A New Customer Base for Tasso's API

B2B healthcare companies are rapidly expanding. Just as rapidly, these companies are expanding into a product opportunity for Tasso. I interviewed leadership at a bunch of these companies, sketched out their problem and product requirements, and proposed a solution we can sell them.

Telehealth companies like Omada Health, Maven Clinic, Teladoc, and Hinge Health have ballooned since COVID to fill a $250B market. These companies offer personalized, online-first care, from mental health and geriatrics, to women's health and skincare, to optimization and biohacking. They're part of a larger crop of companies that sell healthcare services to other businesses, both online and in person.

The biggest buyers of health—health insurance plans and employers—pay for healthcare for their patients and employees, and want to cut their costs. So they buy up telehealth subscriptions and give them out as perks to their patients/employees. They make up the majority of B2B healthcare customers, and in return, all they ask for is proof that it's actually cutting their total spend.

B2B healthcare companies don't have this proof. Many (but not all) successfully attack health issues before they become severe, avoiding expensive care like hospitalization or hospice down the line. But because they work so far up the chain of cause and effect, there hasn't yet been a reliable way to measure their impact. They struggle to meet customer demand for reports showing their value.

Among many other executives I talked to, Andrew Parker, the CEO of Papa, echoed this. Papa is a unicorn that matches older adults with companions ("pals"), and customers pay for it because attacking loneliness can help avoid expensive health issues. Andrew told me that these customers constantly ask for proof of cost savings—but Papa’s effects are intangible, and don't show up on an itemized hospital bill. B2B healthcare companies need a detailed, consistent understanding of their users’ health, to prove their value to customers.

Users need portable, nonintrusive data that shows when their patients get healthier.

Tasso Connect and API sales to these companies. We can give them the detailed, up-to-date picture of their patients' health they need. They will order Tasso+ or Tasso Mini for their patients, who will ship samples directly to us for analysis. They'll then use our API endpoints to add lab results to their reports for customers, showing improvements in health over time.

Because our device won't be used for clinical decision-making, just as benchmarks for health, these customers should be happy with our assays as replacements for venous blood draws. Still, we need further research to confirm this.

What does this solution look like?

Users need endpoints to access and analyze our lab results. We already have these metrics in our existing API, so all we need to do is give them access through API keys.

Users also need every member of their care team to be able to order Tasso devices. To facilitate this, we'll make a new API endpoint to order Tasso, so users can give their patients at-home testing whenever needed directly from their own platforms.

Here are some examples of API docs for these endpoints:

How do we implement it?

We've already partnered with SheMed and Catapult Health to get Tasso blood collection for their patients. Much of the implementation will be similar, but the beauty of this API-first solution is that it doesn't require partnerships and lengthy negotiations—companies can just order Tasso devices on their own schedules and use our API at will. This should lead to quicker and easier customer acquisition.

Still, since this is a new class of customers, most of the effort involved will be in outreach and marketing to them.

Some possible sales channels:

• Our existing CRO customers, who have their own customers that are telehealth companies
• Cold outreach
• The telehealth platforms we already offer to our employees as perks!

What are some use cases?

B2B healthcare companies, seeking to prove their value, will use our data in the PDFs and dashboards they send to customers. They'll also use Tasso to build concierge patient experiences, giving patients access to blood testing metrics from the comfort of their homes.

Here's an example of a dashboard that uses this API:

One potential user is (Amazon's) One Medical, where I talked to Wendy Hepker, director of High Risk Care. On top of their regular virtual care, they implemented home visits for high-risk patients to great success—they now catch many issues overlooked by traditional healthcare, like minor wounds and fall hazards.

But these visits are also a huge added cost. If Wendy needs to prove the value of home visits to her B2B customers, she could set up recurring orders of Tasso+ for her patients, and use our API to showcase improvements in their labs over time.

This solution may not work. Maybe most of these companies don't even improve their patients' health, so our lab results are useless to them. Maybe they're developing cheaper in-house patient tracking and don't need ours. Here are some rough KPIs to make sure it's working.

Here's a back-of-the-envelope estimate of how big this solution could be in the American market.

Telehealth companies (aka digital therapeutics) have ~30% user penetration in the US. That means that about 100 million people have access to these products. Let's say 1% actively use them, so we have 1M active patients of telehealth in the US. If we charge $100/kit and users order them twice a year, we have a $200M market opportunity.

Telehealth companies are in dire need of proof that they're actually improving their patients' health. This is a huge potential target market for Tasso, with minimal costs that go mostly into sales. With just a few tweaks to our existing software products, we could reach an entirely new class of customers.