Inc.
Leaving Amazon for a health tech startup taught me that leading a life-saving business requires a completely different mindset, balancing complex operations, AI tools, and regulatory demands. At AliveCor, passion and purpose drive a scrappy team to make a real impact on heart health every day.
How AI Is Helping Me Lead a Health Tech Business When Lives Depend on the Results
Author(s): Priya Abani
When people learn that I left a position as general manager of Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service to take the reins of a startup, they often assume that the biggest shift was the size difference. After all, Amazon is a giant with about 1.5 million employees. At AliveCor, we have about 175.
But I tell people that there’s an even bigger difference. Building and running an organization designed to literally save lives brings a host of new challenges and opportunities. It requires new ways of looking at performance metrics, establishing priorities, and assigning tasks. It revolutionizes how you apportion your time. It takes a kind of balancing act I wasn’t used to.
I wouldn’t have it any other way. Our drive to succeed and sense of achievement are exceptionally powerful, making all the extra effort worth it.
More and more small business executives like me will face these new challenges as the health tech space skyrockets. Allied Market Research estimates that the industry exceeded $900 billion in 2023, and is growing so rapidly that it will surpass $3 trillion by 2033.
I’ve found a way to lead a team through all this. It’s something anyone can benefit from.
Adopt an engineering mindset
Any organization can have a lot of moving parts. But in health tech, there are more than I’d ever experienced elsewhere. In addition to developing products, we are integrating regulatory processes and clearances, audits across several dimensions, innovating for betterment of hardware and AI, continual advancements in medical research, and much more.
In our case, we’ve also had to commit time and resources to a legal battle. While it’s unusual to have one as high profile as ours, many small businesses do face legal actions. “A quarter of small businesses have considered closing their business due to legal challenges,” according to a recent survey from LegalShield. In health tech specifically, patent battles are on the rise.
Rather than feeling overwhelmed, I envision our organization as a single machine, with all of our units as vital components. This way of thinking is a form of “engineering mindset,” but you don’t necessarily have to have an engineering degree to do this.
By thinking of the company this way, I’m able to not only keep track of all the units, but also recognize their interactions. Part of my job as a leader is to see how a problem in one part of the company affects other parts. I need to make sure that every advantage is transferred across business units and that any problem in one unit doesn’t damage the rest of the “machine”.
Fortunately, technology can make this process easier. Recently, I’ve found that three AI tools—Perplexity AI, Gemini, and ChatGPT—all help in interesting ways. They assist me in researching healthcare business models and segments, conducting business and healthcare analysis, and automating repetitive tasks, especially for analytics. They also help by summarizing their findings with actionable business insights, allowing me to pinpoint ways to hone and improve both our operations and our offerings.
Tap into passion
At AliveCor, we focus on fighting the biggest killer: heart disease. We develop FDA-cleared ECG technologies that save lives by delivering intelligent, highly personalized heart data to patients and caregivers anytime, anywhere. Our AI-enabled solutions and services help democratize access across the cardiac care landscape, from screening and diagnosis to treatment and management. The Kardia 12L, for example, is a first-of-its-kind system that delivers a 12-lead ECG—an important diagnostic tool—via a portable device lighter than a cell phone, making this lifesaving technology accessible beyond hospital settings.
Our employees share a passion for what we do. It’s widely known that the more committed people are to a goal, the more productive, collaborative, and successful they are. In health tech, we have a very motivated and mobilized set of team, beyond my expectations for a typical business.
I’m an example of this myself. I took the leap to this position due to a personal experience with my father. So many people have lost loved ones this way. Eighty percent of heart disease is preventable. All of us know that the hard work we put in can have a direct impact on individuals and their families.
At a time when top talent is searching for meaning, purpose, and impact in their work, we offer it in droves. We might not have access to all the same proverbial bells and whistles that the corporate giants have. But we know we have something better: a “scrappy” team of experts who will stop at nothing to achieve excellence. Because we know the stakes.
So, yes, jumping over here from Amazon did involve some culture shock. But as with all culture shock, it was a chance to learn new ways of thinking — and I quickly saw the benefits. The people who depend on AliveCor reap those benefits every day.
Credits: TCA, LLC.