Improving Healthcare Communication: Kryptiq CEO Luis Machuca (Part 3)

SM: To me, it sounds as though you wanted to break communication silos in the medical arena with email. Email is a proven killer application.

LM: Intel’s policy is that the adoption of technology is directly proportional to applications which require collaboration. According to their philosophy, the increase of PC sales was not the result of building a better PC, it was about connecting business users with email because more and more users wanted to get connected to each other. When the Internet came along, allowing personal email and Internet surfing in the home, adoption increased even more.

SM: Email is a killer app for everything.

LM: The nature of collaboration is the driving factor of technology adoption. We spent a long time at Intel focusing on building a better PC, yet we drove growth very little. Along comes a collaboration marketplace, and suddenly growth is thriving. Technology breakthroughs really did not move the needle for Intel.

I knew we could take some of that adoption learning and apply it to healthcare and address it from a collaborative connectivity point of view as opposed to ‘the better electronic medical record technology’ or ‘the better electronic claim’.

SM: There are a ton of issues in email between doctors and patients. Even today a lot of doctors do not like to email patients. What was the nature of your system?

LM: Having solved the security problem very quickly, we discovered that in order to make provider-to-patient flows work, we really needed to get provider workflows to work. That meant we had to get the provider more connected before we could even think about the patients. Our initial focus had to be provider-to-provider connectivity.

The thing that made Kryptiq unique was our ability to integrate email into the workflow and to make sure that our technology was application agnostic. We do not have to be on any particular system to be part of the network. We could be equally efficient if the provider was using an Outlook client or an electronic medial record (EMR) system.

SM: You developed an application-agnostic messaging system?

LM: Yes, exactly. Our first big sales takeoff was integrating our secure messaging system to the Centricity system by GE. At the time they were not our partner, but they later became our first partner. We figured that we would have the most success among the early adopters, and the early adopters were providers who were buying electronic medical record systems. Our goal was to integrate into those EMRs and make our messaging system the preferred method of data transport between systems. That enabled EMRs to communicate with each other as well as with practice management software systems. That was our first business takeoff.

SM: Who were the early adopter customers?

LM: Providence Medical Systems in Portland, Westchester Medical in New York, MeritCare in the Dakotas, Baylor in Texas, MedStar in the Washington/Baltimore region, and a slew of people who closely patterned the customer base of GE since we were selling into that Centricity base. GE’s largest customers were our first adopters. Our value proposition made sense because it was cheaper than faxes or letters and it was also self-documenting.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Improving Healthcare Communication: Kryptiq CEO Luis Machuca
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