RX_Paula Muto: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

RX_Paula Muto: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

John Shufeldt:
Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of Entrepreneur RX, where we help health care professionals own their future.

John Shufeldt:
Hello, everybody and welcome back to Entrepreneur RX. I'm really excited to have a uber physician on today. Her name is Paula Muto. She has started a company called UBERDOC, and I met Paula a few months ago talking about this concept which was super intriguing. Paula, welcome!

Paula Muto:
Thank you. Thanks for having me today.

John Shufeldt:
So you have a pretty cool background, so what's the backstory behind it?

Paula Muto:
So I'm actually, I'm a general vascular surgeon in private solo practice. Like, I kind of break a few molds there. But my dad was a great surgeon, a thoracic surgeon. My brother is a general oncologist, I'm married to another general vascular surgeon, I have two uncles in surgery, all in Massachusetts for a collective century.

John Shufeldt:
Wow!

Paula Muto:
So you might say that like it's the family business. So being on the front lines of medicine, I kind of didn't like the system. I was working in an inner-city next to an affluent community, like many of us we work with a health center and we work with other places and watching hospitals cannibalize each other, especially in Massachusetts, during all the changes. And I thought this is silly. We can make this better. So I started writing a lot of angry letters to the Wall Street Journal and then I thought, maybe I could put my money where my mouth is and try to fix it. So I put a bunch of colleagues in a room, doctors, nurses, people manage, care experts, and pragmatic experts, and I said, I have an idea, and it's really kind of simple. What if patients could just find a doctor nearby and available, push a button and just make an appointment without a phone call and without a referral and make it a transparent price? But rather than make it a high price, let's lower the price a little bit, just make it easy. And then I went and pitched it, would you take a patient for cash? And if they didn't show up, they would pay you something? And everyone said yes. So everyone said, what a great idea, let's do it. So we started with it as a surgical kind of specialty model where you could get an appointment in orthopedics the next day, and then it rapidly expanded to include every specialty. All our primary care colleagues, medical specialists, every surgical specialty, doctors from across the country, every state now. We have now thousands of doctors in our network. And so we are the first and largest direct-pay specialty network. And the core mission was really simple and has remained the same, access and price transparency, just make it easy, don't make it hard. When patients are sick, they just need to see somebody right away. So I used to call it a walk-in model for specialty care.

John Shufeldt:
That's really quite, you know, I started MeMD as a virtual medicine business in 2010, my, kind of go-to-market pitch was, you know, you have a doctor, you don't have any friends that are doctors, now you have a doctor to call, transparent pricing, twenty-four seven. I mean, we really did primary care or urgent care, so specialty is really cool. And is it virtual and in-person? Or is it?

Paula Muto:
Absolutely. So we always say you find a doctor who's nearby and available on our platform, but the word nearby has changed, right? Nearby doesn't have to necessarily mean three miles away anymore, it could be available within state lines through a telemedicine model. And we did have telemedicine before COVID because one of the big fathers of telemedicine, Milton Chen, found us and said, hey, you have the model, this is beautiful, I've wanted to put telemedicine in the hands of an end-user, namely a physician. And so I said, well, what do doctors need, what do specialists do with telemedicine? But whatever we'll take it. And then COVID hit, and all of our doctors were kind of in that position, and now I become a big advocate of every doctor, no matter who you are, you need to have a virtual examining room in addition to your physical one. And I think telemedicine has tremendous potential that we haven't even begun to tap in terms of access issues.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, totally. So you have doctors right now, you have multiple specialists in all of the 50 states, how many total providers do you have on your network?

Paula Muto:
So I'm going to be, I'm going to pull the provider card, we don't have any providers, we only have doctors.

John Shufeldt:
Very good.

Paula Muto:
No, I'm sorry. We have to, you know, again, the word provider canceled out because it was used to describe Jewish physicians during the Holocaust. That was presented to me about three months ago, and now I'm like, very sensitive. Yes, so during the Holocaust, yes, it was used for Jewish, to devalue Jewish physicians, they were renamed providers.

John Shufeldt:
No.

