Editor’s Note:  The founder of HealthCare Volunteer and HealthCare Tourism International (now-defunct), Neilesh Patel has a long-standing interest in global healthcare. He recently stepped firmly back into the medical industry with the launch of HealthSouk, an online marketplace for dental services. Medical Travel Today had the opportunity to speak with him regarding his re-entry into the industry and his vision for HealthSouk. This is Part Two of that conversation. Part One can be found in Issue 2 of Medical Travel Today or by clicking here.   MTT: How do you go about recruiting dentists to participate, and how hard is the sell? NP: It’s not hard. There’s absolutely no downside to signing up. We currently have a provider relations team that contacts doctors directly. They explain HealthSouk, answer questions and do the basic training on how to create a profile and update pricing, and so on. In addition, doctors are going to the website, www.healthsouk.com, and signing themselves up. Again, it’s pretty easy to get doctors interested in someone bringing them more patients at no cost. We’ve been signing up providers for the last four months and have a built a presence in ten targeted metro areas — Houston, Dallas, San Francisco, LA, New York… and a few others are in the works. And that’s just in the first 90 days! Again, it’s not a hard sell. What dentist doesn’t want more patients with no fees attached for recruiting them? Plus they have complete control over their fees and personal profiles. Our system updates every sixty seconds so if they want to up their rates or take them down ten times a day, they can do that. We also send reminders to doctors to take a look at their fee schedule so that we and our patients are sure it’s current.   MTT: So the obvious question then is how are you making money? NP: There’s a service charge for each booking or reservation made similar to Ticketmaster or other ticket booking services. It may become a percentage in the future, along the lines of Groupon or LivingSocial.   MTT: But isn’t your service for one-off needs? A one-time booking fee doesn’t sound like a way to make a lot of profit. NP: We’re not looking for one-off patients. We’re looking to build a relationship with patients using the HealthSouk Dental Wellness Plan ™. HealthSouk has a Wellness Plan that includes automated reminders to patients based on the procedure they have previously had, and suggests treatments and even new dental products that could benefit them. So, if a patient had a deep cleaning done, we’ll send him or her three-, four-, or six-month reminders based on need. We will send automated suggestions on what to ask their doctor about. If a new dental procedure, service or even an oral hygiene product comes out, we’ll contact the patient so that the patient can be proactive about their dental needs. The idea is that we won’t book a patient just once, but will become their long-term partner and advisor. The second concept is the patients go for an exam and X-ray. Maybe they like that doctor – great – but maybe not.  People are willing to jump around. The third concept is if patients purchases on our system, we give them automated reminders – customized to their personal dental needs – something most dentists often don’t have time to send themselves other than for basic appointment reminders. We also send reminders for deep cleaning. We are effectively putting dental care back into the patient’s hands using the HealthSouk Dental Wellness Plan. The Plan works great when you purchase your treatment on HealthSouk, so many patients who want to see their dental costs actually decrease each year will use HealthSouk for every dental need so that their purchases integrate well with our dental wellness plan.   MTT: How are you attracting patients? NP: They seem to be finding us. We’ve had over 10,000 patients sign up already.  There are a 110 million people in the United States without dental insurance. Consumers are looking for ways to save money and, consequently, they’re finding us. There are over 200 million people who could benefit from our service by dropping their dental insurance and using HealthSouk instead.   MTT: What are you plans for expansion? NP: We are currently building our base in California, Nevada and Texas, and our next step will be assisting patients across the entire country. Concurrently, we plan to expand our operations into Brazil, Dubai and India. We started serious discussions with two venture capital groups last week so I expect things will move along rather quickly.   About Neilesh Patel  Dr. Neilesh Patel is the Founder of HealthSouk, a software engineer and a U.S.-based practicing dentist. At age 17, he founded StudentsHelp.org Consulting, the world’s largest student-run volunteer computer consulting organization, which ultimately served millions of people and non-profits worldwide. From 1997 – 2002, Mr. Patel worked at over a dozen technology companies such as Netscape (acquired by AOL Time Warner) and OnePage (acquired by Sybase). From 2002 – 2004, Mr. Patel worked in regulatory affairs at Medtronic Inc. He currently has several medical device patents pending with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). He has been featured on CNN and in several dozen print publications, including Financial Times, New York Times, S.F. Examiner and The Columbus Dispatch.