Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Taking Retinal Imaging Beyond Ophthalmology: Interview with identifeye HEALTH CEO Vicky Demas

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Vicky Demas, CEO of identifeye HEALTH (formerly Tesseract Health), who's leading the company's efforts to democratize access to retinal imaging. Using advanced algorithms and automated systems, identifeye's technology captures and analyzes retinal images to detect early signs of disease.Before joining identifeye HEALTH, Vicky led new product development at GRAIL, supporting the creation of the company's multi-cancer early detection test (Galleri). She was also a founding member of Google Life Sciences (later Verily) within Google [x], where she led teams focused on diagnostics, medical devices, and translational laboratory science. An engineer and scientist, Vicky holds over 20 patents and has authored numerous scientific publications across multiple disciplines.In this interview, Vicky challenges founders to consider: Are you building a diagnostic solution that can scale globally or a product limited to specialized healthcare settings? She also discusses why understanding real-world implementation challenges early can prevent costly missteps later.Before we dive into the discussion, I wanted to mention a few things:First, if you’re into learning from medical device and health technology founders and CEOs, and want to know when new interviews are live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter.Second, if you want to peek behind the curtain of the world's most successful startups, you should consider a Medsider premium membership. You’ll learn the strategies and tactics that founders and CEOs use to build and grow companies like Silk Road Medical, AliveCor, Shockwave Medical, and hundreds more!We recently introduced some fantastic additions exclusively for Medsider premium members, including playbooks, which are curated collections of our top Medsider interviews on key topics like capital fundraising and risk mitigation, and 3 packages that will help you make use of our database of 750+ life science investors more efficiently for your fundraise and help you discover your next medical device or health technology investor!In addition to the entire back catalog of Medsider interviews over the past decade, premium members also get a copy of every volume of Medsider Mentors at no additional cost, including the latest Medsider Mentors Volume VII. If you’re interested, go to medsider.com/subscribe to learn more.Lastly, if you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Vicky Demas.

Market conditions I have no control over, which means you need to focus on things you can control. Things we can control as founders, entrepreneurs, executives is a couple of things. Creating value and having a very clear path that people understand, that investors understand on how you plan to create value. Welcome to MedSider, where you can learn. from the brightest founders and CEOs in medical devices and health technology. Join tens of thousands of ambitious doers as we unpack the insights, tactics, and secrets behind the most successful life science startups in the world.

Now here's your host, Scott Nelson. Hey everyone at Scott, this episode of MedSider, I sat down with Vicki Deem, as CEO of Identify Health, where she leads the company's efforts to democratize access to retina imaging. Before joining, Identify, Vicki led new product development at Grail, supporting the creation of the company's multi-cancer early detection test. She was also a founding member of Google Life Sciences, where she led teams focused on diagnostics, medical devices, and translational laboratory science.

An engineer and scientist, Vicki, holds over 20 patents and has authored numerous scientific publications across multiple disciplines. Here for the key things that we discussed in this conversation. First, don't get seduced by technical concepts when evaluating med tech ideas. It's critical to identify problems truly worth solving that also have a reasonable market size.

assess the unmet need and determine if you're genuinely passionate about addressing it. Vicky explains that while market sizing matters, long-term value comes from scalable solutions that fit within existing workflows. Second, for prototypes, test early and test often. Vicky is a big believer in getting your product into testing environments as soon as possible even before they're fully functional. This is critical because user testing reveals unexpected behaviors and preferences that can't be anticipated in the lab, and it will help you refine your product iteratively while maintaining focus on core functionality. Third, fundraising during market downturns is challenging, but not impossible if you hone in on factors within your control. When external funding conditions tighten,

focus on creating demonstrable value and communicating a clear path to success. Present milestones in concrete terms that investors can easily understand. You can position yourself for success by maintaining relationships rather than scrambling when capital is needed. All right, before we dive into this episode, I'm pumped to share that volume 7 of MedSider Mentors is now live. This latest edition highlights key takeaways from recent Medsider interviews with incredible entrepreneurs like Bill Hunter, CEO of Canary Medical, Brian Lord, CEO of Pristine Surgical, Don Crawford, co-founder of Safion and current CEO of Corvista Health and other proven MedTech founders and CEOs. Look, we get it. Keeping up with every MedCider interview isn't easy. That's why we created

