Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: HealthGrid CEO and Serial Digital Health Entrepreneur Raj Toleti (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You are no longer going to integrate with Epic and the others? You’re just going to focus on Allscripts?

Raj Toleti: No. 80% of my customers before Allscripts acquired us were non-Allscripts.

Sramana Mitra: That integration will continue. You will continue to cater to other EMRs but you will obviously penetrate deeply into the Allscripts ecosystem.

Raj Toleti: If you understand the healthcare IT space, Allscripts has been phenomenal in terms of acquiring emerging technologies such as healthcare and having them provide value outside of Allscripts’ base.

If you’re using an ATM or an airline check-in system, you don’t really care what the backend is. That’s our philosophy. We will continue to go outside the base.

Sramana Mitra: If you look around, what are the open problems that you would steer new entrepreneurs towards that you think need to be solved and that the time is right?

Raj Toleti: I think you need to have passion for something in life. If you wanted to solve the problems in the healthcare sector, there are quite a few problems. Healthcare lags behind financial service, retail and other industries from an automation standpoint.

There are so many problems that an entrepreneur can look at and say, “The data within healthcare is not readily available for just-in-time usage. There could be a number of problems that could be solved.”

Even with Epic, Cerner, or Allscripts, getting the EMR data and accessing that just-in-time with the patient is going to be the next wave of innovation. It’s not so much IoT, but it’s more like connected systems that can be tapped into real-time.

Sramana Mitra: Let me try to spin it the way I’m understanding what you’re saying. You want entrepreneurs to think about how they can add value to the on-premise physician-patient interaction  or provider-patient interaction and add intelligence on top of the EMR system data to make that interaction more high-value. Is that correct?

Raj Toleti: Yes. Providers are getting stressed out. A big topic in the industry is physician burnout. They just have to do so much with these EMR’s that it’s pretty painful. It adds hours to their day. If you can elevate and invigorate their day-to-day work life by providing data just-in-time so that when they’re seeing patients, they know what they’re up to.

Today when you go to a doctor’s office, they have to study your EMR so much before they even see you. They have to notate so much after. Yes, they should focus on not just making it more intelligent but also making their lives easier.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. That’s a pretty concrete pointer. That’s exactly what I was looking for. Thank you for your time.

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This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: HealthGrid CEO and Serial Digital Health Entrepreneur Raj Toleti
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