Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: HealthGrid CEO and Serial Digital Health Entrepreneur Raj Toleti (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: To achieve what you’re talking about, you must have had to interact with some of the existing systems. I live in Menlo Park, California. The two medical systems that our family interfaces with are the Stanford healthcare system and the UCSS healthcare system.

They have their own electronic medical record system. Epic is very popular. What is the interface that you’ve had to navigate? How are those interfaces adopting this consumerization of healthcare IT?

Raj Toleti: You’re talking about technology interfaces, right?

Sramana Mitra: Yes, I’m talking about technology providers and technology integrations that you had to do. What is the point of view of those providers? What is their state of the union in terms of readiness to adopt modern technology?

Raj Toleti: You’re lucky to live in Palo Alto and have one Epic record. The entire country is not built that way. A lot of health systems are heterogeneous. They might have a different practice management and electronic medical record for the physician offices.

They might have a different electronic medical record for the hospital. The patient and their families are challenged to aggregate their medical records. With Epic being the backbone for you, I don’t know how proactive you and your family are with your health. Do you get reminders?

Sramana Mitra: We are very proactive. We keep track of our stuff, but I think the notification systems are not very proactive. We take initiative.

Raj Toleti: Not every family is as proactive as you are. A lot of families need the nudging and pushing. From an integration standpoint, it was a platform that could talk, technology-wise, to various systems.

In the country, the top three would be Cerner, Epic, and Allscripts. Cerner is a public company. They have probably about $4 billion in revenue. Epic is private. They make about $3.5 billion or slightly less than Cerner. Allscripts has about the same revenue as Epic.

Our technology actually sits on top of quite a few other smaller technologies as well. I had to interface with quite a few of these backend systems and provide a very consistent experience for the patient. Patients want to have a proactive experience. We’ve been able to do that very successfully.

Sramana Mitra: Within Epic’s customer base or the other players’ customer bases, are you fully penetrated? Are you 50% penetrated?

Raj Toleti: If you look at the healthcare available market, there’s about a million physicians and about 7,000 hospitals in the country. That’s the entire market from a provider standpoint. Our penetration rate is maybe 10,0000 to 20,000 physicians and a few hundred hospitals.

That’s the reason why a company like Allscripts that has over 150,000 physicians and member of hospitals spent millions of dollars to acquire my company because there is so much potential.

I’ve bootstrapped all my businesses. I didn’t have to raise a single dollar. We built the company, ground-up, to be very profitable. It is the discipline that we’ve built in the business to have a sustainable business model that helped us capture 100% of Allscripts’ market.

It’s also a significant differentiator when we compete with the likes of Cerner or Epic in this modality.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: HealthGrid CEO and Serial Digital Health Entrepreneur Raj Toleti
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