Saúde Pra Já - healthcare marketplace

In Brazil, only 25% of people have health insurance, because it is very expensive, due to its inefficiency. It capitalizes on information asymmetry, depends on a complex risk evaluation, incentivizes unnecessary usage and has consistently failed in engaging patients in prevention. Therefore, 150 million Brazilians do not have health insurance and depend on public health system, so they commonly have to wait months for diagnostics and treatment. They cannot commit to a monthly payment, because 40% of workers have informal jobs, but they are willing to pay in urgent or severe cases.

Health providers accept insurers' low imposed prices, because that is the prevalent solution to being found by patients, but try to compensate overcharging in private appointments.

Insurances are regulated by an autarchy, but have been pushing to decrease coverage and increase prices. Still, they have been seeing worst financial results and are even downsizing.

Saúde Pra Já is a private healthcare marketplace, in which patients easily find and schedule the cheapest, closest and available option, paying only for what they need. They search for the services they need and contact providers or schedule online. We send appointment reminders to patients through automatic WhatsApp messaging and confirm if they will attend, informing providers. We later confirm if they did attend. Patient scheduling example: https://drive.google.com/file/...

In the future, we will be simplifying communication with providers and allowing patients to save and share their medical history with different healthcare professionals.

Healthcare providers register online to be found by more patients, can easily resume patient contacts and may offer online scheduling. They are informed of each appointment scheduled instantly by e-mail and later can see if patients have confirmed that they will attend. They can confirm on our platform if patients attended and later will be able to charge patients using our platform. They perform more appointments, have autonomy over their prices, only pay a 15% take-rate.

Partner registration and use example: https://drive.google.com/file/...

In the future, we will simplify providers processes in communicating with patients to incentivize return and treatment engagement and in operations management.

We focus on uninsured patients' needs, prioritizing health services by lower price, closest location and scheduling availability. There are 135 million middle and low class Brazilians, with a R$ 1,9k to 9,5k Household income, who spend R$ 89,7 billion per year in appointments, exams, dentists, ambulatory treatment, surgery, hospitalization, treatment material, medicine and others.

Prices are the first information they need, to evaluate paying for a healthcare service.The public system does not have enough capacity to provide timely assistance to everyone, since health infrastructure is extremely expensive and the government is not enough cost efficient. Therefore, people might wait months for diagnostic and treatment and some in fact die waiting. In urgent or severe cases, patients will find a way to pay for private appointments, but some low price healthcare providers might be fully booked for weeks.

Many of the patients have difficulties in going to distant places, because they don't have cars or due to age and health issues, so they might not attend to public healthcare appointments that are scheduled without taking distance into consideration.

Providers have difficulties managing patients and processes, so making service details available, such as payment conditions, preparation necessary to perform exams, deadlines to receive exam results, are very useful to patients and providers.

In Brazil there is no unified medical history platform, which leads to inefficient diagnostics. In the future we will allow patients to save and share their medical history with other providers, so they they can spare time and money in medical exams.

Meeting the largest patient segment needs will allow us to capitalize on network effects, generating more demand to healthcare service providers, who provide their service information in return, which leads to generating more benefits to patients.

To attract more providers, we offer autonomy and will support them in defining their prices in a way that increases demand and profit margins. We will facilitate communication with patients, to incentivize return and treatment engagement.

We only charge a 15% take-rate success fee, which reduces churn and acquisition costs, but in the future we will charge a small monthly fixed amount (R$ 25 to 35) to increase ROI and business sustainability.

Paula Piazi is the CEO and founder of Saúde Pra Já, which was launched in September 2020. Realizing her work lacked positive social impact, she decided to search for business opportunities that would allow her to achieve this purpose. Raised by doctors, health issues were frequently present in her life which led to her interest in the industry. After studying the health sector, Saúde Pra Já was idealized with the vision of facilitating access to quality health services to all Brazilians and to bringing demand more efficiently to service providers.

We started doing research on public clinics and urgency units, to understand patients needs. Than launched a static website that led users to talking to us via chat and phone. Only after 1,5 year we stopped receiving patients' contacts, to focus on our technical scalable solution, but we keep tracking user experience through surveys and user recording.

We started researching health providers after 6 months of MVP and are in close phone contact with some of our partners, to understand their pain points continuously.

We reached over 3,6k MAU in patient website at a 9% conversion from user to patient lead and at a R$ 9,80 Cost per lead. 25 patients per month confirm that they have performed health services with our partners, but the response rate is 30%. In April we started confirming services performed with our partners and 9 were confirmed and paid for.

