Sherpaa does to the world what email and texting did to the phone and handwritten letters.

Prior to the invention of email, texts, and within-app messaging, we depended on things like telephones and meetings to communicate, relay messages and make decisions. Everything had to happen “synchronously.” Communication was difficult, decisions took longer to make, and execution of a strategy depended on expensive, time-consuming meetings. This was a pain, it was complex, and for the most part highly inefficient. Especially when considering that most transmission of information does not require syncing up schedules. Not everything is important enough to take to the next level and go through the challenge of expensively syncing schedules. And the kind of situation where this is needed falls into the old classic category of “you know it when you see it.” That’s why meetings are called. Or instead of texting you pick up the phone and call the person. Or instead of emailing you walk down the hall and pop your head into your coworker’s office and spend two minutes discussing something to make a decision— something that would have taken multiple email exchanges to solve. When given the option, humans have great intuition to choose the most appropriate method of communication. We’re social creatures from day one. It’s literally in our DNA to communicate efficiently and effectively.

In the last twenty years, we witnessed a huge transformation in how humans communicate. Asynchronous communication, like email and texting, is such a profound change that it’s highly likely that sociologists will eventually split the history of human communication into pre and post-synchronous communication.

And that’s why what we do at Sherpaa is such a profound change in healthcare. Ninety-eight percent of communication that happens between our doctors and patients happens via secure asynchronous messaging within our app. Only about 2% of the time do we step it up to the phone. Sherpaa does to the world what email and texting did to the phone and handwritten letters. It enables things to get done in an entirely new and efficient way. And it gives us options, both doctors and patients, to use our intuition to communicate most effectively. It’s a new era and a new genre of healthcare. One that I know will eventually change healthcare into a new epoch of opportunity.