In our third interview, we’ve got to exchange emails with Prime‘s CEO and founder Tyler Hayes.
First of all, he’s not a doctor but a tech guy with the idea to improve the healthcare experiences for patients before. This philosophy led to his founding of Prime. Tyler is also an alumnus of the Techstars accelerator program.
Here’s what he had to say about his company and the mHealth industry in general:
How would you pitch Prime?
Prime empowers people to take control of their personal health records on the go. Users can apply information from multiple sources into a single view giving them complete access to important data. The end result is individuals and their loved ones achieving a better healthcare experience. Prime is a free, HIPAA-complaint mobile app available for download in the Apple App Store. The company launched out of Techstars in 2014.
What sets you apart from competing solutions?
Prime was designed for mobile from the ground up and is the only app that instantly and automatically aggregates all health records with no manual entry required. Prime universally supports over 300 healthcare providers and has recently hit a milestone with 50,000 healthcare records connected.
What’s your business model?
We make money by giving our users the things they need, like medication refills.
Can you share some numbers? How many users do you have?
We have helped users connect to more than 50,000 personal health records.
Where do you see Prime going from here?
Prime’s goal is always to help as many people as possible get their health history, so we’re going to just keep working toward that as hard and fast as we can — truly universal access to our own health information, on any device, anywhere, at any time.
Where do you see the mHealth industry going?
Overall, we see the health industry going in the same direction every other industry is going: more global, more personal, and easier to use and understand. Healthcare is an industry with tendrils in every nook, so this will happen for not just patients, but doctors, insurers and vendors too. There are no excuses to not make something that doesn’t work for everyone, everywhere, anytime now, other than simple hard work.
How long are we from seeing modern mHealth technologies going mainstream?
They’re already starting to go mainstream, which is why you see VCs talking much more publicly about healthcare as an investment area now. They’re finally starting to get it, both because regulation has helped and because enough collateral progress led us to a tipping point. Now, for example, we’re seeing wearable fitness trackers for consumers become widely recognized as acceptable paradigms and cloud-based EMRs for doctors quickly gaining traction. This is the first inning.