inteliPRACTICE

Rachel Flick is the Founder of inteliPRACTICE, a startup helping health providers to improve their own business health and longevity.  

With almost two decades of experience as a strategic marketer inside businesses as notable as IBM, numbers and performance are firmly entwined in Rachel’s DNA.

Her ability to use data to pinpoint problems and measure success has been finely tuned over years designing strategic campaigns to help large corporations and tech companies grow their business.

Central to this, says Rachel, is the ability to define success, then take the right steps to achieve it.

Approximately 18 months ago, Rachel identified an opportunity to take the industry best practice knowledge she gained working in large corporate structures and apply it to smaller organisations, where she could take a whole of organisation approach.

Very quickly, she identified an urgent need for a tool that could help owners of group psychology practices.

“Psychology practise owners are incredibly focussed on trying to help their clients. Right now one of their main priorities is to minimise long wait lists that have spiked throughout the pandemic. There are a lot of vulnerable people waiting in line for their help.”

Rachel explains that as ‘people people’ psychologists and other health practitioners often have the human resources side of things covered, but have rarely been trained in business.

“Practice owners tend to be motivated by helping people, rather than by money, so are less focussed on the operational and financial aspects of their business. Most of them aren’t being compensated fairly. You’ll often find that their staff are earning more than they do.”

“There will often become a point when they decide that they want to be fairly compensated. To achieve this, they need their business to be financially sustainable and at a point where they pay themselves for the additional responsibilities they take on in running a practice. The problem is, many practice owners do not know their financial situation or what levers they have to improve it.”

Once she started digging, Rachel was shocked at how widespread the problem was across the industry.

In her line of work Rachel frequently hears the phrase ‘I want to grow, I want to help more people’, to which comes her reply ‘How do you measure success’.

Unpacking this problem, Rachel has spent the last 18 months developing and applying an industry specific digital ‘scorecard’ for psychology practices - inteliPRACTICE. The scorecard plugs in data from across the business to track performance against set KPIs, visualising information in an easy to reference dashboard.

As Rachel explains it, “It’s a tool to help those who are preoccupied with helping others.”

Piloting her approach in two practices, her results have been extraordinary.

In one pilot site she identified major utilisation issues (the amount of time psychologists and rooms are in use), with psychologists operating at roughly half the industry benchmark.

“Although incredibly significant, the utilisation issue was not apparent until we started applying the scorecard. Once we identified the problem we were able to set some targets and a measurable plan for how to achieve them.”

Since then, the practice has increased its utilisation by more than 20% (and rising) and profits by more than 50%.

Justifiably reassured by these early results, and recognising that the solution could potentially be scaled to other types of private practice, Rachel joined the Female Founders Program to verify that she was onto a scalable idea and understand how to scale responsibly.

“I’d been sitting on the inteliPRACTICE idea for a year before I plucked up the courage to take the first step. I guess I didn’t know where to start and like many women in similar situations, was fighting an imposter syndrome inner monologue,” says Rachel.

“Through the Female Founders program, I’ve been able to build a team of people around me that support my idea, believe in me, and want me to succeed. The startup community in Newcastle is really quite amazing. Connecting into that has been one of the most valuable things I’ve done.”

One area Rachel had identified as a gap was her baseline knowledge of how to create a startup, including IP management.

“The theoretical component of the program, which includes legal and IP management, helped me understand how I will successfully establish my business,” says Rachel.

“This experience has validated my hypothesis, given me the confidence to keep going and helped me understand the value of rapid evolutions of my idea before investing significant money in the solution. It’s been an amazing program, really empowering.”

Next steps for Rachel and inteliPRACTICE include securing her first subscription-based clients, a milestone she expects to reach early next year.

You can contact Rachel at hello@intelipractice.com