Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What happens in 1998?

Philippe d’Offay: You have to go back a little bit because the two questions overlap with one another. There’s a lot of news lately about medical errors. According to a Johns Hopkins, more than a quarter million patients die due to medical errors a year. In 1991, my grandfather was one of those who died unnecessarily. In 2003, my mother was one of those who died unnecessarily.

In between those two was this awakening that I’m focusing my energy and career on consulting with business, and here you have this huge dysfunctional industry with innocent people dying. I was very drawn. I’ve avoided healthcare my whole life. All of a sudden, I realized why I couldn’t do that anymore. My mother was diagnozed with an awful brain tumour in 1998 about a week after I started my consulting firm. It was good timing because I didn’t have to worry about reporting to anybody. I didn’t have to worry about accountability to a customer.

I focused all my energy on helping her with her battle and helping my family. I, essentially, got an MBA in healthcare during that time. My first career was in looking at systems and identifying the dysfunction. I found myself analyzing, looking, and thinking through a chance encounter with a cousin of mine who was a cardiologist. He and I discussed what I was observing in healthcare. That was the first pivot at PMD – from a consulting firm to a company that would help with saving people’s lives in healthcare.

Sramana Mitra: When PMD was a consulting firm, what kind of consulting were you doing? Did it have any synergy or relevance to what the product company became afterwards?

Philippe d’Offay: I stopped the consulting company. During that time, I was looking for a business. I got my first engagement, which was a wonderful, lucrative, long-term engagement. Then I started thinking, “What am I doing here? One day, I’m going to be the person who gets sick or someone else that I love.” I don’t want to have another family member that becomes one of the 250,000 people dying unnecessarily every year.

I sought advice from everyone including the partner who hired me as a consultant. I was an Oracle specialist and I was going to continue to do the same business process reengineering that I had done in the past. I was an expert at it. It was good. My plan then, through my consulting revenue was to fund a development arm within that same consulting firm that would develop products to fill the gap that Oracle Financials did not. I spoke with this partner and I told him the dilemma.

He said, “I don’t want to lose you as a resource. I can’t imagine me being in your shoes and not pursuing this. You’ll regret it. “ That was a good, unselfish advice I got from him. I pivoted to this medical software company. The idea was to flip the ratio. It was 80% software development and 20% consulting. Consulting was something I was good at. I knew what the benefits were. I felt like it would allow me to stay engaged with customers who were buying our software. The first thing I did was I reached to the same cousin I told you about. I said, “I want to do this.”

I flew to New York for several weeks and just shadowed him. There was another business person that he introduced me to who was running a medical billing organization. I did the same with him. I shadowed him and followed him around. The three of us came together and I gave them what I thought was the solution to address some of the issues that were occurring in healthcare.

It was a mobile application that utilizes some of the global software capabilities that I was seeing as a consultant. The idea was that there would be just one patient record. Every patient in the world would have a single record in the database and any health information or transaction that occurred would be tracked in that database. That’s how it got started.

The other thing that carried over from my consulting days was an obsession with treating people right, both employees as well as customers. As you know from being a consultant, you get exposed to different cultures and different ways of running businesses. I kept an ongoing list of things that I would never do and things that I would definitely do as an entrepreneur.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Philippe d’Offay, CEO of PMD
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