Nandini Devi: Disrupting the Consumer Healthcare Experience

With the mission of empowering consumers, to take charge of their healthcare by providing solutions that improve transparency, choice, access, and convenience, Mpowered Health was founded by, Nandini Devi. Mpowered Health is a bold experiment to showcase the voice of the consumer, which provides consumers a voice, transparency, the choice, the access, and the convenience they need to manage their own, and their family’s healthcare from birth to end-of-life. Mpowered Health is also the nation’s first healthcare marketplace and independent healthcare fiduciary that enables organizations and consumers to transact securely and conveniently.

Nandini is an entrepreneur, business leader, director, and investor with more than 2 decades of experience in the US healthcare sector. An engineer by education, Nandini started her career in software development but she later moved into management consulting after completing her MBA from Wharton School. She has worked with Accenture in their corporate strategy, M&A group, where she consulted with clients across industry verticals like health insurance, and pharmaceuticals.

During this time, Nandini Devi was struck by the complexities of the US Healthcare system, and she soon realized, there was an opportunity to leverage the transformative power of technology to reduce this complexity. This belief formed the basis of her work for the last two decades which spans the founding of two healthcare technology companies – ZeOmega & Mpowered Health, and her investing, advisory & board work with both private and public companies in healthcare sector.

Inception Story

We all know that people in the US have fragmented and many times stressful experiences when it comes to healthcare. Nandini says, “We have millions in our country for whom healthcare is out of reach because they cannot afford the insurance or the out-of-pocket bills.” Nandini also explains that the US has a rapidly aging population and it is yet to figure out how to care for all of them without bankrupting medicare.

More than 80 percent of seniors desire to spend their end of life at home, yet less than 20 percent do so. Caring for seniors places a burden on nearly 40m caregivers, who are usually family members. Nearly 75% of caregivers make compromises at work due to caregiving while nearly 40% – 70% suffer from depression. They are also at higher risk for heart disease, cancer, addiction & mental health issues.

As a healthcare leader, Nandini Devi has seen significant health inequities in the most vulnerable populations in the country – namely seniors, caregivers, uninsured, underinsured, and those on Medicaid. Nandini says, “We can eradicate health inequities at scale only by empowering these vulnerable populations to become informed consumers themselves.”

On a personal level, Nandini Devi has observed and learned that empowerment begins only by speaking up and making your opinions heard. So, she founded Mpowered Health as a bold experiment in 2019 to showcase the voice of the consumer. Nandini Devi believes that for consumers to win, organizations also need to benefit i.e a win-win. From that belief emerged the notion of an independent healthcare marketplace/fiduciary that empowers individuals and organizations to do what is right for everyone, the society, and the nation.

Leaving Positive Impact on People

Success for Nandini is all about making things a little easier for people to manage their healthcare, being able to inspire her team, people, and organizations to work towards a daunting yet exhilarating vision, knowing that her efforts had a positive impact on the team, partners, and investors.

On a personal level, Nandini thinks, success is all about having a positive impact on people around her, seeing her parents age in comfort, and seeing her children grow up to be mature, compassionate individuals who also leave a positive imprint behind them.

Lowering the Cost of Consumer Acquisition

The marketplace gives Mpowered Health a unique opportunity to help organizations drive down their cost of consumer acquisition, engagement, and compliance. This is the underpinning of the organization’s enterprise platform, which enables, companies to reach, acquire, engage, transact and collaborate with consumers in ways that were not possible before.

Nandini also explains that Mpowered Health’s consumer acquisition solution enables organizations to reach target audiences in a highly precise, secure & HIPAA compliant manner while protecting the privacy of the individual. Additionally, the firm provides solutions for member engagement and interoperability compliances.

This is ready-to-deploy infrastructure without the overheads seen in traditional B2B enterprise platform deployments. Nandini Devi and her colleagues’ goal is to help healthcare organizations achieve growth without resource constraints. She believes a small payer or provider must have access to the same sophisticated technology as the larger players. This is about creating a level playing field that enables the best consumer-oriented organizations to win irrespective of their size.

Plans for Future

Nandini Devi feels growth is not a monolithic framework, with each stage of a company’s growth demanding a different framework. The typical approach is to spend the minimal effort to prove product-market fit, and then prepare for growth & scale. However, she also knows scaling teams, systems and processes can be messy, and can be fatal to the company, if not executed properly. During the first 3 years, Nandini and her team assembled the leadership, and a team that could get excited by Mpowered Health’s vision, systematically build the technology stack, and deliver the core capabilities for the platform.

Scale was as much a priority in Nandini Devi and her team’s thinking as was consumer experience and enterprise value. Building repeatability & performance-oriented, but compassionate work culture were also key factors as they built their internal systems & processes. The Mpowered Health team probably spent more time thinking about this than is normal for a typical start-up.

The firm is now a strong team of about 50 people, with proven technology, products, market fit, and an impactful marketplace that can enable more than 150 million people and hundreds of organizations.

Mpowered Health’s approach to growth is disciplined and systematic. Nandini Devi plans to expand the team, with a special focus on the firm’s go-to-market efforts shortly. The company anticipates raising capital early next year to meet  growth needs.