I was first introduced to the CEO, Yuri Sudhakar, by the Geneva Health Solutions (GHS) Co-Founder, Dr. Manish Wadhwa, in the fall of 2015. What I immediately noticed was the conviction they both had for why their organization was going to be successful. Fast-forward 18 months and here they are – winning.
In my recent conversation with Yuri, I asked him how he was finding success and I was amazed. I was as amazed at GHS’s fortitude and focus as I was at their bold use of curated consumerism for the Clinician.
In our interview below, Yuri shares many insights about working in the healthcare technology vertical as well as his lessons learned in growing a small business in this space.
Given your exceptional background in other industries, why did you choose healthcare as your next venture?
Yuri Sudhakar: I would say that whenever you are dealing with an industry that accounts for 18-20% of GDP it becomes an interesting endeavor to take on something as big as healthcare and begin to break it down and figure it out: Why are the costs so high? Why are there so many inefficiencies? And what will help drive the two key levers in healthcare – improving patient care and reducing the cost of this care? So, I guess from my perspective, I was always attracted to healthcare. I was always aware of it from a technology perspective, but GHS gave me exposure to the clinical side of care and specifically the medical device area of healthcare.
Was GHS an idea that was brought to you or was this your own concept?
Yuri Sudhakar: The founders are two cardiologists in San Diego and a CEO of an industrial design firm. I became connected with them through another internet security healthcare endeavor. The wireless medical device space was exploding. Specifically, the ability for implantable cardiac devices to provide both device and physiological data about the patient. But, there are multiple device manufacturers with heterogeneous technology platforms and different data streams. The founders created this idea of Geneva, a neutral platform to aggregate and workflow the disparate data. The idea of aggregating and presenting this data in an intuitive easy to read format was compelling. The founders were able to build out a beta version of the platform and get into local San Diego hospitals. When the time was right we agreed to build a company, and take it to market. That’s when I decided to commit to building a company with them.
What about GHS do you think resonates most with your Clients?
Yuri Sudhakar: We are a group of people invested in trying to improve healthcare; trying to figure out how can we ascertain information about a patient before they arrive at the hospital door or practice door with a chronic disease that must be dealt with; trying to identify problems or co-morbidities through alerts from the patient’s device well in advance. Remote monitoring, telemedicine, telehealth, make a ton of sense from two aspects of healthcare- improving patient care and reducing the costs of that care by proactively identifying what’s going with that patient.
One of the biggest takeaways for us is that the industry focuses a lot on C-level, physicians, management, decision-makers. What is not focused on and where we have made a big effort to communicate to our customers is the importance of the support staff on the ground, dealing with the day-to-day mechanics of patient care. I mean the medical assistants, nurses, NP’s, back-office team, the practice managers. These are the people that are literally the ones keeping up the practice and making it run every day. They go above and beyond the call of duty every day. Often times they are not recognized for their efforts. They really care about the providers they are helping and they have so much passion for their patients. That’s where we’ve turned the messaging around — we are streamlining all this data and creating workflow efficiency for, of course, the physician but just as importantly, for the support staff of the physician. This was the key. Once we did that and once we started collaborating and partnering with these stakeholders on a daily basis our business really took off from an onboarding perspective.
Another thing that resonates with our customers who have decided to collaborate and partner with us, is the concept of Geneva- we are this neutral platform for both technology and services aggregating data from various cardiac device manufacturers. We bring it all in, every day, and do it in a way that is easy and simple to use. We have reduced the multiple points of access for data, aggregating all of it, and streamlining it. Making it very intuitive and an easy-to-use interface with a couple of clicks to access the data. We’ve also been able to workflow that data back into systems and processes that they care about whether it be an EMR, Billing System, or Analytics engine. Through all that we remove the paper process. I think that at its core is why: 1- our customers are finding value in working with us and; 2 – why we think we will have continued success in this space. It is why we will continue to deliver a really strong combination of technology and services to our customers. We simplify the access and review of really important clinical cardiac device data.
You talked about the importance of working with the day-to-day people using the application. How has creating that curated data experience for the clinician’s driven adoption and product success?
Yuri Sudhakar: Even with artificial intelligence (AI) or rules engines, filters, thresholds, or all of the above, you still need a curated experience for the people on the ground. Often times we tend to think of technology as exciting, innovative and disruptive, but void of the change and the effects of this change will cause and that’s extremely important. Whether the people that are using it need to be made more efficient or effective is a separate discussion. Digital health entrepreneurs in providing these technologies and services, need to be more sensitive to the fact that there is a lot of change going on for the provider staff. There is a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt when new technology & services are introduced. The more you can communicate that there is value to these stakeholders, and I mean the staff, that are operating and engaging with patients every day then you will be more successful than if you didn’t consider it at all.
What do you think is the biggest competitive advantage for companies in Healthcare Technology and how is Geneva taking advantage of it?
