Sasha Cahill, CEO of Healthinfomap, is leveraging a software-as-a-service platform with machine learning to help healthcare providers improve their businesses. She, a first generation, Russian immigrant, and her rock-star team are poised to take on the challenging healthcare space.
Sasha Cahill and her Healthinfomap team want to help revolutionize the healthcare industry. Specifically, they plan to measurably improve operational performance and outcomes for healthcare providers by focusing on two key metrics – cost and quality.
For Cahill, the journey into healthcare is a personal one. Growing up in Russia, Cahill’s mother was a physician. To level set, physicians in Russia are not compensated like they are in the US – a decent one would make a mere $300 a month. So the profession for Cahill’s mother was one of principle and passion which is now engrained into Cahill.
She also had a person close to who her – who helped raise her – die due to preventable malpractice errors. “That really impacted me”, Cahill admits. As she traveled the world – Germany, the Middle East, etc. – through casual conversations, she found that others had similar stories. So for her, this wasn’t an isolated case.
She deeply cares about care providers, but she understands that profit margins are slim, inefficiencies exist often, regulations are very strict and quality of care is inconsistent. So she started Healthinfomap to help providers by leveraging technology.
Cahill describes Healthinfomap’s software as – “an AI driven platform that allows care providers of any size [or] specialty to reduce the cost of care and to prove their outcomes.”
The company’s initial attention is on fixing the core cost issues. Today healthcare costs sent to insurers and patients are estimations – not calculated costs. Essentially, you and I could go to the same doctor and receive the same procedure, but the physician’s office could bill different, estimated costs. “There are no tools to actually calculate the true cost of care.” So, Healthinfomap is creating that calculation tool. She stresses that this is different than the reimbursement portion of healthcare, as that relates to who owes which party money – e.g. patients to insurers to providers.
“The secret sauce we have is our ability to do activity-based costing.” So the platform will give providers a way to accurately and consistently track operational expenses.
The AI within the platform – over time – will help providers to better understand their core profitability drivers, quality metrics, clinical outcomes and operational bottlenecks and flaws. This will essentially put decision making information at the fingertips of management to help reduce the costs associated with obtaining higher quality. Cahill wants to give them – “insights how to not just improve their bottom line but how to deliver the very best care possible.”
Healthinfomap is focusing on small and mid-sized healthcare providers by way of channel partnerships with electronic health record companies. “Those providers don’t have much money, but they see the most patients. I’m a believer that there is a way to deliver quality technology at a very affordable price point.”
To date, the Healthinfomap team has spent the majority its time building the platform and designing their cost-calculating, machine learning algorithm. They are currently in the final stages of signing a sizable electronic health records company (EHR) to a proof of concept which would give them access to nearly 100,000 providers.
In focusing mostly on the product, Cahill’s active team consists of her CTO and a chief data structuring officer. When explaining their backgrounds, Cahill’s eyes light up – she’s very appreciative of their support and highly values their input. Healthinfomap’s CTO, Jay Tolton, has a “skill set [which] allows us to bring the market a complex solution never heard of before.” Bill Inmon, their chief data structuring office, is known as the father of data warehousing and has a number of patents extending through his three exits.
Outside of her passion for healthcare, Cahill is fiercely driven – she’s an accomplished student athlete, a first generation immigrant who moved to the US twelve years ago with just over $300 in her pocket, and prior to Healthinfomap, founded a healthcare consulting company.
Her journey to the US came with significant sacrifice – personally and financially, where in many ways she started from scratch. But Cahill has a contagious, passion for entrepreneurship that will turn her healthcare vision into a reality. So, her advice to wanna-be-entrepreneurs is to never discount yourself nor your idea despite your situation or environment. Whether a first-time entrepreneur or a first generation immigrant, surround yourself with a support team who will help guide you on your journey.