We offer 17k health services in Rio de Janeiro State, of which 10k are performed by our 700 partners. We recently acquired two national Key Accounts partners, that are offering special prices for our patients.

We need the most help with provider acquisition and with reaching and attracting more patients. Contacting providers and negotiating discounted prices to offer on our platform will be key to our success. Also improving online campaigns and media exposure will definitely allow us to generate more impact to patients and results to partners, which will generate positive network effect. It is important for us to learn how to measure the impact we generate to people who find better healthcare options through our website.

We will also need help with fundraising and with hiring a CTO.

Saúde Pra Já offers patients the possibility to perform health services paying no monthly fee and paying less than in private appointments. There is no need to assess patient risk, or to change patients behavior and doctors tend to be more mindful when prescribing medical exams to uninsured patients, which makes paying on demand more efficient.

Also, health professionals have autonomy to determine
their prices and will be inclined to reduce them if demand directly
improves by doing it. They can charge more than insurances pay and are willing to charge less then they charge on private appointments to increase attendance.

We are aiming at generating 7k healthcare services performed in the next 12 months and 50 million in 5 years.

For that we have to be able to reach more patients, which depends on improving campaign efficiency and investment, on improving variety and quality of the healthcare services being offered and on improving SEO, patient usability and experience. So we will need to raise more funds, hire a Key Account executive and improve our technology delivery efficiency.

We are currently only operating in Rio de Janeiro state, but will expand to other southeast states and then to southern states, where healthcare offer is more abundant. We aim at generating network effect quickly, to then expand to the other states, where doctor-patient reason is lower.

We are focused on increasing services performed, generated by our platform. We will also measure the average price difference in pricing, from our partners full regular prices and the discounted prices they are offering in Saúde Pra Já, to measure our business model's efficiency.

Later we will compare time saved by using Saúde Pra Já, versus time spent by patients waiting for public healthcare system.

With Saúde Pra Já, we hope to make demand and offer meet more directly and efficiently, which will impact on systemic pricing, making healthcare more accessible. Patients will easily compare healthcare offer, so providers will have an incentive to decrease pricing in order to perform more services. As they currently have to accept insurers' low prices to be found by patients, without insurances inefficiencies, they can earn more, pay Saúde Pra Já a commission and still offer lower prices than the ones they charge from uninsured patients.

As an example, one of our partners has 400 locations in Brazil and are also the owners of an basic vertical insurance. They charge R$ 35 in medical appointments from the 92% of patients that pay their R$ 34 insurance monthly. Only 4% of appointments are from uninsured patients, who pay R$ 105. They are offering Saúde Pra Já's patients R$ 70 per appointment.

Our platform is web based, since we are still developing functionalities, but in the future, we will also offer mobile applications.

Providers register online, we save their data on our database and allow patients to search for it on a dynamic webpage. When patients try to contact providers, they leave their contact and we inform our partners of it, so they can resume contact and confirm scheduling. In the future, payment will also be performed through our platform.

As we are a small and diverse group, we have not implemented any diversity programme yet. I am a female founder, our marketing manager is female and both developers are male. I am white, but two of us are brown skinned. Two of us live in Rio de Janeiro and the other two in Minas Gerais, another state and we all work fully-remotely.

We offer healthcare services to patients through our platform, where they easily find and schedule the cheapest, closest and available option, paying only for the service they need and without charging any extra fee from them.

The services are registered on our platform and performed by our partners, healthcare providers. They register to perform more appointments and have autonomy over their prices. Today they only pay a 15% take-rate charged after the service is performed, but in the future we will charge a small fixed amount.

We are focused on increasing conversion from users to unique patient leads and from unique leads to performed services, so we can increase social impact and revenues.

Also, we have begun prospecting large popular clinics to increase variety and quality of services being offered. Furthermore, we started offering a free partnership, as well as the premium partnership, in which providers are highlighted and can use more features, as resuming contacts received and online scheduling. In the future, free partnership will cease to be offered. As network effect evolves, we are able to deliver more contacts to each partner and offer more solutions, we will also charge partners a small fixed amount monthly.

Saúde Pra Já is totally bootstrapped so far, but we will soon fundraise. We are currently focused on increasing services offered and performed to be able to generate more impact and revenues.

Since the acquisition of 5 large clinics, in March, our revenues have grown from R$ 8,50 in February, to R$ 83,35 in March and R$ 161,60 in April. 1 service was confirmed by partners in February, 9 in March and 12 in April so far.