The following interview is a conversation we had with Dilpreet Sahota, CEO of Trek Health, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $3M Raised to Help Mental Health Providers Accept Insurance
Dilpreet Sahota
Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me, Brett.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Dilpreet Sahota
Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up here in California. I was born in Fresno, California. I grew up to an Indian immigrant family. It was the first in my family born here in the US. Even my older brother was born india. Family came over in the early ninety s. And yeah, in early parts of my life, super rural area and farms, factories, that’s what sort of life was like in the early days. And one of the things that I ended up shaping the way that my trajectory went forward was when I was seven years old, I lost my mom to leukemia. And from that age I knew I wanted to work within healthcare, I wanted to build within healthcare, I wanted to do things within health care. For a while I thought I wanted to be a doctor. And that was a really shaping experience for me.
Dilpreet Sahota
After high school, I moved out to here in the Bay Area. I came to Berkeley, went to graduate Stanford, and that’s really where I was exposed to the startup ecosystem and the tech story began. Amazing.
Brett
And two follow up questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder and as a CEO, is there a specific CEO that you admire the most? And if so, who is it and what do you admire about them?
Dilpreet Sahota
Totally. So this is a hard question to answer because there’s so many folks I admire. But one example of a CEO I definitely admire, his name is Punit Sony. He’s the CEO of a Founder of a company named Suki S-U-K-I. They’re an AI company within healthcare, really thinking through the process of natural language within healthcare and the workflows that can be changed if healthcare providers and administrative staff didn’t need to do the work that they do today. And slow pace and sort of the manual tasks. And he’s really taken a long approach at how he’s going to build a company that’s defensible and has the technology to really disrupt the industry. And so love beneath and love what he’s building at Suki. What about books?
Brett
There a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder. This can be a business book or could also be a personal book.
Dilpreet Sahota
Totally. Yeah. The main book that I think has really been pivotal for me, it’s a book called Mindset by Carol Dweck. I think this is a relatively popular book now, but thinking through the growth mindset and how you can actually apply that tactically within your day was something that was pivotal for me. Taking responsibility for what your output is within your day to day and helping shape your own trajectory, I think, is really my key takeaway. And I know you asked for one book, but another one I just got a shout out is also Shoe Dog Bill Knight. That was an amazing book and awesome to see how even a company like Nike had to go through the very burdensome pains of being a startup.
Brett
Yeah, I just finished that book a couple of months ago. It’s such a good book, and it’s kind of refreshing to get outside of tech and get into these other industries and see that at the end of the day, business is business to an extent.
Dilpreet Sahota
Totally.
Brett
Now let’s switch gears, and let’s talk about what you’re building there at Trek Health. So what’s the origin story behind the company? And I know you touched on your personal story there a little bit, but what’s the origin story behind the company?
Dilpreet Sahota
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve worked at a handful of companies within the health tech space, companies backed by entries in Horowitz SoftBank within the insured tech space, also within behavioral health space. I’ve held a range of roles working with founders at these companies, doing strategy work, running marketing analytics, helping them grow the businesses. But the way that I came across Trek I mean, I named the company Trek because I was literally Trekking on a trail here in San Mateo when I was thinking through the plan. But my fiancee is a mental health clinician. She just got licensed recently and was going through the process of figuring out how all of that works, how you establish a practice, how you get a business off the ground as a healthcare provider. And I got to see the pains very acutely as that was all happening. And from a technology perspective, the way that this all works is absolutely ridiculous.
Dilpreet Sahota
And even the challenges that these providers are having to solve by getting credentialed, managing the revenue cycle, it’s not a massive challenge, but the old school infrastructure has really held providers back and limited their productivity. And so back in the beginning of 2022, I always knew I wanted to do something of my own, and I went straight in heads first and started Trek Health.
Brett
So I’m guessing that was your dinner conversations with your fiance for quite a few months there. Just extracting everything there is to know about the space?
Dilpreet Sahota
Absolutely. I mean, there’s so much complexity in the healthcare revenue cycle management process. Like, even today, on a weekly basis, I’m uncovering some new nuance that comes across. And yeah, the unfortunate reality is, like, providers, including my fiance, are having to spend a ridiculous amount of time on the phone with insurance networks dealing with angry patients that have a claim that was rejected, and now they got to pay a ridiculous amount out of pocket. And it’s really what causes so many workflow issues in healthcare. And, yeah, dinner conversations are right.
