Online Exclusives

OWM: Please describe the education, training, and work experiences that prepared you for your current position as the CEO of Wellsense.
  I spent 15 years with General Electric (GE), including 7 years with GE Healthcare. Most of my work was on the business development side, doing mergers and acquisitions. I moved to Israel in 1999 to integrate a couple of businesses GE had acquired there, and later that year I became the national executive, having overall responsibility for GE businesses in Israel. In 2003, I left GE to start MediTech Advisors, a medical device venture fund with two GE colleagues. We transitioned it into a second fund in 2006 with Ziegler Investments, a US Midwest Merchant Banking group. Right before joining Wellsense, I served as CEO of Ovalum Vascular, a medical device company that develops and produces technology designed for arterial conditions.

OWM: Why did you choose to lead this particular company?
  I decided I wanted to go back into operations after Ziegler MediTech was fully invested. I started working with a number of entrepreneurs, including Ran Poliakine, the founder of Wellsense, who are invested in a number of medical device companies. Wellsense is one of the companies in that cluster that is in the more advanced stages, and I decided to join them to help build the strategy for the group. After I completed the go-to-market strategy for Wellsense, the board asked me to come on as CEO to implement it.

OWM: Please describe the education, training, and work experiences that prepared you for your current position as the executive director of the US Wound Registry (USWR).
  During my residency in Family Medicine, I had some exposure to public health research. Back then, we were using paper medical records, and few people were discussing patient registries as a mechanism for research. I became interested in electronic health records in 1995 when the AMA published its 53-page physician documentation guidelines. By then, I was a faculty member of the medical school and we were threatened with pay cuts if we over-coded our services. It was clear to me that only a computer could consistently calculate the level of service correctly, given the complexity of the system. So, in 1995, I began working with a computer programmer to automate the calculation of the physician charges generated in the wound center. By 2000, Intellicure, Inc (College Station, TX) was a company, and David Walker, our CEO, had developed a similar internal calculation system for the hospital facility charges.

OWM: Please describe the education, training, and work experiences that prepared you for your current position as CEO of Telemedicine Solutions, LLC.
  I’ve always been a people-person with a keen interest in the world of medicine — so much so that at one point I was actually thinking about becoming an ER physician. However, experience told me I don’t do well with broken bones, so I graduated from business school and entered the healthcare industry in a sales capacity. This was a time where technology was leapfrogging what we could do in both medicine and communication technology. I found the intersection of these two worlds fascinating because I believe by leveraging technology you can make healthcare better. We see this all around us not only with new medicines and medical procedures, but also in the way we approach our jobs, daily workflow, and processes.

OWM: Please describe the education, training, and work experiences that prepared you for your current position as CEO of Burman’s Medical Supplies.
  I graduated in 1983 from Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science (now University of the Sciences) with a Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy and was awarded the prestigious Presidents Award for high academic achievement. After college I worked for my father, Harvey Burman, at Burman’s Pharmacy (Brookhaven, PA), and in 1995, I purchased the pharmacy from my father. The pharmacy’s respected reputation provided an ideal base upon which to build other companies and serve a broader range of healthcare needs. In 1989, I founded Burman’s Home Health Care, which was known for its comprehensive durable medical equipment (DME), oxygen, and field-based clinical respiratory therapy program. I sold this company in 2003 and founded Burman’s Medical Supplies in the same year to focus on wound care supplies.