Making Eye Care More Accessible With Next Gen Eye Testing w/Eyebot Co-Founder & CEO, Matthias Hofmann | HealthBiz Briefs

Matthias Hofmann (Co-Founder & CEO, eyebot) discusses the significant expenses and inconvenience associated with traditional eye exams, and how his company is simplifying eyecare for everyone

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CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (Senior Advisor, Walgreens Health) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy.

🎙️⚕️ABOUT MATTHIAS HOFMANN
Matthias Hofmann is Co-founder and CEO at Eyebot, bringing experience from previous roles at 123 SEE, Lumicell, Formlabs, and EyeNetra. Matthias Hofmann holds a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech and a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Dayton. With a robust skill set that includes Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and more,

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Transcript

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Eye exams are important, but they're also inconvenient and expensive, which means many Americans go without. There are more than 30 million Americans whose blurry vision could be corrected, but isn't. But what if getting an eye exam was as simple as going to a retail store and pressing a button? Welcome to Health Biz Briefs. I'm David Williams, president of Health Business Group here with Matthias Hoffman, co -founder and CEO of Eyebot. the company focuses on simplifying eye care for everyone. Welcome, Matias. Hello. Matias, why don't Americans get eye exams? That's a great question. There's a couple of problems. One of them is there's just not enough doctors in the United States. So there are actually more eyeglass stores than there's doctors. And another problem is that we ran a ton of surveys before we even started this company. And... Originally, we thought it was the price, but it's not actually the main reason. It's simply for most by far for most people, for most Americans, it's the inconvenience component. So probably a five to one ratio. It's the inconvenience problem that people face. And of course, then also is the price point. And on top of that, only about 50 % of Americans actually have vision insurance. And so that doesn't help either. It's interesting that certain things like vision and dental. which are very much part of health. I mean, they're both on the face too, but, you know, just not considered part of regular health insurance. And certainly I imagine that, you know, the eye and the mouth are important for health. So it's kind of a weird thing. Yeah, that's a very American thing. It's about a 50 year old story of why that actually happened. Yeah. You want to give me the two second version? Oh, that's a, I can't do it in two seconds. Fair enough. But I mean, these things have all separately, right? And one I know on the dental side, part of it is just like dentists are not physicians. And so they have their own kind of coding and approach. And sometimes when they went and put something under insurance that might have started as like hospital insurance, you know, it's a while before it was all kind of connected together. So I'm just guessing it's something similar on the vision side. Yeah, there is a there's a protectionism. There's Julia typically around money and just want to protect certain things. Yeah, fair enough. All right. My next question is, what is iBot's value proposition? Yeah, so what iBot does is we provide a vision exam in a matter of 90 seconds. And it requires no instructions and no learning and no technical know -how. All you do is you walk up to a machine, you push a button, and it automatically does the exam, scans your eyes, and we have results in front of you immediately. Do I have to keep my, do I have to stop from blinking for 90 seconds? We deal with that too. As long as your eyes are open at some point, that's fine. Yeah. Yeah. And I want to be like a clockwork orange situation. I get a problem open in order for it to, for it to work. That's good. And has that, does that value proposition resonate for people? Yeah. So what we did before we, this, this year we're doing a much bigger public launch. But we have done. multiple shopping locations, shopping centers, including around the Boston area. One particular location was the Burlington Mall, which is a premium mall here in Boston. And we also did a B Malls, one in New Hampshire, and also C Malls, strip malls. And we've surprisingly found almost identical results. So we put our systems out there for everyone to use, just to put a big sign up. It says free vision test 90 seconds. And... The results have been actually very surprisingly good. On average, we would do about 45 exams, free vision exams per day. We would on some days on Saturdays have lines, people forming groups around it, bringing their friends after they did it themselves and bringing more people. So the response has been very positive. And we've found very interesting statistics as well. 22 % of our users... It's their first lifetime vision exam. Yeah. And when that happens and we saw also the kind of a cultural background, we're talking black, white, Asian, Latino, everybody, right? We're talking all income levels from rich to poor age group, 16 to 88 years old, very broad age distribution. To us, it was very clear that we've created an interface that worked for everybody. And that was very exciting to us. And we've proved it. proven it multiple times over now in multiple locations that this is a format that people can understand and can use. And now we are in the process of scaling this. Matias, your background is in technology, electrical engineering, PhD, a lot of experience creating things from scratch. And this is a technology company. And I'm wondering if you can describe a little bit, what is your technological edge? Talk about scanning, what's the principle behind what you're doing? So I can't talk into too much detail, but the main thing to understand is that we replicate a lot of the traditional technologies that you can find in the clinic. So for the refraction components, we use the same fundus reflex method that traditional clinical units use. There's a lot of innovation in how we specifically do that. What's very important to us is that we retain near infrared imaging, which... means that people don't actually see us. You don't see the light scanning your eyes. It's in a way of things that you can't see. It's invisible. But that also makes sure that your pupils don't shrink or you don't like, it's not like flashing your eyes. And these are a lot of the techniques that are already in the clinic. We're just doing it in a different form factor and also in a different way that allows us to have a very completely touch free exam. You're not sticking your head into anything. It's you just stand there. and it does all the work. Cool. Well, that's it for the latest Health Biz Brief. If you like what you hear, check out my Health Biz Podcast for a full -length interview with Matthias about his life and career. Matthias Hoffman, co -founder and CEO of iBot, thanks for joining me today on Health Biz Briefs.