Tagnos’ Founder Neeraj Bhavani’s ultimate vision for the company is to assist patients and their families by creating a frictionless experience across the care continuum.
Prior to founding Tagnos, Bhavani served as a Vice President of Corporate Development at RoundWorld Solutions Big Data Security & Governance Solutions, President of the TiE SoCal non-profit network of entrepreneurs, and in other roles at various companies.
Health Evolution interviewed Bhavani about securing corporate partnerships with the likes of Honeywell and Zebra Technologies earlier in the startup funding phase than is typical, aligning with channel partners to position Tagnos for growth, pilot testing Amazon Alexa at a county hospital, and more.
What inspired you to found Tagnos? Or what is the origin story?
Bhavani: There are a couple things. One, my father was admitted to a hospital at one point. He was taken for an x-ray, on the same floor — but no one in the hospital could tell me where he was. He was in his late 70’s, I was walking the floor, talking to nurses, and more than an hour later we found him two doors down the hallway. It was interesting to see how the hospitals operated once you got in and how patient flow is not visible to others. The other part is I went to UCLA and they have a good public health, engineering, business school, that all come together in a health care consortium. There are ideation workshops where professors help launch ideas in health care. When I presented this idea to improve patient flow there was support. UCLA Foundation is one of the seed investors.
What should Founders know about the technology? Not so much the machine learning algorithms but a high-level of what can be done with it …
Bhavani: The way we describe Tagnos in any customer meeting is we say we are a workflow orchestration company that takes real time data of patient movement inside the hospital and then we also take historical data to learn from the past and put those together to give next best actions. In patient flow orchestration, we help make the operating room (OR) room turnover better, improve on-time starts, time from admission to discharge, reduce the number of patients leaving without treatment in the Emergency Department (ED) — all to deliver a better patient experience.
How, if at all, has the COVID-19 outbreak changed your strategy?
Bhavani: We gained more traction both inside and outside health care. We were already heavily invested with Cisco, Zebra and Honeywell so they are interested to take us into proximity tracking, contact tracing not just in health care but other industries. We are also gaining traction with other supply chain businesses. New opportunities have arisen because we had use cases around proximity tracking for infection control and being able to tell who came in contact with an infected patient.