Medsider mentors. These ebook volumes distill the best practices and insider secrets from top founders and CEOs, all in a downloadable, easy-to-digest format. To check the latest volume out, head over to MedsiderRadio.com forward slash mentors. Premium members get free access to all past and future volumes plus a treasure trove of other resources. If you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. We recently revamped Medsider with swanky new features, especially for our premium members. In addition to every volume of Medsider mentors, you'll get full access to our entire interview library dating back to 2010. You'll also get Medsider playbooks, curated guides packed with actionable insights and topics like fundraising, regulatory challenges,

reimbursement strategies, and more. And if you're fundraising, don't miss our exclusive investor database, featuring over 750 life science VCs, family offices, and angels. We've even created three custom packages to help you with your next fundraise. Learn more about Medsider Mentors and our premium memberships by visiting MedsiderRadio.com forward slash mentors. All right. Without further ado, let's dive in the interview.

All right, Vicki, welcome to Medsider Radio. Appreciate it coming on. Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be with you, Scott. Yeah. Should be a good discussion. and definitely interested in learning a little bit more about your journey and then what you're building at Identify Health. So with that said, I recorded a very short bio at the outset of this

episode, but I always like to start here, kind of hear it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Can you give us like a one or two minute overview of kind of what you've been doing or what you have done leading up to the CEO role I identify? Sure. So I'll say that the basic principle or what has shaped my career is my passion for technology. I started as an engineer and a scientist. But I really found kind of just the main motivation for my career being the appreciation of what technology can do to enable, let's see, help patients or enable healthcare providers, help patients.

So I found myself then at the interface or the intersection of technology, healthcare and life sciences. So over the years, I have been really fortunate to work with incredible people building and leading teams. I'll see primarily in startups, some large organizations, but still more of an incubator setting, and really have gotten to work on products and platforms across diagnostics, life sciences, interventional medicine. Some of the companies include, you know, before Identify Health, include companies like Grail and Google. So that has been super fun. One of the main themes in my career has been that obviously I've made a lot of mistakes and I've learned from them, but I also have learned from some of the mistakes from people around me. And again, a ton of experience, I guess,

which now it's sort of like, it feels almost like identifies the culmination of that journey and leveraging all of those learnings. And the one comment I do like to say just because I never really aspire to be a CEO. It wasn't that this was a clear path. to how do you become a CEO? It was more of the, I want to make impact. I really wanted to focus on making contributions. And I did find myself somehow very opportunistically in this position. And it has been a very exciting almost four years now. That's a great overview. You mentioned four years. And it looks like based on your LinkedIn profiles, you took up, took on the role in mid-2021, if you will. But I'm on the website right now,

which is, and we'll link to it in the full write-up on MedSider, but it's Identify.com. So, I-D-E-N-T-I-F-E-Y-E-E-D-Halth. So Identify Health is the website, Identify. Dot Health. But very cool website, very consumer-esque, if you will, especially for Life Sciences company. But give us a high-level overview. For those that I've never heard of the company or what you're doing, what's the major

problem you're trying to solve here and, you know, tell us a little bit more about the system. Amazing. Well, thank you for the compliments. We are very, we care a lot. about having a website and you'll see our products, etc., that are exactly as you described, consumer-friendly medical devices, medical products. And something to help people remember,

like what I tell is we replaced the Y in Identify, the verb, with the I, because what identifies is doing, we're leveraging AI in automation to make retinal imaging simpler, really bring it to the masses, make sure that platform can become ubiquitous. And I'll start a little bit how we're approaching the space. We're starting with diabetic retinopathy as the first problem we are trying to address because it's a huge problem. It is a diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness in adults of working age.

And it is mostly preventable if it is caught early. However, there is a screening recommendation. there is reimbursement, but compliance is low. A big reason for that is accessibility. So we're trying to make retinal imaging accessible so that we can avoid preventable vision loss, but then also place the platform so that eventually we can actually screen for systemic diseases.

And I like to tell people that really are the thesis behind what we're trying to do is create a tool that supports personalized preventative health care. Got it. And diabetic retinopathy, so the disease you're starting out with anyway, considering this is a platform technology, how is that currently diagnosed today? Walk me through kind of the workflow if I'm a patient that maybe a physician expects to have diabetic retinopathy.

