Derek Streat, CEO and Founding father of DexCare, is an experienced entrepreneur with a track record of founding and leading six venture-backed corporations, 4 of which have achieved successful acquisitions. His ventures have included scaling businesses to over $100 million in revenue and establishing non-profits that profit greater than half of all children with kidney transplants. Streat focuses on solving large-scale, impactful problems by leveraging revolutionary data solutions to bring transparency and efficiency to markets, reducing costs and delivering societal advantages.
DexCare is a care orchestration platform that optimizes healthcare delivery and workforce capability while enhancing patient convenience. It integrates with existing systems to unify data, forecast demand, allocate resources, and guide patients to essentially the most appropriate care, delivering actionable insights and streamlined operations.
DexCare was born out of your personal journey with healthcare, specifically in helping your child access critical care. How did this experience shape your vision for DexCare, and the way does it proceed to influence the corporate’s mission today?
Fifteen years ago, my three-year-old child needed a lifesaving kidney transplant. It was an arduous journey full of sleepless nights as my wife and I struggled to navigate a fragmented healthcare system. We watched as our toddler moved between specialists, surgeries, and intensive care, ultimately receiving a transplant. Through all of it, I spotted just how fortunate I used to be to have unfettered access to care. For a lot of Americans, that’s not the case.
Over 37% of Americans live in healthcare deserts. My very own experience, combined with years of working closely with healthcare systems, revealed a transparent have to bridge the access gap for everybody. In actual fact, not every patient must see a physician – they need the fitting care, in the fitting place, at the fitting time. And that insight led me to found DexCare, a platform designed to orchestrate where and the way care is delivered. By reducing provider burnout, creating capability, and expanding access, we aim to serve more patients effectively. Incubated at Windfall, DexCare spun out in 2021 and now proudly partners with leading health systems across the country, including Texas Health Resources, Tampa General, and Piedmont Healthcare.
You’ve successfully founded several healthcare-focused corporations. What specific challenges did you encounter in founding DexCare, and the way did your prior ventures prepare you for launching this care orchestration platform?
From idea to prototype, to raising capital and scaling, every startup faces familiar hurdles. In healthcare, these challenges are amplified by talent wars, long sales cycles, cautious capital markets, and an ever-shifting regulatory landscape. Success demands a careful balancing act. Having founded and exited multiple corporations, I’ve been within the trenches and gained firsthand insight into what it takes to construct resilient teams and products able to thriving under pressure. These lessons became essential when launching DexCare and crafting a technique to succeed amid the complexities of healthcare.
My foray into healthcare began with Medify, an intelligence company that used NLP technology to create structured data from the vast, global repository of medical literature. The platform made an actual difference for patients with rare diseases, bringing together small, scattered populations into larger groups with meaningful insights. At its peak, one in ten doctors across the U.S. relied on our knowledge base to seek out treatments and therapies that would make a difference for his or her patients. Eventually, Medify became a part of Alliance Health, a number one health network.
After Medify, I started tackling a unique set of challenges, specializing in how technology could directly influence clinical practice through C-SATS.
An AI-powered platform, C-SATS leveraged robotics and machine learning to guage surgical performance, providing surgeons with actionable insights to enhance their skills and patient outcomes. This work with AI—long before today’s hype— opened my eyes to the uncharted complexities of integrating advanced technology right into a high-stakes environment like healthcare. While the platform sidestepped privacy concerns through the use of anonymized surgical footage, it surfaced deeper issues, as surgeons were apprehensive about being credentialed based on technology, because it had direct implications for his or her careers and livelihoods. This experience taught me that introducing innovation in healthcare requires greater than technical expertise—it demands constructing trust with stakeholders and proactively addressing the unintended consequences that may emerge when technology intersects with human lives.
Throughout my profession, I’ve focused on dismantling systemic barriers—scarce resources, disconnected data, and inequitable access—by leveraging technology rooted in practicality, not hype. When constructing DexCare, I prioritized data intelligence because the cornerstone of our AI applications. And this focus ensures clean, reliable, and unified data that powers how care is orchestrated, routed, and delivered. By exposing capability imbalances—identifying overburdened providers and underutilized resources—we’re reimagining healthcare to optimize operations and to deliver higher outcomes for patients.
