Shift+6

James talks to David Golan CTO and co-founder of viz.ai, an applied a health tech company working to help stroke victims receive timely care. With David and team pioneering the integration of deep learning and medicine, viz.ai became the first ever FDA-certified computer-aided triage application.

Highlights:

• 1:06 - Frank’s description of Aptible and their products
• 2:57 - From a Princeton dorm room to Aptible
• 5:04 - Tradeoff decisions in building an infrastructure product
• 10:00 - Transitioning from one to two products
• 12:09 - When does it make sense to get security certifications like HITRUST
• 16:00 - Current technology challenges
• 21:20 - Advice for folks just starting out
• 22:51 - Special considerations towards growing your team
• 26:10 - Resources for people new to the space

I've known Greg Tracy since before founding Redox, connecting over civic hacking projects in Madison, Wisconsin. As the co-founder and CTO, Greg helped Propeller Health from its inception to serving patients across the globe and through its recent acquisition by ResMed (for $225M), where he now serves as the chief architect. 

Greg shares the Propeller Health story, their early choice to go through FDA clearance, and how they built the business into a global brand, as well as the constant struggle to prioritize projects, no matter how large the organization. He’s always been a mentor to the up and coming developer-leaders in Madison; this conversation exemplifies this. Thanks for the great conversation Greg!

• 1:12 Overview of Propeller Health’s product offering
• 3:09 Greg’s background and starting Propeller
• 8:29 Balancing speed and quality in an FDA certified domain
• 11:57 Managing a diverse set of users and stakeholders
• 14:29 “Suck” meetings for engineering
• 16:59 Getting acquired by a public company
• 23:24 Prioritizing endless wants
• 27:19 How Slack fails product teams
• 30:00 The best innovation in healthcare comes from those without experience

Find Greg on Twitter (@GregTracy).

Today’s guest is Danielle Ciofani. A data architect turned strategist, she leads the Broad Institute’s Data Sciences Platform team maximizing the impact of data science on the biomedical ecosystem. She also cares deeply about the startup community and serves as a mentor to early-stage companies at the intersection of healthcare and data.

Prior to these roles, Danielle designed, built, and grew the largest integrated real-world database of clinical and claims data at Humdecia which was eventually acquired by Optum. 

I really enjoyed this conversation. I learned about how the Broad Institute (pronounced “brode”) enables genomic research (1:11) and how they manage that much data via a hybrid cloud strategy (11:20). I found their reasoning behind their decision to utilize GCP (13:58) fascinating. They’re at a point where building a federated multi-cloud architecture (17:18) spanning AWS and Azure is starting to make sense. We discussed infrastructure considerations for international expansion (22:23) and how personalized medicine can combat institutional biases (24:33) to create more equitable healthcare delivery. 

Danielle shares her take on the state of our healthcare system as it shifts under the weight of the pandemic (28:56) and why diversity in building teams (31:51) is so important. We get into what it means to build open-source software (34:08). Finally, Danielle shares resources to dive into for folks getting into the space (39:52). 

If you’re interested in reaching out to her, find her on linkedin or her website. 

Danielle, thank you so much for spending your time with us on the show!

We’re thrilled to announce Shift+6, a developer-focused, health-tech podcast from Redox. Here we'll explore the ways amazing technologists are bringing new innovation to market, growing their teams, and dealing with an ever-changing landscape in one of the world's most complex industries.

Our first guest is Ryan Scharer, the CTO of a new (and maybe in stealth mode?) telehealth startup called Folx. You might be wondering, “Does the world really need another telehealth offering?” Short answer: yes, this world does. Folx is aimed at LGBTQ+ communities with representative care providers, “Telehealth that’s pretty queer” as their website states. Check out their purpose statement here, it’s moving. 

Ryan’s building on a long history of success in the digital health space, having played this early-stage engineering lead role at Humedica (acquired by Optum) and PatientPing. We dive into those early decisions and tradeoffs we make in building product and eventually taking it to scale. Here are some highlights:

• 2:00 - Ryan pitches Folx
• 4:33 - unique features, based on this demographic
• 6:07 - contrasting more established digital health with early stage startups
• 8:53 - new technologies Ryan’s excited about
• 13:10 - balancing moving fast, or building things for scale
• 17:33 - the benefits of experience in getting started
• 20:34 - choosing an EHR
• 29:45 - resources for getting started in health tech

Ryan mentioned to reach out to him on LinkedIn if you have questions or want to start a conversation. 

Thanks for tuning into our first episode of Shift+6. We’ll be launching our own podcast show soon so look out for that and be sure to subscribe. And let me know ([email protected]) if you have ideas or feedback for the show. We’re excited to bring this to the healthcare developer community.