Rosenberg’s career in life science and healthcare spans more than 40 years. He has led the development and deployment of cloud-based solutions with a focus on driving more integrated approaches to patient-centric trial management. Rosenberg was recently Senior Vice President and General Manager of Oracle Health Sciences. Prior to that, he was the visionary behind the integrated clinical technology suite introduced by Phase Forward which Oracle acquired in 2010. Rosenberg joined uMotif, the patient-centric platform powering site-based to fully decentralized clinical, real-world, and post-marketing research.

Conception of uMotif

Established in 2012, uMotif has developed an e-Clinical platform that meets the real needs of patients, making trial participation and data capture as simple as possible. uMotif was born when its co-founders met two patients with Parkinson’s Disease, who wanted new digital tools to help them manage, track and understand their disease, treatments, medication, and healthcare journey. Like many patients, they wanted a better way to engage with their health, communicate more effectively with clinicians through data, and feel more empowered.

uMotif launched two large-scale research projects with over 18,000 people tracking and donating over 9 million Patient-Reported Outcomes, symptoms, devices, and other data points. This led uMotif to take its learnings from healthcare and pivot into patient-centered research. Whether one is talking about site-based, fully decentralized clinical, real-world, or post-marketing research, patient participation, and engagement are core challenges to study success. Study dropout rates are incredibly high across all phases of research, slowing the pace of essential new research, observes Steve. “uMotif saw the opportunity to address these research challenges by applying its consumer-grade design best practices and cloud-native applications to digital health technology. We started by understanding the burdens that trial participation puts on the patient and how that impacts patient engagement. We drove a patient-first mindset in developing the software.”

Healthcare challenges galore

One key risk is that sponsors and CROs can be too fast in putting technology first and being seduced to implement the next new tech innovation, says Steve. “Rushing to implement new technology is often risky, high cost, and can often fail to deliver value. Instead, pharma sponsors of clinical trials need to start with patients first, designing thoughtful solutions around the needs of the people involved in research. Tech should come later, once the patient-centered solution is designed.”

An integrated approach to patient-centric clinical trial

Patient-centric trials or patient-centricity is something that many people are speaking about. For the most part, they miss the real point. “The idea is to recognize two things. First, the patient sacrifices their time and body to contribute to the greater good. There are patients who believe that the trial is their last hope, but even in that case, they are sacrificing. It is also important to recognize that the clinical trial is just one aspect of a patient’s experience with their disease. That gives us the opportunity to meet the patient where they are and engage them accordingly.”

Providing a decentralized clinical, real healthcare world

The uMotif platform powers all study designs, in all research settings. “Our software is available from app stores on any device and is designed to provide pharmaceutical, biotech, MedTech and Contract Research Organization (CRO) clients with the most engaging patient data capture experience.” The platform captures regulatory-compliant eCOA / ePRO, symptom, eDiary, device, and other data for clinical trials and real-world studies. “Our relentless focus on high quality, patient-centric design and modern cloud-native software, allows uMotif to deliver high rates of data capture, patient retention, data quality and delivery speed – ultimately helping achieve faster, better trials.”

Leadership traits

“I find that respect is the key trait. Also, the ability to use humor, remain calm in a crisis, and encourage risk taking. I also believe that both in my personal life and professional life – taking the time to explain the context of what is going on to people, encourages teamwork and commitment. I think the fear of failure can be a good driver as long as it doesn’t limit the ability to take risks and try new things. I have learned a long time ago that if you aren’t willing to change and adapt, you will fail.”

“Empathy is extremely important. Especially in the healthcare and pharma services sector, understanding what your end users are trying to accomplish in their job is the only way you can come up with good solutions.”

Luke Hejl is the CEO, chairman and co-founder at TimelyMD, the leading virtual health and well-being solution for college and university students. He is an entrepreneur at the intersection of higher education, health care and digital transformation. A champion of finding good people, creating great teams and empowering them to achieve amazing results together, Luke finds company building to be incredibly interesting, challenging, motivating, energizing and fun. In an interview, he speaks on an array of topics. Excerpts:

The inception of TimelyMD

Luke Hejl co-founded TimelyMD in 2017 with Chris Clark and Alan Dennington, M.D., with a vision to help students be well and thrive in all aspects of their lives. “Building upon our team’s previous experience in health care, we identified higher education as an underserved market where students often waited weeks for campus health center appointments,” notes Luke. Seeing increased interest and adoption of virtual care platforms and understanding the reality of a looming national primary care provider shortage helped them to recognize and act on a huge market opportunity for a telehealth company focused exclusively on college students.

As college and university leaders seek solutions that improve student well-being, engagement and retention, they turn to TimelyMD more than anyone else for a best-in-class 24/7 virtual extension of campus health and counseling center resources. With licensed providers in all 50 states, TimelyMD is the only higher ed-specific virtual care company trusted to care for over a million students at more than 200 colleges and universities nationwide.

TimelyCare: A platform for digital natives

“This generation of students is connected to technology more than ever. Whether it’s their phones, laptops or tablets, wherever they go – they’re online. Digital natives need a digital solution for health care that is available on the go, after class and after hours. That’s where TimelyMD can help. Sixty percent of students who sought mental health support through our TimelyCare platform said they would have done nothing if the service were not available.”

Luke adds that since college students are always plugged in, TimelyMD’s on-demand medical and mental health care optimizes campuses’ existing services and gets students care the moment they need it. TimelyCare includes a range of services, including mental health counseling, on-demand emotional support, medical care, psychiatric care, health coaching, basic needs assistance, faculty and staff guidance, and digital self-care content. With services available 24/7, TimelyMD becomes an extension of on-campus health resources and gives students the accessibility they crave.