Paula Muto:
And so then when women and minorities and insurance companies started ruling the roost, the word provider became utilized. So we don't like the word provider, we use physician, PSs is all we have on our platform. But we have over 4,000 now in seventy-five specialties, every state I think but Utah, for some reason we haven't in North Dakota, but we're getting there. And the exciting thing is we have partnerships now with medical cost-sharing groups. You know, there's a lot of this what we call the new age self-insured companies, people who are kind of looking beyond the traditional insurance model. These are sometimes captive groups that want direct pay. They want, they just want to know the price, and price transparency is a federal law. So we're kind of sitting on the front end of, we're kind of the dating app I like to say, we get you in the door, and then patients can utilize their insurance or go direct pay for the next route. We are completely agnostic and again we encompass the DPC world as well as the specialty world because all of our colleagues in primary care are in fact specialists, right? Internal medicine, family practice, they're specialists, too.

John Shufeldt:
Right. But I'm still blown away that my hero, Viktor Frankl, was called a provider. Wow.

Paula Muto:
Yeah. I mean, it's like, yeah, it's one of those things that it took. But I think it's spreading through the doctor social media, whatever, we're not very social, but there are some nice articles about it highlighting Jewish physicians who actually escaped during the Holocaust and came to this country and were huge leaders in their field, researchers, and.

John Shufeldt:
That's amazing. Ok, so you actually really have kind of three businesses. You're doing general vascular surgery, then you also run a vein center, correct?

Paula Muto:
I do. So that's kind of one of the reasons I think I was, I'm the only independent doctor left in my community, and I think I was able to kind of set, kind of weather that storm because I've always done, I've always been a vascular surgeon and a general surgeon, because as a woman, women wanted women, right? So I always had a robust breast practice, general surgery practice, but vascular is my training and where my heart is, and when Lipitor and smoking cessation started taking the arterial disease way, you know, venous disease was always part of my practice. And it's funny because women vascular surgeons, the three of us that are out there have always been on the front end of venous disease because they, you know, they always had, oh, that lady doctor, she will take care of your veins. And now venous disease, huge disease in this country, 30 percent of the population gets worse with age and obesity. We just actually literally published a paper with our residents about restless leg syndrome. So I've always had a vein clinic, but it really did teach me about UBERDOC because I had to market to my patients, I knew early on that the primary carers weren't always educated enough about venous disease. A lot of them don't even take shoes and socks off anymore, there's no time for that. My husband and I staff all the wound clinics, we do all the wound care in our community, so then we see the kind of the end results of it. And so I started marketing directly to my patients using the internet. That's how I kind of realized there's a lot of money people spend to have fancy websites, but then no one drives traffic to them, doctors don't understand how the internet works in terms of referral, and that was a lot of the impetus behind UBERDOC to be able to give doctors basically a free website and get them out there, you know, hey, you've got to be a digital doctor. You know, you have to not just see your patients online. I mean, you have to be able to market your patients directly through the internet, Doctor Google is a very big referring physician for specialists.

John Shufeldt:
Sure.

Paula Muto:
And so, so that's kind of where it all came from. So, yeah, so my vein center, I have one of the best teams in the business. I actually am very blessed by the people I work with for, oh God, 15, 20 years now. And so, so we do a lot of it and like, you know, you do a lot of something, you finally figure it out.

John Shufeldt:
You think so, just by talking to you, I can and everybody almost see very quickly there is no burnout in you. And one of my theories is for myself, you know, I've been doing this for a while as well. The reason I don't think I ever got burned out in emergency medicine which is a really high burnout field, and I suspect vascular surgery would be as well as a tough field, obviously.

Paula Muto:
Yeah, general surgery is a very high burnout, yes.

John Shufeldt:
But I think for me, at least, it was that I had, I could use my creative talents for things outside of just direct patient care, like running these businesses. That's the sense I get from you.

