Media Coverage, News

Meet Bryant Castleton of Holon Solutions – VoyageATL

Posted on by Holon Solutions
30
May

Today we’d like to introduce you to Bryant Castleton.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
Having spent almost 15-years of my career in healthcare IT I have had the opportunity to see and experience many of the wonderful technologies and advancements being made to improve the lives of healthcare providers and the care and outcomes they provide to patients. I once learned, and I strongly believe that the best leaders surround themselves with those that are smarter and more capable than they are, provide them with goals, the tools for success and continued encouragement motivation. Throughout my career I continually made note of those individuals I would want on “my team” should I ever have the chance to assemble one.

As I worked with innovative and pioneering customers I again made note and vowed that should I get the chance, these would be the organizations I would partner with should I ever be fortunate enough to run a business.

In late 2015, with two of the most brilliant minds I know in healthcare, Robert Connely IV and Saurabh Mathur, two trusted friends and past colleagues, we were given the opportunity to present a radical new concept in healthcare IT to the ownership of Holon Solutions. With this new concept, we provided an 18-month business plan with projections for completion of the software platform, development of customer pilots as well as delivery of revenue and full go-to-market commitments. Leveraging our combined experiences of collaborating together at prior companies, Rob, Saurabh and I have worked extremely hard to build a world-class team of developers, support staff and commercial operations.

Has it been a smooth road?
Our journey certainly has not been easy. We began keenly aware of the fact that 90% of venture back companies fail. We knew we had a truly innovative idea. Though I never doubted that Rob, Saurabh and the team were brilliant enough to make it work we had several initial challenges. First, one very difficult and gut-wrenching challenge came from consolidating and aligning our team to our development, bottom-line and revenue commitments. A second and equally difficult task was convincing our investor that what we were creating was “real”, patentable and desired by the market. Lastly, we had to do all of the above within the 18-month timeline and business plan we had initially proposed.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Holon Solutions story. Tell us more about the business.
In healthcare, there is a major need to solve the issue of interoperability among the many disparate systems that exist. With seven patents currently pending, the team at Holon has developed a first-to-market solution that is able to sense when a patient is context, or in front of a provider using one of many of the many electronic medical records utilized today. When that patient is detected, truly actionable insights from any number of multiple sources can be surfaced to the point of care where and when they are most valuable to the clinician.

As healthcare moves increasingly to a value-based care model, Holon provides a solution that is agnostic not only to the EMR and other clinical solutions but also provides a method of surfacing actionable insights to the point of care in real-time for entities such as health plans, Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and population health management solution vendors.

In 2017 two major organizations that had previously worked with our team, Great Lakes Health Connect, Michigan’s largest health information exchange (HIE) and Banner Health, one of the largest and most innovative health systems in the country, stepped forward and agreed to be strategic partners signing multi-year agreements and deploying our solution system-wide solidifying Holon’s first-to-market status.

Holon received industry-wide recognition in January of 2018 when Healthcare Informatics named the company Innovator of the Year In Value-Based Healthcare.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Despite political and regulatory changes, healthcare remains ripe for innovation.

Unfortunately, clinicians are experiencing burn-out at unprecedented rates due to excessive stress, financial strains, regulatory burdens and more. The transition will continue towards value-based care and health plans (including Medicare and Medicaid), health systems, vendors and others looking to alter the behavior of providers will have to look for innovative, unobtrusive ways to surface actionable information to the point of care.

Note: Sorry for the brevity above – when I first wrote my answer to this question it had asked Essential Qualities – Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success? My answer is below:

Throughout my life and career, I have always held integrity as invaluable. I am certainly not a perfect person, but in every interaction, I have with a customer, an employee, an investor or my family I do my very best to be an honest, upright person. I cannot tell you how much I value the fact that many of my customers throughout my career are not only repeat customers, they are valued friends that I care for and am invested in their success as I believe they are in mine. Those that work for our company, particularly those on my management team, I consider peers and valued partners.

Every employee of our company has visibility to our company and executive goals and everyone is driven to put our customers first and continue innovating in everything they do. Recently one of our customers commented, “I think Holon is actually the best vendor I’ve ever worked with in my entire life. Whether I’m reaching out to Bryant the CEO or someone on his team, they drop everything and make it seem like I am their only customer.” Example is set from the top down. If my team and my customers don’t know I am there to help them succeed I have definitely failed in my role as CEO.

Contact Info:

Image Credit:
Chelsey Heidorn

Getting in touch: VoyageATL is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.