Health care equipment is crucial. It’s often expensive, undergoes significant wear-and-tear and then, doesn’t get the quality service it needs.
Enter Ilerasoft, which aims to fix those problems.
Co-founded Kwaku Owusu, who also serves as the company's CEO, Ilerasoft utilizes its "Efficiency Score" to provide insight into a medical tool's state. Functioning much like a credit score, the rating is based on the device's utilization and 16 items that users' input themselves, like their hospital's patient population. Ultimately, it helps managers make wiser choices about the types of tools they're purchasing by providing analytics and recommendations tailored to their hospital's needs.
Owusu told Cincy Inno that the Ilerasoft team is about to go to market in a “big, big scale” on June 24.
Debuting their system is the culmination of a long entrepreneurial journey for both company and for Owusu, who was born in Ghana and moved to the United States as a kid. As a professional, he studied health care management and went into consulting, eventually moving on to tech.
Despite his transitions, an observation he made during his stint in the health care industry stayed with him: the dance around obtaining, maintaining and using medical devices was unnecessarily messy. He found hospitals renting equipment because they couldn’t locate the tools they already owned. Sometimes, hospitals would waste money buying more equipment than they needed. While hospital staff was aware of these problems, they weren't sure how to fix it.
"We believe that we’ve created a new standard in healt hcare,” Owusu said. “Our efficiency is going to be the same manner that banks use the FICO score, so our strategy is to get that out as early as possible to as many people as possible.”
Eventually, his business acumen, experience in the industry and a desire to fix these problems coalesced into what would become Ilerasoft in March of 2017.
“We’re really solving two problems around medical devices," Owusu continued. "One is the under-utilization of medical devices, and one is the safety of medical devices. "So, we created a platform that allows hospitals when a device has been recalled by the FDA or the manufacturer.”
Owusu said that his team's work as a participant in Hillman Accelerator in Cincinnati was crucial to Ilerasoft’s growth, especially the intra-ecosystem introductions he made thanks to the accelerator.
Hillman wasn't the only early win for the team; they also received an Arch Grant in St. Louis.
It's using these boosts to spur their work ahead. For example, their product is completed and they partnered with a large company that already has a foothold in the health care industry. Next on the list? Finding more partners who share their vision.