Paula Muto:
You know what? I'm going to now kind of cheat. I'll tell you the real story. My dad is a great thoracic surgeon, but he was an inventor. He had a quote "machine shop" which I always thought was like the back of a mechanic's garage. But when I ever saw it, it's like, Oh my God it's like says hi-tech R&D place. He used to work with engineers, he designed things, instruments, that would modify things whether it's a tracheostomy collar, pacemaker leads, in-chest tube insertion trays, and we always call dad a crazy inventor, we never called him an entrepreneur, but he was passionate. He was a great doctor who operated till the day he died, but he loved the young people, he loved being in that world where he was inventing things and being able to fix problems and make it easier for someone else. So I saw how much joy he had in his practice till the end really, he never lost that joy. And I think that there are a lot of obstacles in our way as doctors, especially surgeons, there's so much burnout because you have to be employed, you can't stay independent, you have to put up with a bunch of nonsense that is really interfering with your patient care. You can be disruptive, you know, you complain, and then they wrist-slap you or sham-peer review you. I mean, it's just ugly, but I don't believe we give up, we just find a new path.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, so that's actually .... so speaking of not giving up, this is what I really want to chat a lot about with you. As you and I talk briefly about, so first off, I'm really excited about UBERDOC, so congratulations, that's really cool. And I've got all sorts of great ideas I want to run by you. But anyway, so you had the challenges of starting this business, running the business, practicing medicine, I get all that, but then you went out fundraising, tell people about that story, because that is.

Paula Muto:
Well, you know, like, again, I'm a woman and became a surgeon. You know that there are challenges, but you have a playbook, right? When I applied to surgical residency, my mentor, you know, my advisor sat me down and said apply to these programs, not these ones, because these programs graduate women, these don't. It was pretty OK, so you didn't apply to the ones that didn't graduate women, right? It's kind of pretty logical, right? When it came to business, there's no playbook for women, none, you only can follow kind of the startup playbook, and there's a ton of information for startups, there are startup groups and there are all sorts of pitch contests and there's all this stuff out there. So I'm like, OK, fair enough, we just do our homework, we do our study, prepare, do what we need to do. I'm a very prepared person, so I'd go in into these audiences, I'd pitch and I'd get like a standing ovation because of course, everyone has a visceral reaction when you couldn't get the care that you needed, that breast lump that you had to wait for, right? Everybody knows how health care is and how this is just such a wonderful solution and people would say, "oh my god, I want to use this". Then crickets, like crickets? Like nothing. Now, I should say at the beginning, doctors have always supported me, my local doctors, the people around me, my friends and family gave me money at the beginning, which is a good place to start. So when we tried to pitch it to the angels, which is the next level, again, so after a while I decided, what's wrong with me? There must be something wrong with me. And then the Wall Street Journal article came out about, you know, about women founders and the statistics, and I didn't know that only two percent of women raise money. So I immediately went to my lawyer first, and I'm like, how did you not know this? Oh, I don't know. I guess I didn't realize it. It's like, how do you not know this? If I told the patient, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know this operation I just performed on you was never going to work, they'd say you're not a very good doctor, isn't it your job to know? And then I went to my very, very feminist PR person at the time and said how did you not know this? And I got the same answer. So then I realized I can't blame them. The system doesn't recognize it, and then it became a little harder because, as you know, as a physician, when you move to medicine, it's not, medicine is fairly logical, right? You can kind of figure it out. But business doesn't follow the same rules, right? It's not really a science business, right? You don't always have, you have numbers and stuff, but it's not always easy to navigate that. So it really has been a journey. And I hope at the end of this journey to turn back and make the path a little easier for other people, at least shed the light on some of this because I think we could be better. I think there are phenomenal ideas out there by women, they tend to fall off the train, they don't get down the track because of the funding issues, but when they do make it, they succeed more, which is cool.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned before, I started this venture capital fund and I started it just for that very reason, but I literally had no idea, never even hit my cortex that, and it probably should have so I'm embarrassed, I'm a white male, but I just, it didn't hit my cortex that women would be less funded than their male counterparts with the same equally great ideas.

Paula Muto:
You know, it didn't hit my cortex either, John, I'll be honest with you because we live in a world of meritocracy. You know, medicine, you know, again, you do your time, you get to fly the plane, right?. No one's going to question it. And so that's the world I lived in is that you can kind of get around some of these things because of your competence, and your credential, and the time you put in. But it always seems like the goalposts are moving. And then we pitched also to some, you know, female founder funds and things like that. But you know, you know, my co-founder who's this whiz kid, you know, 30 years younger than me, she does this brilliant pitch and makes it to semifinals, finals and then loses to a guy in a women's pitch competition because they have like a woman CMO somewhere. I mean, I don't know. It's like, and then you realize, you know, I don't get it. And then I got frustrated and I said, forget it, I'm not fundraising. So I bootstrapped. So that's when I said, hey, forget it. My husband and I, we made, you know, we'll figure it out. But then I realized, if you don't get institutional backing, you will never scale, right? You will never be seen, and UBERDOC could never be a local product. From the beginning, it was a national product and we were on TV once and the platform flooded, so I knew this isn't something, I knew that we had something good here, and so we just had to be patient and continue to build. And then when you are frugal, you build really well, right? When you don't have money, it's like being in the field, when you don't have the right equipment, you get very creative.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, the tourniquet, your belt becomes a tourniquet.

