Raj Toleti, CEO of Andor Health and serial entreprenuer, is no stranger to finding innovative technology solutions to some of the biggest challenges in healthcare.
On a virtual Microsoft Teams call during the COVID-19 pandemic, serial entrepreneur Raj Toleti brings up an interesting question:
“If we were doctors and nurses discussing a patient right now, how would we pull up the patient’s files for review?”
The answer, many times, is that it would be impossible. Most healthcare providers’ electronic medical record systems (or EMRs) are not inherently built for team collaboration. EMRs are excellent repositories to capture extensive patient data over a period of time but they lack the tools to enable effective care team coordination. But collaboration in healthcare is critical; healthcare professionals need to be able to work together to provide care while pulling clinical data on-demand into collaboration platforms.
That’s why Toleti’s latest endeavor is Andor Health – a company looking to change the way healthcare professionals connect and interact with healthcare data. The company is working with Microsoft, Google and others to have its solution come out-of-the-box with tools like Teams and Hangouts. Andor is also able to work independently to ensure that care teams can collaborate efficiently.
Toleti shares an example, “With Andor Health’s technology, a care provider can set up an alert that notifies them of abnormal lab results instantly. Once a lab test is conducted on a patient, the care team needs to monitor the EMR manually to see if the lab test has been resulted and decide what action will be required.” This manual process can take up to 20-30 minutes in some cases.
“For critical lab tests like COVID-19, any delay is unacceptable.” says Toleti. With Andor, the care provider is notified in real-time of the abnormal screening result, saving precious time and even lives of those who may be exposed in an Emergency Department or other care setting.
Andor Health has already secured partnerships with the National Institutes of Health and Orlando Health. During the pandemic, the company is even offering discounted rates to hospitals and health systems that can’t afford to pay for the technology upfront. Florida House Bill 843 and the national interoperability rules are requiring hospital and health systems to notify community primary care physicians about admit and discharge for their patient populations. Andor is currently the only system that guarantees compliance to these regulations.
Toleti is no stranger to finding innovative technology solutions to some of the biggest challenges in healthcare. Before his journey as a serial entrepreneur, he was a master’s student and post-grad fulltime researcher for industrial engineering with a focus on simulation modeling for autonomous vehicles at the University of Central Florida (UCF).
UCF is the leader in simulation in the areas of computer science and Artificial Intelligence.
Raj Toleti, CEO of Andor Health
“And that’s a big reason that Orlando is rich with excellent research and development talent,” he explains.
Entrepreneurship runs in Toleti’s family, too, and the itch to innovate led him to start his first company – Cytura, a medical web content management & personalization software company that was acquired by Mobius in 2002.
“From coast to coast, here in the Florida tech corridor, we were able to recruit and train software engineers and technologists and build teams that were innovative enough to bring products to market first,” he says. This first venture, and the success of building a strong team, gave him confidence that Central Florida would allow him to pursue his passions in healthcare IT.
Toleti has successfully launched and exited three more companies. His next enterprise, Galvanon, introduced the first online bill pay software for healthcare customers, was acquired by NCR in 2005. PatientPoint took the customer experience a step even further, implementing check-in technology similar to airlines’ processes into the healthcare industry. It was acquired by Health Advice® Networks in 2012. HealthGrid combined population health management with patient experience to create a best in class patient engagement platform. It was acquired by Allscripts for over $100 million in 2018. In each venture, the guiding principle was about improving the customer experience, and not necessarily, the technology. And each new venture built upon the experience of the last.
Here in Orlando, we are able to leverage talent that knows how to craft the best customer experiences, such as from Disney, in order to design and create patient and provider self-service technologies.
Raj Toleti, CEO of Andor Health
“And if you can build an experience that works for the country’s largest healthcare providers, many of which are located in Florida, that technology can be used anywhere in the country,” he adds. “Building and testing healthcare technology here allows for a large and diverse sample population of users.”
Toleti’s love of innovation runs deep, and he currently serves as a Board Member of the UCF Foundation and is an active supporter of the UCF India Center.
“My personal goal is to create 2,000 more high tech jobs here in Central Florida,” he says.
And with the region’s fast-growing Lake Nona Medical City, new big data research at the UCF Medical School and the thriving collaborative ecosystem at AdventHealth, Orlando Health and HCA, that’s a dream that might just come true.
