Jared Kaplan is CEO and Co-Founder of Indigo—an AI-powered insurtech platform for medical malpractice insurance. Jared has served in executive roles at several private equity-backed fintech companies prior to founding Indigo. Most recently, he was CEO of Cadre, a tech platform facilitating access to commercial real estate investment. Previously, he was CEO of OppFi (NYSE: OPFI), an AI lending platform powering community banks, and Co-Founder & EVP of Insureon, the leading online agency for small business insurance. Jared also led financial services investing for Accretive, an early-stage private equity firm. He began his career as an Analyst at Goldman Sachs and holds a BBA from the University of Michigan.
I would say that, like all people, doctors sometimes make mistakes. These mistakes can be very scary for the patients they serve, and they need protection so that, when these mistakes happen, they can ensure that their business is able to continue to operate after it occurs.
Doctors also sometimes perform their job as they would be expected to, but they're falsely accused of doing something wrong. And they also need protection in those instances so that people don't take advantage of them.
Actually, in medical malpractice, it's particularly pervasive because 80 percent of the claims are bogus. It's only 20 percent of the time where there's a legitimate claim there. So doctors need protection for when they did make a true mistake, but they also need protection when they are falsely accused. And lots of five-year-olds in kindergarten, especially when I had five-year-olds in kindergarten, I know they definitely were falsely accused of lots of lots of issues that they needed to be protected from.
I think, in general, physicians play a really important role in our lives. I make decisions every day as the CEO of a business, but they're typically not life-or-death decisions. Actually, they've never been a life-or-death decision.
So you've got physicians making the most important kind of decision, which is a life-or-death decision. And their business models are increasingly under attack. They're under attack from a revenue perspective—how they get reimbursed. They're under attack from a delivery model perspective, like how they do their job. That's very prevalent today after COVID with telemedicine, or the prescription of GLP-1s, or any of the trends that you see.
And it's also under attack from a cost perspective; it's just more expensive to do lots of things these days. Inflation is one of the drivers of that, and it's more expensive to employ people. It is also more expensive to insure your business. And we have actually a relatively large role in addressing this problem because, most people don't realize it, but medical malpractice is typically the second largest expense that a doctor's office has after their people. And it's also administratively burdensome to procure. It's crazy how stuck in the stone age the process of actually finding a medical malpractice insurance policy is. So our mission is to make that process unbelievably simple and transparent and ultimately save money.
Doctors then not only have peace of mind back so that they can focus on their life-or-death decisions, but hopefully, we've made the operation more efficient from a cost perspective, which allows them to run a better business.
Historically, physicians are underwritten, meaning insurance carriers assess their risk of a future claim based on a very small number of data points. They're looking at where you work, so your geography, and they're looking at what type of doctor you are, your specialty, and then they're looking at your historical loss history if you’ve filed claims. Those three data points are supposed to give you an idea of how risky that doctor is, and we have just found that to be unbelievably antiquated, to figure out true risk at the individual physician level. Because if you think about all of the potential alternative data points that exist out there, we've come to the point of view that you can actually stratify risk at a much more granular, individualized physician level if you take into effect what type of medication they're prescribing, what kind of procedures they do, what their patient population looks like. In fact, many times, historical claims experience has nothing to do with predicting future risk.
And so, our whole approach is to take a new school approach to an old school industry and to use artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to compile all of these individualized data points and then come up with a very comprehensive assessment of, “Oh, that doctor is risky and that doctor isn't.”
And when you get to our outcome, at the end of the day, we're able to save about half of physicians money in this space because we can tell who's risky versus who's not risky at a much more granular level. And that's the beauty of innovation and technology, highly leveraged by these new AI technologies.
I think the reality with healthcare is you have all of these new tools coming to market, which should collectively reduce human error and create better patient outcomes, which are actually also great for doctors. And the root of poor decision-making is often based in human error.
It's your view of your experience and how what you've experienced helps you make decisions, and it's how you feel on a certain day. And really, technology is helping us wipe all that out and have a consistent, highly accurate process for doing a number of things. And that's everything from examining a patient to diagnosing a patient to potentially even operating on a patient. Each of those processes is rife with human error. And so, if you're able to definitively and accurately and consistently produce what should be expected from a set of facts, at the end of the day, you're going to have much more satisfied and healthy patients. And I think everyone is underestimating where this world is gonna go. And it's just scratching the surface.
Be optimistic about the power of what is out there. I think, speaking from my personal experience, I've been a multiple-time CEO and each job has had lots of time between them, but it's amazing how much changes in between these roles. The advancements are so stunningly quick, and you can do so much more now with much less human activity. You’ve got to adopt it and not become a laggard, right?
So you have to make the investment to learn, to read, and to understand what's going on, and then you can't be afraid to test it. And I think if you're forward-thinking and you're motivated to stay ahead of the curve, you're going to be a huge beneficiary of these tools. There are so many people who are going to get lost and left behind by not investing the time that's required to actually understand what's out there. And again, don't look at it as a threat. Look at it as an opportunity and a way to make your business more efficient and to make your customers more satisfied.
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