Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: It’s the same kind of architecture that you are doing with your product. You’re catering to the pharmaceutical industry across their use cases and drawing hua ndred sources of data. You’re suggesting a similar architecture but catering to the end user.

William King: Yes. If you think about the great companies, Apple has been an evolution. The iPhone was very much an evolution. You’re right. There’s a continuum as well. You described it nicely. I do think this is an evolution. Health category is an interesting one because you have so many different constituents. It is so fragmented. How one goes about solving the problem of unity is really important.

At Zephyr, we focus on the manufacturers. They’re an important part of the ecosystem. We’ve been very successful with them. The concept can be applied to all of the other constituents in the ecosystem. It’s a very exciting time. Back to the theme of data being the battle of the ball, we are generating the data. We are more and more able to quantify ourselves. That, for me, is part of the evolution of the thinking.

Sramana Mitra: How far along are you? How many customers now? Are you getting ready to go public? Where are you?

William King: We’re growing. We had a terrific year last year. We launched Zephyr Illuminate in the fall of 2015. It’s been very successful. We’re deployed across North American and Western Europe. We are in many of the top 10 bio pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical customers. We’ve got several of the top five on the device side. The cool thing is the deployments now are not just solely commercial.

We’re now working with marketing teams. We’re working in medical affairs – purely just scientific dissemination of information. The big metric for us is when we engage with our customers, these are huge companies. They’ve got many brands and divisions across the world. If they see success in one, do they emulate that and replicate that across the other divisions? That’s what we’re seeing very clearly. That, for us, is the best validation.

At the end of the day, it’s all about the patient. With each use case, we get more and more feedback from customers who say that there’s a movement in the needle. That is the best metric.

Sramana Mitra: What is the destiny of Zephyr? Is it an IPO or an acquisition by Veeva?

William King: What we just try and focus on is customer value today. It’s a relevant question. What we try to focus on at this stage is value creation and also partner enablement. It’s going to be an interesting time ahead. Consolidation is a theme in life sciences and in healthcare. We see these massive acquisitions that are occurring. That’s never out of the question. I also think that what we’re doing gives the business a lot of merit to stand on its now two feet and try to create a lot of value in this ecosystem.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. It was very nice catching up. Thank you for taking the time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health
1 2 3 4 5 6 7