Yuri Sudhakar: Our ability to take data as it is coming in, helping advance better diagnosis and improve patient engagement, that is what this whole idea is about. Our platform as a service is connecting what is going on with the patient when they are not right in front of you with the clinician who needs to “see” what is going on virtually. That is why digital health is so valuable in healthcare. If it is going to work, it has to help reduce the cost of interacting with that patient, reduce the time that a provider discovers a patient has a serious problem, and how effectively the provider can treat the patient before the problem becomes chronic. If you can help build a technology platform that can help with that paradigm, then you are making great strides in addressing the larger problem of rising healthcare costs.
From the Geneva perspective, the biggest competitive advantage for us in digital health is that our business model is tied to reimbursement. In order to be successful in the space, you need to trace how the clinical procedure being diagnosed is tied to reimbursement by the payers. Another reason why I feel really excited about what we are doing at Geneva is that this remote monitoring space has shown huge clinical benefits. These clinical benefits are so compelling that it has become the recommended standard of care. Benefits like reduced hospital readmissions, reduction of mortality and morbidity, early identification of atrial fibrillation and heart failure. Being able to be proactive about the identification of those issues using remote monitoring reduces large-scale costs on the back end when things aren’t identified on time, like preventing strokes. From our perspective, that’s what’s making this compelling for us and of course, a reimbursement model that is tied in with the standard of care.
If we are sitting here 12 months from now celebrating Geneva’s success, what did you achieve?
Yuri Sudhakar: First, be profitable in the next 18 months. Second, we want to have over 40,000+ patients that we are monitoring. We often define it by the number of practices we represent, but it’s really the patients that we are helping to monitor. That’s why we changed our tag line to “data-driven patient care”.
With respect to being a startup company, what have been some of the surprising burdens, and how have you managed the unknowns?
Yuri Sudhakar: Rule #1: Just because something is being done in every other vertical, doesn’t mean that it translates to the healthcare vertical Healthcare itself is not rationale. If you can’t deal with that, then don’t get into this space. It will drive you crazy.
Rule #2 – you don’t realize until you actually get into the weeds how byzantine the healthcare process really is. But you have to recognize it and get into the weeds- how to improve workflow with device data in the practice, how to deal with change when you introduce new technology and service like this at the provider level. How does the staff feel about it? That was the biggest realization for us. We really changed the way we messaged our providers. We weren’t coming in saying ” we are going to do all this work for you, you don’t have to do anything and everything is going be ok- we are going to optimize your revenue and improve your patient care”. We actually changed our mission to think about the staff and their workload.
Rule #3 – You have to learn how to completely focus. Using what we call Customer Development, not Product Development, we really try to listen to our customers and get their feedback. Once you figure out what works you dive in and build expertise in that area. If it doesn’t work, you have to quickly move off of that because any type of delay can crush you as a start-up. We had our failures and we needed to pivot when we realized the business model did not work and we said ok, we are going to stay laser-focused on remote monitoring. We get requests all the time as is natural in this space that is constantly innovating. Can you integrate with this platform or that engine or this device? That’s all great, but let’s continue to build with this customer base, make them happy so that we have a sustainable partnership with them and then take that success and onboard other customers that have the same challenges with remote monitoring for device patients. In parallel, we can think of creating ways to innovate as long as there is a business model associated with what we are building.
How do you see Healthcare changing in two years and how do you see Geneva creating that change?
Yuri Sudhakar: I’ll talk about it from a managed care perspective first, then I will talk about it from the patient perspective. You see this movement towards value-based care, whether its capitated arrangements or monthly arrangements or incentivizing/penalizing based on the complete care pathway of a patient. It is about “how do you look at managing a set of patients holistically”. We see that more and more as we touch different practices and we see how the different insurance companies and providers are really approaching the cost of care for the patient. I see that continuing. I think that’s a good place for Geneva, because if you think about why remote monitoring for cardiac patients and remote monitoring, in general, is so important, once they leave a hospital or the provider’s office the physicians need to continue to engage that patient and monitor their health. That’s really where healthcare drops off because the patient drops off. As a patient, it’s human nature to not respond back to your provider or forget about the problem you had and deal with it transactionally when there is a larger problem in front of you. We are all like that with our health.
There was a recent report predicting that telemedicine will be a $30B market by 2020. I see this shift happening when you look at the healthcare demographic crucible- an increase of patients over 65 years, an increase of chronic disease in the patient population, and the shortage of providers to care for these two trends. We feel like there will be a need for innovative service models that are helping with this shortage and caring for patients beyond that face-to-face interaction. It’s happening at home, and you are proactively reaching out to patients. That is where we are going to see a tremendous shift within the healthcare model.
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Tiffany Rosik, Principal Consultant at TGR Management Consulting, is focused on helping software development companies in the healthcare industry achieve customer success by creating scalable operations in software deployment. Connect or follow Tiffany Rosik on LinkedIn.
