How This Immigrant Entrepreneur Built A $5 Billion Healthcare Company

Author: Zack Friedman / Source: Forbes

I interviewed Shradha Agarwal, the co-founder and president of Outcome Health, the Chicago-based healthcare technology company that earlier this year raised $500 million from investors such as Goldman Sachs and Google at a $5 billion valuation.

Founded in 2006, Outcome Health is building the world’s largest platform for actionable health intelligence at the moment of care.

Today, Outcome Health’s platform has a presence in almost 20% of doctors’ offices in the United States, and impacts more than 580 million patient visits each year.

In our wide-ranging interview, Shradha and I discuss, among other topics, how to transform an idea into a company, the difference between a good idea and a good company, the future of healthcare, what she learned from failure, her favorite business books, where to find the best Chicago pizza, and whether the Cubs can repeat as World Series champions.

Zack Friedman: How did you come up with the idea for Outcome Health?

Shradha Agarwal: Growing up, I had a passion for bringing people and information together.

While in college [at Northwestern], [my co-founder and now Outcome Health CEO, Rishi Shah, and I] learned of technology that allowed for this information to be highly customized and we wanted to leverage this technology in a meaningful way.

We have each had healthcare experiences in our family and saw the immediate opportunity to improve a large and critical industry.

Zack Friedman: How did you take your initial idea and turn it into a company? What steps did you take?

Shradha Agarwal: The first step for us was to validate whether our customers truly felt that pain.

We spoke with hundreds of physicians and patients as well as healthcare product manufacturers and payers to understand the industry dynamics, gaps and opportunities.

Second, we built the first iteration of our product and focused on sales of it.

We received a lot of rejections initially, but in each of those conversations, we asked our prospective customers what would make them sign up. With this feedback, we strengthened our product and started to gain sales traction.

Finally, bringing the first few people in the team in a thoughtful way is necessary – a lesson we learned much later.

Zack Friedman: What did you do to disrupt the patient experience, and how is it now better as a result of Outcome Health?

Shradha Agarwal: Our vision is to provide health intelligence to support every important decision a patient is considering with their physician.

Today, we impact about about half a billion patient visits annually by providing relevant and actionable health information to patients and their caregivers in the most critical moments of care. We have measured a variety of outcomes – increased adherence by patients, driven by greater understanding of their diagnosis as well as treatment options, as well as cost savings resulting from that.

Ultimately, this means an improved quality of life for a patient living with a chronic disease.

Zack Friedman: What does the future of healthcare look like in the U.S.?

Shradha Agarwal: We have the opportunity to personalize healthcare and leverage technology to assist the physician as well as the patient to make better decisions together.

With 18% of our GDP spent on healthcare currently, 80% of which is on chronic disease management, empowering patients to participate in their own health decisions has great potential for reducing the cost of healthcare while improving outcomes for individuals.

At a more human level, technology has the power of automating much of the clinical workflow, allowing patients and physicians to connect with greater empathy and time allocation for these important conversations.

Zack Friedman: You founded Outcome Health with a co-founder. Would…

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