1) Tell us about your background and how/why you started the company.
My husband and co-founder, Anand, and I come from healthcare and technology backgrounds, but grew up surrounded by physicians on both sides of the family. Through them, we saw first hand the frustrations and negative impacts, both financial and clinical, of the specialty physician shortage in our country. The lack of access to the right specialist at the right time all too often resulted in unnecessary patient transfers and lengths of stay, excessive testing and cost of care, and sometimes, suboptimal care or avoidable disease progression. Often, all that was needed to avoid all that was a consultation from a specialist, but both the shortage of specialists today and the suboptimal geographic distribution of those that do exist meant they weren’t able to reach all the patients in need. We believed that with the right technology streamlining and automating their clinical workflows, we could not only efficiently integrate remote specialists into hospitals and medical facilities around the country, but also help them see more patients in the same amount of time, dramatically improving access to care and ultimately both clinical and financial outcomes for health systems coast to coast. Today, the AmplifyMD platform is helping thousands of patients get the specialty care they need every day, and helping specialty providers deliver care remotely more efficiently than ever before.
2) What are the key problems you are addressing and how you are delivering value to customers through software workflows?
The U.S. faces a looming physician shortage expected to exceed 100,000 physicians in the coming years, and ~90% of our nation’s hospitals lack specialty coverage in at least 1 critical medical specialty. While there are many companies providing telehealth point solutions, until AmplifyMD, no one has been able to offer a comprehensive, fully bi-directionally EMR-integrated virtual care solution, one that is completely hardware, clinical setting, specialty and EMR agnostic. With those tight integrations and data analytics underpinning our clinical services and platform, we are able to streamline clinical care workflows, and drive the efficiencies needed for providers and hospitals to do more with less, and find a solution for all their virtual care needs within AmplifyMD instead of through multiple individual point solutions. That’s the problem we’re solving with our platform, processes, and specialist provider network.
3) What have you enjoyed or what do you look forward to about working with Tau Ventures?
The amazing network, both of founders and investors. First off, Amit & team are super knowledgeable about the space, what’s happening where and why, who best to connect with on any given problem/issue/question at hand (and just as important, willing to make that connection). They’ve done a great job bringing together people with great experience, people with great ideas, and people with the money and motivation to do something about it. And the events they hold (picnics, investor days, etc) offer a great, low key forum to continue to build on and grow the networks and connections necessary for success.
