Pain has been a constant in Dr Ben Hurst’s career. He cured patients of pain during his time as an emergency department registrar and prison psychiatrist. Now, as co-founder of software platform HotDoc, he’s tackling a major pain point impacting his former healthcare colleagues: admin overload.
Hurst’s pivot from doctor to CEO makes sense when you consider his professional philosophy: “I’m excited by doing things that impact one-to-many, as opposed to one-to-one,” he explains. While there was no Business 101 among the anatomy and biology classes at university, Hurst learned on the job how to turn a start-up into a multi-million dollar market leader. The company was recently acquired in a deal reportedly worth more than $250m.
His experience offers lessons for SME owners that extend beyond the care sector. He’s shown that friction can be turned into business opportunities and that solving problems for people can bring about behavioural change.
Admin Burden Sparked A Hot Business Idea
Hurst was less than halfway through his medical studies when he decided he wouldn’t be a lifelong doctor like both his parents. He completed his training, then tried his hand at writing, before his next career move emerged at the dinner table. His mother was bemoaning the red tape involved in running a GP practice.
“I remember sitting hearing Mum and Dad talk about all the bureaucracy, the payroll challenges, the compliance stuff and how frustrating and painful that was for her, when all she wanted to be was a great doctor,” he recalls. “For me, HotDoc became a way to help doctors like my mum just be great doctors. We take care of the crap, the stuff that they don’t want to spend time with.”
The administrative burden in medicine is well documented, as doctors battle to balance their vocational care role with the practical realities of running a healthcare business. Research suggests 77 per cent of Australian GPs are dissatisfied with the volume of administrative tasks including note-taking, mental health and care plan paperwork, aged care correspondence and insurance assessments for Centrelink and WorkCover. Much of that work is unpaid; a NZ study finding doctors spend only 56 per cent of their day with patients.
“It’s a very noble profession, but there’s a lot of it which is quite thankless and many doctors are burning out as a result of that,” Hurst laments. He cites a RACGP survey that found a third of GPs plan to leave the profession within 5 years, many due to the workload, exacerbating an existing shortage. “Being a doctor is stressful enough, and having to do all the other stuff that gets in the way makes it less enjoyable,” he says. HotDoc frees up some of their time by automating bookings, results follow-ups and patient registrations.
With red tape costing Australian businesses $160b a year, admin friction is rife across the economy. The lesson for SMEs is to find the pain points in their own sectors and create value by giving people their time back.
Opportunities Can Be Found Among The Weeds
The admin load in health businesses goes beyond clinical tasks and office management. There’s the added layer of work that comes with operating in a highly-regulated field with heavy compliance requirements.
HotDoc now has a 70 per cent market share in GP bookings, and Hurst believes the company’s success is due in part to its willingness to tackle a significant pain point – navigating the relationship with Government and associated regulations – that other businesses may consider too complex and shy away from. “Everything comes with pros and cons,” he says. “When you work for the government, you often have a much more predictable source of revenue. But, yeah, you have to handle that red tape. That’s the cost of being in that universe.”
He recommends SMEs apply a different lens to regulated sectors and instead look for opportunities, since customers will be extra motivated to accept solutions. “If you’re willing to go deep into those weeds and come out with great solutions that can minimise a lot of operational burden, then you are providing a huge amount of value to the customer,” he says. “It might not be the most exciting area of innovation, but it does provide genuine value. I’m definitely glad we’ve done what we’ve done.”
Hurst adds that tackling hard problems requires a certain mindset in an SME owner. He argues owners must be obsessive, not keen to ride a wave into the beach. “That’s always helped me,” he says. “Work on your own psychology and what is most exciting to you before kind of moving to the next step of trying to solve the problem.”
Solving Problems For Customers Earns Trust
For patients who were conditioned to phoning their local clinic for a doctor’s appointment, convincing them to embrace the impersonal option of online booking could have been a challenge, particularly among those least willing to embrace the technology. But Hurst says HotDoc applied an approach any SME attempting disruption could attempt: shift the focus from the technology to the solution. “I think it’s always about ‘What’s the pain?’” he explains. “Focus on the problem that people are experiencing day-to-day and understand what would make them really motivated to solve that.”
Extra motivation came during the pandemic, when millions of new patients turned to the platform to find scarce Covid vaccine appointments. That valuable service delivery bred what Hurst sees as another catalyst for behavioural change: trust.”They feel a sense of alignment with the values and that creates a positive momentum,” he says.
The older demographic has been swayed. “We have people who are over 100 that use the platform,” he added. “We hope our platform democratises healthcare and what’s cool is if you’re providing a good solution that solves a problem, people tend to use it.”
It’s OK To Be Strategic In AI Adoption
Hurst’s advice to look beyond technology extends to artificial intelligence. He agrees AI is transformational but says it’s too easy for businesses to be swept up in the hype and feel pressured into adoption for adoption’s sake. “We’re not an AI native business, so a lot of our stack is based on 2.0 online solutions,” he explains. In order to transition, he felt speed was less important than strategy. And, again, it came down to pain. “The way to build a great business is you try and keep things really simple, like, who are we trying to build for? What’s the pain that they experience? And what are the values that can inform the choices that we make?”
Hurst says the key for HotDoc, and for SMEs, is to ensure the rush to upgrade doesn’t erode the business’s strengths. “What makes us special and different is that 5,000 practices trust us. We’ve got 25,000 doctors that trust us, and we’ve got 10 million patients that trust us to deliver a really good experience,” he says. “And so we want to understand, how do we embed some of the AI technology in a way that helps each one of those stakeholders and not just one or another?”
He says the immediate benefits of AI are in personalising practices and automating communications. But the nature of medicine means changes are more likely to be incremental. “It’s a very manual profession,” he says. “So, we’ll be busy for a decade to come.”
