Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Jas Grewal, CEO of CareSkore (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the payer side. What is the use case on the payer side and how do you cater to those customers?

Jas Grewal: Interestingly, both have the same use cases. On the payer side, they also want to understand the existing and future risks of the patient. We are working with them to look at their member population based on the claims they have. In the hospital, you have the EHR data, but in the insurance companies, you have claims data which has some details around labs. They’re also trying to understand the risks and engage the members in their own care.

The hospital does a few things which are more active. The payers are doing things that are both active and passive. They are passively saying, “You should be going in for a preventive checkup after six months.” We are helping them engage those members who we identify as high risk and putting them in special >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Jas Grewal, CEO of CareSkore (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about disease-specific or more demographic-specific?

Jas Grewal: I’ll take a disease-specific example. In our latest presentation, we followed 12 years of data for cardiology patients. One of the really surprising findings was that 58% were women. It is seen as a man’s disease but, at the same time, it’s known as a silent killer in women. There’s a huge bias towards a high percentage of women having heart disease especially after the age of 50. That was surprising to us.

If you think about it, it should be pretty close to 50/50. Women are much more likely to have heart disease after 50 and the onset is very sudden. It doesn’t have the typical symptoms of agitation or hypertension that you would see in men. In women, it’s more subtle. It has this acute onset. >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Jas Grewal, CEO of CareSkore (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: These models that are helping with the recommendations, do you have heuristics? How are the models architected?

Jas Grewal: The models are actually based on past research. One of the things about CareSkore is that we are a pretty academic company. We started following patients. We have historical data from Stanford and Yale. We also work directly with Medicare. In our data bank, we have data from 15 different hospitals on around 39 million patients.

I think there are 90,000 physicians that took care of those patients. We based our model based on that training data and understanding that if you are a 45- >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Jas Grewal, CEO of CareSkore (Part 1)

Jas bootstrapped CareSkore with a paycheck and then was accelerated at YCombinator. The company rapidly scaled to over $5 million in revenues in 2016 selling a patient relationship management to hospitals and insurance companies. It’s a great window into a segment of Healthcare IT!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to CareSkore.

Jas Grewal: The product that we’re bringing to market is called personalized population management. We are going after the population health market. There’s a lot of reasons why that segment is emerging at a really fast pace. It has a lot to do with what kind of outcomes we expect from this country from a >>>

5 Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT

The cost of healthcare is a hot issue since costs can be prohibitive, not only for the average person, but for employers and providers too. Improvements in IT are expected to reduce these expenditures dramatically, to help keep healthcare costs down without sacrificing the quality of care that patients receive. The opportunities in Healthcare IT are clearly huge in multiple dimensions, and I am convinced that many businesses can and will be built in this segment over this decade. The following conversations with some top leaders in the field discuss where their businesses found traction and shed light on where other problems that still need to be solved exist.

• John Palumbo, CEO of HealthRight – The US Healthcare system has much to be desired. HealthRight is trying to address a portion of the challenge.
• Norm Wu, CEO of i-Human Patients – There will be an acute need for trained medical professionals as healthcare becomes democratised around the world. Norm discusses what his company is doing in this very important realm using online education principles.

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Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about revenue ramp. You talked about hitting $1 million in 2009. How did the business accelerate from thereon? What were the drivers?

Philippe d’Offay: We’re a four-time Inc 5000 nominee. That is one distinction that we’ve had. Last year, we generated $6.4 million in revenue. From 2009 to 2015, there was a six-fold increase in revenue and a two-fold increase in profit. Of course, we’re a recurring revenue model, so keeping those customers happy allows us to start the year with new revenue on top of revenue from new customers. We’ve always been obsessed with customer support and providing a great service.

The other thing we found was that eventually, we got so big that nobody was able to keep up with their customers anymore. It just got to the point where each of us had 500 or more doctors who knew us by name. It got to the point where everybody was spread thin. Everybody was trying to do all of their duties. >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What you described is a very interesting organizing principle for organizational behaviour.

Philippe d’Offay: It was fascinating. I’m one of those people who can’t just stop thinking about identifying the solution to the problems.

Sramana Mitra: When you figured this out, you were able to put back the right dynamics in place?

Philippe d’Offay: Yes. Another really interesting thing happened as well. The people that we had hired in the past and the people who worked really well in that small environment were not the same people that we had to hire as we were growing. I call it the soldier mercenary type of environment. Earlier, we had these people who would just do whatever you told them to do.

Then all of a sudden, those people had to decide if they were willing to report to somebody else. Some of them were willing and some. So we >>>

Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: After you moved to the Bay Area, what were the next major strategic moves?

Philippe d’Offay: After moving to the Bay Area, we had a product that physicians were very happy with. We were cash flow positive for four straight years. I talked about almost being bankrupt when we were in Atlanta. The turning point was we also had our first opportunity to be profitable. We maintained that momentum. We came to the Bay Area with a profitable company and with a product that was well-respected. We were generating almost 100% of our year over year revenue in new customers through word of mouth.

Sramana Mitra: That, by the way, is the point to move to the Bay Area. If you have any aspiration of moving to the Bay Area, that is the point when you should move. If you move before doing those things and that level of validation, you basically get killed. >>>