Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Gautam Sivakumar, CEO of Medisas (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I always ask this question of people who have interesting vantage points. What do you see as interesting open problems? If you were not running this company right now and starting out as an entrepreneur today, what problems out there do you see are good pain points to solve?

Gautam Sivakumar: I’ll give you three buckets of problems that I think could use more innovation. There are lots of opportunities to create real companies that can make a real impact.

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Gautam Sivakumar, CEO of Medisas (Part 2)

Gautam Sivakumar: The handoff process alone is responsible for about 300,000 to 350,000 deaths every single year in the US. Medical errors are the third biggest killer in the US killing about 440,000 people every single year. 80% of that is estimated to be because of this handoff problem. We built software for people to manage their tasks.

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Gautam Sivakumar, CEO of Medisas (Part 1)

Hospital workflows are inefficient. Gautam discusses the evolution and the promise to address the issues.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Medisas.

Gautam Sivakumar: I am a doctor by training. I went into Medicine for the same reasons that, hopefully, most people are going into medicine and healthcare. I wanted to do something meaningful. It was driven by my experiences during childhood.

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: David Weingard, CEO of Cecelia Health (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you elaborate on the business? I still don’t have a granular sense of what it is that you’re doing.

David Weingard: Every day, we get feeds electronically from a client. Those feeds of patient information come into our technology system and get distributed out to our expert clinicians across the country who will reach out to the patients who will first engage electronically and then in the way that they prefer the most.

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: David Weingard, CEO of Cecelia Health (Part 1)

David and I talk about diabetes management in this conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Cecelia Health.

David Weingard: I’m the Founder and CEO of Cecelia Health. We’re an organization that improves the health of people with diabetes and other chronic conditions by leveraging experts and using technology to scale their reach.

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: HealthGrid CEO and Serial Digital Health Entrepreneur Raj Toleti (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You are no longer going to integrate with Epic and the others? You’re just going to focus on Allscripts?

Raj Toleti: No. 80% of my customers before Allscripts acquired us were non-Allscripts.

Sramana Mitra: That integration will continue. You will continue to cater to other EMRs but you will obviously penetrate deeply into the Allscripts ecosystem.

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: HealthGrid CEO and Serial Digital Health Entrepreneur Raj Toleti (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: To achieve what you’re talking about, you must have had to interact with some of the existing systems. I live in Menlo Park, California. The two medical systems that our family interfaces with are the Stanford healthcare system and the UCSS healthcare system.

They have their own electronic medical record system. Epic is very popular. What is the interface that you’ve had to navigate? How are those interfaces adopting this consumerization of healthcare IT?

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: HealthGrid CEO and Serial Digital Health Entrepreneur Raj Toleti (Part 1)

Raj has built and sold three HIT companies and is a real expert in the domain. Excellent discussion on the state of the union in the field and open opportunities that need entrepreneurial problem solving.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself. Give us a bit of background as well as your various healthcare IT companies.