GT Grad Has Helped 54 Million Patients

This past Wednesday, the Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship (ILE) Impact Speaker Series hosted Willie Tillery, a Georgia Tech alum and the director of imaging at Nuance Communications. His startup Accelerad, a cloud-based medical image sharing company, was acquired by Nuance in 2014.

Willie shared his story of what it took to create a successful Health IT company

Willie started his entrepreneurial journey at Georgia Tech by writing a business plan in the ATDC incubator as a student. After graduating he kept finessing the project, morphing his first idea from Neurostar to eventually Accelerad. Accelerad worked to create a connection between healthcare organizations, physicians, and patients to cut down on inefficiencies in communication between healthcare companies. Nuance picked up on the vision of Accelerad and saw an opportunity to obtain visibility into a new market.

Now apart of the Nuance company, Willie’s technology is present in 2,100 hospitals and imaging sites. It has become a proven scalable cloud based technology, processing more than 400million images annually to help 54 million patients. As Willie explained, the program acts like linkedin to bring hospitals and imaging systems together. The program: identifies problems in coordination of care, cuts down on fraud and abuse, and clinical inefficiencies.

Key Takeaways:
• Surround yourself with good people who believe in your idea
• Have a solid plan but use small incremental goals to allow you to navigate and make adjustments along the way. This plan also helps make failure more manageable
• Create a good team around you that can compliment your skills
• Hit your mark and continue to make your next goal. Don’t let inexperience let you down
• Create diversify and distribute your client footprint

Impact Speaker Series is free and open to the public. The next event will be March 25th with Robert Pozen.

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