In the future, a silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic will be the rush of investment and research that went into updating the antiquated healthcare system. For example, between January and June 2020, venture capital entities invested more than $5.5 billion into digital health startups.
However, it didn’t take a pandemic for the founders of Abacus Insights to realize healthcare data needed an update. When CEO Dr. Minal Patel began his career in healthcare nearly 30 years ago as a medical student, he saw advancements in brain surgery operations and cancer research, yet the developments in health care cost, access and quality remained stunted.
Due to the siloed nature of healthcare data, gathering information from different sources could sometimes take weeks to get an answer from a simple query. This lag time affected healthcare systems’ ability to recommend doctors for patients, provide transparent healthcare costs and coordinate between different care providers.
Enter, two major technological developments: the digitization of healthcare data and cloud computing. Abacus Insights’ digital platform harnesses both technologies to help consumers make better healthcare choices and allow providers to offer more informed recommendations.
And now they’re ready to grow.
In June 2020, the company secured $35 million in Series B financing and brought Krishna Kottapalli onboard as chief commercial officer. With more than 20 years of experience in the healthcare industry, Kottapalli had led SCIO Health Analytics, a company he co-founded, through several rounds of funding for an eventual sale of $240 million in 2018. When asked to join Abacus Insights a couple of years later, the pause was short.
“The innovative technology and product, solid management team, and thriving company culture made it an easy decision for me,” Kottapalli said.
Kottapalli looks forward to overseeing Abacus Insights’ go-to-market strategy, driving continued growth and launching formal sales, marketing and technical solutions functions. Below, Kottapalli spoke to Built In Boston about his playbook for 2021.
What inspired you to join Abacus Insights?
I have been working at the intersection of healthcare, technology, data and services for the last 20 years, providing solutions to payors, providers and life sciences organizations. I have led entrepreneurial organizations and helped scale them, resulting in successful exits. Before Abacus, I co-founded SCIO Health Analytics and led it through multiple growth phases. We sold to a publicly-traded company in 2018 and after the integration, I left the organization in February 2020.
I started looking at up-and-coming digital health organizations and was immediately interested in Abacus Insights. Abacus has built a unique cloud-based enterprise data management platform. The innovative technology and platform, solid management team and thriving company culture made it an easy decision for me.
Additionally, it was very helpful that I had previously worked with two members of the leadership team: Dr. Minal Patel was a client and CPO Sumant Rao was a colleague.
In your own words, what is Abacus Insights’ mission? How does this mission impact company culture?
Abacus insights’ mission is to liberate healthcare data that is locked away in silos and make it available to key stakeholders to deliver the optimal health outcome. This mission has guided the company culture and instilled integrity above all else.
How does Abacus Insights use data to improve the healthcare system?
In the past, health plans of all sizes have kept healthcare data in walled repositories. This made sense, as contracts, claims and care management were operations autonomously run by separate systems. However, times have changed and stakeholders want access to this data. Providers want this data to inform treatment decisions and digital health companies want it to help create innovative new technology and services. Now, because of the government’s mandate (The Interoperability and Patient Access final rule released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services), individual patients should be able to access their data within 24 hours.
How do you plan to achieve a competitive advantage and deliver a unique value proposition for Abacus customers?
The challenge that health plans face is that they will not be able to analyze and share information at scale if they continue to rely on the cumbersome, manual process of “data wrangling.” With “data wrangling,” a considerable amount of time and resources are burned to pull information together in one place from dozens of different databases. A simple query that should yield a quick answer can take weeks to resolve.
Abacus has developed a unique cloud-based enterprise data management and analytics enablement platform. We have spent tens of millions of dollars developing the platform by obsessively focusing on the data quality, privacy and security needed to handle sensitive information. The platform is implemented to focus on providing value quickly, robust change management and thoughtful data governance. During deployment, we strive to coexist and leverage existing investments made by our clients and support the path to ROI.
2021 sounds like a big year for Abacus Insights, as you will be launching formal sales, marketing and technical solutions functions. Describe the process of building out these teams and what you’re looking for in senior hires.
As we enter the growth phase, we will need to increase and diversify our client base and deepen our relationships with our existing clients. We have created a robust go-to-market plan and identified the payer and non-payer segments and accounts we plan to target. We have established the sales, marketing and solutioning, and sales enablement functions to execute the plan.
Sales will be responsible for acquiring new customers by building trusted relationships, identifying the buyer’s needs, and articulating the value of the Abacus platform. Marketing will work cross-functionally and collaborate with sales and product management to develop go-to-market content and help deliver sales enablement tools and resources. Solutioning and sales enablement will drive data and technical solutioning, craft messaging on products and technical fit, and manage the proposal process.
We are looking for talented individuals who have a deep understanding of healthcare and specific experience working in SaaS or PaaS organizations. In addition, it is important that they are good team players who will fit and thrive within Abacus.
Why is now an exciting time for marketing and salespeople to work in healthcare?
Healthcare spending accounted for nearly 18 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, which is about $4 trillion. This level of spending is simply unsustainable, especially if the U.S. wants to be globally competitive. The industry needs to transform how it delivers personalized care and address administrative inefficiencies.
Digital health, which is at the intersection of healthcare, technology and data analytics, has emerged as an area that is attracting significant investments. Companies playing in this space are striving to deliver meaningful value across healthcare segments. Marketing professionals who understand consumerism and want to impact society will find working in healthcare to be very gratifying. Salespeople who thrive in fast-paced environments will find this space highly rewarding due to the explosive growth expected in the next decade.
Abacus has developed a unique cloud-based enterprise data management and analytics enablement platform.”
What do you envision the future of the healthcare system looking like?
The future of the U.S. healthcare system is one in which treatments are more closely tailored to individual patients at the right place of care and rendered at the right time. All stakeholders involved have bemoaned the fact that much of our system’s most valuable healthcare information is locked away in silos, where it cannot be properly analyzed and used.
We see a world where this data is made interoperable by health plans and shared freely with doctors, patients and researchers. Abacus is positioned to help liberate the data that health plans are holding and then build connections between these newly formed “data lakes” and the many partners and stakeholders who want access to it.
What are Abacus Insights’ growth goals for 2021?
Our growth goals for 2021 include increasing our customer base and expanding our footprint at existing customers. We plan to diversify our customer base across various-size payers as well as non-payers. Concurrently, we will continue to build our platform and add modules to further increase the value delivered to our customers.
