CourMed CEO on being first recipient of Microsoft's capital fund

Derrick L. Miles, CourMed CEO & Founder, joins Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre and Anjalee Khemlani to disucss his company being selected as the first to receive Microsoft’s $50 million capital fund to support small businesses.

Video Transcript

JARED BLIKRE: And we have the very first company selected, CourMed and its CEO Derrick Miles. He is the CEO and founder. And we also have Anjalee Khemlani joining us here. And Derrick, tell us a little bit about this fund here and what it means to you and exactly what you're able to do with some of the money from this grant from Microsoft.

DERRICK L. MILES: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. The fund means a great deal to us as a startup. It gives us the opportunity to go out and recruit A players. I believe that there's a competitive advantage in the startup marketplace, and it's the team who has the most A players who's going to eventually win. So it'll give us an opportunity to recruit marketing, IT and sales executives to help us move a lot quicker.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Derrick, Anjalee here. Let's talk about what they will need to be doing once you do hire them. Obviously, you started off as a health care solutions company, really pivoted towards the pharmacy sector. I know that you did a little bit with offering monoclonal antibody therapies, for example, in the home. What else do you have going on right now? And how much have you had to say pivot because of the pandemic?

DERRICK L. MILES: Well, we actually started off as a pharmaceutical delivery company, and then we got accepted to the Microsoft for Startups Accelerator. And what I noticed when we got into the accelerator is, that they kept sending us ideas for us to expand our vertical. So the first thing they sent to us was, hey, they said, Derrick, can you deliver vaccines? I was like, we never tried it, but let's see if we can do it. And were able to start delivering vaccines back and I would say March of 2021.

And then we also behind the scenes partnered with Amazon Pharmacy, and it was Amazon Pharmacy who was like, hey, Derrick, do you think you can deliver monoclonal antibodies? And we say we never did it before, but we'll give it a try. So the thing that I saw, you know, Microsoft started off as office productivity software. Google started off as a search engine. And Amazon started off as a bookstore. And they've been able to pivot. They've seen the opportunities to create a solution and they provided a solution.

So for CourMed, we've done the same thing. We started off as a pharmaceutical delivery company, then we saw opportunities yo deliver vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, IV vitamin therapy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I would say the bee in our bonnet which makes us really unique in how we continue to partner, is that we help our partners; physicians, nurses, pharmacies, actually make more money and make more margin on the monies that they are able to deliver to homes, corporate offices and luxury hotels through our software.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Well, let's dig into how you do that. Because of course, right now, this is all unfurling while there is a national debate about generally health care costs, as well as drug pricing. And I know that you don't necessarily work through insurers. So walk us through it. How does this all work in terms of maximizing for them, but also with that background, keeping in mind the whole overall theme of health care costs?

DERRICK L. MILES: Right. So one thing I didn't share before, that I'm a former health care executive. Spent about 15 years in some of the nation's largest academic medical centers. Became CEO at the age of 31. So because of that experience, I know where a lot of the bones are buried. So one of the things that I knew, there's opportunities in the health care space for us to provide a more, I would say concierge service. But we never were able to do it because we didn't work together.

So when it comes to delivering monoclonal antibodies, the pharmacy can't go into the home and set up the IV therapy. The nurse cannot get or create the concoction. And so what CourMed has been able to do, is provide partners. And we are able to provide more I would say high end concierge services in people's homes, offices, and luxury hotels that we never could do independently.

So through the relationship with the physician, anytime a person receives a monoclonal antibody, it requires a physician order. So our system is able to pull that order, and once a patient pays for it, we have a nursing partner and the pharmacy partner that also receives that information. Once that information is received, it goes into the CourMed software. Now there's tracking. Prior to CourMed being involved, these nurses who go out and provide these services in homes didn't have any insight as to where they were going as far as instructions. And then the patients didn't have any insight as to when they were going to be there.

So in a nutshell, again, we use partners with individuals who have been deemed the nation's most trusted physicians, nurses and pharmacies, to work together provide a concierge high end level of health care. I believe that more people would be more interested in concierge health care if they knew about it. The unfortunate thing is, that it's not really promoted that much, so most people just accept what we call seven-minute medicine.

JARED BLIKRE: And it seems like a great idea, it just takes some technological heft. And that's one area where the medical field has been lagging. I know this is an issue that you track very closely in your notes. You mentioned that the health care field tends to lag other fields by about 10 years. Is health care finally catching up? Is there some kind of acceleration that can take place here that can really bring it into the modern times?

DERRICK L. MILES: Unfortunately, health care is not going to catch up. And I'll say that again, being in space for many, many years, when someone goes into health care, they're going in for patient care. Innovative people don't go into health care. Some events that happened within the last year that lets you know how hard health care is to innovate, like last month, Google for Health decided that they were going to get out the health care space. Many, many months before that it was Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan Chase and Amazon said they were throwing their hands up in the air. They just were not going to go into the health care space.

So health care tends to be at least 10 years behind what's cutting edge. So what I decided to do when I saw the proliferation of crowd-sourced delivery, the Uber, Lyft, the Grubhub back in 2010, 2011, we just say, hey, there's an opportunity to bring this into health care. When we came up with the idea actually in 2015, but we didn't launch it into 2018, there was no solution out there at that time. Typical to America, most people will find a solution and they will copy. I used to work for an organization called Universal Health Services. We never wanted to be number one in a market. We always want to be number two. So we did have different companies come out and kind of copy what we've done.

But what we're doing today with Microsoft really puts a moat around our services, because also in the announcement, people have to understand that CourMed is the identified company for any corporation that uses Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, as the company that can provide on site delivery of health care products and services. So in a nutshell, I think that the pandemic also accelerated some health care innovation, but I don't think that health care will ever catch up to the marketplace.