So let's think a little bit. Most patients with diabetes will at least get seen by a primary care clinician or an endocrinologist once a year or twice a year. and usually what happens is your primary care doctor will say, have you gotten your annual screening? For diabetic retinopathy, you may say yes or no. It's the same, right? The mice, do you need a referral, et cetera.

That usually kind of what happens. So typically then they will refer you, you'll go, you'll see an ophthalmologists, and the majority will say, like the majority of people who are getting screen will go and get screen at an ophthalmologist, which means that you actually have to have a formologist. follow-up appointments, schedule, and then you go, there are wait times, et cetera. Obviously, really expensive equipment. You understand, like, a little bit of bottlenecks and the expense for this.

Places where screening happens, by the way, just like, you know, higher compliance rates are in places like an integrated delivery network. Like, you know, you were working with someone like a Kaiser, so they will follow up, schedule the appointments and all of that. there has been a push over the last year, I want to say, like not quite 10 years, but, you know, maybe five, seven years to bring screening closer to the patient at the primary care setting. Because again, for a moment to stop, most, you know, 80 to 90 percent of patients with diabetes do get a primary care appointment, whereas a very, you know, almost half heaven of phalmology appointment. So there have been some attempts to actually do that closer to the patient, but they haven't really been anyone that has been successful in really addressing some of the problems that need to be

addressed for the screenings to happen at the non-specialist, I'll call it set up. Got it. And again, I'm on the website now, which is a very cool looking device. So do you envision this being sort of a point of care system at the primary care office then? Is that kind of where this would maybe be located or maybe you're thinking more broadly. Like could this be at a CVS or a Walgreens or maybe in the home? We are thinking very broadly. We are looking to start with primary care, but think, again, also integrated delivery network, value-based care.

But also to your point, the retail pharmacy is an interesting idea because, again, like, we see the trends that they want to make sure that they have more offerings, right? in the physical locations that they keep in compensating for the fact that we have digital pharmacies coming in. But from our perspective, the focus is trying to place devices closer to patients, and that is going to be a little bit of our, the first year in entering the market will really be about figuring out where it makes sense to place units. But we for sure have built the device in a way that is super easy to use. So think, I mean, when I say applied consumer product development principles,

like it is intuitive. Like I can't wait. Like I'd love to do a demo for you. Because usually like we demo the device and halfway through. I give you the iPod with the app that is controlling the unit. I'm like, why don't you run the exam for me? And you are able to do that. So very, very excited to see where we'll be able to take it.

Yeah, that's cool. And highly encourage everyone to check out the website. And I like your, I like the way you described, right, how to get to the website as you. is you identified, or you replaced the why, right, in the verb, identify with I, E-Y-E. So identify.com. And we'll link to it in the full, the full write-up on Med-Ziter. So Vigy, with that said, give us a sense.

We're recording this kind of an early mid-Q-1, call it, of 25. For those maybe listening after the fact or a few months down the road, give us a sense for kind of where the company's at today. Yeah, we're in a very exciting stage. We have finished the development of the Identify Camera, and we're working to transfer the design to manufacturing, doing all of the work from an infrastructure perspective, to be able to register as a medical device manufacturer,

and list the device, and to enter the market in the next couple of months. While additionally, we are working towards the development of our first AI screening product, and that would be an autonomous AI that is going to come later on and sort of look like a software update, if you wish. to the camera. Got it. So you're fairly close to actually commercializing the technology. Yes, we are.

Oh, wow. Well, yeah, that's a big, big step. So very cool. So with that said, let's spend the next, you know, 30 minutes or so kind of jumping through some various sort of functions, right, that any startup like yours has to get through in order to get to this point, right, of eventual commercialization and experience some level of success. And first question kind of on the docket is kind of pulling on your experiences, right,

other startups and maybe even even some of the some of the learnings coming out of out of the kind of the incubation framework within within Google Life Sciences. So when you think about various ideas or concepts, right, there's a lot of folks that listen to this podcast that have an idea in mind, right? They're maybe debating on whether or not they should leave their full-time gig and pursue it with more rigor. So when you think about, you know, evaluating different ideas or concepts, are there a few things that you've picked up on over the years that help you really kind of make,

you know, help you determine whether or not it's something truly worth pursuing or not. For sure. The main thing, and I think especially coming from the technical background that can be tempting for people to do is get obsessed with a technical concept and really want to focus on that. So the thing that I've learned over time, and I'm a huge believer of that, it's really about finding a problem that is worth solving and trying to understand the problem. problem. That is the biggest, I think, component. And obviously, people in the product development and product management side will speak about product market fit. But I go even one step back and say, just really ask the question that says, what is a problem that is worth solving? Why do I care

