant dermatology fields, urologists, OB-GYNs, functional medicine, primary care, cardiologists, they're all using our platform now because they realize that they need to be treating obesity. And at first people would look at that and think, "Why is a dermatologist offering weight loss meds?" Well, that whole paradigm is shifting. People are going to start to understand that they're all treating obesity.

We're all obesity doctors now. Not necessarily obesity specialists, not necessarily fellowship trained obesity specialist, but these medications are so effective that you can offer them and their safety profile is so good that you're not, I'm not treating the fragile diabetics. They're still seeing their endocrinologist. But if they can't get their meds through Kaiser, then they're coming to me to get the meds. That's one example. So we are going to see providers from all across the spectrum that are getting into obesity. That's who's using our platform now and then they're collectively treating thousands upon thousands upon thousands of patients getting access to about 5,200 compounding pharmacies across the country. Offering, right now, our catalog includes about 50 different types of medication for all the things that I mentioned before between weight loss and hair restoration, erectile dysfunction, skincare, anything. So yeah, we're already big. We're already, as far as financially, a lot of money. I don't know who the audience is, but we're probably going to generate probably about $15 million in revenue this year.

I mean if you look at the graph, it's like a hockey stick going up. So it's very exciting as we add on more providers, more meds and make this easier. And we have a team of coders that's building out, that's continuing to improve upon this platform, so it's getting easier and easier for consumers and for providers to use. And even though we're generating a lot of revenue and growing, in answer to your question, the cost of the meds that the patients are getting are less and less and less than what they would've had to deal with if they were going to the pharmacy. And that's the crazy thing about insurance, is that there's one stat out there when it comes back to GLP-1s, for the weight loss meds, that about 23% of insurance plans cover it, but when you really delve into the data, 23% is not accurate.

It's probably really less than that. And this is what I mean, they might say they cover it, but if you get approved for it and then you go to the pharmacy to get your GLP-1, your Ozempic or Wegovy or whatever that they'll say, "Okay, no problem. Yeah, your insurance covers it, but your copay is $1000." I was like, "Okay, well that's not really covering anything. That doesn't do me any good if I'm having to pay $1000 out of pocket for this." So that's what I'm saying is that I think the insurance companies are saying they cover it, but they're putting hurdles in front of the patient as far as like, "Oh, you got to do six months of diet and exercise." Diet and exercise is important as part of this medication to help minimize lean body mass loss, but it's not going to help you lose all the weight that you're trying to lose. And so they'll say they cover it, but then they really, when it comes to a practical sense, they don't cover it. The copay's too high so that we're helping those patients get these medications at a significantly reduced price.

So the point being is that even though insurance may cover meds, any types of these medications, the copay may be exorbitant. And so patients are still, even with insurance, are going to need a provider to get access to this less expensive meds at compounding pharmacies,

Jonathan Wiik:
For sure. Are you seeing that, Dr. Kaplan, happen more frequently where patients are like, "Look, I just want to pay cash. It's just easier to do that than to try to hit my plan benefits because I've got a $5,000 deductible or it's actually less out of pocket by the time it applies to my benefits than it would be because the charge is so high on that side that I don't have first dollar coverage anyway. I might as well just pay cash and let it roll." What are you seeing in your products?

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
We're definitely seeing that, and we do offer, in my practice, we're piloting a program right now that we may roll out to the rest of our providers is that we give patients the option of trying to go through their insurance, but only if they meet certain parameters. We're not going to just try it for everybody because we know it's not going to get approved. But if you do meet the BMI parameters, if you've got private insurance, so not Medicare and not Kaiser in this case, that if they meet those parameters that we will try. But that's what they're finding is that even though we do their benefits assessment and then the pre-authorization and they get approved, they're finding their copay is higher than they want.

So I feel like though these cohorts of people and the cohort is not necessarily a certain age or demographic, it's just all the people that try and then they learn the reality of that, "Okay, insurance may cover it, but it's still not affordable." And so they all understand it and so then they kind of fall back to the compounded version instead of going with the name brand drug again talking about GLP-1s. So it's just this cohort of people that keep learning about how the realities of how insurance works. And so yes, it's going to get this point or this tipping point where they all kind of go into it understanding that it's just easier to pay out of pocket. I'm going to be able to get the medication quicker. I see friends constantly seeing this where one goes with insurance and then they have to wait two to three months before they can finally get access to it all the while their other friend who's been on the compounded version has lost 30 pounds over the last three months and this other person is just getting started. I love it.

