The Redox Podcast

The Redox Podcast 9: The Mint.com for healthcare with Aaron Patzer from Vital (and founder of Mint.com)

February 18, 2020
Niko Skievaski President & Co-Founder

Key Moments

02:31 – How Mint.com came to be 
10:40 – Why isn’t there a Mint.com yet for healthcare?
17:02 – Applying the lessons learned at Mint.com to healthcare
23:10 – What is “adversarial interoperability?”
26:43 – What is Vital? 
37:08 – Enabling providers with the right information at the right time so they can provide the best care
46:55 – Powering applications that make a difference

“Hospital software shouldn’t be that much different than consumer software. It should be just like Apple products, where you kind of know how to use it. None of us trained on how to use Dropbox, Facebook, and other consumer stuff. Companies wouldn’t have been successful if everyone had to go through training.” 

Aaron Patzer

In early 2017, a few of us at Redox realized that we were all having similar late-night technical conversations with Aaron Patzer. He was devouring our developer documentation and blowing up our developer slack community at all hours. It took a few days before someone finally looked him up. 

Aaron Patzer, of course, founded Mint.com in 2006 and eventually sold it to Intuit. This was the guy whose company was the catalyst for the FinTech revolution that followed. And more interestingly, from my perspective at least, Mint.com drove consumer demand for their financial data, giving way to companies like MX and Plaid. This enabled developers to build an ecosystem of FinTech applications that would forever change an industry. (Visa acquired Plaid for $5.3 billion just a couple of months ago.)

In healthcare, we’re seeing the roots of a similar open data revolution, albeit with our own dizzying spin of data types, countless different expressions, misaligned incentives, and disengaged consumers. All of which I get to ask Aaron about in this interview. Since the days of Microsoft Health Vault and Google Health’s failed attempts to create a consolidated view of one’s medical history, people have been trying to create the “Mint.com for health.” 

Since Mint.com, Aaron’s journey took him through other ventures until he eventually found himself in healthcare. No, not to build the “Mint.com for health” (he addresses why that’s a bad idea), but to build Vital, an AI-powered software for hospital emergency rooms and patients. This is what was in his head back in 2017 when he started poking around our dev tools. Last year, he came out of stealth mode to announce Vital, along with a $5.2 million seed round funded by an impressive tier of angels and VCs. 

Aaron Patzer was one of the major figures responsible for disrupting the enormous personal finance market. We’re anxious to see the results of his foray now into digital healthcare. Our thanks to Aaron Patzer for joining us on The Redox Podcast.

Stay in the know! Subscribe to our newsletter.

Related Posts