SaaS startup targets better financial health for Puerto Rico hospitals
Equiply.io’s technology helps hospitals make smarter medical equipment investments and manage and optimize their use more effectively.
A Ponce-based software-as-a-service startup is on a mission to improve the financial health of hospitals and health care systems in Puerto Rico.
“What we’re doing has an immediate impact on their financial viability, and the more financially healthy our hospitals are, the better service they can provide to patients,” said Oscar A. Misla, co-founder of Equiply.io, to News is my Business.
Equiply.io’s SaaS platform is designed to help hospitals make smarter investments in medical equipment and manage and optimize this equipment more effectively throughout its life cycle. It analyzes data before purchasing equipment, during the life of the equipment and when a decision is being made to replace that equipment.
The platform analyzes two data points: the expiration dates of medical equipment and the cash flow within the department where that equipment is used. Cash flow data can be further broken down into a variety of metrics, including equipment usage.
“We have access to real-time data, and with the correct integrations and metrics, we can create a visualization in real time of how the money flows through the active assets that the hospital has in its infrastructure,” Misla explained.
The bottom line, and Equiply.io’s value proposition, is that it will help clients improve their capital planning, reduce overspending and lower patient risk.
“When you don’t look at the data and go out to purchase equipment — usually when it’s too late — without preparing yourself to make those acquisitions, you end up buying on a whim, in a rush, which leads to overspending because you’re buying without comparing alternatives and without doing a clinical analysis,” Misla said.
Real-time data and insights enable hospitals and health care systems to lower the risk of treating patients with outdated infrastructure and reduce delays in medical equipment acquisitions, he added.
Unlike similar companies that offer solutions for capital planning, managing and optimizing medical equipment, Equiply.io’s has a double-pronged approach.
“We look at both sides of the equation — not only at the expiration dates of the equipment, but also at the cash flow — to understand the financial viability of that acquisition. Other companies look at the expiration dates and leave the rest to the hospitals. They tell you when things need to be changed, but they don’t tell you if you’re financially viable to change them. We help in that area,” Misla said.
“Those companies are very large companies, and capital planning is just one of their verticals. Their focus is to provide repair, maintenance and supply chain services. They don’t focus on the financial and accounting side,” he continued.
According to Misla, Equiply.io is unique in Puerto Rico. “We are the first,” he said.
Misla holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, a master’s in digital business and innovation from IE Business School in Madrid, Spain, and is pursuing a master’s in health care systems engineering at John Hopkins University.
He comes from a family of engineers. His father, a biomedical engineer, and his mother, an industrial engineer, founded their own biomedical engineering business in Ponce 26 years ago. Ciracet provides service, maintenance and repairs to medical equipment throughout Puerto Rico.
Misla worked with them for years in a clinical engineering, health care technology management capacity. It was during this time that he stumbled upon the problem that he’s trying to solve with Equiply.io.
“A couple of hospitals in Puerto Rico filed for bankruptcy, and I (with Ciracet) was analyzing where the medical equipment was in its life cycle and why the hospitals were spending on certain pieces of technology in departments where there was no patient flow. It made no sense to invest in a business line that didn’t have the cash flow to back that asset and make it financially viable,” he said.
Misla noticed that the hospitals had been making decisions about medical equipment without having a sustainable financial plan.
“We were using data to do an autopsy to determine what had happened there that led to bankruptcy, and it was an eye-opener. We had access to the data, but we were looking at it after the damage had already been done,” he said.
Misla started to “tinker around” with the data to develop a hypothesis for what Equiply would eventually become. He interviewed hospital administrators and other stakeholders, created Power BI dashboards and participated in the Pelleven accelerator in Ponce. Later, he applied to and joined Antler, a global venture capital firm, spending three months in New York City.
Misla started Equiply.io in Ponce this year with co-founder José Suárez. Suárez holds a computer science degree from Boston College and previously worked at J.P. Morgan. The co-founders expect to launch their first pilot round with eight to 10 hospitals in February and plan to raise additional capital in March.
“From there, our vision is to collaborate with all hospitals in Puerto Rico before jumping to the States, particularly the East Coast. We want to first support and help the hospitals here, where we identified the problem,” Misla said.