Brett
And why do you think that is? Why is this space so slow to adopt? And why are things so miserable right now for providers?
Dilpreet Sahota
Yeah, so, I mean, fundamentally, what it is the way that all of these transactions are processed within healthcare in the United States today is based on this X twelve infrastructure that was implemented a little over 40 years ago. And it’s what the CMS and the federal government have put in place. They’ve dictated how these transactions should be run, what a provider is expected to do after a patient encounter happens, how an insurance network is supposed to manage those claims. All of that is well defined. But the issue is that the infrastructure is over 40 years old, and the way that the systems were designed were definitely not for scale. And so now, as these healthcare providers are getting things off the ground, there is a massive influx of unstructured data that needs to be put through these old pipelines. And so there’s been so many bandits that have been put on the system over the years that today, the reality of the situation is that of the $4 trillion that are spent in healthcare in the US.
Dilpreet Sahota
Every year, which is, by the way, 20% of US. GDP massive spend 25% of that. So $1 trillion every year is spent specifically on healthcare admin. And most of that is related to billing claims, insurance, all these things, because providers have to end up spending time hiring internal staff or outsourcing their billing workflows so that they can get this manual work done. And that’s really what we’re trying to solve here at Trek Health.
Brett
And is there a specific size organization that you’re selling to? Is this the individual practitioners? Is this a larger practice? What does that typically look like for you?
Dilpreet Sahota
Yeah, so absolutely what we have is a single platform that supports provider groups. So our client is the owner of a practice, generally, that wants to clean up this process and wants to streamline as many of these workflows as they can. So we support provider groups ranging from someone as small as just a couple of providers. And now our largest clients are venture backed startups that have a presence in 15 states and really have grown things out. And so it’s a variety of different clients that we serve. All of these folks are provider groups directly. They’re delivering care to the endpatients and are the ones that have to actually take on the burden of processing transactions with insurance. And yeah, so things have changed over these past few years and we’re seeing a ton of adoption increasingly from these folks that are provider entrepreneurs is what I call them.
Dilpreet Sahota
Whether it’s venture backed or even just someone that just got licensed and now wants to set up their own practice, that’s who we serve.
Brett
And are there any numbers or metrics that you can share that demonstrate the growth and traction you’re seeing so far?
Dilpreet Sahota
Yeah, absolutely. We today are serving 35 clients, over about 200 providers today that are encompassed within those 35 clients. And so the team has been growing quickly and when we’re serving these folks, we are generally taking 5% of the transaction on behalf of these providers to actually service them. And so it’s been a long haul and we’ve only been around for one year and we’ve seen, I think, this pretty quick adoption because of the fact that the pain that these folks are dealing with, they’re just so massive and.
Brett
What’S that sales process like for them and how open are they to buying new technology?
Dilpreet Sahota
Yeah, so in terms of the sales process, what we found is that selling to providers is definitely not the challenge. The pain point resonates very well with these folks. What is the challenge is implementation. Reason being, data interoperability within healthcare is quite lacking. Many of the practice management systems or EHR systems that these groups have within their stack today. Many don’t have APIs or the only way that reporting can be done to port data over to us when we want to integrate is via CSV reports. Or in some cases, even remote process automation or screen scraping might be required to build out integrations here. And so the biggest challenge around go to market has definitely been the integration post sale and the sales process. Thankfully, we’ve had to figure out the interesting ways to reach providers and to get our message out, but thankfully seeing some positive reaction there.
Brett
And how do you think about market categories? Is this mental health payments or how are you defining your market category?
Dilpreet Sahota
Yeah, absolutely. So in the same way that 20 years ago we needed PayPal to allow for the first set of transactions to flow over the internet or via email. And we needed over the years, Plaid to enable banks to be connected to internet products so that users can actually pay for things online. Or now Stripe as a great example of a company that can within minutes allow business to start accepting credit cards online. The way that I see what we’re doing is that we’re doing payments processing within healthcare. So we’re talking about the person that’s actually going out and starting a practice instead of them having to spend three months being credentialed and getting set up with insurance and then spending the 45 days that it normally takes to get paid for a claim after they actually see a patient. We want to make that instant, and we want to enable that through the Internet.
Dilpreet Sahota
And so we’re a vertical SaaS payments product within healthcare specifically. Got it.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And what would you say so far you’ve done right? How have you managed to rise above the noise? Because I feel like this space does have a lot of noise there today.
