Patent Attorney and Founder
Right now, I’m the President and CEO of a company called Personetics Analytics, based in Jacksonville, Florida. What we’ve built is pretty groundbreaking. We created a platform that can pull in all kinds of fragmented healthcare data from different parts of your life. You might have records from 10 years ago with your pediatrician, then data from a specialist more recently, and maybe even from a nursing home if you’re older. All of that information is typically stored in isolated silos, it’s not aligned longitudinally.
Because of that, AI struggles to make sense of your full health journey. It doesn’t know what happened to you five or ten years ago, which means it can’t truly personalize care or treatment. So we developed the underlying framework to ingest and unify all that scattered health data. The goal? To build a system that supports personalized medicine tailored to you and your health story.
Interviewer: Sounds a bit like MyChart, but maybe a version or two ahead, especially in terms of what physicians can actually do with the data. That’s impressive. What are the biggest challenges you’re facing right now? Is it mostly technical, or are you dealing more with adoption and trust?
Well, in healthcare, privacy is always front and center. HIPAA compliance and cybersecurity are massive concerns. It’s not enough to just have the right AI and analytics, you also have to layer in strong protections and ensure that sensitive data stays safe. Health data, especially genetic data, is incredibly valuable and vulnerable. Imagine if your DNA profile were leaked globally, bad actors could potentially use that to engineer more dangerous viruses, like a weaponized COVID strain.
So we’re working with a tough paradox: people know their data should be shared for the sake of better medicine, but they also don’t want to share it. That tension is at the core of what we’re trying to solve.
Interviewer: You’re clearly a serial entrepreneur. One idea that stood out to me is your use of AI to match company needs with solutions, almost like a matchmaking platform for innovation, without disclosing proprietary inventions. How does that work?
Yeah, exactly. The idea was to look across the entire medical device ecosystem. If a doctor’s invention uses a balloon anchoring system or a particular material, we can use those traits to connect them with the right manufacturer or prototyping team. Even VCs, if it’s a urological catheter and a VC firm focuses on urology, we can connect them too.
It’s essentially a smart recommendation engine that speeds up how innovation happens. And for me, it was personal. I had built a catheter designed to prevent infections, something my sister desperately needed. She was bedridden and dealing with recurring infections caused by intestinal bacteria. I pushed hard to get it through FDA approval in time to help her, but I was two months too late. Other patients benefited from it in clinical trials, but I couldn’t use it for her.
That’s when I realized: we need better tools to accelerate medical innovation. So I built a SaaS company to do just that.
Interviewer: That’s powerful. Let’s talk a bit more about the FDA process. For first-time inventors in the medical device space, how do they even begin to figure out whether they need a 510(k)? Where should they go for guidance?
That’s one of the things I tackled directly. In my EOSI platform, we built a module that helps inventors classify their products. It asks around 20 questions about your invention and then calculates your FDA classification, CE Mark classification for Europe, and even what it would be in Japan.
There are probably other tools out there now, but this was 15–20 years ago. The good news is the FDA is more accessible now. They’ve realized how complex things have become with drug-device combos and the rise of IoT in healthcare. The lines between classifications have blurred, and even seasoned professionals struggle to figure it out.
So now, inventors can actually talk with the FDA early in the process. That’s a huge shift. Misclassifying your product can really set you back, so it’s worth the time to get it right.
Interviewer: Is that system, EOSI, still live? Are you still involved?
I still own part of the company, but I haven’t been involved in day-to-day operations since 2017. That said, I’m very proud of what we built. I was the architect of most of the platform, and it’s still helping companies today, both big and small.
Interviewer: Let’s say I’m an inventor with a new medical device. How would I get started?
You’d head to their site and check out their Q&A-based tools. What’s cool is that many big companies use it for external innovation. Large companies are great at incremental improvements, but they often struggle with breakthrough ideas. So they use platforms like this to crowdsource solutions from inventors around the world.
These companies post real challenges, maybe a design flaw or a manufacturing issue,. and invite outside innovators to submit potential solutions. Then, if there’s a fit, they strike a deal and move forward together.
Interviewer: So in a way, it’s like brokering innovation. Helping companies find the solutions they didn’t even know existed.
Exactly. We launched it as an open innovation platform. I built it between 2000 and 2006, then spun it out of ZY Medical. It’s been incredible to watch it grow and continue solving big problems.