Richard Blanton wants to open remote care up to the masses. His goal is for patients to find a provider with a virtual option while equipping physicians to launch remote care. Blanton is the CEO of Sniffle, an app that aims to do just that.
Blanton is a serial entrepreneur with experience running global conglomerates and management consulting firms. He saw the promise of virtual medicine in the days when medical boards hadn’t yet approved telehealth as a viable option. It was illegal in some states, and once had attempted to acquire telehealth company AmeriDoc. That move didn’t work out, but he founded Sniffle in response.
Sniffle’s central tenet is to put artificial intelligence diagnostics (Sniffle calls it Aignostics) and virtual care into the hands of patients and physicians. “The idea behind Sniffle is to open telemedicine to all providers in all patients worldwide,” Blanton says. “Not just if you’re a member or an employee of a certain employer or carry a certain insurance policy.”
For physicians, the app enables the launch of a virtual care platform and a way to connect with patients with added technology services like coding intake, eligibility checking, and integration with tier-one electronic health records to ensure the interaction can be transcribed into the physician’s internal health record system.
When patients download the app, they have access to artificial intelligence that diagnoses the patient given the information entered by the patient. The algorithm is based on 10 million patient encounters and includes a machine learning protocol that considers demographics and asks multiple clinically-vetted follow-up questions.
“It’s not a symptom checker,” Blanton says. “It’s a full-blown class one medical device that can diagnose symptoms with 93% accuracy.”
After AI makes the diagnosis, the patient can search geographically, or their preferred physician would populate, connecting them to a physician who already has what the patient initially entered, like a digital triage. Rather than a series of anonymous telehealth docs, the app will allow patients to establish a long-term relationship via the app that they can visit in person when necessary. “So much of traditional telemedicine is random doctors seeing random patients,” says Sniffle Chief Growth Officer Chris Mathew. “That’s not health care. That’s just script care.”
The app asks for health insurance information and allows patients to purchase benefit plans, including dental, vision, and mental health services for the family, for $10 a month. Sniffle also provides a discount prescription service that can direct them to nearby pharmacies with the best prices.
Sniffle generates revenue by selling benefits packages for $10 per month. With legislation shifting to require payers to fully reimburse virtual care, physicians will need a way to see patients virtually if they don’t already have one.
Though it is based in Dallas, Sniffle launched with 85 physicians in ten Arkansas clinics covering 120,000 patients after the state made an investment in Sniffle. Blanton says the company has already signed a contract to join athenahealth’s Marketplace Program to offer Sniffle to AthenaHealth’s growing network of healthcare providers. Athenahealth has 160,000 provider clients that see more than 110 million patients. “They see our product as a huge advantage for them to offer their clinics and hospitals across the country versus their own product,” Blanton says. “They have their own telemedicine module, but it’s not near as robust as ours.”
With diagnosis and scheduling made simple for the patient and pain points eliminated for the physician, Blanton sees the app as one ready to transform how we interact with the healthcare system and how physicians perform. “When the doctor gets a patient from Sniffle, their insurance has already been verified, and their payment method has already been checked. The patient is pre-diagnosed, and there’s an intake chart already done,” he says. “The doctor is free to walk right into the consult and do what they were trained to do.”
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