After spending nearly three years building wearables at Amazon, cardiologist Maulik Majmudar is jumping back into the startup world as the chief medical officer of artificial intelligence and digital therapeutics company Biofourmis. Majmudar, formerly the principal medical officer for Amazon Halo, led the retail giant’s push into general wellness. At the Boston-based startup, Majmudar will be using technology to tackle some of the most complex patients with multiple chronic conditions.
“Biofourmis is interestingly positioned in this intersection of what's happening in the world, which is the transitioning of care from the hospital to the home,” says Majmudar.
Since its founding in 2015, Biofourmis has been using artificial intelligence to help predict, treat and manage disease. The company uses sensors and algorithms to enable health systems to remotely monitor patients with issues like heart failure or Covid-19. It’s also working with pharmaceutical companies to improve clinical outcomes for certain medications by monitoring the data of patients who use them. The company’s cutting edge approach attracted a $100 million round led by Softbank Investment Advisers last September.
“All of us, I think, recognize that technology is only one part of the solution of actually addressing these complex patient populations and their needs,” says Majmudar, who has served as a clinical advisor to Biofourmis since inception and a board member since 2019. In the new role he will oversee product management, data science and clinical affairs. “The vision has always been there to say what are the services to put around that technology to really drive the outcomes that we care about.”
Biofourmis cofounder and CEO Kuldeep Singh Rajput says the pandemic helped illustrate just how important it was to integrate the technology with in-house clinical care. The company had contracts in Singapore and Hong Kong to monitor Covid-19 patients through its wearables and analytics engine, but learned that doing it right meant creating groups to virtually support patients as well. “To drive compliance, to do regular check-ins with a patient, to do proper escalation, we had to very quickly put together that team,” says Rajput, an alum of the 2019 Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list. “That was a great learning curve for us to really see how much impact it makes on the patient engagement and the eventual outcomes.”
This evolution means turning Biofourmis into a provider of medical services and taking on risk in value-based contracts where payment is tied to patient outcomes. Majmudar says the company’s software foundation is key not only to clinical success but also being able to “drive operational efficiency at scale.” It has a dual role of serving both the patient, by predicting problems before they start and guiding treatment, and physicians and care teams, by making their workflow easier.
Biofourmis already has relationships with health systems to monitor patients to help avoid 30-day readmission penalties, but its new target will be health insurance companies, who are responsible for the long-term costs of care.
Majmudar and Rajput’s relationship pre-dates the company. The duo met in 2014 when Rajput was an undergraduate student in India participating in an MIT workshop for which Majmudar was a clinical advisor. Majmudar has a breadth of experience, having previously been the associate director of the Healthcare Transformation Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital and a founding member of the startup Quanttus, which tried to develop a wearable that could track blood pressure and ultimately ran out of money before getting it to market. Rajput says it’s all of Majmudar’s combined experiences, as a clinician, entrepreneur, product developer and technologist that make him ideal for the role. “It was critical to have somebody who understands [all of] this,” he says.
Biofourmis’ growth in the clinical space will likely include strategic partnerships and deals in order to be able to scale across all 50 states and deliver in-home care. “We're thinking about how to partner with the right entities in various geographic areas to actually be able to deliver care that really is holistic and end-to-end,” says Majmudar.
After a few years at one of the world’s largest tech companies, Majmudar says he’s looking forward to the speed and nimble decision-making of the startup environment. While experience drove a lot of the product development at Amazon and in the tech space, he says Biofourmis will be focusing on outcomes. “That's going to be our credibility driver and that's going to really be what drives customers to trust us.”
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May 10, 2021 at 07:00PM
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