DexCare CEO pushes against capacity constraints in hospitals

Many hospitals are struggling to hire enough doctors and nurses, but Derek Streat discusses a different challenge in understanding the supply and demand of health care.

Derek Streat, co-founder and CEO of DexCare, works with hospitals to improve their capacity to see more patients.

Too many health systems don’t understand how many patients they could actually be serving, and they’re missing the opportunity to serve more patients and capture more revenue.

Streat is the co-founder and chief executive officer of DexCare, a technology company that provides a software platform for hospitals and health systems to expand their capacity and see more patients. DexCare was developed by the Providence health system and spun out of the health system more than four years ago.

“Unfortunately, for all of us as healthcare consumers, the capacity constraints are everywhere,” Streat says.

In a recent interview with Chief Healthcare Executive®, Streat discusses the growth of DexCare, his journey as an entrepreneur, and how the system is aiming to help hospitals find ways to serve more patients and improve their bottom line.

Streat says DexCare was founded on the proposition that “the main rate limit has been that the needs of patients, providers and the health systems themselves had not been understood and balanced.”

‘Built by a health system’

Streat has founded several companies in his career, and DexCare is his third company in the healthcare industry. As he writes in his LinkedIn biography, “I like to start, build and grow things.”

So far, DexCare has raised nearly $150 million in funding. He notes that DexCare was incubated at Providence, and this is the first company he’s led that was spun out of a health system.

“We're a four-year-old company that's been in production for eight years,” Streat says. “The first four years, it was a project inside of one of the leading health systems in the country where we were able to validate that this is a real thing,” he continues. “And so that gives us a bit of an unfair advantage relative to other digital health companies out there. It was tried and tested before it was out the door.”

Providence is one of six health systems that are investors in the business, along with Kaiser Permanente, Mass General Brigham, Community Health Network in Indiana, Tampa General and Texas Health Resources.

DexCare continues to work with Providence, Streat says. The health system based in Washington state says DexCare has helped improve digital access for patients and helped Providence bring in and keep more patients.

While Streat wouldn’t say how many health systems are working with DexCare, he says the systems that are partnering with the company cover about 20% of the U.S. population. DexCare also offers a telehealth platform to allow systems to reach more patients.

“We were built by a health system for health systems,” Streat says. “So we understand that world really well.”

“When you're trying to truly understand capacity in the health system and the real-time nature of it, and be able to make decisions in real time, and have that generate actions inside of the health system itself, you've got to understand things at a deeper level,” he adds.

Streat says DexCare’s platform allows health systems to find more opportunities to see more patients, in part by directing them to appropriate services. Some patients may need to come to a clinic but they may not need to see a physician, and that can free up a doctor visit for another patient.

“You're getting more patients that are able to be seen, whether it's in person or through virtual visits,” Streat says.

DexCare’s platform is also reducing the wait time to get an appointment, so patients are getting seen faster, he says.

Streat says the idea of finding more capacity is resonating with health systems, who can serve more people without hiring more clinicians, which isn’t an option for some providers.

“You can't hire as many doctors and nurses as we need,” Streat says.

He pointed to a number of factors playing into improving capacity at health systems, including having the right equipment in clinics and finding imbalances in service lines.

Plus, hospitals are wanting to improve the consumer experience and make it easier to navigate the organization to find what they need.

Hospitals are focused on “being relevant for consumers and patients, when and where they need care, by providing them experiences that get them access to care in a better way and more easily,” Streat says.

Mission and margins

DexCare finds capacity needs around most ambulatory services, and is also working with health systems to expand capacity for specialty care services, including oncology, behavioral health and orthopedics.

The company has been working with one of its systems to help identify more people who need to be screened for cancer and getting them in for tests and, potentially, earlier interventions.

Expanding capacity also provides more opportunities to patient populations that have had trouble getting access to care, Streat says.

“We've found that by balancing that supply and demand you actually are able to now reach places that you weren't able to reach before, to serve those underserved populations,” he says.

Pointing to DexCare’s origins, Streat recalls the words of former Providence CEO Rod Hochman, MD, who said the faith-based system must be financially sound to serve those in need.

Echoing Hocman, Streat says, “There's no mission without the margin.”