Paula Muto:
Yes, exactly. And I think that's what we've done with UBERDOC and the reason we've gotten so many specialists for like literally a tenth of what other companies have tried to do, I think part of it is, of course, our mission is very clear. People trust because again, you know, because of what we're doing and how we built our company, but also because we, you know, we've had to get along with a lot less.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I know. I mean, you literally live the lean startup mode. When I started MeMD it was the same way, it was all self-funded for quite a long time. That is always angel, it was always friends and family funded. But you're right, you know, the competitors are raising 30, 40 million around or more and we're, you know, you become very lean.

Paula Muto:
That's OK because it sets the price, right? If they have to pay one hundred and fifty million for like Rubicon with two hundred and fifty mid-levels, it's like, whoa, I can't imagine what, when it's worth, right?. I mean, but I think you and I both probably know that we are both practicing. You still practice, you fly everywhere and take care of patients. So you and I have great day jobs, right? Why are we doing this, right? We're trying to fix something.

John Shufeldt:
Change the world.

Paula Muto:
And yes, it's the billion-dollar idea, there's no question. If I get a seat in every waiting room, think of how many waiting rooms are out there and UBERDOC can just sit back. We don't need a big infrastructure to make massive revenue with adoption, and our adoption is, you know, our scalability is unparalleled because of the way we built our model. But that's also because we have this secret sauce. We have the inside track, right? I know how it works, I know how it works, and every day I go see a patient, I know better how it works because I have my ear to the ground.

John Shufeldt:
And I think you being to specialists and subspecialists actually really helped sell that model because before telemedicine was a primary care physician sort of model. I mean, that's how I started it, and but with very few specialists. But now again, with COVID, all of a sudden now people are like, yeah, we absolutely need to be in telemedicine even though I'm a vascular surgeon or even though I'm a neurologist what-have-you.

Paula Muto:
Oh, the access, we have like a phenomenal rheumatologist, she's, Dr. Granita is amazing. And there are eight million people in this country with gout. There are under like 3,000 rheumatologists. I mean, just taking that funnel and increasing that, those access points for people who can in three questions, know your answer, right? That's the beauty of a specialist. We see the same thing over and over again. I talked to a patient, ask them three questions. You know, they have restless leg, they didn't notice any veins, did your mother have veins? Did your father have veins? Oh, my grandfather did. Ok, boom. I made the diagnosis in three questions, right? Just like when you go to the doctor's lounge and you say, you ask your orthopedic colleague, my elbow hurts, right? They don't send you for an MRI. They know, well, you know, they know kind of what the problem is. So just like me health having that family friend to call, I always thought, UBERDOC was that friend. And I always resented the fact that like my brother's a top-two oncologist at the Brigham. To get to my brother, you'd have to phone a friend, call me, call someone else, have the right insurance, have the right employer, pay the right amount of money, and I was like, this, that's just unconscionable. Anyone should have equal access. That's it, anyone should have equal access to the best. That's a lot of what UBERDOC is about. It's that egalitarian approach, and why? Because you and I both know what motivates doctors is never money. It's volume, right? How many cases do you have on the O.R. right? How many gallbladders do you have versus me? How many patients are in your waiting room? Doctors are entirely motivated by the desire to see them. So knowing that you can put a seat in their waiting room. Easily.

John Shufeldt:
You know, it's interesting. I have a relative in town who was having this chronic facial pain, and he's seen all sorts of people and somebody said, somebody I sent him to, a plastic surgeon for a block and he said, you know, you ought to go to see this, an interventional anesthesiologist who does this on their ultrasound. Now they're from out of town, so I called a couple of people and about an hour I had an appointment with it. That person was impossible to get in, this rock star interventional anesthesiologist, but you're right, butt for connections and like you calling people, calling you to get to your brother, you just don't.

