Tell us about flipMD.
flipMD is a gig marketplace for physicians to work on non-clinical work in industry outside of their clinical duties. The problem we were trying to solve is how to engage physicians that are practicing, and see patients all day long and have insights and expertise into what's happening on the ground, outside of the hospital walls, doing innovative work in medicine, whether that's a medical device company, or a small drug company, or an early-stage startup. How do you build a bridge to connect with them and get their insights and help them with a variety of opportunities? And so we started the company in 2020 with the aim of building that meeting place.
Being under the umbrella now of GoodRx, has that changed the trajectory of flipMD in any way?
Yes, growth and scaling. Now, with additional features, there are additional resources—such as larger scale market research projects. There's a lot of from the platform standpoint of growing our clinician base. The second thing is that there are many suites of products that GoodRx offers providers and finding the right way for us to work within those product suites, introduce our offerings and really give a holistic experience for the clinician. Clinicians are working with GoodRx when they're with their patients, and then they're working with flipMD in their off time, so it rounds out the capabilities and also the physician experience.
Tell us a little bit about the mechanics of how this works.
We wanted to find the right way to engage practicing physicians, so the platform itself is meant to be an opportunity then for them to be in the driver's seat. As a physician, you come to the platform and sign up with an account, you create a profile explaining your medical training, your research interests, your procedural background, all the things that are like a social network, but with the expert medical expertise, that someone would need to have to vet a candidate. On the opposite side, a client would then post a project or a staffing position. They can post anything from a one-hour Zoom call or an advisory role, all the way to a long-term engagement with someone or even a placement as full-time staffing position. Then those physician candidates submit a proposal to work with you, you evaluate them on your own.
Can you give us one or two examples of clients you’ve worked with?
There's a lot of opportunity for early-stage companies. We've had projects that come through where the opportunity is just getting in the mindset of a physician or getting in the in the exam room. We had a project where a company had a digital health solution for hysterectomy and wanted to know how physicians actually deliver that news to a patient.
What makes you different from other organizations?
What we're trying to do is really democratize the opinions pool. It's really hard for physicians, especially within the environment that they're working in now, to think outside of hospital walls. And we're trying to educate and explain their impact on medicine outside of patient care. For young physicians it's a huge opportunity, because they're looking at another 30 or 50 years in this career called medicine. The biggest differentiator for us is just engaging a different physician population than the traditional networks would have. What we're trying to offer is some solutions and some opportunities to diversify that workload and when we hear the news about shortages and physician burnout, and all of these things, it's a really scary field to be going into.
We see our clinicians are often trying to toe the line between non-clinical and clinical, and they don’t really know how to do that. I spoke with someone just the other day who said he physically can’t practice medicine anymore because of the long hours of surgery on his back. He has a ton of experience to share but doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s the perfect person to be on our platform, using what he’s learned in the past 30 years of medicine. We are bringing a different audience that is very innovative and entrepreneurial thinking just by the way of how the platform works and how they come find us.
