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Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about how exactly that move played out.

Grant Kohler: We started to get some outside requests from clients who wanted to use our system to provide things other than just strokes. Two of the other service lines were based around trauma patients coming into the ER and patients that were possibly coded as septic patients. >>>

Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: That was your second round of financing?

Grant Kohler: That was the genesis of the first round of financing.

Sramana Mitra: In the first round of financing, you already wanted to go beyond stroke into Telemedicine field to be able to cater to these remote communities.

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Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Each hospital would only be paying you a couple of thousand dollars? The hospital would pay in terms of the software subscription service per month?

Grant Kohler: That’s correct. That’s each hospital. Each of these networks would grow to be anywhere between 20 to 25. Some of them have 30 community hospitals attached to them. Each one of those hospital would have to pay that subscription fee.

Sramana Mitra: If you were to look at your 2007 situation, how many of these hospitals were part of your customer base?

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Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: During the bootstrap stage, what happened in terms of customers? What were you able to bring together and who were these customers? Who were your target customers to begin with and then how did you acquire those customers?

Grant Kohler: Being based out of an academic medical center, we were very fortunate that our physicians were very well-connected in the stroke community. What was happening was that it was their word-of-mouth publicity. Some of them even left the Medical College of Georgia to go to other institutions. For instance, the Medical University of South Carolina. That was another large institution that was taking our technology with them. Within that year and a half time frame, our primary customers were the

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Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: All these entities were equity partners as part of the licensing deal?

Grant Kohler: That is correct.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of getting the company off the ground, was there any funding involved? Did you bootstrap the business?

Grant Kohler: We bootstrapped the business to get things started. The first thing that we tried to do was go for a small business grant. We applied for, what is known as an SPIR grant through different research organizations to get some seed money to try and

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Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler (Part 2)

Grant Kohler: By the time they would get into the medical center, they would be outside that window of treatment for this particular drug. The Department of Neurology was investigating how to treat these patients out in their home communities and treat them fast enough so that they will still be within this three-hour window for this drug to be administered.

We started looking at different technologies. The reality is that the doctors need to be able to see and talk to the patient, and see medical imaging around that patient to make this decision of giving this particular drug to the patient. Conceptually, that’s how it started in the Medical College of Georgia (MCG). This was around 2002. Between 2002 and 2005, we did an alpha project. We

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Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler (Part 1)

Spun out from university research, Reach Health is an interesting case study in building a company around concepts like Telemedicine and remote healthcare.

Sramana Mitra: Steve and Grant, I would love to have your back stories. Where were you born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances? What paths did you follow in terms of college and so forth? How did your paths intersect?

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Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO, Phil Copeland (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you sell? Do you sell primarily in Australia or do you sell globally?

Phil Copeland: Australia is a great marketplace because they’re very early adopters of technology. Very early on, we recognized that to really succeed in this industry, you need to become an American-established business and you need to have a lot of the momentum behind your business here in North America. I’m actually based in Colorado. We have an office here. I spend about 80% of my time here helping grow and expand our North American business. We also have a small operation in the UK that has been very successful as well. Our core focus is really getting to critical size here in North America, because we realized that the exit events that may occur in the future will be from an American company.

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