It Takes a Village: Customers, Investors and Advisors in Healthcare (Michael & Chris of Synaptec Health)
Michael and Chris share their experiences and insights on the medical coding industry, as well as their journey building a start-up. They delve into the challenges and decisions they faced during the pandemic, and what they sought from investors.
About
Welcome to the 25th installment of Foothill Ventures’ Lessons from Founders series. Every week, we publish an in-depth founder interview, ranging from early-stage entrepreneurs to successful businesses. Our conversations cover their personal journeys, the lessons that shaped them, their visions for the future, and their failures. We also learn more about their companies and about the challenges they try to solve. These insights and lessons are applicable to any entrepreneur — current or future.
Synaptec Health leverages the power of AI to offer a fully automated medical coding solution
Synaptec Health is a fully automated, AI-powered medical coding solution that interprets patient encounters, assigns codes for reimbursement, and generates value-added analytics. You can reach the team at www.synaptechealth.com
Michael is the CEO of Synaptec Health and a board certified emergency medicine physician. As a resident, Michael recognized a growing systemic constraint on medicine resulting from outdated administrative technologies and disorganized systems. One night, while documenting at his keyboard, sifting through a never-ending stream of notes, he was convinced that there had to be a better way. He realized that while clinical medicine was advancing rapidly, the administrative side was starved of innovation. Without a dramatic, rapid overhaul, our ability to advance clinical medicine will become ensnared by three decades of technological reticence. Synaptec Health was founded to completely reimagine what today is considered ‘non-clinical medicine’ into an optimized, critical resource for driving advances at the bleeding edge of medicine, starting with a critical gateway: medical coding.
Chris, as CTO of Synaptec Health, brings together his passions for business and technology. A UC Berkeley graduate, where he studied Business Administration and Computer Science, Chris began his career at Sybase and later moved to Yahoo, where he served as Director of Corporate Development and Senior Director in Search & Ad Products. Later, as VP of Product Management and Data at Munchery, Chris managed a 15-person engineering and data science team and was responsible for the entire product and technical roadmap, developing customer purchase behavioral models that optimized marketing spend and improved customer product recommendations and purchasing behavior. Chris co-founded Synaptec Health with the ambitious goal of making a fundamental change in a field that would significantly impact people’s lives: healthcare.
Why we invested in Synaptec Health: The US healthcare system is facing a cost crisis due to government caps on reimbursement, making cost-cutting measures critical. Synaptec Health’s innovative software not only solves the real problem of expensive manual teams coding physician charts–a $16Bn market–but also positions the company to capture hundreds of billions of dollars in efficiency gains through real-time analytics and patient interventions.
What is the most interesting trend in health care?
In the medical space, I think the most interesting trend is actually the move towards technology — physical technology starting to integrate with organic human tissue, and that movement is going to be a big deal. We are either going towards cyborg–becoming the machine or the machine develops on its own. I’d like to be in the camp of going with the technology and integrating.
Looking back knowing some of the things you know, what was the best decision that you made? What would you have done differently?
Don’t start selling new technology to emergency departments at the beginning of a global pandemic, that would be my first bit of advice. We launched our company publicly in Feb 2020, everybody was very interested but told us: we can’t talk to you right now, we have a pandemic to figure out.
My perspective is that we’re still pretty early in our journey as a company but in general, making decisions as fast as possible and trying to fail quickly will get you to the right place faster.
How do you get to deal with launching right before the pandemic?
Persistence; plus we did have a couple of pilot customers during that time, so we did take advantage of that when the new customer pipeline was a little bit on hold. We focused on stabilizing the foundation of our product, getting the data from EHRs into the system, etc. The pandemic actually gave us a little more time to work on the product side.
What is something that you look for from investors?
Being able to depend on them — obviously for the round you’re currently in, but also getting to that next round. At the end of the day, that’s really the most important thing, making sure that you can keep the ship running. More so than that, really helping you to get to that next stage by introducing you to the right people. There’s a VC that can write you a check and then there’s a VC that can offer you value beyond that, and that’s really the goal of what you’re trying to find. And it’s tough because every VC website out there always says they are founder focused, but to find one that actually is, is the trick. For us in particular, medicine is a very niche community, so being able to break into and gain connections there is huge. The other thing is that VCs carry reputations with them — they like to partner with VCs that they’ve worked with before. So, as a founder, it’s important to get as much context about the VCs reputation as possible because that’s going to impact your future rounds.
In terms of boards and advisors, what are some important factors that you’re looking for?
It depends on what you need as a company. One of the things that we’ve been very fortunate with is Michael being a doctor and his network. As we look to continue to build out our board, we’re looking for people that have healthcare industry stature and experience. Additionally, you want to find people that can help fill in expertise gaps that you may have in the company to be on your board,
To get the full version of the interview: https://youtu.be/otXSb3FilcE
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Foothill Ventures is a $150M seed-stage technology firm. We back technical founders across software, life sciences, and frontier technologies.
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