Paula Muto:
That's why we need that rock star anesthesiologist on UBERDOC. So we have some of these rock stars. We have a guy on in Nebraska who does like this one of like two or three people that does surgical correction of peripheral neuropathy, and he's getting amazing results.

John Shufeldt:
Wow.

Paula Muto:
You know, and it's like, wow. And this interventional pulmonologist in Pennsylvania. Now, I didn't even know interventional pulmonology existed, it's a fairly new specialty in medicine. And her goal is to eliminate mortality in lung cancer in women because it's diagnosed late, there's a genetic propensity, you can do low-dose CT, so she can do telemedicine, she can do genetic testing. If you take a history genetic test, do a low dose CT and do the bronc and catch them early. You know, those models, I mean, in my own field breast, it's like I can absolutely see the virtual breast center, right? Like these specialty verticals, they can build if you will eliminate the obstacles and bring the access points in. So I have to say UBERDOC attracts really amazing doctors because they have something to share and you can't get to them. And we've only heard again, patients have tremendous satisfaction. But then UBERDOC also has your neighborhood doctor. You need, you have a kidney stone, you come into the E.R. you say, go to your primary, they say I don't have one, you can A, as an E.R. physician, you say, well, go to UBERDOC and find somebody and get seen and you can get seen the next day. And again, we're not an emergency, I should say nobody on, we have a 12-hour lockout, so we don't replace emergency services or urgent care in that sense.

John Shufeldt:
Right. What advice would you give the female physician entrepreneurs out there? I know a number of them and they probably, unbeknownst to me, share your frustrations. You've kind of come out the other end so to speak. What advice do you have?

Paula Muto:
I think that, first of all, there's a network of us and we talk, and I think support is the biggest thing. You know, this is a lens I threw on myself. When I was going through this, complaining about the business world and saying it doesn't happen in surgery, suddenly, I realize, guess what? We're 80 percent. Female doctors make 80 percent of male physicians across the board, except for one specialty. And that's radiology, which is gender-neutral, right? You don't know who your radiologist is, right? Sareh Parangi is the chief of surgery at Newton Wellesley. She's like a full professor, my first full professor in surgery at Mass General has this fantastic talk on parity and she goes through all of this. So suddenly I'm sitting there criticizing the business world and I'm like, whoa, what about the lens on ourselves? So I finally started to dig deeper and deeper and deeper and realize that some of this is that proud, you know, do you make, you know, no one would want to say, I make less money. No one wants to say I'm treated differently, right? No one wants to say it because it puts a perceived weakness. So if you go to a founder, a female founder, and said, are you having trouble raising money? Some of them will say, you know, if I say yes, it means my company is no good. We've got to go way beyond that and say we failed, I make less, I work just as hard as you and I make less. You know, and I don't know why that is, but I need to at least acknowledge it. So I definitely think that moving women and then that's true for minorities, too, moving everybody into a much more transparent, you know, just recognize it and say, yeah, it exists and it exists for this reason. All investment to me is friends and family, whether it's an actual friend or family, or someone who's private equity that looks just like you and they look at you and they say, hey, this is just like a person I know. I think that you have to break those, you need to or anonymous stuff. You know, the new telescope that's up in space, you have to apply for time on it, and they realize that the same people were always getting time, so they decided to do something interesting. They took away the person who's applying for it, they didn't know who was applying for the time. They just literally looked at the reasons why, the studies they were doing. Just on the merits of the scientific experimentation and all of a sudden, 30 to 40 percent of them were women, and they were before, like five percent. So they were coming from labs that they had never, and they kept saying, oh, this this this report's really good, it must come from this guy. It's like, no, it didn't, this, it came from somewhere else. Same thing with the, you know, the orchestra, symphony orchestras decided that you had to play your instrument behind a screen.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah.

Paula Muto:
And then all of a sudden more, you know, there was an increase in diversity. So I think that investment would be really cool that way. I think it would be really cool to just take the names off. And I know the team is the most important thing, which is in some ways kind of crazy, right? Beasties always saying I invest in the person, the team. It's like, maybe that should be the last thing you look at, right? Because the team could be the project, right? And not just say that you don't invest in the person running the company and the idea, but it almost seems like, you know, if you had it all pitched by the same person, what would there be any differences in what you invest in?

John Shufeldt:
Well, it's kind of funny, now that you bring that up, you know, your namesake, Uber, nobody, no, nobody now would invest in Travis Kalanick knowing what they know about him. But in the companies.

