Physicians need trustworthy service providers in every aspect of their lives. But they’re often too busy to dedicate their limited free time to sorting through referrals and internet searches.
That’s why Physician Focused created a platform designed to save physicians time and money.
“We started with this idea of cutting down the time physicians take to find services for their life and practice,” said Caleb Ulffers, Physician Focused CEO. “A physician who’s working 90 or 100 hours in a week when they’re on-call might not have the luxury of using their time [in that way].”
Justin Nabity, Reid Lancaster and Ryan Scott founded the Omaha-based startup. Nabity and Lancaster and are also behind 10-year-old parent company Physicians Thrive. Scott is an attorney at Welch Law Firm.
Physicians Thrive provides financial advising services to over 4,500 physician partners. Scott suggested that they could help physicians in other areas of their lives as well, and the founders started formalizing the idea into a business.
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Scott put together funding for the platform with a team of physicians from around the country.
“Not only did he raise money, but he was able to validate some of the core ideas with this board of physicians that believed in it so much that they also wanted to put money into it,” said Ulffers. “That’s how it got started up to the point where they brought me on in August.”
With Ulffers on board, the Physician Focused team spent the next several months building the platform and hand-picking providers that understand the needs of medical professionals.
Currently, the platform boasts over 65 services for physicians’ professional and personal needs, covering things like job search support, digital reputation management, continuing medical education (CME) tracking, a forum to collaborate with peers and daily medical news.
Ulffers said the platform enables physicians to play a more active part in their digital profiles.
“Doctors who maintain an online profile, whether it’s part of their private practice or they’re a hospitalist who is a more prominent doctor, they often don’t have the time to manage them,” said Ulffers. “We provide a service that helps them manage that, and alerts them to any sort of negative reviews or potential buyer intent reviews, meaning anyone who is ready to schedule an appointment.”
The platform also helps physicians find jobs without having to speak to recruiters directly.
“We partnered with National Coalition of Healthcare Recruiters, the largest non-contingent recruiting firm in the United States,” said Ulffers. “We go on behalf of a physician looking for a job to these recruiting agencies looking for positions for them. We’ll submit it to them and if they’re interested, then we’ll make the connection. It helps to protect their information.”
Ulffers said that CME tracking alone is so beneficial to physicians that they’re willing to pay anywhere from $500 to $1200 a year just for that one feature from other service providers.
“We are excited to be approved for the prototype grant [from the Department of Economic Development] in the amount of $40,000,” said Ulffers. “We’ll be using the funds to further development on our CME tracking system and to add cloud storage for physician-specific documents.”
Physician Focused just launched, but the startup is already talking about what’s next.
“There’s no other site that currently has all these things built together,” said Ulffers. “What we’d like to do is continue adding benefits and services for physicians to make it an even bigger and more value product for them.”
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Christine McGuigan is the Managing Editor of Silicon Prairie News.
