Kyle
If it’s the weekend and you break your arm, or your toe, perhaps your nose or have some semi-emergency that requires you visit the ER but isn’t life threatening than I’m sure you’ve experienced the extremely long wait time that is the ER waiting room. Whatever the reason you’re in the ER, I’m sure you’re experiencing some kind of discomfort and ER waiting rooms are far from comfortable. What if you could use a web app to speed up the ER waiting process.
Well Nashville startup InQuicker is here to help. InQuicker is an online waiting room. In conjunction with their hospital partners someone who needs the emergency room services and is not in a life threatening emergency can sign in at the InQuicker online waiting room. InQuicker gives the patient a projected wait time. When the patient arrives at the hospital or clinic they are greeted by a healthcare provider.
InQuicker reports that eight out of ten patients that use InQuicker get seen within ten to fifteen minutes of the time they arrive. For just a rough idea on the value of InQuicker, they recently ran a study with their ER partners and found that patients can wait up to 208 minutes to get into the ER to see a doctor. That’s a lot of time you could be nursing your injury or ailment in the comfort of your own home.
InQuicker is very beneficial in the emergency room, but they also work with doctors offices as well.
We got a chance to interview InQuicker. Check out that interview below:
What is InQuicker?
InQuicker.com is an online waiting room that enables patients to skip the waiting room at the ER and urgent care centers nationwide. With InQuicker, patients are provided with projected treatment times so they can wait from the comfort of home. Once they get to the hospital or clinic, they are promptly seen by a health care provider. In fact, eight out of 10 patients using InQuicker.com spend less than 15 minutes in the waiting room.
Hospitals provide treatment based on the most urgent need. So if there’s a delay due to changing conditions at the facility, InQuicker patients receive instant notifications via phone call and email with updated projected treatment times. InQuicker is only intended for patients with non life-threatening conditions.
InQuicker also offers instant online appointment scheduling for doctors’ office visits. You can locate and access all three levels of care at http://www.inquicker.com.
Tyler Kiley, a programmer by trade, founded InQuicker in 2006. As the son of a hospital CEO and an ER nurse, Tyler spent a considerable amount of time at the hospital and witnessed people waiting for hours upon hours in the ER waiting room with little expectations for when they would be seen by a provider. He knew there had to be a simple tech solution to prevent endless waits, so he made one. Tyler debuted the software in 2006, and it remained a side business until 2009 when he was joined by Michael Brody-Waite, our current CEO.Mike joined the company in 2009, leaving a job at a Fortune 50 company in computer hardware sales as a newlywed to pursue his dream of helping to build a company from the ground up. Mike had his own experiences with unnecessary waiting at the doctor’s office, so he teamed up with Tyler to bootstrap the company and grow our revenue. Between 2009 and 2012, he helped grow InQuicker’s revenue by 47x, created 21 jobs, and increased the size of our client list from 3 to over 140.
Where are you based?
InQuicker’s business development and marketing team is based in Nashville, Tennessee – the health care capital of the United States. Our software development team is based on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The Nashville team is not at all jealous of the fact that the dev guys can go both snowboarding and surfing in a single day.
What’s the startup culture/scene like in Nashville?
The startup scene in Nashville is booming. While the startup community is growing in general, there is a strong contingency of health IT startups that are rapidly disrupting the way health care works in the United States. The “new guard” of organizations like InQuicker.com, Stratasan, and Shareable Ink are introducing innovative solutions, but the best part is that long-established players in the health care industry are helping to shepherd in a new era of innovation with open arms.
Resources like the Entrepreneur Center and Jumpstart Foundry are filled with health care veterans who are helping educate new companies, incubating their ideas, and assisting innovators to achieve their goals. Nashville has an extremely supportive startup community, and it’s only getting bigger and better.