Paula Muto:
The idea was game-changing.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, same with WeWork. I mean, knowing what you know about the yipe probably wouldn't have invested in them. And so you're right, people, I hear, he says all the time and I'm sure I will or have said it or, you know, I'm, you know, Paula, I'm gonna invest in you because I believe in you and your mission, and that makes total sense to me. But then obviously, people are wrong given some of the fallout of a lot of these huge startups of late.

Paula Muto:
Right. And I think that it's hard to take the team away from the project because it's so much. I mean, I'm, UBERDOC is my third child, right? So it's like, this is like, this is I am UBERDOC. But I do think that from the merits of an investment, it is still data and revenue and forecasts and market fit, right? And it's all those things, it's the addressable market, it's everything. So we do look at it in a scientific way and with data and numbers. So I'm just wondering at some point in those investment circles, you know, erase that or switch, you know, because I really, you know, I was at a meeting once the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs in Boston, and I was on a panel and they had this young guy on the panel with me from one of the Boston venture capital firms. And he was going on and on and on to these poor physician entrepreneurs who are in the audience trying to get, you know, tidbits on how to get their money, how they get their company funded. And they were hanging on his every word and he was, you know, I shouldn't say typical millennial, very chatty, happy guy, all you know, very. So I asked him, I said, you know, you understand that so few women get investment. He said, yes. I said, why do you think that is? So Chatty ... went silent. Ok, silent. And then he realized, I can't be silent. I'm got to say something, right? And so what does he say? He says, well, we're just more comfortable investing in people we know. Literally just came off his tongue. So at that point, every doctor in there was like closed the book and say, OK, you don't know me.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, see you.

Paula Muto:
Right? See you. You know, and it's like, but I mean, it was the truth, right? He said the truth. And so you can't criticize. You just have to acknowledge it and say, well, you're going to make a change, how do you make that change? Because there's you can't invest in every idea that's out there, right? That's kind of crazy. A lot of them are going to fail and you don't want just token investment. You want to make sure that you're supporting. But women companies that do get investment do succeed two to one. And I think that's because you invest in us when we're like through college, whereas you're investing in male companies when they're still in junior high. You know, I just, I just ... right, well, I think that's just, I think that's actually the truth. We get invested in kind of later stage instead of like even though we're really kind of not later, we're later stage maturity-wise, but not funding-wise.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, that's interesting. Ok, so what would you, I mean, you look like you are about twenty-five and you're probably a few years older than that just given all the training you've had, what would you tell your younger self now, now that you know everything you've been through all this, now go back to the start of UBERDOC. What would you tell yourself? Like run away, run away? Or what would you do different?

Paula Muto:
You know, the mistakes are what make you better. It's not the case that you succeeded. It's the one you failed that you change your technique and figure out how to make it better. So I kind of look back at this and say, if I had gotten money early on, I don't think we would be where we are. I think pretty confidently, I could say that. So what I'd say to my younger self is that the only thing is I being, kind of structure function-oriented, I figured that, oh, once we built, our platform was done, right? You kind of figure out, oh, you build it, you're finished. It's like, no, you're just beginning. And so maybe the patience part of it, like understanding that this would be a long-term play, that this wasn't going to be build it, sell it, you know, make a splash and get out. It was going to be something that was going to have to build. If you're going to build something big, you don't get away with cutting corners, you're going to have to put the time. And so I guess what, I just, I think patience is the only thing, it's like being prepared to go longer. But it's hard to, like I said, I'm not somebody who ever looks back on regrets. I mean, I look back and say that was a dumb decision. But at the time you tried to make the best decision you could.

John Shufeldt:
It's funny. I have literally the exact same perspective. And I wonder now if this perspective is shared by all entrepreneurs because if you went back and beat yourself up for all of this, you'd be I'd be black and blue, but I look back and laugh at myself, say, wow, I could have done that a lot better. What did you learn? Move on, go.

Paula Muto:
And I think that medical people are very built internally intrinsically for entrepreneurship in the sense that I always said it every doctor is a small business person. Whether you work in a big hospital or you're, because again because we're transactional, we work on our patients the way we're motivated and everything we do is risk-benefit. Everything we do. And we, unlike most people, risk-benefit literally, as is what we're, what we are exceptional at.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, we live that. I live in the emergency room ....

