Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Abraham Gutman, CEO of AG Mednet (Part 1)

Clinical trials are hugely expensive for pharmaceutical companies to administer. Abraham Gutman has created a solution to make the process substantially more efficient and offers insights on new entrepreneurial opportunities in the field.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Abraham Gutman: I’m the founder and CEO of AG Mednet. I’m a computer scientist by training. This is my second entrepreneurial company. I started the first company in 1998 in the area of telecommunications where we were building software to do provisioning of large carrier-based optical networks. We sold that company to AT&T. In 2005, I started AG Mednet. Perhaps it may be interesting to entrepreneurs that what I set out to build and what I’m doing right now are somewhat different.

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Bootstrapping Using Services: Robin Wiener, CEO of Get Real Health (Part 5)

Robin Wiener: The next phase, which is very exciting, is to push that patient information back into the hospital so that they can get better care. We have an alert system. Let’s say your blood sugar gets out of whack, an alert is sent out to let the doctor know what’s going on with you. If your blood pressure is slowly creeping up, they can see that and can get you a doctor’s appointment versus bringing you into the emergency room at an acute time. We’re in the right place and the right time in the United States.

One of my first large clients is the province of Alberta, Canada, which had 3.2 million people. They’re rolling out because their social medicine is totally different from the US. They want to pull down the cost of healthcare. How do you do that? It’s by engaging those patients and making sure those patients know what’s going on with their healthcare and making sure they’re taking their medication. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Robin Wiener, CEO of Get Real Health (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the business you built is this flexible toolkit with which you can put together health applications. What kind of clients did you go after with that basic concept?

Robin Wiener: We’re small and we have some big partners. We do the personal health records. We work with the patient. The patient needs to get that information, so we need to integrate into larger EMR systems of hospitals. We can actually put our platform on top of any data source. Otherwise, it wouldn’t mean much for the patient. You want to know if your doctor has your records or if your pharmacy has your record. You want to have your complete checkup.

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Bootstrapping Using Services: Robin Wiener, CEO of Get Real Health (Part 2)

Robin Wiener: I think the one thing about being an entrepreneur is that you always try to find what you like to do and see if you can make a career out of it. That’s what happened with recruiting for me. I found something I was passionate about and started following that. That took me to the IT world. All of a sudden, I’m recruiting for developers, project managers, and solution architects. With that, I’m learning about how technology can change people’s lives and what you can do with it.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you start this business?

Robin Wiener: I was the HR Director for USWeb from 1997 to 1999. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Robin Wiener, CEO of Get Real Health (Part 1)

Robin has built an excellent company with large, international clients in the healthcare domain and has used the bootstrapping using services technique that we espouse in 1Mby1M.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Robin Wiener: I’m from Connecticut. I was born in Bristol, the home of ESPN. I went to the University of Connecticut for college. Early on, I had a major speech problem. I couldn’t really pronounce things. Along with that, I had a major learning disability. I had two sisters and a brother. The teachers told my parents that I just wasn’t as smart as my brothers and sisters. Maybe I could get married and that would be a good thing for me to do. >>>

Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: These two competitors that are heavily venture funded, what are their names? What is the situation right now? Are they comparable in revenue numbers? What metrics are you tracking for them?

Steve Liu: Good question. I don’t know their revenue numbers. It’s an interesting time in this market right now. One of them is PatientKeeper, which was recently acquired by a healthcare system. I don’t know where they stand but I do know that when it comes to what we do, we would always win the deal only because that was our focus. They were doing many different things on top of what we do. I don’t think they’ve had as much customer growth over the past years. We just didn’t see as many press releases. I’m not sure there’s as much adoption of the product when they rolled out. The other one is a company called MedAptus. These two are great companies but for some reason, we just do a slightly better job.

Sramana Mitra: You executed better and you were focused. It’s a wonderful story. What do you want to do next? Is money a lever that you can push to accelerate growth? Do you want to push that lever? What is your game plan?
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Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the business was starting to become more of an enterprise business from there on.

Steve Liu: Very much so, yes.

Sramana Mitra: How did it scale? 2008 was when you made the transition to the new CEO. Between 2008 and 2014, what are the milestones and scaling strategies that you deployed?

Steve Liu: I think the big things that happened during that time were that we shored-up the product where the product just can’t meet expectations, and we put money and resources in making the product rock solid. Then, it was just building up and hiring. These days, we’re about 160 employees.

Sramana Mitra: All in Atlanta?

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Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Was the company based in Washington?

Steve Liu: In Atlanta, actually. The hospital medicine job that I got was in Atlanta.

Sramana Mitra: I see. You recruited a CEO who would run the company in Atlanta?

Steve Liu: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find this person? What was the criteria and process of finding this person?

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