Our founder, Tyler Kiley, was raised by a hospital CEO and an ER nurse. He got plenty of early exposure to the hospital setting and always wondered why, with the tech-based resources we have today, long waits in crowded waiting rooms still had to be a problem. Why couldn’t a concept like OpenTable work in the ER? He decided to do something about it and created the first iteration of our company’s software as a side project.Tyler created InQuicker as a means to enable patients to wait from the comfort of home with the relative assurance of a projected treatment time. The ability to send instant delay alerts to patients and our doctors’ office appointment-setting service came later on.
InQuicker’s mission is to end unnecessary health care waiting and bring power to patients in a moment when they have little to no control. We do this multiple ways, the first is by helping folks solve the problem of “I need health care help now, but where should I go?” The second is our ability to prevent patients from seemingly endless waits for ER and urgent care in often uncomfortable environments with little to no expectation of when they will be seen by a health care professional.
Our secret sauce is in the five questions we ask ourselves before we do anything – as individuals or as a company:1. Will this action change behavior and results?
2. Before I choose to act, what assumptions am I making?
3. Could I better spend my time and resources on something else?
4. Will this action create exponential benefit?
5. If the action passes all of the above questions, what is the minimal viable product?By going through the five questions, we are able to take action only in ways that supremely benefit our service, our clients, and the thousands of patients who rely on InQuicker.com to access care each week. But most importantly, the five questions benefit our employees in both work and life. We believe in exponential value and doubling down on our core competencies so that we can achieve healthful work-life balance.We created a company and a culture that we all love, and by working smarter we can enjoy the lives we’ve built more than the company we’ve built – which is how it should be.
Many of our partners have their own on-going research and the research shows exactly that – InQuicker.com is improving on-site wait times and the overall hospital experience. From our own data, we’ve found that 8 out of 10 patients wait on-site less than 15 minutes before seeing a health care professional. Among the general ER visiting public, that number is only 18% nationwide.
Furthermore, 92.4% of patients who visit the ER using InQuicker.com express positive feedback about the overall hospital experience. It’s an unprecedented level of satisfaction – one that is afforded to patients by the convenient option to do most of their waiting from the comfort of home.
You can find more information about our most recent on-site wait time study at this link: http://blog.inquicker.com/
2012/07/11/emergency-rooms- offering-inquicker-beat- national-wait-time-statistic- by-70-percent/
It’s not a dilemma, but InQuicker is a rare business model in that we are a health IT company that wasn’t built by taking capital investment. We’ve been privately held since day one and have turned down all offers from investors to date. There are a lot of companies out there getting considerable attention, but so many of their stories have nothing to do with the value they deliver to their end users, which they certainly do. The stories have to do with the fact that they received yet another round of funding or were bought out by some larger company for a big payday.The decision to take on funding or not was a dilemma until we chose to go the path of less mass and follow our gut feelings. We’ve built a company we love, and we’re fulfilling a mission about which we are all truly passionate. In the process, we’ve become the experts in the niche we’ve carved out inside the health care industry. Why give that up? Why let someone else have control of the reins? At the end of the day, we all want to be a part of something special – something just like the company that we can currently call our own. That’s not to say that we wouldn’t ever take on funding if the opportunity were right. We’re in a great place as a business with projections to continue growing exponentially, but much of that is owed to our decision to stay small and nimble back when we did.
One of the most difficult things to evaluate when you are starting a business is what to spend time on, since there never seems to be enough hours in the day and many times you feel like a puppy being attracted by the shiny object of what you should do.For us, we’ve utilized the five questions to help us prioritize and focus our time, and evaluate what are really the most important opportunities to pursue. We are not perfect by any means, but the ability to say “no” to things that aren’t critical allows us to say “yes” to what is most important and we feel that’s a good start.
Aside from world domination? Only playing. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure what’s next for InQuicker.com but what I do know is that we will continue to offer the most value that we can to current partners and patients, and look to grow our business in the coming years. We are launching our mobile website in the next few weeks, allowing even more convenient access to patients who are searching for health care help on the go.
Whatever we decide to do, it will continue to fall in line with our mission to end unnecessary health care waiting and bring power to the patient.
Linkage:
Checkout InQuicker here at their website
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