Our Founder

I graduated from Medical School in 1988. It was a time where clinical exam and judgment reigned supreme as MRI scanners were new, the human genome project had not started and the internet was fledging. We were not allowed to use calculators in exams and were forced to memorize a myriad of potential drug-drug interactions for fear that we would harm a patient if we were not well versed. It was a time of highly skilled clinicians that used insight and clinical judgment to treat patients.

A few years after this I was struck by an event that I thought would never happen until it did and then realized the world had changed. In 1996 IBM’ computer algorithm (Deep Blue) successfully defeated the undisputed world chess Champion on the world stage (Garry Kasparov). While I was incredulous to begin with, I started to realize that my doubt about the feasibility in accomplishing this feat was more rooted in my sense of existential anxiety. That is to say….if a computer program can beat Kasparov at Chess, why can’t they develop an algorithm to beat the very best doctors (or at least me) at treating disease as a Doctor? Had I really just wasted 13 years of training?

Fast forward to today in the year 2022 where algorithms on our cellphones tell us the fastest traffic routes to take, the cheapest/most direct flights we can take and EHR systems are in every clinic with built in drug-drug interaction analysis commonplace. Surprisingly, we are really still no nearer to having Doctors supplanted by computers and it really starts to beg the question:

If we first look at 2 other industries: Banking and Air travel it helps to compare their advances to that of Medicine. In 1996 we still consistently had to go to tellers to deposit checks, bank statements were mailed to us and very few transactions were able to avoid a human to human interaction. Similarly, Air Travel in 1996 required a paper ticket that was often printed by a travel agent and was presented at the airport after waiting in long lines to have a direct human / human interaction. All changes to the flight itinerary required a visit to the airport or discussion with the travel agent so that a new paper ticket could be produced.

Fast forward to today and you can see what impact technology can have on an industry when there is an alignment in goals.

Then you consider how outpatient healthcare delivery has largely lagged in technological advances. Today patients still have to call to change appointments, are given clipboards at every doctor’s office to fill out the same questions each time by hand and although there is now EHR in most offices, any request to get records is met with paper copies.

Why have other technologies advanced so rapidly and medicine really has not? It is certainly not because of a lack of importance. It is also not because of TAM issues as the size of the world healthcare market this year will crest $4 trillion and is larger than the size of e-commerce.

The answer is likely related to four factors:

Medicine has considerably more regulations and privacy issues.
Patients generally want to believe that their doctor is the best and that no other doctor or machine could possibly be better. Unlike in a chess game, there is no immediate arbiter of success or superiority.
Doctors are still the ultimate gatekeepers in this deep rooted profession of tradition.
Seismic changes (esp given the barriers listed above) require tech startups to take very small incremental improvements given the traditional 5 year window/cycle allowed to take a product to market.

Having thought about this for a while, I decided to start Intelligent with the express purpose of addressing this clear unmet need. We strive to accomplish a few critical pieces that will hopefully be impactful in the Healthcare delivery system.

1. Build an operating system with an EHR/EPM/Inventory backbone that will integrate digital data from a variety of sources and collate them into a structure that is centered on patients. Simply stated, ALL data (from VOIP calls, to faxes, to reimbursements to correspondences ) will be digitally accessible and linked to a specific patient in what we are referring to as a “Patient Relationship Management system” or PRM. This will function in the same manner as a “Customer Relationship Management system” or CRM that is now commonplace in business.

2. Building Machine Learning capabilities that are innate in our Cloud native EHR that will allow for “supervised learning” to take place with each physician patient event. INDx’s sister company Acuity Eye Group currently sees over 500,000 patients a day and it is our express intent to ensure that in the future, all of these visits are tied to an ML “supervised learning” algorithm so that we can learn and improve our clinical decision making. Through Machine learning algorithms built into our bespoke EHR system we hope to be able to have 2 bold outcomes:

Ultimately provide algorithmic assistance to doctors to be able to provide them “better than standard of care protocols. Essentially “beating Kasparov at treating conditions like glaucoma and macular degeneration”.
Provide consistent regular audits of patient care protocols across doctors/clinics/locations to ensure that minimum “standard of care” criteria are met.

Building a high performance team that collaboratively works to solve large problems in Healthcare using automation, robotics and machine learning. With automation we hope to

It has been said that when healthcare and technology achieve sufficiently facile integration, that the seismic changes that were seen with e-commerce will be eclipsed by the massive impact of helping patients heal better/faster.

We are building a team to try to change this future and welcome others to join us if they can align with our vision to successfully merge technology and healthcare.

Thank you
Tom Chang