about it? Because especially if you're thinking about leaving your full-time job to do something or invest a lot of energy, you better pick a problem you really care about because it's not a nine to five job. Like that's how you don't do this because, right? Yeah. Oh, it's so true. It's so true. Yeah, if you're not passionate about building whatever this is to solve this, this problem, these startups, and especially in life sciences, are not short flips, right? They're long halls. And certainly not a nine to five jobs. So, but kind of certainly back around to the problem. You know, I think myself included, right, I still struggle with this even because I very much am an idea guy. I think any any entrepreneur is fairly optimistic and loves kind of this, the idea of thinking about various, various ideas and problems to solve.

But when you think about kind of prioritizing, right, let's say someone has got, you know, several different ideas, really trying to figure out is they're trying to answer that question, right? Is this a problem worth solving? Are you, are you believer that it's, I mean, just like the market's got to be significantly. enough? Let's double-click into that into that a little bit. It's more than the market, right? Because it goes back, you know, someone said, and I think maybe it was one of my first startups, and I remember we had built a product that it was an infectious disease. It was a diagnostic test that in a couple hours would return a result that at the time you had to wait for three days for black culture results to come. It was a very small niche market that we had selected. And for those patients, we

knew it was life-altering, right? The majority of patients that had the infection that we were detecting, most likely would have gotten treated with a broad spectrum antibiotic, and by the time the culture would come back, they would have died. And I remember, like, having that epiphany. Like, I was like, wait a minute. Like, if we go and we tell doctors, like, look, like, we're going to save. Like, it's only, like, you know, I don't know, up to, I think, 40,000 patients a year. But for them, we are saving their lives, that's not what you needed to tell. You needed to do the calculation that said in how many days am I saving from the hospital from hospitalization and all the things that you're doing if you're having to actually like end of life for a septic patient,

et cetera, et cetera. But at the end of the day, when you are building value, there is like the economics usually follow. Like that's like if that makes sense. But a little bit more like on the systematic assessment, like let's take a step back and. And, speak a little bit about the market and how big. There has to be an unmet need because there have to be people that will help you drive adoption. So thinking of the adoption, like there are specific things that especially if we're speaking about healthcare, it's very difficult to change workflows. So trying to figure out that, you know, that's a component as you're thinking and prioritizing. Can this fit, right? Look, with the people you have, with a workflow you have in a particular

healthcare setting. There is a little bit of the, what is your differentiation and what is the scalability of the solution, like especially for people like, you know, what we're doing at identify as well, but I have seen it in a series of places. You are building something that is a platform. Like if someone says here, I have a new diagnostic tool, even if it's IVD, et cetera, you always want to think about, okay, so this is your first test. It has some, it writes some basis on why you selected it, but can the platform do more things? Can you detect more stuff later? How scalable is the business? So there are components. So yes, to your point, like you can't just find something so niche, that even if you took over the whole entire space, like you still

don't generate enough revenue to get investors excited, but on the other hand, you have to think it's a, yeah, like structure this longer term, I guess, if you wish, opportunity. Yeah, it makes sense. And I love what you mentioned earlier just about the economics, too, that if you're tackling a true unmet need, right, and delivering a significant amount of value, in a lot of cases that economics will follow eventually, right? And there may be various paths of sort of capturing, right, that economic value. But generally speaking, they will be there, right? If you are truly solving a large, unmet need. Correct. But you do need to do that homework to actually do it. Yeah, no doubt. Yeah, certainly go into it. I mean, if it's something that's, you know,

maybe not, doesn't currently have a CPD code, there's not covered widely by CMS or private payers, that doesn't mean that there's not, it's not worth pursuing, but you're definitely going to need to account for that, right? In terms of, you know, what it's going to take to eventually get there. So really, really good points. Let's transition to kind of your engineering background. You mentioned that kind of when you were describing, you know, what you'd, you know, some of the companies and some of the, some of the roles that you've held before, you know, taking on the CEO, get identified. But I often think, you know, for an early stage, you know, startup that, that maybe has identified a true and met need. And there's a, there's a significant market.

