Name: Gil Addo
Degree/Specialty: B.S. Biomedical Engineering & Economics, MBA
What has been your experience of working in healthcare?
RubiconMD is a 6-year-old platform built to improve access to specialist expertise. Our technology allows primary care clinicians to connect with specialists and receive an expert opinion within hours. Primary care is the foundational building block of an effective and sustainable healthcare system. Our product helps to empower and support physicians to provide more effective and efficient care to a wider range of patients.
What do you wish the general public knew about healthcare delivery?
I think the set up of our healthcare system is very imperfect. And the people that receive care, and benefit from it, aren't necessarily the people that pay for it. This causes competing incentives and fractured care. We generally believe that healthcare is a public good and everybody should have access, but we have not made healthcare available for everybody in the same way. I think we have to work within the existing system and infrastructure, as painful as it is. And we have to find ways to give clinicians better access to information, tools and resources so that they can do the things that only they do well, which is patient care and empathy.
What is the most challenging part about working in our current healthcare system?
I have a background in biotechnology and healthcare consulting. I thought I had a clear understanding of the challenges in healthcare from my work in the pharmaceutical and biotech market. Working directly with healthcare organizations, however, has been an eye-opening experience. We had heard that interoperability between systems is a major challenge. Then we saw the tools that groups were working with firsthand and quickly realized you can't build a sophisticated new age health tech platform on some of the existing infrastructure. You can design a product beautifully that solves a real concern, but if it doesn't fit into the other pieces of the clinic workflow, and that can mean so many different things, then it's still not going to solve the underlying problem. The pace of change can also be frustrating. There are pockets of great innovation where you can move quickly, but much of healthcare still moves a lot slower than people would like.
What motivates you at the end of a long day?
My guiding light is improving access to care. Our mission is to expand access to great care in a timely manner regardless of socioeconomic standing or geographic limitations. We support clinics that serve undocumented immigrants, large Medicaid populations, rural settings, correctional facilities, in addition to supporting international sites and the largest tech companies in the world of onsite clinics. We have a large network of specialists that continues to grow. We are a piece of the broader suite of solutions to the challenges we face in healthcare.
What’s your dream for the future of healthcare?
I believe that in our future world, e-consults will be a standard form of how care is delivered. We have talked a lot with the professionals who publish most of the literature around physician burnout and discuss how this shifting system is asking the most burdened physicians to do even more. All you're doing is further contributing to and exacerbating the problem. I’m hopeful that we can address some of challenges physicians face. I'm really excited to collaborate with physicians/innovators that are building next generation care models. They're creating change within the existing infrastructure and taking on risk for large populations. My hope is that these folks can get to the scale where they represent most of healthcare and they become the rule, not the exception.
Short Bio (Name, professional title, social media links)
Gil Addo, Co-founder and CEO of RubiconMD, https://www.linkedin.com/in/giladdo/
For more information about RechargedMD: www.rechargedmd.com
To leave comments, please visit linkedin.com/company/rechargedmd