The Scan.com Platform Is Bringing Pricing Transparency and Data Integration to the World of…

The Scan.com Platform Is Bringing Pricing Transparency and Data Integration to the World of Diagnostic Imaging

Led by CEO and co-founder Charlie Bullock, Scan.com is applying the best of marketplace tech to diagnostic imaging, so patients can have predictable, competitive pricing, and imaging centers can have more integrated, accessible imaging data.

Join us at the StartUp Health Festival @ HLTH this week in Las Vegas to meet Charlie Bullock and more than 100 other Health Transformers in person.

Challenge

It’s one of the cruel ironies in healthcare that as technology advances, access to these new and improved services doesn’t always follow suit. One example is in diagnostic imaging. Tools like CT scans, MRIs, and ultrasounds let us see inside the human body with greater clarity than ever before, yet the costs surrounding each can be murky, confusing, or just plain out of sight. When a physician orders a scan for a patient, they’re unable to tell them what that scan will cost. There are too many factors at play — the patient’s insurance plan, their deductible, not to mention that the individual imaging centers vary wildly on their pricing for the same type of procedure.

Because of the uncertainty around cost, research shows that up to 15% of patients don’t follow through with investigative scans ordered by their doctors. When you take in the number of scans ordered a year — from mammography to X-rays to PET scans and so on — you are talking about millions of patients a year who abandon recommended diagnostic tests, resulting in a myriad of untreated health issues.

On top of the issue of price, the scheduling and the followup related to image scans is also an administrative migraine. A doctor’s office ends up as a go-between for their patients and the imaging center, trading phone calls and faxes back and forth with both to nail down scheduling and get results back in. Then, the results from image centers are returned using CDs or fax machines. The whole process is sloppy, expensive, unpredictable, and out of date.

Thankfully, a team out of the UK is building a healthcare marketplace to bring greater price transparency and administrative ease to the world of diagnostic imaging.

Origin Story

For Dr. Jasper Nissim, an osteopath in the UK, streamlining how his patients obtained and paid for diagnostic imaging was personal. The status quo just didn’t add up, and he knew there had to be a better way.

When he laid out the problem to his long-time friend, Charlie Bullock, he agreed. For Bullock, a financial auditor and strategist, addressing this challenge went beyond making patients’ lives easier. He also saw an opportunity to radically transform an industry through price transparency. What if patients knew exactly what a scan would cost them? What if they could choose between different imaging centers based on price and quality of service? What if their results were delivered more quickly, in a way they could access and understand?

In 2017, Dr. Nissim and Bullock formed a founding team alongside Joe Daniels, a computer science graduate; Oliver Knight, a former M&A banker; and Dr. Khalid Latief, a respected radiologist. Together they built and launched Scan.com formally in the UK in 2018. For three years, the team bootstrapped the project on the side of their other commitments, creating a web-based patient portal where people could seamlessly compare prices and schedule imaging.

After a few years of steady cash-positive growth, a few key inflection points turned this side hustle into a major player in the imaging market. First, Scan.com formed relationships with the largest imaging site operators in the UK, such as Alliance Medical, Nuffield Health, Circle, Prime Health and many others. Then a large UK insurance provider, Aviva Health, partnered with the company as an investor. The expansion of telemedicine during the pandemic also provided an opportunity for Scan.com to consider how to create a seamless way to integrate imaging services into telehealth.

Scan.com gained traction in the UK and passed the 15k patient mark, building their own imaging marketplace where they were able to work on the insurance side and negotiate rates with imaging centers. In 2021, they raised a seed round of investment to expand to the international market, setting their sights on the Southeast United States as an entry point. This US expansion corresponded with price transparency legislation that requires hospitals and insurance companies to disclose how much different services cost.

“Our timing was just right in terms of getting in fast and capitalizing on these new regulations,” says Bullock.

Under the Hood

Scan.com operates in two main ways. The first is a website, available directly to patients, that allows them to search for a diagnostic imaging center near them, compare prices, and schedule and book a scan directly through the site.

