Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Abraham Gutman, CEO of AG Mednet (Part 4)

Abraham Gutman: We needed to figure out a way of using our infrastructure. It was the same infrastructure as for the eBay of radiology, but I needed to have a way of enabling people to send these images using just a software front-end. There were a number of things that you needed to be able to do. One of them was being able to de-identify the images because unlike care environment where it’s very important that a patient record always has the patient name, it is exactly the opposite in clinical trials. Any subject record should not have the patient name because these are blind trials. So, we developed a front-end and we released it on October 31, 2008. I always remember that date because it was Halloween.

Again, luck struck because as we had been developing this, a pharmaceutical company called Glaxo Smith Kline somehow heard about what we were doing. >>>

Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Canada: Jory Lamb, CEO of VistaVu (Part 7)

Jory Lamb: In the middle of 2007, I moved to Denver to get things off the ground in the US market. In the early years in Houston, the company was a bit of a revolving door. It was really hard to retain the staff. Again, I made another error, for which I’m smarter today. I kept hiring staff, sticking them in the office and trying to manage from a distance. We had our clients and staff but every six months, we were changing at least one or two people. I couldn’t get them to stick.

The recession in 2009 was hard. But we got really close to our existing clients. We did all sorts of project work for them. We made sure that we didn’t take on any new expenditure. Especially having faced bankruptcy once, my management is probably more conservative. In 2010, I made one of the most significant hires I’ve made in my career. We hired Roy Garcia who’s the VP – Sales out of Oildex to head up sales for our company. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Coby Sella, CEO of Sansa Security (Part 1)

The Internet of Things (IoT) trend is significant, and will blossom over the rest of the decade. Imagine, however, with so many connected devices, how the security issue becomes critical! Let’s explore with Coby Sella.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Sansa Security.

Coby Sella: I have been the Managing CEO for Sansa Security for the last four years. Sansa Security is a security-oriented company focused on IoT. We see ourselves as solving deep security problems in a smarter way.

Sramana Mitra: When you say focused on security in the IoT world, tell us more about specifically what the security issues and what kind of challenges the IoT world is facing vis-a-vis security? What part of that are you solving?
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Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Abraham Gutman, CEO of AG Mednet (Part 3)

Abraham Gutman: Pretty soon, I realized that that’s not how medicine works. It’s not arbitrage. This whole notion that people have that most radiology images are leaving the United States and going to India to be read, is absolutely wrong. In the United States, you are required to have three things in order to be able to do a final diagnosis. The final diagnosis is what you need to have in order to be reimbursed by Medicare or insurance companies. The three things are the following. You need to have board certification in the United States. You can have this if you’re a foreign doctor. You need to have a license in the State where the images were taken. That’s also manageable. But, you also have to be on US soil to do the reading.

Sramana Mitra: That rules out all this off-shore business.

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Bootstrapping Using Services: Robin Wiener, CEO of Get Real Health (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What about the team? Tell me a bit about the three best at the Maryland Incubator. How did that all play out?

Robin Wiener: We started out with three people. One of the guys we worked with early on was Raj. He is kind of our fourth partner and a phenomenal one. He moved back to Bangalore where he started our Indian office, which is not the typical Indian office. They’re part of our company. He has built a phenomenal team. We have two offices. We’ve 34 people in India. Here in Maryland, we’ve 33. Then we’ve three people in Texas.

My Vice President came out of our first client, American Heart Association. She really wanted to try something different. She lives in Dallas and wanted to stay in Dallas. If you’re talented, I want you to work on my team, but you don’t have to sit next to me. You can work wherever you want. Then, we also have two people in England. We’re about 71 right now. We went from four or five of us to this. I have the most phenomenal team. They’re just really fantastic.

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Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Abraham Gutman, CEO of AG Mednet (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Moving big images is no big deal.

Abraham Gutman: I said, “I won’t compress images. Who cares about compressing? There’s a lot of capacity in the ground already. Tell me how big a pipe I need and I’ll just make or lease a pipe. I can move truck loads of images very fast and efficiently.” Now I had a solution for the problem but I was wondering if the problem that he had suggested was a real problem. So I got in my car and started going to little hospitals in the New England area. >>>

Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Canada: Jory Lamb, CEO of VistaVu (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m with you that you set that up as a separate entity, ran by a full-time manager, and you focused on oil and gas contract software development. That’s where we are, right?

Jory Lamb: We focused on oil and gas commercial software products that would sit on top of SAP. We got out of contract work and we made a decision that we would write commercial software package for the oil and gas industry that managed the day-to-day operations of a field service company.

Sramana Mitra: Where did that idea come from?

Jory Lamb: In 2003, one of the challenges of running this web software company was that we were living from project to project. Some years we’d be written into the budget and some years out of the budget. We made a conscious decision that we would go find a solution because >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Robin Wiener, CEO of Get Real Health (Part 6)

Robin Wiener: US is also starting to think about that a little bit. The other place where we’ve launched is Australia. It’s the same model of telehealth. We’ve partnered with Telstra Health, which is the largest telecommunications company in Australia. We’re rolling out our first application there. A new region that is very interesting is the Middle East. The population is getting sick. They’re very interested in trying to work with their population to keep them healthy. Since we can do the product in Arabic, they’re very interested in what we can do. >>>