Paula Muto:
That the only Achilles heel I think we have is empathy.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah.

Paula Muto:
Right? Because empathy is what drives us. And in business, it's not always a good quality, right, because you have to be willing to make a pretty nasty decision or something that you don't think is necessarily a good decision for, like, it's not a nice decision, but it's really good as a business decision. And I think that that kind of I would say Achilles heel, I think, that can kind of stop or potentially can make you delay in recognizing something that's good for the company.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, it's funny. I speak on that very subject often about the difficult business decisions that they may not bring out your empathetic side, but in fact, are probably good for the person and for the businesss.

Paula Muto:
And yeah, I mean again, and that's just part of our nature. And but that doesn't mean physicians can't make great companies and in health care. I'm not saying I'm selling, you know, making a company, selling shoes. I'm selling something that we live and breathe every day. I'm giving something to doctors that they need and giving to something to patients that they need and that we don't have in the marketplace. So the end of the day, what is UBERDOC? UBERDOC is creating a marketplace.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah.

Paula Muto:
It's between doctors and patients. And as we keep building the doctor marketplace, nothing stops us, right? Nothing stops us. I can shame any doctor into giving in for a direct-paid patient. And on the patient side, what stops us there once we have this core of patients who know that they can access to healthcare for an affordable price anywhere in the country, even if they live in Austin, Texas, and they work in New York, how are they going to get health care? Are they're going to fly to New York for it? It's ridiculous, right? We are very much positioned in the modern world. At the end of the day, the doctor who's nearby and available who can solve a problem. That's, you know, medicine isn't very high tech at the end, it's very much personal.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, exactly. It's hands-on. Well.

Paula Muto:
It's hands on ...

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, totally. Where can people find out? This has been amazing, and I have all sorts of follow-up questions for you at our next go-around. But where can people find out more about you?

Paula Muto:
So they can reach me directly. I'm super reachable, Paula@Uber-docs.com or they can go to the UBERDOC site, the website, and there's an about page, there's contact stuff there, there's a lot on our page. I've written a lot as well. I do write a lot about policy. Part of the other part of this is advocacy, which is really exciting because I know you also are interested in that, you know, changing the system because we don't like it, but we have to change it at every level.

John Shufeldt:
Internal. Yeah, from inside.

Paula Muto:
And so that's been very exciting, too, because there's a lot of, you know, again, my website has a lot of information on it. You just go to UBERDOC and find Uber-docs.com or you can Google UBERDOC. And if your physicians are listening out there, join UBERDOC. I need that, that, that, that facial nerve person, that's exactly the kind of specialist. And some people say to me, you know, I'm so busy, it takes weeks to get into me. I said you're like a Hamilton ticket because, you know, I kind of joke that UBERDOC is Ticketmaster, right? General surgeons, we're Cats, nobody wants us. Funny, but, you know, like a great plastic surgeon, like a great dermatologist or one of these specialists that do something.

John Shufeldt:
Hamilton.

Paula Muto:
You're like Hamilton tickets, right?

John Shufeldt:
That's classy. I love that analogy.

Paula Muto:
Ticketmaster. And that's the funny part, is what can we do next? Well, you know how Ticketmaster says you don't just get the ticket to the show. You get a discount at the hotel, you get a discount at the restaurant, well, guess what? Everyone's coming to us, surgeon centers, people, imaging, like people like green imaging, blood tests, and prescriptions. There are all these great companies out there that are offering very good prices for generic drugs, right, and they are looking too, so our patient side of our marketplace is now going to be able to access. So my moonshot is that the UBERDOC platform becomes the symbol for transparency, so we don't set the prices. But if you go to your service center or your hospital or your imaging center and you see UberDocs sign in the window, you know you can get a transparent price.

John Shufeldt:
Very good. Well, Paula, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for being on being on the show. We'll have all this information in our show notes as well as links to you, links to UBERD0C, and kind of the general description of what we talked about. So thanks for being on this.

Paula Muto:
Oh, terrific! It was really nice talking to you today.

John Shufeldt:
Thank you! You too.

John Shufeldt:
Thanks for listening to another great edition of Entrepreneur Rx. To find out how to start a business and help secure your future, Go to JohnShufeldtMD.com. Thanks for listening.

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