The second is a referral portal and proprietary API for clinicians, which integrates with hospitals, diagnostic centers, physicians’ offices, and other digital health platforms. It provides the infrastructure for them to book scans for patients and seamlessly receive the results — all in one place.

Both sides of the Scan.com model adhere to three core tenets: simple scheduling, cost transparency, and patient education. The ease of scheduling combined with knowing the bill for a procedure helps increase patient adherence to recommended investigations and reduces scheduling phone tag. Focusing on patient education means creating greater understanding of what exactly an ordered scan is meant to do, as well as creating a pipeline to deliver results in a standardized, patient friendly format — no more lost CDs or indecipherable faxes.

“It’s easier for the physicians to get someone in for a scan, it’s a simplified workflow for the imaging centers, while increasing their volume of scans, and we reduce the administrative headache for both when the patients have the ability to self-schedule through our platform,” Bullock explains.

Because of the fragmented nature of the imaging market, Scan.com literally has to write the integration software for each imaging client they sign. Jill Austin, their Head of Implementation, oversees this time-consuming process. But by putting in the hours to integrate themselves into the imaging centers’ programs, Scan.com makes themselves an essential part of the infrastructure of how those centers connect to clients.

Currently they are launching city by city in the US, starting in Atlanta, GA. They’ve signed 35 imaging centers in the area, with 28 exclusives, including a pilot program with Northside Hospital. They’ll follow their successful playbook from the UK, proving themselves with independent networks first before going to the larger health systems and payers. Given the $120B market size of medical imaging in the US, there’s massive room for growth, especially as hospitals and insurance companies comply with the new regulations for price transparency.

“There’s a huge opportunity here to provide the infrastructure that helps consumers compare costs and book their imaging. We can give patients agency and be the connection point to care so that it happens faster and easier.”

Scan.com recently closed £2.2M in fundraising and is starting its Series A to expand its presence in the US as well as in Europe. They’ve also brought on a CMO, head of business development, and founding product manager for their US team. After over five years navigating the British healthcare landscape, the team is primed and ready to make the process of booking and receiving results from medical imaging scans faster, easier, and clearer for patients worldwide.

Why We’re Proud to Invest

StartUp Health is proud to back Scan.com’s set of solutions for the medical imaging world, thanks to its strong founding team, its clarity of purpose, and its smart, systematic approach to scaling globally.

Scan.com originated out of a partnership between physicians who understood the problem for patients and themselves and financial analysts who understood how to strategically navigate the market. From the beginning, Scan.com was able to marry real-world experience with the imaging world and entrepreneurial, big-picture thinking. This potent combination has kept the company’s feet on the ground and head in the clouds in the best way possible — they put in the grunt work with each individual imaging center and also keep their eyes on the market as a whole.

At each step of the way, they’ve proven themselves committed to their core tenants: simple scheduling, cost transparency, and patient education. They haven’t abandoned their mission to chase an easy revenue stream. This commitment means their product makes a meaningful difference to patient health. People follow through and get recommended screenings. Results are given in a way that can be understood. Physicians make diagnoses in a timely fashion. Patients have the best possible information to make care decisions.

As Scan.com expands to the US and Europe, they’ve identified ways to prove themselves in the market to fuel steady growth, letting their results speak for themselves. By starting hyper-local with independent hospitals and imaging centers, they establish themselves quickly in an area and prove the PMF of their service. It worked for them in the UK, and all signs point to this strategy leading to the same exponential growth in the US.

Join us in welcoming Scan.com to the StartUp Health portfolio; we can’t wait to see what the year ahead holds for them.

Learn more and connect with the Scan.com team. Then join us at the StartUp Health Festival @ HLTH to meet Charlie Bullock and more than 100 other Health Transformers in person this week in Las Vegas.

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The Scan.com Platform Is Bringing Pricing Transparency and Data Integration to the World of… was originally published in StartUp Health on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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