Giving Compass' Take:

• In this Chief Executive interview, Sundeep Bhan (CEO of healthcare AI company, Prognos), talks about how disruptive information technology in healthcare can lead to more useful therapies and treatments.

• How can funders support such innovation? In what ways should we engage with communities as AI advances, so we ensure that all voices are heard?

• Read more about the case for digital healthcare for the public good.

Sundeep Bhan always knew he’d be around medicine. After all, there a lot of doctors in his family and he went into pre-med himself. But the CEO of Prognos, a healthcare AI company, figured he’d have a bigger impact if he got into the business and technology side of healthcare, rather than donning a stethoscope.

Thus one year out of college, Bhan founded Obelisk Interactive, which offered multimedia medical education software on CDROMs. Later, he founded and ran Medsite, also in the medical education space, which ended up getting bought by WedMD in 2006. A few years after that, Bhan and his cousin Jason (a family medicine physician), founded Medivo, later changing the name to Prognos, which leverages AI in an attempt to predict disease at its earlier stages.

The company works with pharma companies and health plans, which use insights that Prognos gleans around disease risk factors, both at an individual and a population level. For pharma companies, Prognos will help them identify useful therapies that will help a certain patient population. For health plans, it will identify patients that are at risk for complex (and costly) diseases.

Read the full article about why healthcare is overdue for innovation by Gabriel Perna at ChiefExecutive.net.