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Steve Schwartz reveals secrets to successful marketing campaigns and growth strategies for the concierge medical industry, this guide draws from 25 years of digital marketing expertise and experience working with over 900 clients.

Steve and Harsha
Episode 20: From Physician to Investor with Harsha Moole
January 14, 2025

In this episode of the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast, host Steve Schwartz interviews Dr. Harsha Moole, an internal medicine physician and venture capitalist. They discuss Dr. Moole’s journey from practicing medicine to investing in healthcare technologies, particularly focusing on the growth of concierge medicine and direct primary care. Dr. Moole shares insights about his platform, FindMyDirectDoctor.com, which connects patients with concierge and DPC physicians, addressing common pain points in the industry. The conversation also touches on the importance of online presence for physicians, balancing work and family life, and the future of concierge medicine.

Welcome to the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast, the show dedicated to helping concierge medical practices grow and thrive.

Hosted by Steven Schwartz, a digital marketing expert with over 25 years of experience and a passion for improving American healthcare by helping concierge medical physicians succeed. Here’s Steven Schwartz.

Hello and welcome to the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast.

I’m your host, Steve Schwartz, and it’s my pleasure to have Dr.

Harsha Moole as our guest today on the podcast.

Harsha, welcome.

Steven, how are you?

Wonderful.

Thank you.

I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast today and share a little bit of your story as a physician, as a venture capitalist, and as one of the primary driving factors behind FindMyDirectDoctor.com, a huge database on the internet

of concierge and DPC physicians and offices.

So without further ado, let’s dig right into this.

Harsha, can you please give us some background on yourself? When did you decide you wanted to be a doctor and where did you go to school?

And just give us some background information on yourself, please.

Pleasure to be here, Steven.

Thanks for having me.

No, I’m an internal medicine physician by training, trained at UIC, Illinois, then worked as a travel physician all across the country for about a couple of years.

After that, I right now work as an internist in the Midwest for the last five, seven years, five to six years.

About six years ago, as a group of friends, we started an investment business, mostly investing into real estate that eventually kind of snowballed and evolved into a venture capital firm.

As of today, we are about 200 physicians pooling our capital and investing into early stage startup companies.

We are mostly vertical agnostic.

We invest in healthcare technologies, we invest in utility scale solar projects, cloud computing, kind of coordinating with industry exports on a consulting basis and making those investments.

So the company’s scaling up pretty good.

During that journey, we kind of stumbled upon this concierge free market direct primary care space back in 2019, a bunch of market analysts working with us saw a trend where the number of patients and providers signing up to this space was exponentially

growing.

And that was our first introduction to this field as a potential opportunity to build something or invest in something.

And we can go into the details, but yeah, that’s kind of the background.

That’s great.

Tell me a little more about findmydirectdoctor.com.

Obviously people can go to the internet and just type it in and look around, but can you maybe go over the top features and how the physicians listening to this podcast can get their practice listed on that website if they’re not on there already?

Got it.

I’ll have to give some backdrop on the company before we get to the feature sets, just so that it ties in well with listeners hearing in.

As I mentioned earlier, when we were trying to kind of learn about the industry from more of a venture capital perspective, we spoke to about 100 DPC concierge providers, several hundred patients that were signed up to these services and trying to learn

about their pain points.

What do they like?

What do they not like?

The biggest pain points were on the patient side, lack of awareness, like 98% of the population that we spoke to had no idea about what a direct primary care or concierge doctor is.

Their world was kind of completely around insurance-based, fee-for-service type of healthcare models.

So we knew that patient awareness was a big bottleneck in terms of the industry growth.

On the provider’s end, running a successful business unit was a challenge for many doctors because none of our community, we are not trained to be a business operator or a small business entrepreneur.

We just go to med school and work for a W2 job and kind of go on about our lives.

Lots of providers kind of like shut down their practices because they were not able to acquire adequate number of patients and break even in a reasonable amount of time.

We heard lots of horror stories.

And for the providers that were running it, like, yes, you hear a lot of success stories about people doing well, but, like, talking to so many people, we realized that there is many more failure stories than success stories, primarily due to lack of

ability to acquire adequate number of patients.

So that was the second big pain point in the industry.

