Miiskin CEO Jon Friis on Digital-First Dermatology | Empowered Patient Podcast

Karen Jagoda: Welcome to the EmpoweredPatientPodcast.com show. I’m Karen Jagoda. My guest today is Jon Friis, Founder and CEO of Miiskin, miiskin.com. The topic
today is dermatological care. So Jon, I want to welcome you to the show. Iappreciate you taking a few minutes to be with us.

Jon Friis: Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.

Karen Jagoda: Thank you. Tell us about Miiskin’s mission.

Jon Friis: Miiskin’s mission is to make high-quality dermatology care more accessible and convenient without compromising standards and care. We see ourselves as a
differentiator in the market because we’re enabling providers with a dermatology platform that they can use for their audience. They’re not contracting with us as a provider. We enable the clinics and the providers with this technology platform. So we give the control back to the providers so they can meet the digital-first audience themselves and grow their business based on that.

Karen Jagoda: It seems to me dermatology has gained a lot from the sophistication of the cameras in the mobile devices people carry. So is that one of the reasons that you’ve been able to move this forward, because of the ability for people to take pictures of their skin?

Jon Friis: Absolutely. With dermatology care, the skin is visible to the patient, and I
strongly believe that the future will strive towards that. Every visit starts with the patient taking images and supporting patient information and patient history before they see any provider and consult with the provider. So it’s essential that the cameras are good, the quality of the images, and the capturing of the images are standardized and of high quality. And that’s where we’ve been evolving a lot of imaging technology to support that process for our platform and providers.

Karen Jagoda: Tell us more about how the platform has evolved.

Jon Friis: It’s like a digital dermatology platform now that allows patients to start their
consultation from home by securely submitting images and medical history through an independent dermatologist of their own choice on our platform. This has enabled dermatologists to expand their services and meet these digital patients in a convenient way. We evolved from a simple skin tracking app that I started because I had complexity with managing and monitoring my wife’s skin because she was at high risk of developing skin cancer. Now we are a fully integrated, end-to-end dermatology platform provider across all 50 US states. And we believe that this way of working for more routine care delivery, such as acne and inhalers, mla, prescription renewals, and all these things, is a very efficient way for the providers and the clinicians to work.

Karen Jagoda: And so what has been the feedback from the dermatologist and the
dermatology clinics that you work with?

Jon Friis: I think one of the feedback we have is a very efficient way for them to work on
routine care delivery. So instead of patients in person, there are a lot of examples of less severe acne, for example, mild-moderate acne, hair loss, and other routine care that don’t need to have in-person visits to diagnose and treat the patients in the proper way. And that creates a lot of efficiency. That makes it very efficient for the provider to work in this way. Enable them again to take more high-value patients in and expand their reach into this digital audience, and hence they grow and build their independent practice.

Karen Jagoda: What has been the feedback from patients?

Jon Friis: I think the patients are the group that is overwhelmingly positive. This is the
stakeholder who is leading the transition here. We know that over 90% of our patients receive care within 24 hours, and almost 100% receive care within 48 hours. They, of course, value the access to quality care delivery, the speed, the convenience, and we have high retention rates, with many returning patients coming back for care delivery.

Karen Jagoda: Do you think patients are more likely to explore a mole or a rash or something that’s on their skin if they have this kind of tool available as opposed to just
saying, well, it’s just a rash and ignoring it?

Jon Friis: I think convenience is extremely important here because some of the
complexities with face-to-face consultation are, of course, that they need to schedule an appointment. There are long waiting lines and queues. You need to take off from work, you need to drive potentially long distances, and so forth. So, the convenience and the digital region that you can do and start this consultation from within your own home, the comfort of your home, of course, gives that advantage that things that you think are a little bit cumbersome to do, you get done basically.

Karen Jagoda: And so, tell us more about the process. This is an asynchronous model, and people are uploading information, uploading images. Say how it works from the
patient’s point of view.

Jon Friis: If a patient discovers a concern or they know they need a prescription renewal, they find our workflow online, and they go in, and they can start a digital
workflow from the comfort of their home. They download the app or go through our web platform, where they answer clinical questionnaires, structured information, and patient intake forms. They upload or take, with the app, high-quality images of their skin condition and answer more questions about personal information.

Jon Friis: Since it’s a cash pay-only solution for now, they can also have the opportunity to pay directly. Then they select a provider based on qualifications that they can see on our platform, and also specialty or other, say demographic consideration, or whatever the patient’s preference is. And as soon as they’ve submitted all that information without any professionals or providers have spent any time on it, all that information is gathered and structured and presented to the dermatologist in a HIPAA-compliant, secure and safe provider platform online where they get a notification that a patient has submitted this request for consultation. Then the provider logs in and does the assessment of the clinical condition, documents it, potentially prescribes medication to the patient, and then sends all that information back to the patient.

