HIStalk Interviews Luke Bonney, CEO, Redox

Luke Bonney is co-founder and CEO of Redox of Madison, WI.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

Redox is the world’s leading cloud integration platform for healthcare. We help great healthcare technology companies integrate with thousands of providers on our network. We accelerate the adoption of these tools at healthcare organizations across the country. We are live or installing at 19 of U.S. News & World Report’s top 20 health systems across the country.

I am first a husband and then a father of two. Zeke is our son. He’s two and a half. Leona is our eight-week-old daughter. Our chocolate lab is Leroy. We call Madison, Wisconsin our home.

Large health IT vendors are partnering with cloud services such as those offered by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. What opportunities or challenges does that introduce?

We see that as a massive opportunity. We see healthcare embracing the cloud as a key to the overall realization of bringing technology innovation into this space.

The whole bet of Redox from the very beginning  has been on the cloud. When we got started back in 2014-2015, we had to say “no” 100 times in order to get one “yes.” That was because we refused to compromise on that vision of the cloud being a key component to what healthcare was going to need in the future. We saw that initial inflection point of healthcare as an ecosystem getting more comfortable with the cloud sometime in late 2017 and early 2018. That’s been a big trend that has accelerated Redox and all of our customers.

As provider organizations pick and choose the technology that they see as adding the most value, a a greater and greater percentage of those companies that they work with are cloud native. Whether they are hosted in the cloud or not, they are cloud native. More and more of them are SaaS based, fully managed services that they pay a subscription for. We see that as a massive change that will allow healthcare to catch up to how the rest of the world sees the technology and innovation sector working.

The industry’s news is filled with unfamiliar company names that are creating buzz and investment activity. How much of that was driven by technology advances versus business needs?

Digital health as an investment sector has been growing at an accelerated rate for the past five to seven years. That’s a predictable extension of what we have seen over the past four to five years, with an accelerant being that the world now has a clearer understanding of the importance of technology in healthcare. That’s because so many of us have come face to face with it as part of COVID. How many people have had their first video visit with a doctor, or scheduled online for the first time with their doctor, because of COVID?

The trend has been pretty consistent. The difference in 2020 has been that we’ve seen a lot of investment come from outside of healthcare. People who haven’t historically invested in healthcare and digital health are starting to write pretty major checks. That goes hand in hand with provider organizations being more comfortable purchasing tools, purchasing technology, that is hosted and built in the cloud.

The big EHR vendors don’t get most of the splashy headlines or credit these days, but their decision to open up their systems fueled these other capabilities in allowing these upstarts to connect. How do you see that model playing out?

Redox has always had a vision that healthcare is best served when there’s a thriving ecosystem of technology and tools, whether we’re acting as patients, providers, or administrators. Single, large incumbents can solve many of healthcare’s problems, but they will never be the best at solving a long tail of what those problems could look like.

We’ve always had a vision that the role of the EHR will always be critical. There will always be a core need for data. There will be a core need for closed loop workflows. But we also see what we’ve experienced so far, which is the explosion in third-party applications that add significant value, that have targeted tools, that have targeted workflows. Regardless of the incumbents or the situation, we’ve always seen the demand for this kind of thriving ecosystem.

This is where our vision and that of regulators are aligned. We need an open and thriving ability to integrate data, wherever that data might be. We are excited about where the 21st Century Cures Act and TEFCA, these big pieces of legislation, are pointed. This is what the industry needs and what we have been building towards all along. We see it as a significant accelerant to what we do and to our ability to help a growing number of customers.

What impact will result from the Cures Act’s API requirement?

The exciting thing is that it is already changing the industry. A lot of the major EHR vendors who are at the center of this regulation are moving faster than expected. There are major pushes to enable FHIR endpoints and to help large provider organizations turn them on and start to use them. We’ve seen a number of delays in the enforcement of things like information blocking and some of the API mandates, and those delays make sense given the impact of COVID, but we see some of the major groups in this space leading that instead of lagging behind.

