Closing a Series A funding round is a major milestone for any startup. It’s a powerful validation of your vision, your team, and the traction you’ve achieved. But it’s not a finish line; it’s the sound of the starting gun for the next, more challenging race: scaling.
Having recently gone through this process, I wanted to reflect on the key challenges and lessons learned as we transition IOMED from a scrappy startup to a growth-stage company poised for international expansion.
Scaling the Technology
What works for ten hospitals and tens of millions of patient records doesn’t necessarily work for a hundred hospitals and hundreds of millions of records. Scaling our technology has been our top engineering priority.
- From On-Premise to Hybrid Cloud: While our core principle of keeping patient data on-premise remains, we are increasingly leveraging cloud infrastructure for our central query engine and management tools. This allows us to scale our computational resources on demand and improve the performance and reliability of our federated queries.
- Optimizing the Query Engine: As the number of nodes in our network grows, we’ve had to invest heavily in query optimization. This involves designing more intelligent query plans that minimize the amount of data that needs to be processed at each site and finding more efficient ways to aggregate the results.
- Automating Onboarding: Manually onboarding each new hospital is not scalable. We are building a suite of tools to automate the data mapping and validation process, making it faster and easier for new partners to join the network. This includes developing more sophisticated data quality checks and leveraging machine learning to suggest mappings.
Scaling the Team and Culture
Scaling a company is as much about people as it is about technology. Growing our team from a small, tight-knit group to a larger, more specialized organization presents its own set of challenges.
- Hiring for the Mission: As we hire, we’re looking for more than just technical skills. We’re looking for people who are passionate about our mission to transform healthcare. Preserving that mission-driven culture is crucial, even as we grow.
- From Generalists to Specialists: In the early days, everyone did a bit of everything. As we scale, we need to hire specialists—experts in areas like cloud infrastructure, data security, and enterprise sales. This requires creating more structure and clearer roles and responsibilities without losing the agility that made us successful in the first place.
- Communication is Key: With a larger team, communication becomes both more important and more difficult. We’re being deliberate about establishing clear communication channels, documenting our processes, and ensuring that everyone in the company understands our strategy and goals.
The journey from startup to scale-up is a fundamental shift in mindset. It requires moving from a focus on survival to a focus on sustainable growth. It’s a challenging transition, but it’s also an incredibly exciting one. With the backing of our investors and the strength of our growing team, we are ready to take on the challenge of building a truly global federated health data network.