Lucem Health is a company that transforms the science of clinical AI into trusted point-of-care solutions that scale. And with the company’s comprehensive, AI-agnostic platform for building, operationalizing, and improving clinical AI solutions, Lucem Health brings the full power and potential of clinical AI from the lab to the front lines of healthcare where it can help clinicians deliver better care, improve patient outcomes, and lower costs. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Lucem Health CEO Sean Cassidy to learn more.
Sean Cassidy’s Background
Sean Cassidy founded Lucem Health with the Mayo Clinic in 2021 to bring pragmatic and responsible AI to the front lines of healthcare. He has 20 years of leadership experience in digital health. Before Lucem Health, he was the CEO of Corepoint Health and led the company through a merger with Rhapsody. He was also Louisville-based Zirmed’s (now Waystar’s) General Manager of Value Based Care, General Manager of Enterprise Provider Analytics at Premier, and Initiate Systems’ SVP and GM of Healthcare.
“I’ve worked in enterprise software my whole career. I came to digital health about 20 years ago and have held a variety of leadership roles in virtually every functional area of a software business: professional services, customer success, sales, business development, product, engineering, P&L management, etc. Most of my digital health experience is in data integration, data management, and analytics platforms positioned and sold to large provider organizations around the world. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have worked with so many amazing, kind, and generous people who have supported, encouraged, and befriended me over the years.”
Formation Of Lucem Health
How did the idea for Lucem Health come together? “The idea for the company originated within Mayo Clinic in 2020. Mayo was doing, and still does, an incredible amount of groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence and machine learning. However, like many AI innovators, they struggled to get their AI innovation from the bench to the bedside. They saw a market need for a general purpose, “agnostic to the algorithm and data” platform for clinical AI deployment and that recognition was essentially the moment the idea for Lucem Health was born.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Cassidy’s favorite memory working for Lucem Health so far? “Waking up one day, probably in late summer last year – as we were starting to see that our strategy was paying dividends and we were building critical mass – and being on an all-hands meeting and realizing what a phenomenal team of dedicated, creative, passionate people we have working at Lucem Health.”
Opinion About AI
What is Cassidy’s opinion about artificial intelligence (AI)? “While there has been a fair amount of negative press lately around AI, the potential for AI in healthcare is vast it can: help provide patients with higher quality, more affordable care; help societies democratize healthcare access and delivery; help clinicians practice at the top of their licenses; help provider organizations better serve their communities. These tools should not be feared; they should be deployed pragmatically and responsibly and, ultimately, should be trusted, adopted, and embraced.”
Challenges Faced
What are some challenges Cassidy faced in building the company, and has the current macroeconomic climate affected the company? “I’ve said before that it is a difficult market for raising capital, and while that challenge is behind us (at least, for now), it took more energy and caused more stress than I expected. And – this will sound self-serving, but it’s true) – we have been, and continue to be, presented with so many potential growth, partnership, and strategic opportunities that it’s not always easy to stay focused and disciplined when confronted with them.”
Core Products
What are Lucem Health’s core products and features? “We offer a comprehensive platform for building, deploying, and continuously improving clinical AI solutions. We help clinical AI creators get the power and potential of their innovation from the bench to the bedside, where it can do good in the world. It’s easiest to think of us as car makers, not engine makers: we have optimized our capabilities to construct virtually any kind of car and drop virtually any kind of engine into it. While we sell our platform as a broad set of technical capabilities coupled with an engagement model that helps AI creators innovate, we also position and sell AI-powered solutions focused on helping providers confront the challenges they face in today’s difficult healthcare delivery market. These solutions, branded Reveal, help detect diseases earlier and optimize the clinical and financial yield from overburdened resources.”
Evolution Of Lucem Health’s Technology
How has Lucem Health’s technology evolved since launching? “It’s interesting, and I suppose mostly just lucky, that the original vision we had for our platform has played out more or less the way we thought it would. We have been deliberate about executing our strategic roadmap and ensuring that we can deliver meaningful value as we build out our capabilities. Now that we have a robust set of capabilities in the “core” of our platform – data curation, algorithm orchestration, workflow integration, etc. – we are turning our attention to features that help us build solutions even more rapidly than we already do, and features that help our customers and partners better understand real-world solution performance, impact, and value.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Lucem Health’s most significant milestones? “Wow… so many of them to consider… Our first product demo where we actually showed data coming in, an algorithm firing, and an insight being produced… our first signed customer… our first check (I have it encased in plexiglass in my office!)… our first project in production… launching our first solutions… closing our Series A funding round.”
Funding/Revenue
When I asked Cassidy about the company’s funding and how the company generates revenues, he answered:
“Our total funding is now public knowledge. We completed our seed round in August 2021 and completed our Series A round in late April 2023. There is a total of $13.7 million of venture capital invested in the company at this point. We generate revenue primarily from subscription fees to our cloud services – our platform and our solutions. We generate a modest amount of non-recurring revenue from implementation services.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is Lucem Health pursuing? “Because the opportunity for AI in healthcare is so broad and so deep, both in the US and internationally, and with the technology being so new, it can be difficult to estimate the TAM for clinical AI as a whole and for clinical AI deployment platforms more broadly. That said, we think the global TAM for our technology and solutions is north of $20 billion.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Lucem Health from its competition? “Our platform is optimized for building, deploying, and improving clinical AI solutions at scale. It’s all we do. We don’t make algorithms, and we aren’t pushing our own proprietary data science as the best mousetrap. We are interested in helping the very best, most transformational AI innovation see the light of day. We are not a general purpose ML ops platform: we have decades of enterprise digital health platform experience on our team, and we know how to meet healthcare innovators, healthcare providers, and broader healthcare ecosystem participants exactly where they are.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of Lucem Health’s future company goals? “Like most startups with momentum and Series A capital, we are completely focused on expanding our customer and partner footprint and demonstrating more broadly that our offerings precisely fit the market problems we are solving.”
