Healthcare networks, reimagined.

Your network is everything. If you don’t have a kick butt genuine network both personally and professionally, you can only provide a fraction of your value to your friends, family, and clients.

Traditional healthcare networks are financial networks. They’re long lists of random doctors who have contracts with the insurer or the hospital group. That’s it. There’s no effort put into creating networks of doctors based on personality, mission to not overtreat/overbill, or exceptional ability to communicate clearly with empathy (The Trifecta). Quick clarification...this assumes they’ve already met the basics like board-certification, training at a well-respected academic medical center, etc. Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely quasi-financial doctor networks on the internet. There’s Yelp, created by patients to review doctors when they’re really mad or really happy. There’s ZocDoc for doctors who need to pay $3,000 a year for a steady stream of patients.

How do you even create a Trifecta Network?

I’d estimate about 5% (~30,000 in the US) of practicing doctors meet the Trifecta. I wanted to create a new kind of nationwide, doctor network because it hasn’t been done before. And I also believe this network is literally worth billions if you admit that a Trifecta doctor network could eventually become a financial network. As of today, from the last 7 years of Sherpaa’s efforts practicing nationwide and having to occasionally organize local care with local specialists, we’ve organically built this kind of network. Any one of Sherpaa’s doctors can personally reach out to them, via a text message to their personal mobile phone, and say:

Hey Dan. Hope you’re not working too hard. Hey, I have a patient here who’s been having some really weird eye symptoms and they need your services. What should I do now to prepare them for a visit with you? And can you squeeze them in tomorrow or the next day?

And because we’re sending Dr. Dan a few patients a week from Sherpaa, they text back pretty quickly. We give them something (referrals). They give us something (speedy care for our members + their mission-based care). That’s immense value to our patients and to Sherpaa. We built this network organically and it’s constantly in flux. Two weeks after we refer you, Sherpaa solicits a request from you to review the specialist/facility and ~35% of people do. If reviews aren’t up to par, we purge the specialist from our network.

Sherpaa gets paid to have a kick ass network of local doctors and facilities. We’ve made it simple for our doctors to refer you at the point of decision-making. When one of our doctors decides you need to see a neurologist who specializes in headaches, we just start searching the network we’ve built up over the last 5 years. And when we make the referral, this triggers a notification to that specialist letting them know Sherpaa has sent them a patient, a few patient details, and instructions for how to send us their consult report to be included in the patient’s “episode of care” within our app.

When we work with health plans and brokers who, over the years, have built their own local “Trifecta Network-like” suppliers, we add those specialists and facilities to our backend, tag them with the name of the health plan or employer and then leverage those local specialists/facilities when our doctors are referring those plan members.

It’s a health network for a new concept. And, as you can see, building this kind of network unlocks a whole world of future possibilities.