DexCare was incubated throughout the Windfall Health system. Could you speak about the benefits of developing a startup from inside a big healthcare organization, and the way that shaped DexCare’s growth?
DexCare was born inside Windfall to unravel a key challenge in healthcare: balancing supply and demand by leveraging existing marketing, IT, and operational infrastructure. Being built inside a health system gave us an intimate understanding of the twin challenges facing healthcare today. For organizations, it is the constant struggle to fulfill growing care demands with limited resources. And for patients, it is the frustration of finding care when and where it’s needed. This attitude uniquely positions us to empower health systems with critical infrastructure for more practical digital discovery and access, while concurrently optimizing system capability. And our incubation inside Windfall allowed us to refine the platform before scaling to health systems nationwide.
AI in healthcare has been heralded as revolutionary, nevertheless it has also faced significant hurdles. How have you ever seen AI evolve in healthcare through the years, and where do you think that it has fallen in need of its potential?
The rise of AI in healthcare has sparked each excitement and caution. While AI is becoming more mainstream, significant hurdles remain before it may possibly transform the industry. A recent survey revealed that 96% of healthcare CIOs see AI adoption as a competitive advantage, yet integration challenges—like system interoperability and workflow alignment—often stand in the way in which. And without seamless integration into the every day process, clinicians, physicians, and administrators are unlikely to embrace these tools.
The crowded landscape of over 14,000 AI-focused corporations adds to the complexity, making it difficult for health systems to separate hype from solutions that deliver real value. Selecting the fitting technology partner requires greater than evaluating features—it demands solutions that integrate easily, enhance existing workflows, and address real-world challenges.
However the core issue isn’t just finding the subsequent tool—it’s unlocking the potential inside healthcare’s existing data. Sustainable systems rely on harmonizing data across care records, workflows, and third-party platforms. Only then can we tackle real priorities, like freeing clinicians to deal with people over paperwork and shutting critical care gaps. And that is precisely where DexCare matches in.
DexCare uses AI to optimize healthcare delivery by predicting and distributing care resources. Are you able to walk us through how the platform’s AI works and the way it has impacted care delivery at scale?
DexCare’s care orchestration platform harnesses advanced data intelligence by consolidating key inputs—scheduling, modalities, utilization, locations, and costs—to find out where, when, and the way care ought to be accessed. Our AI not only ingests and organizes massive data sets but in addition dynamically aligns care delivery with patient needs. As an example, the platform categorizes content—whether it’s an article on seasonal flu, preventive care, or specialized services—and matches it to essentially the most appropriate pathways to care, all while understanding complex taxonomies and synonyms. The result? By linking relevant content to essentially the most suitable venues of care, the platform ensures patients are guided seamlessly to the services they need, enhancing each access and outcomes.
The outcomes speak for themselves. DexCare enables 40% more patients to receive care using the identical clinical resources, drives a 24% increase in recent patient acquisition, and saves over 34,000 hours of physician time. By eliminating unnecessary steps and presenting clear, actionable selections from the beginning, we’re transforming patient access and operational efficiency at scale—delivering measurable improvements for patients and providers.
AI has the ability to automate tasks and streamline processes, but it may possibly also create fear around job displacement in healthcare. How do you see AI impacting the healthcare workforce, and what strategies can mitigate these concerns?
Addressing fears of job displacement in healthcare begins with clarity. AI isn’t here to switch the human touch in care delivery—it’s here to enrich it. Technology, including AI, augments the capabilities of healthcare professionals, nevertheless it’s not a silver bullet for addressing the growing gap between increasing patient needs and a shrinking physician workforce.
Platforms like DexCare exhibit how AI generally is a critical tool in extending the capability of limited healthcare resources. By intelligently balancing workforce demands, controlling costs, and optimizing capability, AI helps health systems operate more efficiently. This not only ensures patients receive the care they need but in addition alleviates burdens on providers, reducing burnout and making a more sustainable healthcare environment. It’s about constructing smarter, more resilient systems.
