Interview with Doctrly’s founder Devin Goodman

This time round we interviewed Doctrly’s Devin Goodman. He used to ran a private cancer center in the US for about 5 years and created Doctrly as a direct result of his overwhelming frustration with the state of American healthcare. Goodman attended Trinity College in Hartford, CT and Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Before working in healthcare, he worked in the United States Senate.

Here’s how that interview went…

How would you pitch your company?

Doctrly is an Open API for Electronic Health Records (EHR). A “Twilio” for Healthcare.

We have built an EHR application but instead of shipping it with a UI, we have exposed the entire application via REST API. This allows hospitals and other care providers to partner with frontend developers to easily and securely create custom frontends. They can create as many UIs or apps as they wish. This means that every medical specialty, or even every doctor, can have a UI that is custom and A/B tested to maximize the doctor’s ease of use and productivity. Each individual organization’s different UIs connect to the same backend EHR application and database which ensures continuity and integrity of patient health data.

What sets you apart from competitors?

Doctrly is the only EHR to be presented as an Open API.

Currently, EHRs are closed systems, where patient data exists in “silos”. Data interoperability between vendors is near zero. In addition to data interoperability, we are also the only company to enable custom frontends and apps for all clinical components.

The only way to do this is to make the entire application accessible via REST API and Doctrly is the only company to do this.

What’s your business model?

We charge EHR frontend and app developers for API calls and we charge health care entities for the size of their database.

Can you share some numbers? How many users do you have?

Not now because we are currently in a private beta. We have a very long waiting list with users from the USA to China. We are particularly interested in core use cases. For example, we are working with Chief of Emergency Medicine at a nationally recognized hospital in Boston, MA. Cases like these go to the top of the waiting list.

Where do you see the company going from here?

At the moment, we are focused on tuning our product and partnering with quality-focused, integrated health delivery systems. At some point within the next 2-4 months we will begin to look for seed funding.

Where do you see the mHealth industry going?

In a word – “Up”. The sticking point is getting large, institutional healthcare entities to realize the value of new technology and pilot those systems in a meaningful way. Once hospitals and doctors are on board, the mHealth industry will take off.

How long are we from seeing modern mHealth technologies going mainstream?

Again, it is difficult to give a firm number here because so much depends on the hospitals realizing the value of mHealth. Right now, they see it as a liability. It is up to us to show them that mobile and secure are not mutually exclusive.