For Aditya Mukerjee CC’12, his health care startup may be his first business, but it’s not his first time in charge. The former publisher of Spectator says that his experience running the independent student newspaper during its 135th managing board session was the perfect training ground for taking on the responsibility of founding and running his own company. As the co-founder and CTO of BoardRounds, which focuses on increasing patient follow-up care and streamlining care coordination, Mukerjee is ready to expand his tech company by taking advantage of its new home in the Columbia Startup Lab. Along with co-founder and CEO Benjamin Jack ’07E, Mukerjee is trying to modernize hospital follow-up care to meet the needs of both patients and providers.
No stranger to starting big projects, the former Spectator publisher not only spearheaded a campaign to digitize old issues but also raised large amounts of capital through advertisements and alumni outreach despite the economic downturn in 2011. From managing roughly 300 staff members to balancing budgets, Mukerjee kept Spectator running smoothly during his junior and senior years. He says, “They say there is no school for being a CEO other than being a CEO and there is no school for running a company like actually running a company, and I got that experience while I was still in school and taking a full course load at Columbia. [...] You couldn’t run a startup the exact same way you run Spectator, but it really did train me for a lot of the same skills and provide [me with] that experience.” As co-founder Jack finishes medical school at Cornell this year, the team is excited to reunite at the Columbia Startup Lab to expand their product’s reach.
Mukerjee says that helping streamline the process for preventative care visits and follow-up visits can decrease costs for patients, hospitals and insurance companies and provide better care all around. The three-pronged BoardRounds system looks to provide a better hospital and healthcare system for everyone. With BoardRounds, hospitals put in patient data and then the application takes over from there, scheduling follow-up appointments and sending reminders, processing Medicare’s Transitional Care Management reimbursements and then offering hospitals and providers detailed analytics about patients’ post-discharge behaviors. The system is already in trials at Mount Sinai Hospital and the team hopes to continue expanding once they get settled in at the Columbia Startup Lab.
As Mukerjee gets ready to move back into the Columbia lifestyle with his and Jack’s upcoming relocation to the WeWork startup lab space, he says that he is excited for the opportunity to tap into the alumni network and the Columbia entrepreneur community that working in the space will provide. He says of the lab and the spirit of entrepreneurship at the University, “We definitely have a number of enterprising and entrepreneurial figures at Columbia in our alumni community, but it’s only recently that that’s becoming organized. And this is something that both Benji and I are really excited to be a part of — a number of times I’ve had the fortune of being a member of organizations just as they’re getting off the ground. There’s this feeling that you know this is going to be something big because you can see all of the signs pointing to [it] and it’s just a matter of watching it unfold — not just watching but actively participating in it.” As members of the inaugural group at Columbia Startup Labs, Mukerjee and Jack will be in on the ground floor as they work to merge healthcare and technology to make care better for everyone.
Edit 7/24/14: BoardRounds was featured in TechCrunch in an article that both profiled the business and announced that BoardRounds had received backing capital from The Dorm Room Fund.