Jonathan Wiik:
Yeah, I think too, you see my other book talks about just this evolution of insurance because the cost shifting has happened so much from the employer. The value of carrying insurance that actually covers things beyond deductibles is diminishing. Most people pay today 20, $30,000 a year for insurance if they're in an employee job. That's a lot of money for something that might happen and I encourage the audience, listen, you absolutely need to have health insurance. It's a very expensive thing, but I see this kind of trend of people moving to programs for more acute type things and then funding things with an HSA or a Flex Savings Account to where they're actually managing those costs more forwardly like you're talking about.

You think about the application of this and elective surgeries like we were talking about, or diagnostics I think is a huge field where labs and imaging procedures have a cash fee schedule where, "Hey, it's $100 to get your chest x-ray or $500 to get your MRI." And that's what it is, and you don't need the insurance for that because it would've been $1000 copay and billed at some charge that's reflective of hospital operations. I'm excited for some of that, I think to help with some of the price compression in the market.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
There's definitely several platforms out there, including ours, where you can check pricing for the cash paid version of these non-cosmetic services like X-rays like you mentioned, or lab work. So that's definitely something that's growing. The issue is that patients just have to understand that their insurance is not covering as much because that's what's so frustrating is that medical debt, everybody always quotes how medical debt is the most common type of debt, but in the meantime, we're paying more for insurance and getting less and getting in more debt. How does that work? How did that happen that you're paying more for it? The idea is you're paying more than maybe that's going to cover more of your medical costs, but it's not.

It's very frustrating and I've always thought that that was a shame. One shame, and not to totally digress, but Obamacare, they were trying to make sure that people had better insurance, but in the process excluded more of the catastrophic insurance plans that certainly didn't cover as much, but it was less expensive to cover just the catastrophic needs. And so that's really not something that's easily accessible anymore. And so that's really what most people really want is a catastrophic insurance coverage, but even then it's not as inexpensive as it used to be.

Jonathan Wiik:
And I think those health benefit exchange plans, they did a good job of getting people onto something, but the deductible structure and benefit plan structure of those often is a catalyst for debt. People don't have more than usually three, 400 bucks of liquidity in their bank accounts that the federal government does. They do a study every year and those deductibles on some of those plans are in the thousands. And so they're already kind of underwater thinking that I think they're almost more dangerous in some cases, Dr. Kaplan, because the people think they have insurance and then they go to use it and it's like, "Well, wait a minute, I could have just not had this or not paid for or paid for it in cash and done better without paying these premiums or subsidies."

It'll be something I think will get figured out over the next terms and where we're at and we'll see what happens with the exchange plans where they're at. But I completely agree with you. I think that it gets political quickly, but it's important to understand that people are consumers and insurance is there to protect you, not to hurt you, and that it was a hindrance in some regard.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
And I think that obviously it's education and people understanding how deductibles and things work, but I don't know that it's not because I think that a lot of people aren't smart, but it's so convoluted, it's so complex. I don't know that we really can ever fully, can adequately educate people on how this all works. I mean we can certainly try, but why would they understand? It's kind of explaining to everybody about the 2007, 2008 financial crisis that it was a thing with derivatives, and you could watch movies like The Big Short that try to dumb it down, but it still doesn't really make sense.

Jonathan Wiik:
Yeah, watching that bathtub scene, figuring out it was weird. Yeah, I completely agree with you. Health literacy, I talked to lots of folks about medical debt and that's a big issue right now is just even basic understanding what copays and deductibles. You look at these Medicare Advantage plans too where I've talked to everybody that will listen, that has a grandparent or parent out there. I'm like, "Be very careful. Be an informed consumer with those because yeah, you might get vision in dental and maybe free cab rides to the hospital when you need care, but all of those private plan rules are there. You have more cost sharing. People aren't really happy being on those plans. The hospitals aren't getting paid, the clinicians, physicians like yourself aren't getting paid. There's a lot of authorization requirements and it's kind of this bait and switch that's happening." You're seeing the federal government start to look at that pretty closely.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Absolutely. No, it's time for them to look at it. I'm glad they are.

