IAM358- Founder & CEO Passionate about Healthcare Technology

Michael Wang is Founder & CEO of Inspiren, an award winning healthcare technology company. He is a registered nurse and nurse practitioner with vast clinical experience in cardiothoracic surgery and direct patient care. In addition, he holds numerous patents on innovate technologies in both the healthcare and hospitality industry and has founded two successful companies prior to Inspiren.

He received a bachelors degree from Emory University, majoring in Biology and Sociology. He attended graduate school at Columbia University, studying both business and nursing.

• CEO Hack: Daily conversations and touchpoints with my co-founder
• CEO Nugget: My perception of the pain to do something is justified
• CEO Defined: Professional problem solver

Website: http://inspiren.com/

https://www.sonsiel.com/

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Transcription

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:29

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Michael Wang of Inspiren.

Mike, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Michael Wang 0:38

Thank you so much for having me.

Gresham Harkless 0:40

No problem. Super excited to have you on and what I want to do is just read a little bit more about Mike so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing.

Mike is the Founder & CEO of Inspiren, an award-winning healthcare technology company. He is a registered nurse and nurse practitioner with vast clinical experience in cardiothoracic surgery and direct patient care. In addition, he holds numerous patents on innovative technologies in both the healthcare and hospitality industry and has founded two successful companies prior to Inspiren.

He received a bachelor's degree from Emory University, majoring in Biology and Sociology. He attended graduate school at Columbia University, studying both business and nursing. Mike, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community?

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Michael Wang 1:24

Yes, absolutely. I'm very excited. And thank you so much for having me.

Gresham Harkless 1:28

No problem. Thank you so much for being on. And I wanted to kick everything off by hearing a little bit more about what I call your CEO story. And what led you to start your business?

Michael Wang 1:36

Yeah, absolutely. With Inspiren, it was a truly pretty interesting story of how we started. So my first career was in the military. I served seven years, afterward I got out of the war, attended the Columbia Business School, and was trying to figure out how to get back into society in a very productive way. And nursing just really spoke to me and I met my co-founder, Paul Coyne, in Columbia nursing. For both of us, it was our second bachelor's degree.We were a part of the acceleration program that Columbia offered. After we graduated, I went on to go into the clinical side, and Paul went on to go into data analytics.

Actually, what started Inspiren was actually a very unfortunate camping accident where I managed to put an axe into my knee. So while I was out of work for a little while, there was a overset overwhelming sense of restlessness in that I wanted to do something to correct some of the critical gaps that I saw in patient care, that could be solved with technology that can drastically improve patient safety as well as outcome.  I was also frustrated by the fact that knowing what the future of technology will be, and its role in health care, there was really not a very good bridge between where we are today, healthcare and where we want to be and where we aspire to be.

So during my downtime, I started to formulate a plan for a technology that perhaps we can bring to market. I hit up my old friend, Paul, and we ended up meeting at Starbucks, near Columbia and started to brainstorm about this particular technology. Fast forward in three really amazing and challenging years, we developed one of the world's most advanced computer vision platforms that can essentially turn any hospital room into an AI platform by collecting data from the physical world as well as the digital world. The capabilities of the technology had gone far beyond what we had originally thought of.

But the fact that we were not from technology backgrounds, and we were in a way ignorant of the capabilities of the technology three years ago, in a way that allowed us to not be limited by the current state of technology, and allowed us to not compromise our vision to be able to develop this highly sophisticated platform. So we teamed up with some world-class engineers, software developers, and designers from MIT, from NASA, and we essentially established a team where everyday clinicians work side by side with technologists to develop the technology of the future that will be in the hands of the end users.

So overall, Like I said, it's been a very, very challenging journey. But it's a journey that I wouldn't trade it for the world because of the people that I've met and the amazing stories that we've heard and were inspired by the real clinicians, researchers, and everyone who was in the trenches, providing care and making a difference out there. So it's really, truly an incredible journey. I hope to be able to share this journey in more detail in the near future with a book that we're co-writing together.

Gresham Harkless 5:34

Nice. Well, I'm definitely sorry to hear about the axe in the knee. That definitely is not something fun. It's funny enough, yes, not quite the same. But I started a lot of these blogs and these interviews and the things I used to do, largely because I tore my Achilles tendon, which is not quite the same, but maybe definitely something that's painful. So I guess no pain, no gain, maybe they say as far as I knew how to patch myself up.

Michael Wang 5:59

Is that going for me?

Gresham Harkless 6:03

Right. On the other hand, I didn't know anything I had to do I had to rest. That was the big thing and that was one of the most difficult things. So I know you touched a little bit more upon it, but a little bit on it, could you tell us a little bit more about Inspiren, what exactly it does, and how exactly it works? And also like what you feel kind of is your secret sauce, what makes it unique?

Michael Wang 6:23

Absolutely. So Inspiren, the vision was to be able to put one singular small hardware that has advanced sensors that can essentially analyse the physical and digital environment of the patient's care environments. So for example, right now, everything that happens to the patient is essentially recorded via a very subjective format, where we as clinicians are inputting these things into the electronic medical record system. Many of these things are not only subjective but accurate and some of it is highly inaccurate. So there's really no insight into what is actually happening inside the patient's room and inside the caring environment.

