Dr. Florian Otto: CEO and Co-founder of Cedar (Raise the Line)

Watch video only
Hi, I'm Shivani. Thanks for checking out our raise the line interview series.
In which me and my cohost osmosis chief Medical Officer Dr Rishi Desai explore how to strengthen our healthcare system with some amazing leaders in medicine, technology, education and government and they have some great advice for people starting careers in healthcare as well.
I hope you'll watch these highlights and then go listen to the full podcast interview wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Slan today on Raise the line.
I'm happy to be joined by Doctor Florian Oto. Florian is the CEO and cofounder of Cedar, which is a healthcare fintech platform that creates customized interactions to facilitate patient centric financial engagement.
Do you mind just telling us a bit about how you got into the overall health care arena? Um I mean, you have several really impressive degrees here.
MDD DS and P HDI. Happy to, to talk about that.
So, um as I mentioned, uh born and raised in, in uh Germany and then went to medical school starting in 2000. And um after that, I basically, I did my P HDI did that in maxillofacial surgeries.
So it was more of a research and was really excited, got excited about the topic that I decided afterwards to also get my dds because in order to become a maxillofacial surgeon, you need to be an MD and AD Ds.
Um, yeah, then afterwards, um, I decided basically that I don't want to do the clinical work, but more rather want to do the business side of health care.
So I decided then, um, to switch careers and work for Min Company. So Cedar is at the intersection of two very um very hot markets, right?
And you don't really see a lot of health tech plus fintech, which is where Cedar seems to be playing. Can you tell us a bit more about Cedar the mission of the company?
And what inspired you to, to start it? True.
Absolutely. And, and I think the reason why basically the market is a bit hard because there's a big problem in the healthcare and especially I think on the financial experience and it came more from a personal experience where my wife really had a bad billing experience.
So she went to a hospital, swiped the credit card for the copayment, got a stack of forms to fill out. And then a month later came, the first bill was a stack of paper.
Um, everything in CBT codes, nobody really understand it. And um it was actually tough to pay.
So she got the prompt to fill it out or to, to pay it through a portal, but the portal didn't work through Google Chrome.
And then another month later, she got an invoice from the, from the imaging center. And then a half a year later, a debt collector called her for a bill, uh a lab bill that she never got talking to patients and talking to providers.
Both of them are actually really frustrated with the with the process. Patients say this is absolutely intrans parent, this is absolutely inconvenient to do.
Um And this is very unfair, the healthcare providers say the patients they are not willing to pay, sometimes they might not be able to pay and they don't want to pay.
And what we found out that it's actually neither nor patients want to pay. And healthcare payments is actually a really difficult en come some communication between the health care provider and the patient.
So that is also what drove us to it and to this pro development of creating transparency and personalization in this interaction.
Thanks for watching this preview of Raised Line to hear the full interview, check out all of our podcasts and subscribe to the series.
Please go to us motions.org/raised Line podcast or listen wherever you get your podcasts.