Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: HealthRight CEO John Palumbo (Part 1)

The US Healthcare system has much to be desired. HealthRight is trying to address a portion of the challenge.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a little bit about yourself as well as introduce us to HealthRight.

John Palumbo: My career stands almost 30 years now in healthcare. I’ve been very fortunate to have a fairly diverse career in the sense that I’ve done two startups. Both of them went public. One still remains a publicly traded company and is AllScripts, which is arguably one of the largest electronic medical record companies in the US. The other company was a company called I-Trax.

We got on the American Stock Exchange, grew it from a startup up to about $150 million. Ultimately, that company was sold to Walgreens. I also had an opportunity to work with two Fortune 100 companies in between. I have that diversity in large and small companies. In 2010 when the Affordable Care Act got passed, I was doing investment banking.

After understanding the bill, I got very interested in remote care models and recognizing that the healthcare industry is going to force a transformation upon the consumer of healthcare services. We—myself and Howard Seidman acquired a legacy company. That was how HealthRight started.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us bit more about HealthRight. What kind of customers do you work with?

John Palumbo: HealthRight is a consumer-centric population health management company that has a vision around what we call life optimiZed. It is focused on providing access to convenient, quality, affordable healthcare and wellbeing to the population that we serve.

At the end of the day, our high tech, high touch model delivers an exceptional consumer experience for our members. It helps them build a trusted relationship that allows them to have that relationship with nurses, physicians, pharmacists, and other providers of healthcare services. It helps them manage their life their way because it’s all virtual care. The segments that we serve are two large segments.

Sometimes, we get to the consumer through an employer or an insurance company. It could also be through a provider or a large hospital system that serves a community. The other is we have a significant portion of our business where we do Direct to Consumers. We are fortunate to have two additional partners. One is out of San Francisco that handles all the digital media experience and member services. We also then have our care service centre operations, which today is out of Tampa, Florida.

They do a spectacular job of driving tremendous reach out to the consumer and then providing care services and education services to answer those members’ questions and provide access to the kind of care based on the medical that they may have. When you think about it, what has happened in the Affordable Care Act is a lot of companies have moved to a high-deductible plan. Basically, it’s cost shipping back out to the consumer.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: HealthRight CEO John Palumbo
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