Norwalk, Connecticut-based QueueDr, which uses text messages to help doctors fill last minute cancellations, has raised $1.2 million from Rolling Hill Ventures. The funding, which is the first post-seed round for the three-year-old company, will be used to accelerate the company’s growth, according to CEO Patrick Randolph. Previous investors include Launchpad Digital Health and 500 Startups.
QueueDr works with private practitioners and specialists including dentists and therapists. They offer a software platform that connects to whatever system the doctors are using in their backend for appointment scheduling.
“What we do is quite simple,” Randolph told MobiHealthNews. “We fill cancelled appointments automatically. We’re lucky and fortunate that we have a lot of great partners: Allscripts, athena, CareCloud, drchrono, Greenway. That enables us to give customers a fully automated solution. So when they have to fill an appointment they have to do literally and figuratively nothing. They set it up in 30 minutes and it runs in the background.”
When a patient cancels an appointment, QueueDr kicks in and sends that appointment to a QueueDr algorithm which identifies similar patients who might want the appointment and texts a handful of them. The first patient to respond gets slotted in. QueueDr boasts an 80 percent cancellation fill rate with this strategy.
Randolph says the company, which recently moved to Connecticut from San Francisco, is in a growth boom, having quadrupled their number of patients in the last three months and increased revenue tenfold over the last year. He wants to capitalize on the success and scale the business, as well as building out new features.
“We want to build much more than we’ve built and we want to take advantage of the situation we’re in now,” he said. “There’s exciting things we have planned and if we’re going to do it, now is the time.”
Randolph is keeping future plans under his hat, but he’s excited about telehealth, which, with the right partnerships, could allow the company to address not just cancellations but also no-shows.
“Right now, I can fill cancellations and prevent no-shows. But I can’t fill no shows because I can’t bend time,” he said. “But with telemedicine, I could fill a no-show because that person just walks up to their computer. So we’re going to watch it closely.”
