In a recent interview with CanadianSME Small Business Magazine, Balaji Gopalan, Co-Founder and CEO of MedStack, shed light on the powerful convergence of healthcare and technology through his company’s innovative platform. MedStack, born out of Balaji’s vision and his co-founder’s shared experiences in the tech industry, addresses the stringent demands of data security and privacy within the digital health sector. By leveraging his extensive background in software ecosystems, Balaji has positioned MedStack as a crucial facilitator in simplifying the integration of digital health technologies. MedStack’s platform is meticulously designed to ensure compliance with the highest standards of data security and privacy, enabling rapid adoption of technologies in healthcare settings. This has fundamentally changed how hospitals and clinics overcome barriers to adopting new technologies, emphasizing a secure and efficient approach to digital health solutions. Looking ahead, Balaji envisions MedStack playing a pivotal role in the future landscape of healthcare technology, advocating for equitable healthcare access and supporting the broader integration of cloud-based, real-time digital solutions to enhance patient care across diverse communities.
Balaji leads business development and strategy at MedStack and is an expert in building software platform ecosystem businesses across a wide range of industries. He is a strong advocate for the role of ecosystems in industry transformation and in tackling tough problems like improving healthcare. Balaji is a 15-year veteran in product management and a well-respected startup educator and advisor. He is the proud recipient of Founder Institute’s Global Startup Mentor Award for Canada’s Most Supportive Mentor.
Could you share your journey toward co-founding MedStack and what inspired you to focus specifically on enhancing data security and privacy in the digital health sector?
I’ve always believed that innovation and entrepreneurship are best applied towards solving large, lofty, societal-level problems and that system platforms in particular play a key role in unlocking these innovation pipelines. I share the sentiment of many that the friction in healthcare systems, here in Canada and elsewhere, is one of our greatest challenges, and that “health concerns” have now seeped into all facets of life. In conversations with innovators in this field, I discovered that despite the emergence of significant technological advancements, digital health companies are faced with enormous barriers to entry related to data privacy and security expectations, given that health data is the most sensitive data in the world. As a platform strategist, this is where I wished to apply my experience and insight.
How does MedStack’s platform address and overcome the barriers to adopting digital health technologies in hospitals and clinics?
Healthcare service providers are caught in a very difficult conundrum of reinforcing trust and partnership through data security and privacy protection, while speeding access to care, ensuring continuity and delivering on outcomes. Because of this, the data privacy and security assessment of third-party technologies comes very early in the healthcare procurement process, much earlier than would be the case in other industries. At MedStack, we’ve adopted a creator-first philosophy, “raising the watermark” by taking a platform approach to solving this problem. Our flexible, scalable platform technology allows the space for healthcare innovation differentiation to shine and be owned above the line, while guaranteeing healthcare-ready security and data privacy standards below the line. This means that both creators and healthcare enterprises can trust that the data protection protocols are already pre-industry vetted and accepted, speeding the entire procurement and scaling process.
MedStack prioritizes data security and privacy compliance for digital health. What are some of the unique challenges you face in maintaining high standards of security and privacy, and how does your platform simplify compliance for healthcare applications?
Data security and privacy is a complex space, and it means different things to different people. Our entire team at MedStack is diligently focused on our mission to speed the adoption of digital health by driving more consistent, robust and transparent standards of trust, in turn making healthcare better, more affordable and more equitable. To accomplish this, we zero in on the critical juncture at which data security and privacy is evaluated: the point of enterprise partnership. Over the years we have scanned, evaluated, aggregated and reverse-engineered a great number of security assessment processes to determine their commonalities, and with each subsequent review we do on behalf of our customers that database becomes more robust. Of course, the challenge faced by any platform is that you’re introducing users to new workflows, even if the interfaces are familiar. This is why, this year in particular, we’ve doubled-down on developer productivity and benefits.
How do you envision the future of healthcare technology evolving, particularly with the integration of cloud-based, real-time digital solutions? What role will MedStack play in this future landscape?
We knew when starting out that we’d be taking on a very big mission and an evolving, challenging and difficult-to-itemize problem. But it didn’t take long in looking just at the evolution of healthcare itself, as patients, healthcare workers and family members thereof, to realize that this wasn’t going to be a fleeting opportunity. In Canada, the US and elsewhere, the % of GDP annually spent on healthcare has been going up for the past few decades, and only continues to do so. And a very large portion of that spend is driven by patients and their families’ needs in longer-term journeys: chronic conditions, aging, mental illness, social determinants of health, etc. On the other side of this we see physician and nurse burnout and access inequity at alarming rates. It is the freeing of data, the protection and trust and privacy ownership of that data in the process, faster analysis and automated responses to that analysis based on multivariate precedent that will enable us to wrap around this growing challenge. If we can help more things get built, funded and commercialized, more inventors, architects, creators, data scientists and technologists more willing to take on healthcare as a space, then that’s a very important role for us to play. That’s our measure.
The WHO constitution highlights health as a fundamental right without distinction. How does MedStack ensure its solutions contribute to equitable healthcare access and address the disparities in health services delivery?
I’m so proud of the fact that so many of our customers, those creating new digital health solutions for patients, families, caregivers, providers, pharmacists and researchers, are inspired by the needs of health equity to do what they do. Digital health can be a powerful tool in the redistribution of care, from providing virtual care to patients in remote communities, to ensuring care outcomes for those with speech and language barriers, to rethinking machine learning models to work with broader data sets that ensure more representation and fairness. These stories, those of our actual customers today, inspire the whole MedStack team to do what we do. Digital health, in this digital world, can widen the space of healthcare for more equity, but of course, we continue to encourage our community to plan their innovations and business models with fairness in mind, to ensure that technology works for everyone who needs these outcomes.