Dilpreet Sahota
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we’ve really found is that in healthcare, there is a ton of noise, as is the case in most industries. What we have attempted to do is really to obsess with the customer experience. What I’ve learned is that many software companies that try to take on healthcare, and famously, there are prominent companies like Amazon or JPMorgan Chase or Berkshire Hathaway or other companies that have tried to build in healthcare and actually quit and left in substantial ways. But what we’re doing is two things. We’re trying to obsess with the customer experience in a way that is actually specialty specific. So the vast majority of the healthcare providers that we’re serving today are behavioral health providers. So they’re therapists, they’re psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, social workers. And the reason being that instead of trying to chew off more than what we can bite, there’s enough complexity just within this specialty that allows for us to get nuanced and detailed around the CPT code.
Dilpreet Sahota
The transaction flows. Prior authorization, eligibility checks, all of these things that are uniformly teaching us about healthcare. Broadly, but allows for us to create an amazing experience just for a specific customer base. And so I would say focusing on within healthcare, one specific set of specialty providers has really been our key.
Brett
And what’s the tam for that market look like? Are there numbers there you can share just in terms of how many mental health practitioners there are?
Dilpreet Sahota
Yeah, absolutely. So, massive market size, there’s 780,000 mental health providers in America today, and that’s actually close to the total number of physicians. There’s 960,000 MDS and dos physicians in the US. And so the mental health workforce is quite significant. Notably, though, in the physician market. MDS and Dos pretty recently have crossed this critical threshold of more than 50% of doctors in the US. Are now working for corporations, health systems, not in physician owned practices. But that trend most definitely does not stay true within the behavioral market. These 780,000 providers are largely practicing within independent practices owned by clinicians, operated by clinicians, and by effect are also not getting the benefit of the software and the technology that exists within health systems and has really started to evolve within health systems to streamline that process. So these are folks that are disaggregated and also underserved by legacy players.
Dilpreet Sahota
That makes a lot of sense.
Brett
And last couple of questions here for you. What excites you most about the work you get to do every day.
Dilpreet Sahota
Totally. As we think about what Trek Health is doing, in the same way that Stripe allowing for payments to be processed quickly on the Internet has really allowed for both internet entrepreneurs and for your customers on the internet, people on the internet to quickly buy things and quickly do things. Fundamental problem that I see in healthcare today is that there’s a lack of competition. Whether we talk about insurance networks, whether we talk about provider groups, if I get injured and I need to go to an emergency room and the emergency room sends me a bill two weeks later for $10,000, there’s not really much I can do about it. Even if I knew that I was going to be charged $10,000 when I walk in the door, if I’m in pain and I need care, I’m going to seek out those services. And that’s challenging because the lack of competition has put the market in that place.
Dilpreet Sahota
What I’m excited about is the fact that if we can actually make it very easy for provider groups to be stood up and act as competition to the way that care is delivered today, that will enable NetNet A. Better experience for the end patient because patients will have more options to visit psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists or other healthcare providers that accept their insurance and will be paid in a way that today is largely consolidated within a handful of players.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And if we zoom out into the future, what would you say the company is going to look like three years from today?
Dilpreet Sahota
Yeah, absolutely. And the way that I would answer that question is not from like a company sizing perspective or how many customers we serve. Rather what is very important for me is that today a large chunk of transactions that we’re processing on behalf of our providers are quite manual. So a transaction happens, we try to get a claim submitted, the claim gets rejected by the insurance network and then on the back end, inevitably a human has to be on the loop. Someone has to communicate with the insurance network, whether it’s a provider group or someone within our team that’s actually going back and forth and resolving those denials or those issues with payers. What we want to aim to is have less than 10% of total transactions that our team is processing require any sort of human input whatsoever. And that’s a reduction from 100%, which is what most provider groups are doing today.
Dilpreet Sahota
Almost all transactions require some sort of human input and we think that if we can achieve 90% automation, that would be a massive milestone for the industry.
Brett
Amazing.
Dilpreet Sahota
Love it.
Brett
That’s super exciting. Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today’s interview before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey as you build, where’s the best place for them to go?
Dilpreet Sahota
Totally. So Trek Health is on Twitter and also on LinkedIn, so as well as myself, would love to stay in touch with folks there. Awesome.
Brett
Well, thanks so much for taking the time to join us and share what you’re building. This is really exciting and we look to seeing you execute on this vision.
Dilpreet Sahota
Thanks a lot, Brett.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
Dilpreet Sahota
Our channel.
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