So we kind of as a VC group, we said, okay, let’s go and try to find companies that are addressing these pain points so we could technically invest in those companies. We know that this industry is going to grow over the next 10, 20 years.

We couldn’t find any company that met our criteria that were tackling these specific points.

So we kind of ended up building the product ourselves and hence the name Find My Direct Doctor, trying to kind of explain what the company does in its brand name.

We kind of first, like, published a ton of blog content, social media content, mostly directed towards patients, trying to educate them about what DPC Concierge is, what cash pay services are, what personalized medicine does, the pros and cons.

Once we started getting traction there, we kind of built a database of all the concierge and DPC doctors in the country. Just to give you a magnitude of growth, there were about 4,000 DPC doctors back when we started the company, DPC and concierge together.

Back in 2019, as of today, there is about 15,000 doctors that do free market business.

So anyways, going back to the growth of the company, so once the educational content was done, we had patients landing on our website, then we said, okay, what’s the next best thing we could do to help the patients is to help them find their providers.

So we built this database of doctors, 15,000, when a patient lands into the homepage, they can click their location on the specialty, and then they can find the doctors in their community that offer free market services.

Once that happens, they can get in touch with the doctor and eventually decide if they want to become a patient to that particular provider on a retainer basis, either DPC or concierge. So that’s the basic feature set.

They’re kind of almost like a matchmaking service for patients and doctors in the free market industry.

We like to call ourselves as a patient acquisition platform for free market providers.

Most of these providers, as I said, their biggest challenge is to, when they open up a clinic, to acquire new patients, and we help providers achieve that goal by kind of sending our patient leads to them on a day-to-day basis.

So that’s the flagship product.

We also have, like over the last few months, integrated telehealth suite of products where providers can sign up their telehealth clinic onto our platform and we help them acquire patients.

We also have cash pay lab services to our affiliate partners on our website. So we’re trying to kind of get the product into an all-in-one solution for free market providers and patients.

Wonderful.

What an amazing suite of services that you’re offering through this platform.

I know that physicians may be listening to this and say, well, yeah, it’d be great to get leads from this service, but I bet they’re really expensive and I bet that, you know, they’re going to send that same lead to a whole bunch of different doctors.

How would you respond to that if you were asked that question?

I would respond to that by stating the obvious that I’m a physician myself and I receive a lot of these marketing pitches from companies that are very popular. I’m pretty sure all the doctors know what these companies are.

So I’m familiar with what those products look like, how much they cost.

The service that we created, it’s purely on a merit basis.

Every patient lead is earmarked to a particular doctor.

The only way a patient lead gets recorded is if a particular patient who lands on our website interacts with the doctor’s profile and makes a direct inquiry on that doctor’s profile.

That’s what we call a lead.

In true definition, that is a warm lead because the way we kind of, the top of our funnel, the way we capture the attention of patients is by giving them relevant information about concierge medicine.

So this is somebody we already know is open to the idea of concierge medicine.

They’re looking for a concierge medicine provider.

That’s how they land on our platform through our Google search keywords.

And once they land, they go and inquire about a specific provider and that’s a specific lead to that provider, which is not cross over to anybody else.

So that’s kind of the quality of the lead.

At the end of the day, the lead is a lead.

We cannot guarantee that that lead is going to become a customer.

That’s up to the provider’s office to kind of make that final conversion.

But we deliver a warm lead, which is a good quality.

And providers only pay if they end up getting a lead.

And without getting a lead, there is no payment or any fee that is charged upon them.

And listing a profile for a provider is free of cost.

We don’t charge any money.

And for the whole lead generation service, I believe the last I checked, the promo that we are running is about 20 bucks a month for unlimited amount of leads is what we charge.

If the provider ends up getting only one lead that month, they will pay $5.

If they end up getting no leads, they would pay no dollars. years. It’s not an unlimited subscription type of thing.

So they only pay if they have something,

if they achieve or get something from us, so to speak.

Right. Those numbers are very reasonable. I mean, that’s great.

And the math we have done is that even if they end up getting one lead that turns into a patient through our platform, it would probably be worth two years of subscription fee, which is 20 bucks a month.

And that’s kind of how we wanted that to be.

We wanted it to be a win for all their patients are benefiting when meeting the doctors.

Providers are benefiting by getting more patients to the platform and we have adequate amount of funding to keep running the platform.