Jon Friis: Yes, so the assessment and the treatment plan, the diagnosis is communicated
asynchronously back to the patient. Potentially. If the treatment plan includes prescriptions, the providers will prescribe medications for the patients for their conditions. And then the patient can either depend on how the patient selects what type of pharmacy, or if they have a mail order pharmacy, or they want to go down into the pharmacy and buy the prescription medication directly.

Karen Jagoda: And does this help dermatologists reach patient populations they couldn’t reach in the past?

Jon Friis: Yes, absolutely. We call this patient group “the digital first patient group”, which is basically the patient group that, for whatever reason, prefers to initiate a
consultation at home digitally. Our competitors out there have centralized platforms where the patients can do a similar process, but on our platform, they’re always secure.

Jon Friis: But they are all dermatologists working independently. They have their own
business, they have their own clinic, they have their own independence, and we
are enabling them, the providers and clinics to reach into this audience, which is a very valuable audience to the clinics and the providers and where they’ve seen a lot of competition, acne, hair loss, renewals, this is the bread and butter most dermatologists. Now we are giving them a tool to compete with digital solutions for a digital-first audience, patient audience.

Karen Jagoda: It really sounds like you’re streamlining their workflow, so they may not need as much administrative help or people answering the phone. So does this give the
doctor more quality time with the patients who actually do come into the
office?

Jon Friis: That’s essentially up to the providers and how they want to use that. But it, of
course, should free up time and space and availability for the procedures that essentially need action. That’s the idea of it. Not all skin conditions, all concerns need official consultation. Some you can do through an asynchronous platform like ours, but they take dermatology time and allow for more efficiency. And then hopefully over time this enables them to go after severe cases, potentially skin cancer, which always need to have face-to-face or efficient consultations.

Karen Jagoda: And does your software help identify warning signs? Is it doing any kind of analytics on the actual data? On the images?

Jon Friis: No, we don’t have any kind of diagnostic AI or anything like that. Miiskin is a
digital premium workflow for independent dermatology providers and clinics. So they can streamline this process with the patient engagement online from the get-go to a singular workflow process end-to-end, which includes potentially also prescription. But we don’t have any AI diagnostics. All medical standards are up to the providers, and they’re basically responsible for the medical evaluation and assistance.

Karen Jagoda: Makes perfect sense. And what do you think will help grow this virtual care model? So more people are thinking of virtual care first before making an
appointment with the doctor.

Jon Friis: I think, of course, at some point in the future, I believe that a clear
reimbursement pathway will also help gain a broader adoption in this space.
And I think there’s a lot of potential. It’s definitely clear that the patients are already on board; we need to get the message out. The key is making it easy for and valuable for the providers, but at the same time also valuable for the payers’ end of the line. And we’re not there yet, but I think the efficiency speaks for itself, and that’s what we’re continuing to evolve.

Karen Jagoda: And this does seem to be one way to address the lack of access to doctors, so that if somebody has a minor issue, or just like you described, a prescription
renewal, it gives the whole system just one less thing to worry about and can
then focus on the really critical patients. So are you thinking there are a lot of
new features that you’re going to be adding to this process because of what
you’ve learned so far?

Jon Friis: Absolutely. The platform is evolving all the time. We are currently expanding
integration into more pharmacies. We are adding more tools for the support of continuous care for a longer time. And of course, we are also exploring how gen AI can support the workflow of the providers without taking the responsibility away from them. I think it’s crucial that we digitize and make the provider workflow process as optimal as possible because we all know that we need an absolute digitalized dermatology solution in the future to have this supply and demand complexity meeting in the future. We see the demand is rising, and supply is kind of going down or stagnating.

Karen Jagoda: What’s next for Miiskin? Are you looking for additional partnerships?

Jon Friis: We’re always looking for partnerships within the dermatology space because we are not competitors to the dermatologist and to the clinics, we’re enablers. We
enable them to reach an audience and work in an efficient workflow process. So
that’s a partner strategy essentially crucial to us. We see all our providers as
partners on the platforms, and we’ll continue that strategy.

Karen Jagoda: Before we run out of time today, tell us about your background and what inspired you to build Miiskin.

Jon Friis: As I said before, I created this skin monitoring, skin tracking app because my
wife is at high risk of developing skin cancers. She’s a blonde woman and has
passed her 50th birthday. And then you need to take care of yourself and look
after your spots and moles. But from that point on, we could see how much
value we could bring to the margin product by extending our service to be a
complete digital dermatology platform for teledermatology. Images are so
crucial, vision of care, and of course it makes the platform extremely compliant.

Jon Friis: Many doctors come back and say to us, they have better documentation of all
their patient conditions now because they have clear images of all the diseases,
all the skin conditions, all the treatments they have done, which they normally
don’t have. They’re basically giving a description normally. But now we’re
basically starting with the images and all that is captured prior to any
professional workers spending any time or crucial time gathering information.

Karen Jagoda: Thanks to my guest today, Jon Friis, Founder and CEO of Miiskin, miiskin.com I’m Karen Jagoda, Host of the Empowered Patient Podcast. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.