Piction Health Founder and CEO Susan Conover
Skin cancer is the most common cancer in the United States and worldwide. Some 2 people die of skin cancer in the U.S. every hour. Yet when detected early, the 5-year survival rate for melanoma is 99 percent, according to the Skin Cancer Foundation.
Those statistics were all too real for Susan Conover who experienced the fear of a melanoma diagnosis and the challenge of getting a timely appointment with a Dermatologist when time is of the essence.
“I was first diagnosed with melanoma when I was 22. I tried to go see a dermatologist and was told it would take at least three months to get in. And so, I went to my primary doctor and he was like, ‘We don't have time to wait. I’ll just biopsy it, ” says Conover, co-founder and CEO of digital health company, Piction Health in an interview. The biopsy revealed she had stage 2 melanoma. Fortunately she didn’t wait and was able to successfully treat the cancer in time before it spread further.
Trained to solve problems as a mechanical engineer and at MIT, Conover decided to address the problems caused by the lack of early access to dematologists by founding digital health company Piction Health in 2017.
Piction Health is a Telehealth dermatology clinic that provides care for skin, hair, and nail issues. The Boston-based company uses artificial intelligence (AI) and board-certified dermatologists to offer personalized care to patients across the United States.
“There was a huge mismatch in supply and demand of expert dermatology care that's even worse today because of the rise of Botox and other cosmetic procedures that are very high margin. It’s hard for patients to get access to the people who really recognize what condition they have like instantly, visually. And so I realized that there was an opportunity to deliver care and deliver care at scale in a new way with the rise of smartphones and AI being better than experts when you train on the right cases and the right data,” says Conover.
At first, she gave thought to becoming a dermatologist herself to solve the problem. But she decided that working as a team with dermatologists and software engineers would be a faster way to solve the problem and have far greater impact for many more people.
She spent her thesis at MIT on the topic and then another thesis on it at the Singapore University of Technology going deep in this area. “And so, I got that opportunity to learn a lot about dermatology today, and how melanoma is managed at home, primary care and expert specialty offices. But I also learned some things around entrepreneurship and founding a company in those environments as well. And that kind of gave me the confidence and resources to be like, ‘Okay, this can really be a thing’,” says Conover of her first startup.
She started with pitch competitions and projects within the MIT ecosystem to iterate and get feedback on the idea and then had to learn about regulatory implications on creating an AI that identifies skin conditions. Then she had to put together a team starting with her co-founder and CTO, Pranav Kuber, formerly a software engineer working on machine learning at Intel and ByteLight.
“I think building a team is one of the hardest and most important things in a startup, especially if you've never done it. I actually met my co-founder, Pranav, in an improv class. Obviously it's got to be someone who’s excited about startups. But then also you want someone who has complementary skills and the same value system,” says Conover.
The company iterated a few business models before coming to the conclusion that building a dermatology practice with board certified Dermatologists was the best solution beyond just an AI-based software platform.
The idea is to get patients quickly from virtual initial interaction to in-person visit within days, rather than months. Piction Health and its 8-person clinical staff started accepting patients in 2022 spurred on by the Pandemic and increasing acceptance of Telehealth, both by the public and insurance companies.
“We just reached our 2,000th patient about a month ago, and so I believe that was like a 30% to 40% on average, month over month, growth rate since our launch, and now we're in network for over six and a half million patients in Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and expanding that coverage all the time,” says Conover.
The company partnered with dermatologists around the world, including dermatologists in India, South Africa, Tunisia and Spain, to build up a data set that's representative across skin tones to train its AI-based detection platform. “Just like AI can perpetuate bias, AI can actually reduce bias if you train it correctly, says Conover.
Piction Health raised $377k in 2019 to help get the company off the ground. They raised $2 million in the summer of 2020, followed by another $3.6 million in 2020 for a total of $6 million to date. The company is backed by Flare Capital, Techstars, Argon Ventures, Good Growth Capital, Bayless Healthcare and others.
“Argon Ventures is an investor in Piction Health because of their potential to significantly increase accessibility to dermatology care. We're proud to be part of their journey and look forward to Piction expanding its reach and further their mission to bring quality care to all,” said Andy Feinberg, Managing Partner at Argon Ventures in an interview.
Conover grew up in Denton, Texas. Her mother and father were both business professors at the University of North Texas, now since retired. She has a sister who is a public defender in New Hampshire. “My parents raised us to be very family oriented and to have a strong sense of fairness and justice,” says Conover.
She graduated from the University of Texas in Austin with a degree in mechanical engineering and also studied at INSA in Toulouse, France and at the University of Melbourne in Australia. She worked in management consulting for a short while and decided that was not for her and then earned her masters at MIT in systems design and management, as well as graduate studies at the Singapore University of Technology.
“Before I got admitted into MIT, I did not have the confidence to believe I could do a startup. And I think maybe that's social condition. But I'm a problem solver, in the sense that I had an acute, hard experience, and then got the resources and opportunity and time to explore that in school,” says Conover.
As for the future? “We’re using AI to streamline care to help our dermatologists manage 15 times more patients than they could otherwise manage, so our goal is to build a scalable practice that can bring care to every American who needs it, and then also around the world,” concludes Conover.
