HIStalk Interviews Rizwan Koita, CEO, CitiusTech

Rizwan Koita is CEO of CitiusTech of Princeton, NJ.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I have been involved with the company for nearly 10 years now, right from its inception. Prior to CitiusTech, in 1999 I founded TransWorks, a business process outsourcing company. The company was acquired in 2003 when it was about 1,800 strong.

We started CitiusTech in 2005 with a vision of being a provider of technology solutions to the healthcare space. We offer healthcare solutions and services to organizations worldwide including healthcare software vendors, hospitals, medical groups, health plans, and pharma companies. We focus on building deep healthcare domain expertise and technical knowledge. CitiusTech leverages its global workforce in a cost-effective manner to help accelerate innovation in healthcare.

CitiusTech assists its clients and partners build and implement enterprise healthcare technology solutions through its knowledge and experience in the healthcare IT landscape. We’ve grown from zero to 1,600 healthcare technology professionals over the last 10 years, making us one of the fastest-growing teams in the healthcare IT industry.

You offer an analytics product. Who’s getting traction in market and what customers are seeing real results?

Our healthcare BI and analytics solution, BI-Clinical, has been in the market for about five years, helping healthcare providers and services organizations with their analytics and reporting needs. BI-Clinical is deployed at thousands of provider locations across US and is certified against regulatory requirements like Meaningful Use, NCQA HEDIS, PQRS, etc. It offers more than 600 KPIs and quality measures out of the box, and is probably the only solution in the market to have such extensive coverage.

We are seeing significant traction in the market for BI-Clinical, primarily because of its ability to integrate clinical and financial data from different source systems and offer out-of-the box analytics capabilities for use cases like readmission management, population health, and risk-based contracts.

How are you using the $100 million investment by General Atlantic?

I believe that the healthcare space is still very nascent in terms of technology adoption and process evolution. Over the next 5-6 years, I expect this market to grow substantially, both in terms of size and complexity.

To address growing market needs, CitiusTech is making strong investments in four key areas. We are expanding our portfolio of service and solution offerings, especially in new areas like big data, mobility, and analytics. We have also established a strong data informatics group, where our in-house data scientists are helping clients mine clinical data. We are expanding geographically across the US, Europe, and Asia Pacific. In addition, CitiusTech is looking for strategic partnerships or investment opportunities in other healthcare organizations with complementary offerings

What new healthcare IT-related technologies do you think are most promising?

We are seeing tremendous innovation all across the technology landscape, in the areas of analytics, cloud computing, mobile health, and big data. The key challenge for healthcare organizations has been to effectively leverage these innovations in the context for healthcare. Say, using rapidly evolving mobile platforms while ensuring compliance to HIPAA, patient data privacy, safety, or disaster recovery.

So it’s not just the technology, but also the means by which the healthcare industry can use these new tools effectively that hold great promise for the future.

You’ve already created and sold a large company. What are the most important business lessons you’ve learned?

Focus is important. It’s easy to get involved in many initiatives, spread too thin, and lose patience. One needs to understand that any new initiative takes a lot of time to grow or show tangible results.

Secondly, it’s my belief that businesses should keep innovating to stay ahead of the curve. We live in a world where it may not be enough to just solve the customer’s problem, but we would also need to solve them at a much faster pace and at a more competitive cost than others.

More importantly, organizations should place their most valuable asset, employees, at the center of their philosophy. In a knowledge-driven economy, businesses need to place greater emphasis on capability development of their people. At CitiusTech, capability development is the biggest investment we make for growing our organization as a whole. CitiusTech has more than 600 of its engineers HL7 certified. Through our extensive internal knowledge portal called UniverCT, we help our employees constantly upgrade their healthcare domain knowledge.

You wrote two years ago that social media was a vital part of maintaining the company’s culture as hiring ramped up quickly. How do you see it being used by healthcare providers?

The power and influence of social media is gigantic. Social media today has really brought the entire world closer, and at the same time, has disrupted the traditional models of sharing information. I feel healthcare organizations need to hop on to this changing information ecosystem that is being driven less by the enterprise and more by consumers.

The new payer-provider engagement models like ACOs create significant financial upside for healthcare organizations to continue their engagement with consumers and patients outside the traditional care setting.

How would you characterize the healthcare IT market over the next five years?

The last five years have seen significant technology investments by healthcare companies, partly driven by technology innovation and also because of the healthcare reform initiatives announced by the Obama administration. In fact, for all the criticism it has received, Obamacare probably deserves more credit than it gets for accelerating healthcare technology adoption, changing payer-provider dynamics, and paving the way for better healthcare information access and efficiency.

Over the next five years, it will be interesting to see how the healthcare IT market leverages patient data to enhance clinical outcomes and optimize care delivery. I feel that with a wider use of analytics technology like big data and predictive algorithms, caregivers will be able to make significant improvements in population health, disease management, and care coordination programs.

Also, with the increasing adoption of powerful consumer devices like smartphones, tablets, and wearables, patients will start to have a greater say in the care delivery process. We are already witnessing leading mobile vendors like Apple, Google, and Samsung investing heavily in enhancing mobile devices to support tracking of patient vitals and other healthcare information.

Organizations that can effectively leverage these trends — using clinical data for analytics and engaging patients using mobile and social media — will be very successful.