Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Chris Sullens, CEO of CentralReach (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the open problems? From your vantage point, what do you see out there that is not being addressed? If you were to look for other little companies to acquire, what kind of things are you looking for? This speaks directly to our audience who are entrepreneurs.

Chris Sullens: It’s a good question. As we look at it, we tried to build the broadest platform to address the needs of the services. As we look at problems that customers have, we try to figure out if we need to build something or buy it.

The areas that are interesting and ones that we see that are early and haven’t fully been flushed out revolve around a couple of areas. One is hardware-based solutions. We are a SaaS-based company. We are focused on the software side of it.

We see a lot of opportunities for machine learning, AI, and other aspects that we embed in our platform to help improve decision-making. There are some interesting products out there. Some people that are looking at robots, for example, can leverage content and AI to interact with children who are on the spectrum and be able to provide learning therapy for them.

It is a narrow use case; it isn’t going to replace the BCBAs that are providing the therapy but it can be a tool that can be used to engage individuals to improve their learning momentum. That would be one.

We are also seeing some work in the area of therapeutics. We don’t know how likely this would be a solution that could play a role, but there are companies that are looking at ways to leverage therapeutics to rewire parts to the brain and enhance outcomes for those who are on the spectrum. Those would be two areas that come to mind. 

Sramana Mitra: Do you know people who are working on these kinds of problems?

Chris Sullens: Yes, we do. 

Sramana Mitra: A while ago, we had an entrepreneur in the program that had a device for training autistic children. They had a device and an app. It’s a company called Avaz.

I don’t know if you are familiar with this company. It is out of India. The founder has since moved on and is at Google now. He is a great guy. Listening to you makes me think that this might be somebody that you may want to contact.

Chris Sullens: Yes, I would certainly be open to that. We have a mobile device with our app avail^® that therapists can use. The avail^® technology gets delivered through an iPad application. The individual interacts with them directly which is why it helps on the independence side.

We certainly look at other devices. It sounds like maybe he was looking at being able to collect data without having to pull your phone out which reduces the distraction for the child. 

Sramana Mitra: It’s out there. You can look up Avaz. If you are interested in getting in touch with them, I’m happy to connect with you. I’m always fascinated by these vertical specialized applications. There have been many companies built with very good execution of a vertical. It’s very much something that we believe in. It’s great to see something that you are working on.

Thank you for your time. 

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Chris Sullens, CEO of CentralReach
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