Boston-based Orbita, which produces software for HIPPA-compliant voice and chatbot applications in healthcare, has hired Kristi Ebong as its new senior vice president of strategy and general manager for healthcare providers.
Ebong comes to the startup from Cedars-Sinai where she served as the director of emerging technology and helped lead strategy for the health system’s startup accelerator.
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Orbita CEO Bill Rogers pointed to Ebong’s range of experience working on innovation at large health systems as critical to the company’s continued growth, especially as it looks to scale up its business with providers.
“When we started to look at healthcare systems, we realized that we needed real experience in understanding their needs and how best to actually integrate with their systems,” Rogers said in a phone interview.
Rogers also cited Ebong’s high level perspective on healthcare as helping Orbita’s ability to branch out with potential partners in the clinical trial space and beyond.
Kristi Ebong, Orbita’s senior vice president of strategy and general manager for healthcare providers.
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Outside of her experience at Cedars-Sinai, Ebong has helped lead innovation pilot programs at Stanford Healthcare, served as a longtime healthcare consultant and advisor and worked on electronic health record implementation at Epic Systems.
Orbita, which was founded in 2015, has raised more than $7 million for what it calls an “ecosystem approach” to voice-enabled patient engagement in healthcare.
Developers use the company’s platform to design, build and manage voice-enabled healthcare applications which can be deployed in a number of channels including home assistants, web sites and smartphones.
The 35-person company has customers from across healthcare including the Mayo Clinic, Lenovo Health and StayWell.
For her part, Ebong said she decided to join the company after seeing the incredible potential for using voice-enabled applications in healthcare and being specifically struck by Orbita’s platform-agnostic approach.
She highlighted a “sea-change” enabling wide scale adoption of the technology led by startups like Orbita, as well as large tech companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
“It’s an enabling technology that’s really powerful. Voice, specifically, has the ability to democratize access to healthcare and help solve the utilization challenge in the aging population and the pediatric population,” Ebong said in a phone interview.
Ebong’s interest in voice-enabled digital health companies dates back to her role at Cedars-Sinai, where she was responsible for evaluating startups for the organization’s accelerator. She actually initially come in contact with Oribta as a potential member of the accelerator program.
Besides her new role at Orbita, Ebong serves as an advisor for Alan AI, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based voice interface startup, according to her Linkedin profile.
She added that her deep roots at large health systems comes with an appreciation and understanding of what it takes to drive innovation at sometimes slow-moving and bureaucratic enterprises.
“Coming from that background I have a healthy respect of how hard it is,” Ebong said. “One thing you need is an understanding of who the decision makers are and a healthy appreciation for the existing technology and challenges. There’s been a lot of pilots in the past five to ten years, but what I’m bringing to this role is nuance and complexity, and an enthusiasm for what I believe Orbita’s approach can provide.”
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