Sherpaa’s Not-So-Secret Master Plan.

In August 2006, Elon Musk wrote a blog post outlining Tesla’s vision for the next 10 years, The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan. I think it’s important for every company to articulate their long-term strategy and vision. So, with a whole bunch of self-awareness that I’m not Elon Musk, here’s Sherpaa’s not-so-secret Master Plan for the next 10 years. Keep in mind, healthcare moves glacially and the problems healthcare fought 10 years ago are essentially the same as today. With that in mind, here’s what we want to accomplish:

1/ Sherpaa will be a new specialty for young and middle-age adults that focuses on our unique issues.

2/ Sherpaa will be the cloud-based healthcare service funnel accessible anytime and anywhere. We will be the primary go-to service for accessing healthcare and solving health problems, arranging in-person care when necessary, curating and connecting patients to the right online or local healthcare service, and managing ongoing health issues.

3/ Diagnosis will be data-driven. Because 98% of everything that happens within Sherpaa’s platform is asynchronous text-based structured messaging, Sherpaa is the only place in healthcare where the entire conversation, questions asked, tests ordered, treatment plan prescribed, and outcome are meaningful, easily analyzable data points. Since the EMR we built was built to solve communication and health problems, not bill insurance companies, the data we have is extremely real-world and accurate. We will leverage this data to make diagnosis and treatment more accurate and cost-effective. Sherpaa will use a data-driven evidence-based strategy to ensure your diagnosis is efficient and consistently accurate. These diagnostic protocols will be made open-source to benefit anyone and everyone. Think “If This Then That” but for diagnosis. We do not want to focus on diagnosing long-tail diseases. Let Watson do that. We want to ensure that diagnosis for non-long-tail diseases are accurate 99.9% of the time. (Example: “If a patient answered our series of questions in the following way, and the recommended tests ordered showed these results, there’s a 99.9% chance the patient has x diagnosis.”)

4/ Treatment will be data-driven. Sherpaa will ensure all your treatment plans are custom-tailored to your unique body, genetics, and lifestyle and correlated with outcome to benefit you and the entire patient population. These treatment protocols will also be open-source.

5/ Care will be Increasingly cost-effective. Sherpaa will deliver care increasingly cost-effectively for you while also continuing to operate profitably. All virtual care should get less expensive over time with improving automation and artificial intelligence that augment our professionals’ expertise.

6/ Sherpaa will work with professionals from all the specialties that can effectively diagnose and treat virtually (dermatology, allergy, nutrition for example).

7/ Sherpaa will ensure price transparency. Every order for tests, medications, and referrals show an associated cost to you with a description of benefit and value to you and your unique situation.

8/ Sherpaa will curate and drive patients to virtual and local services that fulfill real medical/financial needs that make our patients’ lives easier throughout each step of the patient experience. 

9/ Sherpaa will deliver virtual care and coordinate in-person care in all 50 states and be insurance company and employer agnostic. Your care shouldn’t be tied to your insurance company, employer, or neighborhood. These change in our mobile world. Your care should be cloud-based, accessible anytime and anywhere, and layered on top of any insurance plan to make care more and more cost-effective for you.