Whether you’re interested in the process of generating venture capital funding or intrigued by the growth of cloud-based innovations in healthcare, if you’re looking to learn a thing or two about healthcare IT entrepreneurship, Rich Lopez del Rincon is the right guy to talk to.
A crowd of more than sixty people learned as much on Wednesday night, when Rich, CareCloud’s Executive Vice President, served on a panel at a “Healthcare+Tech” event held by RefreshMiami on the University of Miami Campus.
RefreshMiami is a community of web and new tech professionals, students and enthusiasts in South Florida that was founded to “refresh the technical and professional communities, connect people and improve the local landscape for technology.” Many of its members are entrepreneurs, both budding and established.
RefreshMiami organizes an educational event or networking meetup every month focused around a specific tech topic – in this case, healthcare.
Rich served on the panel alongside Mike Albainy, CEO of MD Clarity, a technology company founded to take the mystery out of healthcare pricing by providing doctors, administrators and patients with straightforward web applications that enable cost transparency.
Like CareCloud, MD Clarity is an expanding startup committed to giving the healthcare industry the modern, easy-to-use technological tools it needs to lower costs, reduce administrative inefficiency and improve patient care.
Yet while they share many similarities, CareCloud and MD Clarity are in different phases of their startup evolutions.
CareCloud, having received its Series A funding from Silicon Valley investors in late 2011, has over 120 employees, including a nine-person marketing team and an outside sales presence spread across most of the U.S.
MD Clarity, on the other hand, is still “bootstrapping” as a self-funded startup with a small staff – but that strategy is serving them well. The company’s SaaS offering is proving a hit with some very large clients and earning a lot of word-of-mouth referrals and business.
During the panel discussion, Rich and Mike addressed the multifaceted challenges of developing technology for healthcare: meeting security and privacy challenges, fighting the pervasiveness of inefficient paper-based processes, and competing against long-established, monolithic vendor entities in the healthcare space.
Both speakers shared a firm conviction that the time has come for healthcare to adapt and become a more connected, modern, electronic industry. It’s undeniable that a more efficient industry will only result from greater innovation in technology.
“If you look at the macro trends that are going to face the healthcare industry in the next five to ten years,” says Rich Lopez del Rincon, “All of them have to be solved with a cloud-based solution.”
The speaking event was an excellent opportunity for Rich and the rest of us from CareCloud who attended to meet a great group of tech professionals that we look forward to engaging with in the future.
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