Outcomes Rocket_Justin Ramsaran: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Saul Marquez:
Hey everybody, how is it going? Saul Marquez with the Outcomes Rocket and I want to welcome you back to the podcast and thank you for tuning in. Today, I got an amazing guest with us. His name is Justin Ramsaran and he is the CEO and founder of R Group. His unique background in biomedical engineering, cybersecurity, and technology drove him into business in software innovation for the last eight-plus years. His passion for entrepreneurship led him to the converging point of healthcare and technology. This has allowed him to bring cross-functional fields together in unconventional ways to help innovate global healthcare companies, and I’m so excited to have him here on the podcast today. So Justin, really glad that you joined us today.
Justin Ramsaran:
Yeah, no, it’s a pleasure to be on with you, Saul, for sure. I definitely appreciate the opportunity as well to be a part of the growing family here with you guys.
Saul Marquez:
Look, you’re doing some fascinating work in particular on the health IT space, so we’ll get a chance to dive into all of that and how you guys are making a difference in healthcare with that. But talk to me first about what inspired your work in healthcare.
Justin Ramsaran:
Yeah, no, honestly, it’s always been a driving passion of mine to find a way to just do things a little out of the conventional way. I mean, healthcare has always been one of those bigger impacts, right? And being able to make a systematic impact across so many different areas, to people’s lives, you’re not even about patient outcomes and whatnot, was really the big driving factor, and what kind of made me have this inspiration behind it. I always wanted to be a doctor, to be quite honest with you. I truly just couldn’t see myself sticking it out for almost 15 to 18 years, so I applaud everybody who’s out there in the field working at the ground level, but the innovation of that with engineering was what brought me to wanting to make change from a different angle. Really, what kind of drives me today, the healthcare perspective and competing at the innovation forefront.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great, and so it’s that oriented thinking that’s driven you and brought you to a place where you can make huge impact. Talk to us about the impact. How is R Group adding value to the healthcare ecosystem today?
Justin Ramsaran:
Yeah, today R Group as a whole, we started focusing highly on health tech and just the technologies and other innovation spaces and bringing that into healthcare. Coming from the background of business, of the background of so many other areas and cross-functional tech spaces, we’ve always seen that it’s been lagging in the healthcare ecosystem and that’s where we’re like, why are we not taking the same types of technologies from AI and innovations in other spaces like banking and finance, and not applying that here into the healthcare system, the most important area to actual people’s lives. And that’s where we started seeing the value we’re adding, is taking that agile speed of thinking from the software development world, reducing siloed information and systems, and bringing that now to make this further impact to an ecosystem of healthcare. So that’s one of the big things where I think we’re doing from a value add standpoint.
Saul Marquez:
So, that’s great. Help us define that a little bit further and unpack it. If you had to dive into one particular thing that you guys are doing, how do you do it better than what’s available and how are you bringing these technologies? What do, what does these technologies like AI or anything in health IT, how does that look in today’s healthcare environment?
Justin Ramsaran:
Yeah, truly, it’s reducing friction, right? The objective is to create frictionless experience, but also allowing the clinicians and our healthcare providers to increase the effectiveness of what they’re doing with the data and creating actual data strategies that are going to impact clinical outcomes. And that’s one area we’ve refined continuously from engineering a lot of R&D and continue to do, I think, daily throughout our company, is that approach in itself, is how do we take information that is now so much that’s being collected and pulled in or find that where each patient is getting a patient-centric focused strategic standpoint with data to really impact what happens to them? And that’s been one of the bigger ways I think that we’ve been able to differentiate ourselves, A, and then the ability to be agile, right? It may be a overused word, but we definitely apply that in the software world here to healthcare. If you can move at the speed of thought, especially when it comes to making clinical insight and decision, you’re making a bigger impact across the board.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, for sure. So walk me through a typical thing and maybe an example of how you guys have been able to help bridge that gap between tech and healthcare.
Justin Ramsaran:
Yeah, no, absolutely, plenty of use cases out there. I think one of the bigger wins we had, we worked with a large medical device manufacturer, we worked with quite a few other ones as well, but systematically, the convergence point that we had with the healthcare system, large integrated delivery network, had a few hospitals that weren’t able to communicate with the device, that was one piece of the puzzle, and the clinical teams were not able to utilize the actual equipment to its fullest, and also not able to really and truly make the best utilization of what they had at front of data in front of them. So we came in, very strategic approach, understood the workflows the use cases, got, honestly, down in the field, and asked a real hard question, where are the failure points, why are we not seeing cognitive data, where are these systems just failing, and just gave them our strategies, right, ways that we can improve the clinical workflow, ways that we could improve the way they’re utilizing data systems, and also just removing silos. And that was a bigger problem that we saw and continue to see throughout the systems, and that was the key one there. There was so many siloed infrastructures of software, if you want to say, that weren’t communicating with one another, and at the same time unifying those where they could understand the utilization of all this information now to create, like we noted, that patient-centric viewpoint is where we made a big impact, where we really, truly found a defining factor for this big healthcare system we worked with.
