Healthcare for Gen Z
By Tamar Vidra
In 2020, I became a semi-expert on head injuries. My friend bumped his head within two weeks of receiving a concussion: a simple mistake that bore horrendous circumstances for the remainder of the year. His vision, energy, and sleep were severely impaired, and focusing on homework or zoom classes posed a serious challenge. Headaches became a fact of life. Returning to the normalcy of his old brain was put into question.
Yet, his biggest frustration was finding a doctor. First, there was the problem of where to go. Finding a specialist that could help solve his problems soon proved a greater task than simply typing “concussion doctor” and choosing “within 10 miles” on Google. Apparently, there are many different schools of thought on how to treat concussions, and more than a few of the doctors on ZocDoc that would readily take your money in exchange for the blanket recommendation of “rest in a dark room and avoid screens.”
Estimating the financial cost of seeing a doctor felt near impossible. The ambiguity surrounding clinics’ policies towards different types of insurance and pricing persuaded my friend to incorrectly believe that his visits would amount to thousands of dollars. Understanding copays, deductibles, and the milieu of other payment methods felt more daunting than his stochastic calculus math course. Doctors and New York City bars have one thing in common: more often than not, they stick you with a bill that, pleasantly stated, surprises you.
Lastly, his most insurmountable challenge was privacy. At the age of 21, he was still on his parent’s insurance, which meant that his parents would likely be alerted by any visit to the doctor through medical bills. Due to personal reasons, he wanted to keep his trips to the doctor off the list of dinner table conversations.
Each of these hurdles to receiving much-needed medical care provoked confusions, many of which led me to my last resort: Reddit. On the internet, it is not uncommon to discover that a surprising amount of people resonate with one’s own niche and esoteric dilemmas. However, the magnitude of young people I found online struggling with their own respective ailments and illnesses and in the same ways as my friend was baffling to me. Through going down the rabbit-hole of Reddit threads, I became unusually knowledgeable about concussions and more attune to important problems within healthcare for Gen Z.
Due to Covid-19 tailwinds, many VCs and techies have been bullish on the online shift within healthcare. While this seems to be the most obvious development that the pandemic has instilled within healthcare, there are plenty of other areas of opportunity that are just as interesting and often way less competitive.
The story I told illuminates three problems that specifically relate to Gen Z and healthcare.
1. The complete and utter confusion problem: Where should I go? Who should I see? How does billing work? What’s included in my healthcare plan? This problem is especially prevalent in Gen Z but permeates across generations (unnecessary ER visits cost $47B a year!)
2. The privacy problem: In 2010, the affordable care act allowed an estimated 15M people to stay on their parent’s healthcare plan. However, this solution posed a tremendous privacy problem that has been left unsolved for. Even D2C birth control companies like the Pill Club and Lemonaid, who have tried to get around the privacy issue, have warned their users who pay through insurance that suspicious bills may arrive home. Their proposed solution: call your insurance company and beg them to not send a bill or omit as much private information about the cause of the bill as possible. Arguing with insurance companies is not a fun or familiar task for anyone, much less for teenagers and college students.
3. The price problem: the price of healthcare in the United States is so notorious that it’s a topic in presidential debates. While government may play an equal role as tech in addressing this problem, startups still have plenty to innovate here in improving the transparency of pricing and creating new, less burdensome, and intuitive payment methods. That’s another commonality between Healthcare and bars in NYC: prices are rarely publicized and it’s quite embarrassing to ask “how much.”
It will take a herculean effort to surmount these issues. Policymakers have been stumped on how to address these topics for years; and investors, until relatively recently, have shirked from healthcare as a “bad neighborhood”: its convoluted, stubborn to change, and worse, un-investible. The iron is still hot from the branding job of the confusion, privacy, and price problems. Nonetheless, certain subsectors are opportune to make initial headway on these problems. Two that have caught by attention is insurance-tech and mental health tech.
Insurance-tech startups that are Gen-Z and millennial-facing and pay special attention to UI/UX are poised to win in this sector. Look to RealWorld, a startup on a mission to make “adulting” easier, for a case study on how great design can make both the mundane and intimidating of topics easily accessible and, dare I say, sexy? Startups focused on developing new forms of healthcare or educating patients on how their own plans work should take note. Another trailblazer is River, a subscription-based healthcare startup that combines online, in-person, mental health care, and more services in their packages. With a mission to make healthcare more affordable and approachable, they are extremely transparent in their pricing and benefits. Solv is another startup on my radar and focused on helping patients book same-day appointments while providing greater visibility into pricing and what is covered before the appointment.
Hedvig, a neo-insurer based in Sweden, is taking a different but apparently successful approach, rapidly expanding its consumer base among Gen-Z and Millennials across Europe. In addition to offering “accident insurance,” which covers hospital stays, dental injuries, rehabilitation, therapy, cosmetic injuries, and more without deductibles and cover, the company has expanded its suite of products to include home insurance and “clumsiness insurance” that covers all of your stuff with one policy. While many believe that their core customer base — those under 30 — would not be cautious enough to spend their discretionary income on extra insurance, Hedvig has proved that UI/UX and marketing plays a huge factor in consumer adoption. With 40% of their growth coming through organic channels and word-of-mouth, they are verifiably a “cult brand.”
In mental health coverage, patients experience the utter confusion, price, and privacy problems to an extreme. Finding a therapist is often a significant barrier to attending therapy. Unlike other professionals in healthcare, therapists do not simply have to be credentialed to match with patients. Patients need to build a trust and connection with their therapists, and they also need their therapists to be open to taking more patients. Oftentimes, patients must wait for months to be seen my a professional, despite their dire circumstances. The extreme bottlenecks in this matching process is only heightened by the growing popularization of therapy.
Mental health treatments also pose significant financial challenges for patients, even those who are insured. There is a large and growing segment of patients who struggle to get their insurance to cover their therapy visits and medication bills, and an even faster growing segment of patients who benefit from therapy despite having milder mental health challenges that do not qualify for a diagnoses on DSM-5. Without a formal diagnoses, patients can be left uninsured. I am looking for startups tackling this issue in particular. Real, an on-demand group therapy startup, has caught my attention.
In my opinion, telehealth is not the most exciting trend that emerged out of the pandemic. Putting a camera in front of a doctor is extremely convenient, but it is not particularly innovative. Rather, I am more excited about the applications of digitalizing health. With more and more of healthcare shifting online, startups can be nimble enough to tackle the more pressing and complex problems that plague the sector. All of the startups referenced in this piece incorporate telehealth as one tool out of many (think UI/UX, subscription business models, unique product offerings and growth strategies) to pursue their mission. For Gen Z, a generation that is both particularly susceptible to the challenges of the sector and openminded to solutions provided by digital health, the opportunity pushed forward by the pandemic is immeasurable.