Interview with Eric Duprat, co-founder and CEO of Faircare

Faircare - Eric Duprat

Our latest interviewee is Eric Duprat, co-founder and CEO of Faircare, a medical big data company focused on uncovering medical costs and empowering consumers to make smart choices about their healthcare. Eric is also an independent board member from WEX, a $3.6 billion public company in the B2B payment space since early 2013. Prior to this, he was the CEO of Verayo for 3 years, a Khosla Venture company focused on mobile security. Even before, Eric was General Manager of Mobile Payments at PayPal from 2008 to 2011, and has held executive positions at VeriFone, Hypercom and Inside Secure. Here’s what he had to say…

How would you pitch your company? What’s your elevator pitch?

We are making real medical prices available to every consumer in the US, wherever they live.

What sets you apart from competitors?

Healthcare is complex and we worked hard to be consumer friendly. It is a long journey, but we are improving every day. We have gathered high quality data from more than twenty billion claims, which is three times more than some established public B2B companies in this space! We are aiming at disclosing prices for all doctors and hospitals nationwide.

What’s your business model?

We have the luxury not to have one. We have been funded to prove the concept that we can build a community of consumers willing to shop for medical care.

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

Our app displays our metrics real time to all our consumers.

Faircare

Where do you see the company going from here?

If we can demonstrate consumer traction, we will move into optional business models that will help both consumers and providers.

We do not believe that one model needs to win over the other, we believe in potential significant improvements for the healthcare system.

Where do you see the mHealth industry going?

mHealth is a very generic term. We think mobile is centric to many consumers; and for some, it even becomes the primary way to access the internet.

We also believe that Healthcare is one of the last areas where the internet has not improved efficiency yet. We are targeting a market of $150 billion of out-of-pocket expenses and empowering consumers to reduce this amount by making smart medical choices.

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

Very soon now, and we may be one of the new massive players in this space as we are leveraging new technologies like big data to augment the quality and reach of our data set. We are serving a noble cause because the lack of price transparency affects the wallet of every American. We also think that the growing trend of high deductible plans will force more and more consumers to consider shopping for healthcare.