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Balaji Gopalan

MedStack is on a mission to improve the quality and effectiveness of healthcare by reducing the friction and burden in building and adopting cloud digital health solutions through a commitment to security-first philosophy, high technical excellence, diversity in thought and culture, and respect for the entrepreneurial/invention journey.

We reduce the time and cost to build integrated patient-centric healthcare apps by 60 per cent. We specifically address, through a series of secure cloud tools, one of the biggest challenges faced by healthcare app developers: data privacy compliance.

Tell us about yourself?

I’ve been fascinated by the process of invention and innovation for decades, both within startups and at larger organizations. In particular, I’m driven by a curiosity about the nature and business of platforms and technologies that help business entities to invent or transact with each other.

I led the consumer cloud applications product management team at BlackBerry in the infancy of the mass mobile computing industry, and there began really exploring how platforms work. I also did some teaching work to evangelize the notion of product management to those who sought to become innovators. The opportunity to launch MedStack came to me later, but I immediately recognized it as my life’s mission, inspired by the very hard work digital healthcare entrepreneurs do in particular.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Hindsight is always 20/20, of course. Some of the most exciting things ever are happening at the company right now, and of course, I wish we would have come to them earlier. At the same time, there is much that is blessed in my family life, and I do and would have constantly reminded myself to ensure none of that is missed or passes me by.

Every moment counts, from being able to track the company’s business, cultural and technological metrics daily to reflecting on life overall and how it progressed from the day before and all the learning it brings.

What problem does your business solve?

We help organizations building digital solutions for healthcare seamlessly adopt and integrate a strong data security and privacy posture specifically required by this industry without having to build it all from scratch, instead focusing on their unique differentiations and providing evidence to speed the diligence process by their customers.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

As mentors and advisors for a number of startups, and inspired by the thesis that entrepreneurship has a responsibility to tackle the world’s most pressing problems (such as the healthcare capacity crisis), my cofounder and I brought our experiences together to conceive of a new way of bringing repeatable data security and privacy protection so that these solutions can be built faster and more efficiently. We both have backgrounds in cloud product strategy and security, and with my fascination with platforms and his experience building healthcare solutions, we found the problem we wanted to solve.

What is your magic sauce?

Every day, more attention is directed toward both the healthcare innovation opportunity (said to be the next big frontier of tech) and the importance of protecting personal privacy and data security. Many are underscoring these areas and attempting ways to streamline the work.

MedStack, however, is the only solution purpose-built for healthcare’s stringent requirements that bring together automated, guaranteed, built-in security configuration with inheritable evidence (“technical safeguards”) with a workflow for policy and procedure customization (“admin compliance”) and automated responses to vendor security questionnaires (“compliance proofing”). This is why we’ve been selected as the MedTech Breakthrough Award winner for Patient Data Privacy solutions and are highly rated by our customers on G2.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

We remain committed to our mission of removing barriers to the creation and adoption of digital health so that people can live healthier lives and that pressures on the healthcare system can be eased. We wish to be the de facto standard for creating new solutions, be it by startups within healthcare enterprises or by larger technology organizations approaching the healthcare opportunity.

In so doing, we expect our team to evangelize new standards and ways of building software and security within that software, and this is why we are so discerning with bringing contributors to our team overall. We expect a web to expand from these innovations in terms of partnerships, product tiers, channels, and industry approaches. We are just getting started.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

The technical disruption inherent in our product approach is vast, so we have taken a constantly-iterating approach to building our business. This led to us having to completely rebuild our product technology for scale after our initial launch, building and supporting at the same time, and we are nearing the launch of our third generation as well.

This is very challenging, but the right balance of experimentation and development requires some very difficult tradeoffs and decisions made with some level of risk and uncertainty and ultimate trust in the team. Context switching happens frequently, and great care must be taken to stay on track.

How can people get involved?

If you’re building, supporting, adopting, or sponsoring digital health solutions (virtual care, telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, care concierge and continuity, patient engagement, clinical trials logistics, provider workflows, etc.) we’d love to learn what you’re working on, explore if our network can be of assistance, and talk about how we can help. Find us at www.medstack.co, or this spring at events such as HIMSS and Collision.