Latest / CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered. / Making Eye Care More Accessible With Next Gen Eye Testing w/Eyebot Co-Founder & CEO, Matthias Hofmann | HealthBiz Briefs

Transcript

Making Eye Care More Accessible With Next Gen Eye Testing w/Eyebot Co-Founder & CEO, Matthias Hofmann | HealthBiz Briefs · CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered.

• 0:00
  Eye exams are important, but they're also inconvenient and expensive, which means many Americans go without.
• 0:06
  There are more than 30 million Americans whose blurry vision could be corrected, but isn't.
• 0:11
  But what if getting an eye exam was as simple as going to a retail store and pressing a button?
• 0:23
  Welcome to Health Biz Briefs.
• 0:24
  I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group here with Matthias Hoffman, co -founder and CEO of Eyebot.
• 0:30
  the company focuses on simplifying eye care for everyone.
• 0:34
  Welcome, Matias.
• 0:35
  Hello.
• 0:37
  Matias, why don't Americans get eye exams?
• 0:41
  That's a great question.
• 0:43
  There's a couple of problems.
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  One of them is there's just not enough doctors in the United States.
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  So there are actually more eyeglass stores than there's doctors.
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  And another problem is that we ran a ton of surveys before we even started this company.
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  And...
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  Originally, we thought it was the price, but it's not actually the main reason.
• 1:03
  It's simply for most by far for most people, for most Americans, it's the inconvenience component.
• 1:09
  So probably a five to one ratio.
• 1:12
  It's the inconvenience problem that people face.
• 1:15
  And of course, then also is the price point.
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  And on top of that, only about 50 % of Americans actually have vision insurance.
• 1:22
  And so that doesn't help either.
• 1:24
  It's interesting that certain things like vision and dental.
• 1:28
  which are very much part of health.
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  I mean, they're both on the face too, but, you know, just not considered part of regular health insurance.
• 1:35
  And certainly I imagine that, you know, the eye and the mouth are important for health.
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  So it's kind of a weird thing.
• 1:42
  Yeah, that's a very American thing.
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  It's about a 50 year old story of why that actually happened.
• 1:49
  Yeah.
• 1:49
  You want to give me the two second version?
• 1:52
  Oh, that's a, I can't do it in two seconds.
• 1:55
  Fair enough.
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  But I mean, these things have all separately, right?
• 1:57
  And one I know on the dental side, part of it is just like dentists are not physicians.
• 2:01
  And so they have their own kind of coding and approach.
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  And sometimes when they went and put something under insurance that might have started as like hospital insurance, you know, it's a while before it was all kind of connected together.
• 2:11
  So I'm just guessing it's something similar on the vision side.
• 2:15
  Yeah, there is a there's a protectionism.
• 2:19
  There's Julia typically around money and just want to protect certain things.
• 2:25
  Yeah, fair enough.
• 2:26
  All right.
• 2:27
  My next question is, what is iBot's value proposition?
• 2:32
  Yeah, so what iBot does is we provide a vision exam in a matter of 90 seconds.
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  And it requires no instructions and no learning and no technical know -how.
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  All you do is you walk up to a machine, you push a button, and it automatically does the exam, scans your eyes, and we have results in front of you immediately.
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  Do I have to keep my, do I have to stop from blinking for 90 seconds?
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  We deal with that too.
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  As long as your eyes are open at some point, that's fine.
• 3:01
  Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  And I want to be like a clockwork orange situation.
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  I get a problem open in order for it to, for it to work.
• 3:08
  That's good.
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  And has that, does that value proposition resonate for people?
• 3:12
  Yeah.
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  So what we did before we, this, this year we're doing a much bigger public launch.
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  But we have done.
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  multiple shopping locations, shopping centers, including around the Boston area.
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  One particular location was the Burlington Mall, which is a premium mall here in Boston.
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  And we also did a B Malls, one in New Hampshire, and also C Malls, strip malls.
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  And we've surprisingly found almost identical results.
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  So we put our systems out there for everyone to use, just to put a big sign up.
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  It says free vision test 90 seconds.
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  And...
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  The results have been actually very surprisingly good.
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  On average, we would do about 45 exams, free vision exams per day.
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  We would on some days on Saturdays have lines, people forming groups around it, bringing their friends after they did it themselves and bringing more people.
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  So the response has been very positive.
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  And we've found very interesting statistics as well.
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  22 % of our users...
• 4:20
  It's their first lifetime vision exam.
• 4:23
  Yeah.
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  And when that happens and we saw also the kind of a cultural background, we're talking black, white, Asian, Latino, everybody, right?
• 4:33
  We're talking all income levels from rich to poor age group, 16 to 88 years old, very broad age distribution.
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  To us, it was very clear that we've created an interface that worked for everybody.
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  And that was very exciting to us.
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  And we've proved it.
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  proven it multiple times over now in multiple locations that this is a format that people can understand and can use.
• 4:58
  And now we are in the process of scaling this.
• 5:02
  Matias, your background is in technology, electrical engineering, PhD, a lot of experience creating things from scratch.
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  And this is a technology company.
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  And I'm wondering if you can describe a little bit, what is your technological edge?
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  Talk about scanning, what's the principle behind what you're doing?
• 5:20
  So I can't talk into too much detail, but the main thing to understand is that we replicate a lot of the traditional technologies that you can find in the clinic.
• 5:32
  So for the refraction components, we use the same fundus reflex method that traditional clinical units use.
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  There's a lot of innovation in how we specifically do that.
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  What's very important to us is that we retain near infrared imaging, which...
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  means that people don't actually see us.
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  You don't see the light scanning your eyes.
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  It's in a way of things that you can't see.
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  It's invisible.
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  But that also makes sure that your pupils don't shrink or you don't like, it's not like flashing your eyes.
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  And these are a lot of the techniques that are already in the clinic.
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  We're just doing it in a different form factor and also in a different way that allows us to have a very completely touch free exam.
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  You're not sticking your head into anything.
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  It's you just stand there.
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  and it does all the work.
• 6:21
  Cool.
• 6:22
  Well, that's it for the latest Health Biz Brief.
• 6:25
  If you like what you hear, check out my Health Biz Podcast for a full -length interview with Matthias about his life and career.
• 6:31
  Matthias Hoffman, co -founder and CEO of iBot, thanks for joining me today on Health Biz Briefs.