Effective communication is vital for the success of any business, but for hospitals and other health care facilities, it’s an absolute must. Vocera helps by providing mobile communication solutions that address the most serious communication challenges that health care workers face every day. More than 750 health care organizations use Vocera solutions to function more
Sramana: You said that Eliza achieved profitability in two years with a lean, bootstrapped operation. What year was that, and what is the story from that point until today? Alexandra Drane: That was in 2001, once we had the platform we started receiving information from people in real time. We had a speech recognition system
Sramana: Once you found the speach recognition technology that led to Eliza, what was your next step? Alexandra Drane: At that time I was 28 years old. I knew I was not yet ready to be a CEO, but I wanted to be involved and knew I had to get a team who could help
Sramana: What were some of the major lessons learned between the time you left Axon Group and joined Eliza? Alexandra Drane: I left CDI to start Axon which was a value capital company. One of the startups with Axon was NewMed which was a medical device company. At each company I have been involved with
Sramana: When you left Axon Group, what company did you create and what was the thesis behind that company? Alexandra Drane: We founded Tesseract with the idea that we would use Web-enabled functionality to help with injury tracking. During our consulting work we had noticed that many times when folks come in to do technology
Sramana: What path did you take from that upbringing? Alexandra Drane: Throughout high school and my early college years I would work in my dad’s startups. He invested in a lot of technology companies and startups in the local area. I was a complete slacker in high school, and I went primarily to have fun.
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Alexandra Drane is a serial entrepreneur who has launched four successful healthcare ventures over the past 15 years. Alexandra is currently president and co-founder of Eliza Corporation, a leading provider of integrated healthcare communication strategies. She is also the co-founder of two nonprofits, Engage with Grace,
SM: How does the stimulus bill affect you? GN: The initial stimulus bill ended up dedicating anywhere from $39 billion to $46 billion to the adoption of electronic medical records in the Unites States. Do I like that? Part of me doesn’t. I wish we had just stayed the way we were without external catalysts because we