And they're just, they're trying to iterate, right? And get to that next, you know, go from alpha, you know, an initial alpha, but it may be a second alpha, you know, and maybe eventually do a beta. But they're often doing, you know, everyone that's been there is typically dealing with not a lot of resources, right? Not a lot of capital in the bank to work with at that point. So when you think about kind of where the identify system is now, right, that looks like it looks pretty nice versus maybe those earlier iterations, walk us through, you know, some key learnings that either you've had to identify or key learnings that you were able to pull into identify to help help you kind of rapidly iterate, you know, during those early, early stages.

A couple of things. And I think in general, as you said, like engineers, one of the things I love about engineering is it's like very methodical, right? Like, it's like, it's very, I mean, It's basic physics principles and it all makes a ton of sense. But probably the biggest thing is you have to remain disciplined because I feel, you know, once you select the product you're working on and you have the user needs, outline, et cetera, you have to be very critical and saying there are some of the things I call them desirements versus these are the minimum viable product. Like this better be there.

Otherwise, we can't. really do anything. Like a product has to be reliable. A product has to be easy to use a product, right? So being disciplined in, you know, what is sort of like the setting also sort of like acceptance criteria for stages of where we are ahead of time because creep, right? It's easy to just want to add on something or just say, well, maybe we didn't meet this, but, right? So it's like doing that thoughtful exercise with the team. The other thing that I'll say, obviously, we certainly have taken advantage of that at identify, and I can't emphasize enough the importance of it is, especially obviously in the right setting,

getting a product prototype out for testing because we can sit, you know, in isolation, in our beautiful lab and build something. But what's really important is, obviously, test that the device or the prototype is a safe and then really try to get feedback. So we've been doing a ton of usability testing and then a lot of smaller clinical studies under IRB to really collect feedback. And if you were to compare the earlier versions of the system

to where it is today from a behavioral perspective, if you wish, we've learned a ton from all of the interesting things that a patient eventually, like now we have participants, might do when you're putting them in front of one of the system. or what are some of the preferences of the operators. But yeah, like on a high level, I'll say try to get out as soon as possible and get feedback and iterate and then stay disciplined in terms of what you say you will accomplish at its phase, knowing that you will always have a list of things you would really like to improve in the next iteration.

It's so true. That's kind of where the discipline comes in, right? is like, you know, being mindful of that wish list versus like that must have list for sure. I love that. But I also just to emphasize that the other point that you kind of honed in on is is getting into some sort of environment where you can get feedback rapidly. So, so crucial, right? It doesn't always have to be in patience even, right?

I mean, that's ideal, right? If you can get into some sort of like IRB feasibility study of some type. But even a cadaver, even basic human experience sort of testing, if you will, it doesn't even have to be a, you know, necessarily a fully functional system, you know, but just getting, getting some real-world data is so, so important, right, in those early stages. 100%. And for us, like, for example, like, you know, you're bringing up really excellent points in terms of how do you stage it, right? You look at the system on the website. We specifically made it look like, right? Like, it's like something that, that patients would feel comfortable,

leaning in, putting their face in the device, relaxing for the couple of minutes that the test needs to take place. So that is something that we tested in many iterations. It was just the goggles. We call it like that interface. It looks like a virtual reality set. So that was, you know, series of iterations and that. Series of iteration to your point of even like, you know, virtual administering of the exam. So we have someone running the app, pretending that we have a patient, right? Like, you know, we actually have that setup versus actually having people run the exam and seeing, right, like, you know, kind of just giving us feedback on what the device should be saying. Do we want a device to completely take over? Do we want the optionality? Just learning what

are people's preferences, what people want to see. So, yeah, a ton of testing. And to your point, thinking very opportunistically about what are the prototypes and workflows, et cetera, that you need to have outlined to be able to capture feedback. You don't need to have the finished product. But then obviously, as you're getting closer to the finished product, you can do more comprehensive testing, of course. Yeah, absolutely. And I like that word that you just use opportunistic, you know,

and being proactively opportunistic, right, about ways that you could get whatever form, factor, you know, you're working on in whatever sort of iteration, getting it into the hands, right, of people as soon as possible, that's, you know, that's ideal. Because there's, there's only so much, I mean, you're always going to be maxed out, right? If you're behind in the lab or behind a desk, you know, working on something. There's only, there's so much, you know, there's so much, you know, to, to garner until you actually, you know, you actually sort of get out into the end of the world world. Hey there, it's Scott. Thanks for listening in

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