What that means for us as people who focus on integration is that we’re seeing a slight uptick in the total number of integrations that we can support as we embrace FHIR. FHIR won’t be a panacea that solves all the different problems and there’s a ton of complexity that remains, but it is definitely a step in the right direction. We are focused on that.

We’re also excited about looking at the opportunity that the Biden administration has, specifically looking at TEFCA, which is not yet finalized. There’s an opportunity to put some real teeth into TEFCA. How do we build this idea of a network of networks where data can really be liquid? As we look at TEFCA and understand the world that it contemplates, we get excited about how that could accelerate the overall adoption of technology in healthcare.

Where the regulators are pushing the industry is highly aligned with where we think things need to go. We are positioned to be helpful and to continue to provide great service to our customers.

What interoperability shortcomings has the pandemic exposed?

We saw demand for healthcare technology narrow dramatically in March, April, and May. The digital health and healthcare market is like 30 technology categories, and about 25 of those were put on hold, while five had unprecedented demand — telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, anything related to diagnostics, anything related to automation where folks could save money. While there was this extreme narrowing of demand, the urgency was unlike anything we had ever seen. We were putting integrations into place that would typically take six weeks in 3-5 days because of the clear need for those technologies

One of the most amazing things we experienced back in Q2 and Q3 was the sense that everybody was willing to pitch in. Everybody understood how dire the situation was. We brought together 15 applications from 15 vendor customers of ours and offered a free package to healthcare organizations that includes the tools that they could need or would need to combat COVID-19. Everybody was clear on what we needed to figure out with incredible urgency.

We also saw, and this talks directly to some of the current archaic methods of integration, that we had to make a big shift, because there was clear demand to do types of integration that we’d never done. Our historical bread and butter is helping technology organizations integrate with provider organizations and their EHRs. What we got asked to do was to work more with groups like LabCorp to support lab workflows.

We also had customers who needed to be able to report COVID results to public health agencies at the state level across the country, so in about two and a half or three months, we built infrastructure in 48 out of the 50 states to report COVID results. We built it because it didn’t exist. We didn’t want to. We would have used things had they already been there, but we built it because it didn’t exist. For Redox customers that are providing COVID testing capabilities, we are processing 10% of all the COVID tests in the country, looking at the volume of results messages that come back across our platform. That’s number one. It’s super interesting.

We are thinking about whether the same infrastructure that we put in place to support a lot of this diagnostic testing can be valuable or helpful as we look at rolling out this massive vaccine work, which will include administering and tracking vaccine distribution.

We’ve seen a lot of change. We are doing integrations that we’ve never done. We are doing it at scale. It has all been because we, along with everybody else, have felt that we have a role to play in helping the country and the globe come back from COVID-19.

How does the changing demands, employees working from home, and your significant investment funding guide you in planning what happens with the company next year?

There’s an art and a science to that question. This is a big part of what we have been focused on. The first is taking this view of how we can support those different categories of technology. One of the big things we will be doing in 2021 is sharing much of what we’ve learned over the thousands of integrations we’ve done, offering those as packages to our customers so that they can go so much faster. If there’s one thing we learned in 2020, it’s how to do things faster than we’ve ever done them. We want to share that learning.

The second big thing is that we are excited about a couple of our big partnerships. We are working with Salesforce as one of the only certified integrators to help stand up and streamline integration into their Health Cloud product. We recently announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services, speaking of cloud hosting providers. We are making it a lot easier for anybody who is either  using AWS or planning to purchase AWS to use Redox and to purchase it straight off the AWS marketplace.

The third thing is the exciting announcement that we will be talking about in February. I can’t tell you what it is because my marketing team would be very upset with me, but you should come check out our event in February, where we will talk about some product work that we will be releasing.

Do you have any final thoughts?

2020 has been a remarkable year. We have seen a lot of collective pain and suffering, but it is inspiring to see how parts of society have responded. We were inspired by all the work folks are doing as it relates to social justice and Black Lives Matter. We are inspired by the speed at which the global workforce adopted working from home. We are inspired by how quickly healthcare adapted as COVID took hold.

I would just end by saying that 2020 has been a really long year. Here’s to a great 2021.