Yeah, that’s great.

And a lot of times business owners feel like everyone’s trying to take their money.

And to have a listing on a website like this is so valuable as yet another place where a physician’s name, address and phone number are listed.

And you as a representative of this venture capital company running this huge website with the marketing that you do and trying to keep things up and running.

So it’s great for the entire industry.

You have expenses.

And so if

a physician’s paying 20 bucks a month and get a couple of patients out of it over the course of the year, everybody wins, right? Your company wins, they win, everybody wins.

An interesting thing that you pointed out is about how much noise there is in the industry with like marketing pressure about like how best practices are being handled in the industry.

When we first launched the company kind of like soft open, we started introducing ourselves to providers.

Like the most common feedback was kind of exactly what you said.

Oh, you’re just like trying to spam us with a bunch of things.

We don’t need another website where we want to post our listing.

We have done it for 25 other companies.

Nothing ever came out of it.

One thing like we always kind of been back to the providers is that Google SEO matters a lot these days.

If not anything, if I was a provider who opened up my own clinic, I would list my practice on how many of our directory listing websites that there are because it just adds up to your

Google presence and it gives you probably access to 10 extra patients than otherwise.

And especially when you come across a free listing that you could put your sign up your clinic for,

that’s probably a no-brainer and just from my perspective saying,

there’s nothing that I could potentially lose by this. My information is already publicly available.

It’s not private information as a provider, my clinic name, my email, whatever it is.

So putting it on an extra directory listing websites would only augment the SEO effects and reachability of my clinic.

You’re so right.

I have a other area of my business called concierge medical marketing, providing digital marketing services and strategies to concierge and DPC physicians offices to help them get the exposure they need to get the patients that they need to fill their

panel and have a profitable business.

And one of the services that we offer, we call business essentials.

And how we do that is we make sure that the Google business profile is created and or claimed that it’s optimized correctly with the correct name, address, phone number.

It’s also optimized with articles and posts and hours of operation and categories.

There’s so many cool things that you can do inside of a Google business profile to fully optimize it.

And this is where it gets exciting.

Once it’s created and fully optimized, we then syndicate that information on that business profile to over 500 different business directories on the internet.

And most people are not going to see most of those, but Google finds them and Google sees that this particular practice in Des Moines, Iowa or Bakersfield, California, or Toledo, Ohio, wherever it is, that business not only has a solid Google profile,

but the same consistent name, address, phone number, and details for that practice are found in over 500 different places

around the internet.

So Google sees all of that.

And by seeing it, Google says, wow, this business is really solid.

Everything’s consistent.

We feel, we meaning Google, feel that that business information is very accurate.

So let’s push it higher up onto the Google listings.

And when that pushes the practice into the first position of the Google map pack, which is where so many people see and click on a search, it results in phone calls.

It results in clicks.

It helps a business grow.

And that’s just one thing that we offer called the business essentials package.

So I’m glad you brought that up because that is such an important thing to do.

So again, thank you for bringing that up.

Outside of your work as a physician, outside of findmydirectdoctor.com, what else do you do for fun? What keeps you,

I guess, fresh? What helps fill your soul, you know, family or, you know, hiking the Himalayas?

What, what’s interesting to you? Well, I have three kids which are very fulfilling.

They’re a reality check.

I venture off too much, too far from the family.

They drag me right back to where I belong.

And yeah, beyond all the work that we do, I think that’s, it’s plenty fulfilling to come back home to a good family man.

But yeah, so we run a bunch of venture capital businesses.

Seven to sevens are like pretty good and solid.

And it’s always good to come back home and like give them a nice hug and, you know, put them to bed.

Right. And before we started recording, you said you work both in Kansas City as well as Miami.

How does that work? How do you make that work as a physician, as a family man, as a business owner? What does that look like?

I mean, there, there, there is like, business wise, I, businesses require me to be in both the places.

So I work as a clinician in Kansas City area, like mostly half the week there, half the week here, one week there, one week here.

Florida is mostly venture capital business and where I’m running, find my direct doctor out of.

So we have a lot of investors, partners in this part of the state.

Family time, obviously it’s a sacrifice where it’s challenging to kind of move the entire family back and forth.

The families in the summers, they’re mostly in

Kansas. In the winters, they’re mostly in Miami. So it is a lot of work, but we make it work.