Saul Marquez:
So there’s a lot of obstacles, right? There’s, folks here listening to this, you’re thinking, Yep, there’s a ton of them where, there’s devices in the hospital that need to be connected. There’s information that needs to be communicated, and oftentimes it’s in silos, like Justin said, it’s an island. You guys, Justin, help unlock and connect the information to the people that need it when they need it, is that right?
Justin Ramsaran:
That’s correct. Yeah, absolutely.
Saul Marquez:
Love it. And how about things like clinical decision support, the use of AI to predict patient deterioration, and those types of things? Are you guys involved in anything like that?
Justin Ramsaran:
Absolutely, so some of our next-generation platform development that we’re working on here within the next couple of months is very much focused on it. It’s taking all the data sets you have across all the different devices, domains, and aggregating that, and adding proactive AI models to it, right? I feel as though in medicine today we are reactive, right? Diagnostic medicine goes back retrospectively and looks at use cases to then apply that to what’s going on to patients. Proactive medicine is taking the models you have today, right, and using all of the information around a data strategy to create a positive movement forward for that impact on the patients’ lives. So we’re pulling all these different data sets, removing the silos, to create what we’re deeming an open healthcare architecture in order to press forward in the innovation, but also, again, advance proactive medicine for the future.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great. We’ve been talking about interoperability for the longest time, and finally, the companies like R Group are making that type of connection possible. And so these things don’t happen without obstacles, so, Justin, talk to us about one of your major setbacks and key learning that you pulled from that.
Justin Ramsaran:
Yeah, no, absolutely. Again, interoperability is the big buzzword for sure in the health tech space and definitely in the field, and trying to unify everything, the talk is the obstacle in itself, right? We’ve got multiple device vendors, you’ve got multiple healthcare systems regionalized and … spread out that don’t want to essentially share information or it’s just data that has been legacy. So the biggest obstacle we’ve been dealing with, I need to fight in a positive manner, is how do we take legacy-based systems and bring them to the next age or next generation, rather, of computing. And that’s where we’re continuing to fight the good fight, if you want to say along the lines on that, and the setbacks have just been on getting the old methodology of what they call monolithic, into microservices, and that’s converting large mainframe software into a simplified, less complex solution that’s modular. That’s the main thing that’s been happening in healthcare and where we’re looking to create that paradigm shift for advancing it.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, thank you for that. Really, it’s just it’s making that paradigm shift to create efficiency and help with clinical decision-making. And I mean, with the problems that we have right now, labor shortage, all of the issues, these things have never been more important. What are you most excited about today, then? As the care system continues to evolve and the challenges that present us, what are you most excited about?
Justin Ramsaran:
Truly is being at the bleeding edge. I think we’re at a key clinical point and then just technological point within healthcare, that we saw so many holes during the COVID-19 pandemic that became exposure points and everybody finally felt a clicking incidence of why we need to move quick. We have to move fast, otherwise we’re losing patients, we have workout, we have burnout clinician issues. All of those became the crux to where this moment is today, and I’m happy and excited to see where the future goes in healthcare because we’re adapting these principles finally to advance the traction of what’s happening from a development standpoint, but also interoperability across the domain.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, it’s definitely exciting. Are you listening to this and thinking, I could use some of that help? Don’t wait, the solutions are out there, and oftentimes it’s just figuring out where and who. The haystack doesn’t have to be a haystack. You’re listening to this podcast to get answers, and today we’ve got Justin Ramsaran with some answers, make sure you connect with him. We’ll leave the link to ways to get in touch with them in the show notes as well as a link to his company, the R Group, as well as his LinkedIn. Before we conclude, Justin, I’d love if you could just share a closing thought and where you’d like the Outcomes Rocket listeners to get in touch with you.
Justin Ramsaran:
Yeah, no, absolutely. Closing thought truly is, innovation needs to move at the speed of thought, especially in the clinical world, and we need to continue pressing forward from that forefront and continue innovating dynamically and uniquely because every patient’s life is important, and that’s probably my best thought. To really reach out to us at the R Group, my email directly, honestly, is Justin@RGRP.co, and feel free to find us on LinkedIn, it’s all noted, and our website as well, RGRP.co.
Saul Marquez:
Love it, Justin. Hey, thanks for joining us. Really appreciate the insights you’ve shared and be sure to stay in touch.
Justin Ramsaran:
Thanks for the time, Saul.
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