Meet Asaf Kleinbort, CEO at Medorion: A Behavioral SaaS-Based Platform For Health Plans

Medorion has created a new category called Health Behaviour Management. Health Behavior Management solutions solve healthcare management challenges by understanding the decision barriers members face when taking a health-related decision regarding their health, with the goal of bettering business outcomes and improving well-being for millions of individuals.

EBR, our proprietary technology, is based on 70 years’ worth of Behavioral Science expertise integrated into revolutionary AI Software as a Service (SaaS). Whereas Behavioural Science was able to cover 5-10% of the population’s health decision barriers, our technology covers 100% of the WHY.

Founded in 2017, the company has steadily grown and is now used by top US health insurers, Medorion has improved Star Ratings, raised preventative service utilization, improved medication adherence, and boosted member retention and acquisition rates. The company is effectively helping organizations manage the entire process of health management more efficiently and take strides that will change medical behavior across entire populations and improve the lives of millions of individuals.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
I’m a computer scientist and mathematician by education. Throughout my entire career, I have always fulfilled one role repeatedly: I have built and led teams that explore new boundaries in and for software. I was heading development at Cloudshare, one of the first cloud computing companies when I first heard about population health management – and I was fascinated instantly.

The idea of using software to manage and improve clinical objectives at a population level sounded like software’s exciting ‘next frontier’ to me, and I knew that this is what my own company should focus on. And so, together with my two co-founders, Shai Levi and Evitar Khen – whom I met during military service – we began looking at how healthcare organizations were managing people’s decisions and how they were persuading them to follow clinical guidelines such as cancer screenings, renewing prescriptions for preventative drugs, etc.

We quickly realized that while people’s decision process is crucial to their wellbeing and to the healthcare organization’s goals, these organizations lack the software infrastructure to manage it as a whole. We then set up on the mission to develop this behavioral-centric software infrastructure today called Medorion.
 

What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?

 
You need to think big and eliminate all fearful thoughts about how your new idea will be received. If you’ve come up with a big idea make sure you’ve got a big vision to match.

We’re looking at a market that’s traditional by nature and full of challenges and, admittedly, we were quite cautious initially but once we decided to take the leap and push our Behavioral AI as a new market category, the demand came very soon. The important thing is to remain consistent, coherent, and logical in your strategy.
 

How has the pandemic affected Medorion, if at all?

 
There is no doubt that receptiveness for innovation in healthcare has soared since the pandemic, from the organization level to the patient level. Value-based care wins big-time over any other model and has proved itself during the global health crisis. We are also seeing increased adoption of digital solutions such as remote care, now becoming a built-in feature of health plans. The persuasion period, to this end, is over. Investments in digital health are growing phenomenally and I reckon this trend will continue. Interest in Medorion’s Behavioral SaaS has grown significantly since the pandemic and we’ve been fortunate to work with several of the top 10 U.S. health plans.

On the company side our HR count increased, we raised money and our existing customer base grew as well. We had to adapt to a new normal, like many other companies, and adopt remote business methods, fewer conferences, and more digital technology.
 

What can we hope to see from Medorion in the future?

 
Behavior is the most significant determinant of an individual’s overall health. Choices are made every day regarding diet, rest, medication, and more, but changing behavior and making better choices can be extremely hard.

Over the past few years, there has been a clear need for technologies designed to support behavior management while keeping a good member experience as well as avoiding abrasion (yet not nudging).

We are also seeing how clinical quality-driven mostly by behavior is trending and all this leads to the need for enterprise software rather than what is available today to most organizations. For many people, many objectives, and a complex environment the need for management is crucial.

As the healthcare industry looks to other industries for a solution, Medorion sees itself as a pioneer in health behavior management software. In the next 5-10 years we will be setting the standard in this field, managing more than 100 million lives across hundreds of healthcare enterprises.