Sure. Do you think you’ll be doing homeschooling

to be able to manage the kids’ education in sort of two different areas?

I think at some point we’ll have to pull the plug and settle down at one place.

Right now, they’re pretty young, so we can afford to travel a lot, but not for long.

Right. I remember when my kids were really young and it’s every day.

What was the phrase I heard?

The days are long, but the years are short.

Before you know it, it’s another birthday, but man, sometimes slogging through a day, wow, this is a long day.

So hang in there. Enjoy every minute.

Parenthood is, as you know, awesome.

And it’s the most wonderful, most rewarding, and most challenging thing I’ve ever done, that’s for sure.

So, well, I appreciate you taking the time to be with me today, Harsha.

Do you have any final thoughts? Do you have anything you’d like to share? If people want to contact you, how can they contact you? What would you like to share to wrap up here today?

No, it’s been good chatting with you.

For the listeners, we as a company are very mission driven to increase the free market healthcare space in the U.S.

That is our goal, mission, and vision.

Every product or platform that we build or optimize is aiming to getting closer to that goal or mission statement.

Check out our website.

It is catered to direct primary care and concierge providers, no matter what specialty you’re in.

We try to do our best to help doctors maintain or run financially successful clinics through our patient acquisition tools that we have.

If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to reach out to me directly at

Harsha, which is my first name, H-A-R-S-H-A, at findmydirectdoctor.com.

Or you could also have general inquiries.

You can go to support at findmydirectdoctor.com.

We feel like we have a real opportunity over the next five to 10 years to revolutionize and change the healthcare space in the U.S.

Being involved in the industry over the last six, seven years, and being in the middle of it, I’ve seen an exponential growth in the industry.

As I said before, starting from having like 4,000 doctors in the entire country to 15,000 doctors have it today.

Billions of dollars of transactions happening in the direct primary care and concierge medicine space.

As an industry, we are very optimistic and bullish about where this is headed. And yeah, as a provider, I can,

I just call upon all the other providers to just start to learn about it, educate yourself.

You never know how these insurance companies are going to evolve over the next few years.

So it’s always better to kind of have a little bit of hedge and learn about alternate styles of practicing medicine.

And we are there to help when you need us.

That’s about it.

Wonderful, that’s awesome.

One of the factoids I saw a while back was that as of the end of 2023, concierge DPC medicine was a $6 billion industry in the United States, and it’s forecast to go to $13.5 billion by 2030.

And that just truly blew my mind to more than double in five years.

And, you know, that’s exciting growth.

I’m excited for you to be in the middle of this for your efforts to help physicians learn about this way of practicing medicine with less stress for themselves and their business practice, more profit and better outcomes for their patients in many cases.

For me, obviously, with offering digital marketing services and consultation to the physicians to help them grow and succeed, whether that would be transitioning from an existing practice to a concierge practice

or growing an existing concierge DPC practice or nurturing an existing practice and wait list to keep the people engaged and keep them renewing year after year.

Those are the services that we offer through concierge medical marketing.

And I’ve written a book called

The Definitive Guide to Winning with Digital Marketing for Concierge Medical Practices.

And anybody who’s listening to this podcast is absolutely welcome to go to our website, conciergemd.marketing.

Scroll down the homepage a little bit to the picture of the book and put in your email address, click it, and our system will email you a link where you can download the full PDF of this book.

Please take it with my compliments free of charge, read through it, mark it up.

If you have any questions, you’re most certainly welcome to reach out to me personally and I’ll try to get those questions answered for you.

Other than that, Harsha, thank you for taking the time to be my guest on this today.

And I do look forward to working with you more closely in the future, perhaps, as we were talking about before, we can offer some webinars, other training on digital marketing strategies and topics that the physicians can implement with their existing

teams and whatnot to help them grow and succeed.

Absolutely, happy to coordinate, Ben.

You have a great rest of the day.

Awesome, very good.

Everybody, this has been the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast.

I’m Steve Schwartz.

We will see you next time.

Thanks for being here.

Bye-bye.

Thank you for tuning in to the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast.

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To speak with Steven Schwartz about growing your concierge medical practice, give him a call at 772-304-2420

or visit our website at conciergemd.marketing.

We will see you next time.