Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Brian Phillips, CEO of MedShift (Part 1)

Brian talks about IT in the medical aesthetics world.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce MedShift and yourself to our audience. 

Brian Phillips: Thanks for having me. I’m the CEO of MedShift. We are a medical technology company based in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

Sramana Mitra: What does MedShift do?

Brian Phillips: We have three key areas of business delivery. First, we build a lot of different technology platforms for medical devices. We also provide services to both manufacturers and consumers of those medical devices.

Second, we have an in-house agency arm of the business which delivers traditional agency services to both manufacturers of medical devices and to practices who utilize those services.

Third, is the device arm itself where we procure roughly 30 different medical devices in the aesthetic industry and place those into a subscription service model with plastic surgeons and dermatologists across America. 

Sramana Mitra: Our focus is on information technology. I will let you pick where you want to focus, and where you are providing thought leadership in the information technology industry. 

Brian Phillips: Why don’t we get into what we are doing in the IoT, payment facilitation, and e-commerce section of the business? Our IoT products are quite innovative.

In this segment of the industry, there are manufacturers who develop, design, and build medical devices that generally costs around $300,000. These manufacturers are good at what they do. They are designing and building the latest equipment for the best procedures in the world.

Their engineers and physicists are keenly aware of how laser energy, plasma energy, or radiofrequency energy affects their patients through the device that utilizes those energies. They are aware of that, but they don’t pay attention to cloud computing, HIPAA compliance, secure information transfer, and all the things that you worry about as a technologist. The medical device manufacturers don’t focus on those areas.

We have built a platform that allows the manufacturers to connect their devices to our infrastructure. Instead of having to invest money and spend millions of dollars to build a compliant, secure, and redundant platform to ingest data from their devices, they can utilize MedShift’s platform. We can connect their devices as a service for them. 

Sramana Mitra: What are some examples of the medical devices that plug into your platform?

Brian Phillips: There is a broad range of device types in the medical aesthetics arena. All of them use some type of energy as their basis of function whether that is lasers, radiofrequency, or gas to perform their treatment. Some devices that you would see in the market might be something like the Ultherapy device from Merz, a manufacturer in Raleigh, North Carolina.

This device tightens skin non-invasively using radiofrequency. There are about 5,000 Ultherapy devices deployed worldwide. If you are interested in having your skin tightened without having a facelift for example, then a doctor would utilize this device. 

Sramana Mitra: Do all your devices fall in the same category – in the medical aesthetics area?

Brian Phillips: They do. We have about 30 different devices in the portfolio now. 

Sramana Mitra: What kind of data is being recorded from these devices? Walk me through a use case. What kind of data needs to be recorded?

Brian Phillips: It’s a great question. Until we came on the market with our solution, the manufacturer would build the device and sell the device to a doctor to prescribe the treatment to patients. The manufacturer would not have any visibility into what was occurring with their system.

They wouldn’t understand the operational health of that device. They wouldn’t understand the number of procedures that are occurring. They wouldn’t understand the setting that was set when those procedures were being done. They would just guess and hope that everything was going well with their machines.

Maybe they could track usage volume because there is a consumable that the doctors may have to buy to deliver each procedure. It may be a sterile treatment tip that is used in the operating room, so every time you do the procedure, you would have to buy another one from the manufacturer.

That would be the extent of the visibility that they would have. When you connect a device with MedShift’s IoT platform, you go from having no visibility on what is occurring with your fleet of devices to having full visibility. This has a lot of different benefits to the manufacturers as well as doctors.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Brian Phillips, CEO of MedShift
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