Exclusive Interview with Babak Movassaghi, CEO and Co-founder, InfiniteMD

The growing need of care for each person in the world has driven the global healthcare industry towards being digital. To deliver advanced patient care at a reasonable cost, healthcare organizations are significantly turning to digital technologies, data interoperability, and alternative care models to meet rising health uncertainties and build the healthcare ecosystem smarter. However, deciding which emerging technologies are worth investing in is often a complex job. And adapting to digital health environment requires a strategic shift towards flexible and innovative care delivery models.

In an exclusive interview with Analytics Insight, Babak Movassaghi, CEO and Co-founder of InfiniteMD and Chief Innovation and Product Officer for ConsumerMedical, speaks about how the company addresses its customers' health queries and the solutions it offers to make digital health smarter and affordable to everyone.

Kindly brief us about your background and role in the company?

Immigrant, professional athlete, and entrepreneur… not quite the journey I expected but here I am! I was born in Iran and immigrated to Germany when I was just 6 years old. Germany became my new home; I developed a natural aptitude for math and physics throughout my time as a student and went on to attend University where I studied quantum physics. I then continued to pursue my education further and received Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, which led me to my inevitable move to the United States where I began my career at Philips Healthcare.

My time at Phillips was amazing. I was able to hone my craft and invent technology in the medical field that is still used till date. As an award-winning technological innovator, I managed product development from ideation to global commercialization, yielding multimillion-dollar results. After working there for eight years, I was awarded the innovation prize and recognized as the Top 2% of talent within the company, which led me to being promoted to the Philips Leadership Program for High-Potentials.

Later on, gaining a reputable experience at Philips, I once again moved on to expanding my education by attending the MIT Sloan School of Management where I gained my MBA in 2014. Prior to my days at InfiniteMD, I had experience with start-ups such as 2nd.MD, where I served as the COO and President. I was also the VP of Innovation and New Ventures at Flex, as well as the GM for the Boston Innovation Center, which I constructed from scratch.

InfiniteMD was founded in 2016. At that time, our primary focus was delivering access to the top doctors in the U.S. to the international markets in the form of virtual second opinions. However, a couple of years later, I had a vision for InfiniteMD. I wanted to pivot us to a technology-enabled/digital health company with a focus on penetrating the U.S. market, while continuing to maintain our international footholds.

It was then,  when I took over as CEO in 2018. I was able to convince some of our investors to provide us more funding and to stay with us for this next chapter. Some did not believe in my vision and chose not to participate in the next round. It was a risky move and against the odds, but with the backing of our Chairman, Avner Schneur, we prevailed. Since then, we have had over 400% growth and are currently serving over 3 million members that have access to InfiniteMD.

Kindly share how your past experiences, achievements, or lessons have shaped your journey as a successful leader.

Prior to my days in the digital health world, I played professional football for the Rhein Fire in the European NFL during 1997-1999. During my years as a professional athlete, I won the World Bowl and was also Team Captain of the German National team, where I won the European Championship several times.

I truly believe my experience as a football player correlates directly with my current entrepreneurial path. The skills required for both are similar and always need to be backed by passion. With passion, you will attract the right people and form a team that sticks together.

In addition to my athletic career, my educational experience at MIT Sloan School of Management, where I earned my MBA, is one of the most formidable experiences that shaped how I chose to create my newly acquired startup, InfiniteMD. Most startup entrepreneurs look for a problem to solve and then make a solution for it. Not me! Team first, always. I put my efforts into finding someone who I can trust personally and professionally, and thankfully, a colleague of mine who I worked with during our time at MIT truly fits the bill and our entrepreneurial journey as co-founders began. I was always intrigued by the vast expert advice the professors at MIT shared with us, but that was one anecdote that really resonated with me. Thanks, Professor Bill Aulet.

MIT is also the very place I met my now co-founder, Christopher Lee. We meshed instantly and had similar core beliefs when it came to entrepreneurship. Using our knowledge and experience from MIT, we stayed away from acknowledging an existing problem and forming a business around that. We knew we wanted to help a large group of people, we wanted to be in the healthcare field, and innovation and technology had to play a role. Finally, we both aligned to the fact that building the team from scratch was a must.

With Chris' interests lying at the intersection of biotechnology and entrepreneurship and my success rate with innovating award-winning medical technology, we set off to develop the technology-based platform, InfiniteMD. After trial and error, we decided to focus on providing the best technology and securing the best channel partners to provide that technology to our clients. One of those channel partners was ConsumerMedical, a clinical advocacy and decision-support company. It leveraged InfiniteMD's technology for their clients with self-funded employee and benefits programs so their employees could have virtual access to the best physicians around the world. We maintained a long-standing partnership with ConsumerMedical throughout the inaugural years of InfiniteMD and in the summer of 2020, ConsumerMedical officially acquired InfiniteMD.

How are disruptive technologies like Big Data/Artificial Intelligence/IoT/ Automation/Cloud Computing/Big Data/Robotics impacting today's innovation?

The evolving technological advancements have a great impact on today's innovation, especially, in the healthcare industry. Big data provides a more holistic overview to patients, giving us a full, in-depth look. In healthcare today, we understand how to leverage data from varying inputs in order to come up with more personalized and accurate diagnoses and treatments.

An example of this is how we utilize Artificial Intelligence for medical imaging in both radiology and pathology. AI algorithms detect the complexity of cancer cells to segmentation and anything in between. The increased use of AI in medical imaging has advanced the success rate in comparison to human diagnosis.

AI can also be utilized when gathering large amounts of data, specifically when combining genetics and behavioral data in a streamlined process to generate preventative measures. We are currently using this approach at ConsumerMedical. We are using more predictive analytics in conjunction with a patients' behavioral health history in order to preemptively recommend care and steer them in the right direction. Just think of Netflix. The platform uses an algorithm to suggest shows you may like based on your watch history. We do the same. We utilize technology to study a patient's genetic and behavior history to recommend proper care.

How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

As an entrepreneur of a start-up, I always look to the future. What could be next? What could I do better? As someone who boasts about "team first", I made sure all partners felt infiltrated within the company –  a true partnership. Being acquired by a partner that has been involved in the evolution of the company proves my strategy to be correct. ConsumerMedical trusted the technology, grew alongside InfiniteMD and now we're operating under one roof. Together, we will continue to use technology to provide access to top physicians, but as one company. We will work to our joint strengths and expand the capabilities of our technology in a continuous effort to provide patients with complex health issues around the world the necessary care.

The digital health industry as a whole has forever changed, mainly due to the ongoing pandemic which heightened the use of virtual care practices, but also because of the constantly evolving technological advancements. I truly believe digital health is here to stay and will eventually utilize more real-time data to enable significant growth of in-home monitoring. Virtual and Augmented Reality advances will provide patients with an 'on-demand' doctor visit directly from the comfort of their own home.

The influx of telemedicine over the last year proves that virtual care is a viable option for a lot of in-person visits. With the increased adoption of technology and data leading to the enhancement of value-based care, more treatments using predictive analytics will dramatically increase.

The future of this industry is Artificial Intelligence. AI is going to play a huge role in the healthcare IT space. From more accurate remote diagnosis to the identification of rare diseases, both will utilize a combination of vital signs and symptom checker questions. Some of these practices are already in place and physicians are using tools and technology daily to increase the accessibility of virtual care practices, but when it comes to AI – that truly is the future of healthcare.