Our next guest is a pain physician who has spent years reviewing records and testifying in various personal injury lawsuits. He saw a big bottleneck involving these cases and medical records retrieval and so decided to start a new company to address that issue. Mike Switzer interviews Gabe Hillegass, founder of Solverein in Charleston, SC.
TRANSCRIPT:
Switzer: Hello and welcome to the South Carolina Business Review. This is Mike Switzer. Our next guest is a pain physician who has spent years reviewing records and testifying in various personal injury lawsuits. He saw a big bottleneck involving these cases and medical records retrieval and so decided to start a new company to address that issue. Gabe Hillegass is founder of Solverein in Charleston, South Carolina, where he joins us from now by phone. Gabe, welcome to the program.
Hillegass: Thanks for having me, Mike.
Switzer: Now give us some more details about how all of this got started and what exactly it is that the company does.
Hillegass: Mike I sit with patients who are unable to work, struggling to make ends meet, dealing with tremendous uncertainty medically, financially, and socially. In my pain medicine practice, I often treat patients with serious injuries, and many of them are in the middle of a legal case. Over the years, I provided medical legal consultations, given depositions, worked as an expert witness, as you've alluded to, and I kept seeing the same problem. Records arrived late or incomplete, cases stall, and my patients carry the stress. I started Sovereign Built Medical Ease because they deserve better, and I became passionate about fixing it. Medical Ease is a web application built for legal teams and the clients they serve. It streamlines medical record retrieval through automation, sourcing them through national networks that are connected to over 80,000 providers. The main bottleneck with record retrieval is that health providers put patient care and billing record requests first. This means that requests from law firms go to the back of the line. And one injury case can involve many providers who work in different health systems. Our, research at Solveren shows that law firms spend three to six weeks just getting a complete set of records.
Switzer: Okay, and so walk us through the mechanics then of how your software changes that equation.
Hillegass: Medical Ease leverages the individual's right of access to their health information. It verifies their identity and, with proper permissions, sources their health history across provider networks nationwide. Once those records are retrieved, it further categorizes and organizes the information in a usable way for the legal team and for the client.
Switzer: And so it sounds like, getting permission from the patient themselves and their right to their records was key in this equation. And then this, also allows the software to go to the head of the line, as you, indicated might need to happen in some of these cases.
Hillegass: That's correct. The use case is called Individual Access Services. And instead of going to the head of the line, it's a different queue that the individual and their legal team are standing in. So it changes the way that the records flow, and by doing so, dramatically reduces the time that it takes to get a complete record set and creates other efficiencies in the process.
Switzer: And so did you have to learn how to become a software engineer or did you hire a team of experts to build this for you?
Hillegass: I certainly did my own learning about interoperability with health information, as well as learning about various artificial intelligence techniques. But I'm, by no means a software engineer. Been fortunate to recruit a talented team who's been alongside me building the medical lease product and getting it to where it is today, ready to serve injury victims, and their legal teams.
Switzer: And so then how did you get it out into the marketplace in front of, I guess, the law firms across the country who would possibly want to use it?
Hillegass: That's been honestly the hardest part. We've been as a founding team, having conversations with lawyers within our networks, with law firms that are in our communities, and doing a lot of discovery and learning from them, what's worked with their retrieval workflows and what has not. And that's been an important piece of our learning, and our ability to create a product that we believe is going to provide value, for our customers.
Switzer: Any specific marketing plan in mind? Then reaching out, maybe through LinkedIn network of, you know, legal associations, we
Hillegass: are approaching marketing similar to consumer marketing. By that I mean we are targeting paralegals, lawyers, operators, managers of larger legal practices who are on LinkedIn. We're also taking advantage of local bar associations and other trial lawyer associations where these professionals tend to gather and tend to learn and discover new products that can support their business.
Switzer: Well, Gabe, thank you so much for spending time with us today.
Hillegass: Thanks for having me, Mike.
Switzer: Gabe Hillegass is founder of Solverein, joined us by phone from the company's headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina. We will have a link to the company posted at our webpage so you can learn more at South Carolina Public Radio, where you can hear this show again, and you can hear us again wherever you find podcasts. With the South Carolina Business Review, this is Mike Switzer.
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