A virtual health care solution that works

This entrepreneur is grateful for the campus leaders who trust TimelyMD to provide equitable, on-demand care to their students. By increasing convenience, staff capacity, and provider diversity and eliminating barriers such as insurance, co-pays and long wait times, TimelyMD delivers peace of mind as well as positive clinical outcomes. “One of the reasons TimelyMD has experienced such growth is because our proprietary TimelyCare platform allows colleges and universities to implement an unparalleled hybrid model of care in collaboration with on-campus resources, at no cost to students.”

Focused on leadership and relationships

Luke is people-focused, strategic, innovative, creative and compassionate. “At TimelyMD, everything we do is centered around our company’s core values of passionate people, accountability, innovation, growth, quality of service and positive impact. We have proven that a laser-focus on serving students first is key to meeting and exceeding our board’s high expectations for annual recurring revenue, customer retention and quality of service.” As a people-focused CEO, relationships are the connective tissue of his leadership style – as well as TimelyMD’s business. “To build lasting relationships, I embrace and model three key principles: trust, transparency and self-reflection.”

Charting a course for the future

Identifying key metrics for the business and being agile to pivot as needed, based on the ongoing metrics, is a very important factor for Luke. “Following our Series A in 2019, we had planned for 2020 to be a year of significant growth. When the pandemic hit, we were ready with solutions to support students’ health and well-being when colleges and universities were forced to shut down.”

For several months, the company focused all of its attention on developing and marketing a new program that helped schools to quickly bridge the care gap for students, as well as building up the infrastructure to support the influx of students long-term. “Knowing when to pivot and throwing all of our resources at that decision was central to our success today,” he said. “It has been two years since telehealth adoption became a norm in higher education, and the demand has never been greater. While TimelyMD has scaled, our programs have evolved, and our impact has grown, our vision to help students be well and thrive has not changed.”

Dr.Demas is an entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience, delivering results and launching products in diagnostics, point of care assays, nanotechnology, wearable devices, biomedical optics, physiological, physio metric and molecular sensing, next-generation sequencing, analytical tooling etc. She comes with a proven record of delivering results by leading, building and managing cross functional teams, operations, process optimization, championing good practices, and managing projects from conception to launch, including overall P&L responsibility. A multidisciplinary learner with the ability to manage ambiguity and operate in complex, dynamic environments, she is the CEO of Tesseract Health, which is part of the 4Catalyzer accelerator, with over $700 Million in funding, 300 scientists and engineers. Tesseract is building a portable, affordable device for monitoring and preventing disease. Vicky also holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley and Livermore National Labs. She speaks on a spate of topics in an interview. Excerpts:

Conception of Tesseract

Tesseract Health is aiming at developing prediction models that leverage the intersection of multiple retinal imaging modalities with expert annotations to create comprehensive and non-invasive health assessments. A specialist can interpret an image of the back of the eye to detect disease early when it can be cured or better managed. “Unfortunately, patients are obstructed by inconvenient, unaffordable care, and providers are forced to rely on expensive specialized tools and workflows. At Tesseract our goal is to democratize healthcare leveraging the information content in the eye” says Vicky.

Healthcare industry – challenges galore

This entrepreneur suggests that people embrace healthcare tools and products from companies that enable flexibility and accessibility to the patients. “Companies like Tesseract that are creating more touch points with patients (the healthcare customers) to facilitate capturing and interpreting high quality healthcare data to facilitate remote personalized health care.”

Tesseract’s solutions

Tesseract is building fully automated, intuitive, portable and high-performing retinal imagers that are also powered by advanced automated (AI algorithms) disease detection to provide a wealth of health data captured from the eye. Our AI algorithms are trained/learn the differences on thousands of images of “healthy” (non-disease) eyes vs images from eyes of patients of disease at different stages/types.

Leadership traits

This empathetic, open, approachable, transparent, driven, resolute and tireless professional says that she is a human first and always is a work in progress. “Staying open, listening, admitting mistakes, learning from my mistakes and the mistakes of others. Always assume best intent (and ask others to do the same). I love working on projects and issues that I care about. Hence, I can give it my full energy and love.” She is also passionate about making products that remove barriers between quality care and the people who need it: keeping the patient needs at the center. This has been the guiding light in her career. “I have been working on building tools that help doctors help patients.”

Dr. Demas also believes in making some great data-driven decisions and in building great teams. “Hiring amazing people, and working to support them, helping them grow, building on their strengths and helping them close their gaps, remove obstacles for them. Making sure each member has something to teach me and the rest of the team. Building great culture and team dynamics, a culture that celebrates the ideas and contributions of the team, making sure each person feels heard and valued. Giving feedback and treating others with clarity and empathy.”

The success mantra

“I have been in the startup world for a long time, so I might be a little oversimplifying. I think keeping in mind that if you don’t fail you don’t succeed, or at least you can’t avoid risk if you want to do something highly impactful would be a good motivator.” Says Dr. Demas that it takes practice to also understand that failure is relative – you go through a failure but then you recover, you bounce up and you learn from the failure, and you are so much better afterwards.

“Solving important problems, addressing unmet needs is an obvious start, but people (the team) come first. It’s easy to not pay attention to building and growing your team members when you must move at lightning speed.  Finally, no one person is more important than the team and mission. Stay open. Follow your heart. Trust your instincts” she signs off.