Chris Rauber Interviews Alexandra Drane, Eliza

How do you make your partnerships work…?

The people who were working with are genuinely engaged in supporting healthcare and the people. Understanding who these consumers are and educating them on the tools and resources out there.

How does it actually work? You’re reaching out to consumers in a similar way as telemarketers.

We don’t do automated calls. We use a speech-recognition software and we’re really respectful of what we’re doing. We are conscious of people’s time and all of the real-time data and our own infrascturcture allows us to know the best way/times to reach people. We’ve gone multi-platform now as well. What we’re trying to do is really really hard.

You’ve been around 10 years. Revenue is $25 million. How do you build upon that level of financial success?

We’ve never raised money; we’ve remained very very raw. We recognize as sophisticated as we are, we didn’t understand social networking. We used partnerships to help us with our deficiencies and ensure that we are moving forward and not resting on our laurels.

You’re asking people to visit Eliza for their own good. Is there a negative to this down the road in terms of how the technology can be used?

A lot of the data out there is inferred. What we think is empowering is to actually get with those people and talk to them. For us, the beauty of data lies with talking to people directly and getting the information directly.

Describe your work with Matt and end-of-life care…

Most people the conversation comes too late. Thanks to Health 2.0 for their help in creating this.