HIStalk Interviews Miles Beckett, MD, CEO, Silversheet

Miles Beckett, MD is co-founder and CEO of Silversheet of Los Angeles, CA.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I’m originally a medical doctor. I went to med school at UC San Diego. I was a plastic surgery resident at Loma Linda Medical Center. I left the surgery program. I was very interested in the technology world. I ended up moving back to LA and starting a digital media company that I sold in 2012.

After selling that company, I was excited about re-engaging with healthcare, taking my tech knowledge and partnering up with a friend of mine from medical school who’s an anesthesiologist — Dr. David Rakoff — and then a product and engineering guy Patrick Cheung, who ran product in my last company. We founded Silversheet.

The idea was to improve life for doctors and other providers and the administrators at healthcare facilities, to make the whole process of interacting with medical staff more efficient. We’re starting out with a credentialing and privileging product to try to automate as much of that process as possible and make it easier for everyone.

You helped create the lonelygirl15 Web series that was massively popular in 2006-2008. What did you learn from that experience?

First and foremost, when the market’s ready for an idea, it’s going to happen. Back in 2005-2006, video was becoming possible online and big platforms like YouTube were emerging. Lonelygirl was obviously a big hit and it was awesome, but there were a lot of other Web series emerging at the time. We were part of a bigger movement.

As I was thinking about new companies and new ideas and things to work on, healthcare was appealing. Not just because of my personal background, but also because for a variety of reasons, change is happening. The Affordable Care Act, adoption of EMR technology, and the general sentiment from doctors and administrators that they want things to be better and to be more efficient. That’s one big lesson.

The second one — and a core of our current company as well — is that by building communities, by connecting people together with technology, that’s really where the power is. Silversheet is a great software product, but even more importantly, it’s connecting the doctors and other providers to the facilities. It’s that exchange of information and ideas that makes the magic.

Healthcare IT doesn’t seem all that exciting compared to what you’ve done in the past and other companies already offer electronic credentialing. Do you see Silversheet expanding into new areas?

We’re not 100 percent sure exactly what direction we want to go in down the road. Most of the investment in time and energy so far has been spent on the way that doctors interact with patients or nurses interact with patients. EMRs are probably the best example, but then other types of services and applications that are focused on that. I just don’t think there’s been a lot of energy on, how does the healthcare system actually function behind the scenes? How do the facilities interact with their doctors and their staff?

We’ve talked to a bunch of hospitals and health systems. We’ve been focused right now on the outpatient setting, almost exclusively with surgery centers initially. We’re trying to learn, how do those medical staff offices and how do the administrators in them, what are the different functions that they’re performing? Any of those areas that we think we could improve through a platform like Silversheet that makes it easier for them to exchange information, we would want to do.

What’s the prevalence of electronic credentialing?

Credentialing itself is a decent-sized market. There’s a billion or so dollars that’s spent on it annually. There actually is a lot of credentialing that’s done both by surgery centers and hospitals and other institutions and insurance companies and medical groups that are doing provider enrollment. It’s fairly big in and of itself.

Most importantly, a lot of the ways that it’s been done before, it’s either outsource agencies that may have some technology but maybe not as much as you might think, or software that still requires huge amounts of data entry on the part of the administrators. The thing we’re doing a little bit differently is trying to automate a lot of those processes.

We automate a bunch of the primary source verifications. We hook into different databases to pre-populate information about the doctor. 

The biggest difference is that because the doctors have accounts, there’s a network. Once a doctor has their credentials in Silversheet, it’s portable. When they go to a new institution that’s using Silversheet, it automatically synchronizes. If they’re not using Silversheet, they can share their credentials with a click. I think that’s fairly unique to our approach.

Do you foresee a more consumer-facing aspect to the business, such as a physician directory or a tool to help consumers make choices?

People have asked us about that. I don’t know. It’s certainly not a focus right now or for the foreseeable future, but anything’s possible.

As someone who works with investors and technologists in Silicon Valley, how do you think they view healthcare IT?

There are two different views. Some people are playing in between.

If you look at the classic Silicon Valley VC, there’s this general attitude of disruption and wholesale change of industries. That’s going to be tough to do in healthcare. The reality is that people’s lives are on the line and there’s a lot of rules and regulations for good reason. There have been some companies that started and ideas that sound great on paper, but when you actually get into the weeds, they don’t work out so well.

On the flip side, there are more older-school healthcare IT vendors that are using old code or old processes or old development strategies. They’re not taking advantage of the network or connected databases and things like that.

There is middle ground. A fair number of new startups that are like that. We hope that we’re one of them. Definitely my perspective and my approach is that I am a doctor. I didn’t practice long, but I did work in urgent care for a year or two after I left the surgery program. There is a component of having a visceral understanding of what it’s like to be a doctor or what it’s like to interact with nurses or to be nurse and be an administrator.

You have to both really understand how people are working in the system, how they’re currently using software, and what they would like to see improved. Then on the flip side, understand the need to go after big markets and do things in new ways and things that are exciting for investors. We’ve tried to do that obviously with Silversheet. We’re tackling a problem that’s like very real and it’s very much burdensome in the lives of both admins and doctors, but there’s big opportunities down the road.

Where do you see company evolving over the next several years?

Certainly over the next year or two, we are focused on making the credentialing and privileging solution amazing. I’d say we’re 90 percent of the way there. There’s always room for improvement.

Software development is an endless process. The best companies like Facebook or LinkedIn are constantly improving. That’s the big focus of ours. There’s a lot of room for improvement. If you look at existing systems, there’s just a lot of things that are not being taken advantage of. When a lot of these systems were first built, email was not really being used much by anyone, so it wasn’t even considered as a part of a lot of the work processes.

Honestly, we’re pretty focused on that at least for the next year or two. There may be other adjacent areas that the medical staff office handles that we might get into. The Affordable Care Act has put a lot of emphasis on quality measures and things like that, so we might get into some of that.

We are still figuring it out and listening to our customers. Almost all of the features that we’ve built since we launched publicly last year have been from customer feedback.

Do you have any concluding thoughts?

I feel like the time is now. Change is happening. As we’ve talked to admins at surgery centers and as we’ve talked to hospital administrators and certainly doctors and other healthcare providers, everybody’s excited about technology and sees a role for it to improve their working lives and the lives of the patients that they treat. I see that as a marked contrast to when I was in my internship in medical school and it was still very much a scary thing for people. I’m really excited. We’re going to see more and more awesome things over the next decade.