So what inspiring technology does is our hardware goes on the wall of the patient's room behind the patient's bed, and through advanced sensors that we have developed in a proprietary sense, we are not only able to essentially map out the entire room, identify and analyze critical issues that are happening, such as patients that have interactions, safety, protocol compliance, any adverse events that are in danger of harming the patient in terms of false or pressure ulcers.

So all of these things are being analyzed automatically in our platform through our software and hardware that can identify risks very early on, and also feed these kinds of data into a predictive algorithm engine that allows us to have very high accuracy in predicting the likelihood or the probability of an adverse event happening inside the patient's care environment. So from that sense, we have complete insight and analysis into the patient's physical environment. But also from the digital side, we integrate and connect with a multitude of BLE devices such as blood pressure, cuffs, vital machines, pulse, ox, and even other more sophisticated equipment, all integrated with our platform, in creating a multi-dimensional view of the digital and physical environment of the patient.

So that has been the vision of inspiring from day one. And our goal is to be able to turn any antiquated hospital room. Trust me, we've seen some very antiquated ones, to be able to turn essentially any room into a platform where we can collect rich, meaningful, accurate, and reliable data to feed our analytics engine and our AI platform to make smarter and more intelligent decisions on patient care.

Gresham Harkless 9:15

That's huge. And then like you touched on in the beginning with being able to tap into the ability and I guess the potential of technology, especially in this day and age, where you know, it doesn't sound like and correct me if I'm wrong, that there's a consistent, I guess, way that a hospital is set up or the service is provided. So to be able to have that and tap into that technology. And all the intelligence and information that you guys are gathering and allows that to be a little bit more, I guess, consistent across different hospitals.

Michael Wang 9:46

I'll correct that there's no standardization across healthcare right now, especially in the US market. It is extremely fragmented and when you are talking about cutting-edge technology, like AI is really like the wild wild West. So right now, it's anything goes. And it's still in the very early infancy stages of development. But that's also why it's so exciting because inspiring is playing a part in helping define how we structure AI and how we structure data. We have a proprietary data structure, format, and conceptual framework called MDMDS. It stands for Multi-Dimensional Modular Data Synthesis.

And this is really the framework of how data should work in AI platforms, and how predictive algorithms could play a part in enterprise-level solutions as opposed to very isolated independent ways of solving things. So yeah, I think there are huge opportunities and huge potential for improvement in technology and healthcare. It has really lagged behind the consumer market on many fronts. And there are various reasons for that. But overall, it's a very exciting time to be a part of that market, because there's so much we can do to define it. And not only just participate in it, but define how it's going to be. And that is really, really exciting.

Gresham Harkless 11:19

Yeah, absolutely. And definitely appreciate you guys for doing your part as far as painting that Canvas, so to speak, to create the world and innovate in this technology as well.

I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app or a book or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Michael Wang 11:42

One thing that's been consistent throughout my experience as a CEO, is I've had very consistent daily touchpoints in conversations with my co-founder, Paul.

Gresham Harkless 11:58

That makes perfect sense. Now I want to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. This is a word of wisdom or piece of advice. Or if you could hop into be a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self,

Michael Wang 12:10

I would tell myself that my perception of the amount of pain, is involved in making something out of nothing, and to make a vision come true, my perceived feelings of how much pain it takes to be able to do that is justified.

Gresham Harkless 12:29

Appreciate you for sharing that, Mike. And now I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different, quote-unquote, CEOs on the show. So Mike, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Michael Wang 12:41

To me, a CEO is not necessarily smarter, more talented, or more capable than those other amazing people who are in the room, I believe that to be a fact. You should not be the most talented or capable person in the room. But your job is the chief problem solver. You're a professional problem solver.

The way you solve problems is to be able to put people who are smarter than you more talented than you more capable than you to put them in a very cohesive way that allows them to execute your vision and execute the solution to the problem that you're trying to solve.

Gresham Harkless 13:35

Awesome, awesome, awesome. I love that perspective and that definition because it talks about things that you even talked about words that you said, being relentless, being able to create that vision, being able to solve problems, of course, and create that culture that everybody marches to the drum of whatever that culture is.

So it's important to implement that and create that. So thank you for sharing that definition. I appreciate your time and all the awesome things you're doing. Thank you for your service as well. I wanted to pass you the mic so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know. And then of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you guys are working on.

Michael Wang 14:13

Yes, so please feel free to reach out to us. My personal email is mike@inspiren.com. Please reach out to us for any interest in our technology or if you're trying to join a really exciting technical team that's executing perhaps one of the most exciting parts of technology in the medical field. We are really making huge progress in terms of the capabilities of computer vision sensors as well as IoT devices in the context of healthcare.

For all of you who are clinicians out there who are at the bedside every day improving the lives of patients. I always dedicate all of our success so far to all of you, because you are us, and we are you. And because of the compassion, empathy, and amazing technical skills of all of you, it makes our job possible to create the technology to assist you in what you do every day and to empower you.

If you're the clinician that has that idea, if you have that clinician that is working night shift and you have this concept that just keeps bugging you, and you want to create it and you want to go for it, and you want to change things, instead of waiting for things to change. I say to you think it through and do it.

Gresham Harkless 15:44

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, thank you so much again, Mike. I salute you my friend for doing all the awesome work that you're doing and definitely making the world an absolute better place again, I appreciate your time and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Michael Wang 15:57

Thank you so much for having me and I really appreciate everything.

Outro 16:00

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This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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