What are a number of the unintended consequences you’ve observed within the implementation of AI in healthcare, particularly when it comes to accountability for AI-driven mistakes? How does DexCare address these ethical challenges?
After I was at C-SATS, we used robotics and machine learning to coach surgeons and to enhance patient outcomes. While revolutionary, this approach raised essential questions on privacy, consent, surgeon autonomy, and the moral use of information. These challenges highlighted an important truth: implementing AI in healthcare requires rigorous, standardized policies to make sure the protected and ethical use of the technology.
In healthcare, there is no such thing as a margin for error—lives are at stake. This makes it imperative to ascertain clear guidelines and frameworks that may function a ‘North Star’ to navigate uncharted legal and ethical questions. And accountability and transparency have to be at the center of AI applications in healthcare. By specializing in data integrity and designing systems to boost, not overshadow, human decision-making, we will advance innovation responsibly while addressing the needs of the industry.
While AI offers tremendous potential for improving access to care, what steps do you think that healthcare systems have to take to make sure equitable AI adoption, especially for underserved populations?
AI adoption in healthcare, especially for underserved populations, requires a deal with data fidelity, diversity, and aggregation. In an industry beset by fragmented data silos, the flexibility to unify and analyze information is crucial. Generative AI has the potential to create life-saving connections by integrating patient records, population health disparities, and propensity models to enhance diagnosis, treatment, and care outcomes. Nonetheless, these advancements rely on using bias-free datasets at scale to avoid perpetuating inequities.
Responsibility doesn’t rest solely with health systems. A unified approach is required, starting with standardizing AI deployment at scale. Sensible, national-level regulations can ensure AI improves our collective healthcare while, at the identical time, must avoid overreach that stifles innovation. Overly restrictive measures risk hampering progress, but clear guidelines on infrastructure, usage, and data governance are essential. These standards might help address bias, mitigate risks, and foster a system where AI elevates care quality for all patients, not only the privileged few.
From a founder’s perspective, what advice would you give to entrepreneurs trying to bring AI into healthcare, considering the unique regulatory and ethical challenges of the industry?
Successful entrepreneurs, particularly in healthcare, must not only challenge the established order but in addition reject the notion that the system is beyond fixing. The opportunities to enhance healthcare are immense, but when you dive deep into the self-imposed complexities and the hurdles the industry presents, the size of the issues can seem overwhelming. True innovation requires resilience—the flexibility to confront these challenges head-on and to stay steadfast in your mission. Your vision to enhance care and outcomes must at all times outweigh the obstacles of scaling technology.
Success in healthcare isn’t just concerning the technology – it’s also about aligning with the needs of patients, providers, and systems, and having the resolve to smile even when the trail gets steep. My advice: Stay adaptable, embrace setbacks, and deal with constructing solutions that solve for immediate, real-world problems.
Looking ahead, what are essentially the most exciting AI advancements you foresee in the subsequent 5–10 years for healthcare, and what specific areas do you think that AI will struggle to penetrate?
Predicting the long run is difficult—it’s uncertain and ever-changing. With 1000’s of corporations exploring AI from every angle, the potential is incredible, but so are the challenges. What we do know, nonetheless, is that AI is poised to fundamentally reshape how care is accessed, delivered, and experienced. One of the vital exciting advancements I foresee over the horizon is actually personalized medicine—tailored treatment plans and unique therapeutic “cocktails” designed to provide each patient exactly what they should heal and thrive.
Healthcare – long hamstrung by fragmented data and outdated systems – is on the point of breaking free. And by connecting patient records, addressing population disparities, and using predictive models, AI has the ability to create life-saving solutions while shifting the main target of healthcare toward greater access and consumer-centric care.
We’re still within the early stages of this journey and navigating unknowns. While we will’t predict the precise breakthroughs ahead, we all know AI is steadily improving how care is delivered—driving higher outcomes for patients and empowering providers. The progress already being made is inspiring, and I’m proud to contribute to this transformation.
