Macadamian designs and develops digital health and connected medical device solutions to improve healthcare. The company is a full-service software design and development consulting firm that provides a complete range of product strategy, user experience design and research, data, and software engineering services.
Ranging from big consumer brands to complex enterprise environments, Macadamian’s goal is to create solutions that are simple and meaningful, prioritizing the experience of the patient, the clinician, and the business needs of its clients.
Each Macadamian-designed solution is based on questions that look at how to improve the patient’s experience, improve the efficiency and effectiveness of clinical workflows, how to enable remote care, and more specifically how to improve patient outcomes.
As patients and healthcare providers alike look increasingly to preventative care to ensure good health, data like the kind Macadamian helps its clients capture becomes invaluable—especially as the data is aggregated to help identify high-level population health trends.
“We’re finally getting to this place where healthcare, in general, is starting to move faster, and it’s because data is becoming accessible,” Fred Boulanger, Macadamian’s Founder and CEO, explains. “That data enables AI, and AI is access to care. It is the ability to be treated or diagnosed or coached when you’re not just in front of a doctor.”
While such means of monitoring are not unfamiliar—FitBits come to mind, as do other body-metric apps we’re only just scratching the surface of what that data can enable in terms of insights—mostly because we’re only just scratching the surface of how much data we can collect. Macadamian sees that future clearly. Fred likes to illustrate it with an anecdote involving a Formula One race.
“A single one of those races generates 30 terabytes of data for McLaren,” Fred says. “The equivalent of the data a patient gathers on themselves, using the devices available, is 100 megabytes per year.”
The company got its start in 1997 in the telecommunications industry. Fred knew he was onto something when he checked his email one Saturday morning to find a message praising Macadamian’s coding knowledge and experience and requesting help on an upcoming project.
Fred was excited to have a sales lead—and then floored to realize it was from Ray Ozzie of Lotus Notes and (more recently) Microsoft fame. Ray Ozzie might have been the first to notice Macadamian’s value, but he wasn’t the last. At some point, it was Macadamian’s code inside the White House’s Red Phone. Honored though Fred was, neither of those instances is the most meaningful to him in Macadamian’s journey.
“In 2011, we shifted our focus to healthcare because I wanted to make a dent in the universe, and I thought this was a worthy North Star to have,” Fred says.
Macadamian has been working with a medical device company, over the course of a number of years, that developed an online clinical software platform to treat aortic stenosis.
“Within three months of the product going to market, we were on the phone with our customers and they could tell us that, at that year’s end, 45 people were able to celebrate Christmas because of this product and because of the software we had put in place,” Fred says. “It’s a powerful story for me.”
Thanks to Macadamian’s software—in this product and others—many more people have had that chance, too.