Jonathan Wiik:
Yeah, it's good. You've had a lot of good news, are there things you've learned through this or if you went back, you would've maybe done a little bit differently that you'd like to share? Or was it all perfect?

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Definitely not all perfect. Price transparency, nobody really wanted to do it. Still, nobody really wants to do it. I remember when I was employed by that hospital, I had the idea back in 2011 that I wanted to do the price transparency and for my practice because it was all cosmetics and cash pay that employed by the hospital, but because I was employed by the hospital, I had to go and talk to them about doing it. So if you can imagine that after these price transparency rules, the federal price transparency rules like no Surprises Act that went into effect in 2022, the hospitals were kicking and screaming about not wanting to post their pricing on their website in 2022. You can imagine how uninterested they were in price transparency when I brought it up to them in 2009, between 2009 and 2011. So they finally let me say, "Well, you can do this on your own."

And I was like, "Well, I'm employee and I need to make sure the intellectual property is mine." So they signed it over to me. So I'm glad that worked out well that I asked for the intellectual property for it, but it was really slow-going after that as far as getting people on board with price transparency. And that's not that I could have really done anything differently because the situation had to present itself. But now that we're into this idea of subscriptions for weight loss meds and all these other meds from compounding pharmacies, the provider to consumer platform idea that providers are more on board with all of that and now that opportunity has presented us, that the price transparency, we're going to be able to back that into all of this. And so providers are going to actually start incorporating more price transparency into their website without realizing that's what they're doing. And that's kind of unfortunate what it took is that to trick them maybe isn't the best word, certainly not a good connotation.

But now that they're offering these different subscriptions and they have to show the pricing, because one of the things is if when you're checking out with your medication, there'll be a pop-up that says, "Well, people who bought this also bought this." And so to be able to present that to the consumer, to these providers are going to have to put in more procedures and services into the back end of our platform associated with pricing. So that's why I'm saying that they're going to basically back into the price transparency thing without realizing it. So that was something I wish that could have all happened faster. That's a big disappointment of mine. But again, that was really a little bit out of my control. It was just this opportunity did not materialize. I could not have willed this opportunity into existence any sooner.

But now as far as things that I'm learning that I really love is that I love plastic surgery. Still operating, still great, but after doing it for 16 years, your learning curve isn't as steep as it once was. So that's what I've really enjoyed about this other company is that I have this very steep learning curve now of working with our employees, our eight or nine coders, understanding the code a little bit better, understanding the processes for getting those coders motivated, hiring a chief product officer, letting go of a chief technology officer. Learning all of that has been just incredibly rewarding. And that's something I want to definitely end on. A positive note that that's been really great to see a company grow that's obviously within the healthcare space, but certainly outside of plastic surgery.

Jonathan Wiik:
Dr. Kaplan, I think we are at time. I really appreciate your time. I appreciate your passion. I hope more things flow through Build My Health and someday I encounter it for something I want. And it was really a pleasure. Again, I'm Jonathan Wiik, the Vice President of Health Insights at FinThrive, and I had Dr. Kaplan here from BuildMyHealth.com. And have a great afternoon and thank you again. Dr. Kaplan.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Thank you. Let me just kind of clarify that. For providers that are looking for is that since we have made that name transition from Build My Bod to Build My Health to Dr. Well Build My Health, that they can find us at DrWell.com, that's probably the best website for both providers and consumers to go to. DrWell.com providers can learn how to join our platform, and then also consumers can go to DrWell.com and they'll find a provider finder page where they can find a provider near them. We cover all 50 states.

Jonathan Wiik:
You bet, DrWell.com, we've got it. Cool

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Thanks so much.

Jonathan Wiik:
Thanks again, Dr. Kaplan, and I'll let you get back to work. It sounds like you got to go do it. You got your scrubs on, so you take care of yourself out there. And I hope to see you soon.

Dr. Jonathan Kaplan:
Thanks again. Thanks for having me.