In an interview with SmartTRAK, Parachute Health CEO David Gelbard discusses the Company and its novel, online DME ordering system for medical devices and supplies that benefit the patient, provider and supplier eliminating the challenges of the ancient fax world.
Parachute Health has implemented a novel, online ordering system that is used for a variety of DME supplies including mobility, sleep therapy and respiratory aids, along with diabetes, wound care, ostomy and urology incontinence supplies. The system benefits the patient, provider and supplier by creating a win, win, win for all and eliminates the challenges of the back-and-forth approval process associated with faxing requests.
In an interview with SmartTRAK, Parachute Health’s CEO, David Gelbard said he founded the Company because his father did not receive an important DME supply after leaving the hospital, causing him to fall at home and requiring additional care. David’s vision for the Company is to establish the infrastructure for DME supplies such that its ease-of-use replicates that of ordering shoes on Amazon or swiping your credit card at a local coffee store. Today, the Company operates across the US at 40,000 different sites of care, from hospitals, nursing homes and doctor’s offices to home health and hospice agencies, and has a network of over 100,000 physicians and prescribers—a number that is rapidly growing. To find out more about the Company and its operation, click on the following video to listen to SmartTRAK’s interview with David Gelbard, recorded via Uberconference (23:35 min). A link to the complete transcript of the interview is also provided below.
SmartTRAK: Hello, this is Susan Paquette from SmartTRAK. I'm here with David Gelbard CEO and Founder of Parachute Health. Hello, David. Parachute Health appears to provide a new healthcare delivery system for DME supplies. Could you describe what Parachute offers and how it is different from what's being done today?
David Gelbard: Thanks, Susan. Appreciate the time today. I got into this industry because my dad came home after a major surgery; the caregiver faxed a walker order to the supplier and it ultimately never came. Without the walker, he did this thing called furniture walking; he fell and got hurt. So sadly, when you boil that down, fax-based ordering and the resulting lost and stalled orders, negatively impacted the way all products are ordered in healthcare.
What got us into the space was mobility products, but that quickly expanded into respiratory and diabetes over the years. And now we're making a major push into wound, ostomy, urology and incontinence care. We're making a real difference in the sector simply by taking out the fax and creating a simple, modern, online ordering experience. Every caregiver at the point of ordering needs to know whether they're qualified or not for the products that they're ordering for the patient. The way we do it is we partner with the existing ecosystem. We're not looking to replace anyone. So, the idea is that in the same way the fax is a utility today, we're hoping to function the exact same way as a vital utility that all the players in the market can use from the DME suppliers to prescribers, payers and manufacturers.
David, when was the company started and how is it being financed?
DG: I started Parachute in 2016 after my dad got hurt. And we proved the concept inside the halls of New York-Presbyterian in Cornell by bringing a digital order end-to-end and thinking through all the steps to make a digital insurance-based transaction. It doesn't get obviously more hands-on than that —sitting inside the halls and understanding where all the pain points break down. Once we were able to get to that proof of concept, we reached out to strategic partners to finance our growth, Greater New York Hospital Association Ventures, Tony Welters of UnitedHealthcare, Fred Browne of McKesson and others who could help us understand the ecosystem to make sure we were building a product with everyone in mind: the hospitals, the payers and the supply side community, and all, obviously, for the benefit of the patient.
In 2018, as we started expanding, we realized we needed to figure out how to scale a software company. We reached out to ...
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