David Fischel: CEO of Steriotaxis (Raise the Line)

Hi, I'm Shivani. Thanks for checking out our raise the line interview series.

In which me and my cohost osmosis chief Medical Officer Dr Rishi Desai explore how to strengthen our healthcare system with some amazing leaders in medicine, technology, education and government and they have some great advice for people starting careers in healthcare as well.

I hope you'll watch these highlights and then go listen to the full podcast interview wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Shuan in today on RA line.

I'm happy to be joined by David Fishel, who's the CEO and chairman of the Board for Stereotaxis, which provides robotic technologies for treating cardiac arrhythmias among other interventional procedures.

Before Stereotaxis. David had a long career as an investor and research analyst for healthcare and life science companies.

So how does an investor go from uh obviously investing and look at the the healthcare uh industry to then uh being ceo of a of a highly advanced robotics company.

So II worked for, for many years prior to coming to Stereotaxis as an investor of medical device companies. Um and as an investor, we were always passive fundamental investors and companies.

Uh so we would research the universe of medical device companies out there uh try to find hidden gems uh companies that had the potential to very positively impact medicine but were undiscovered by others.

And um and as part of that searching, we came across stereotaxis and they had developed a highly uh futuristic technology that actually worked in the real world and that had very good clinical data but had um for for business reasons, had kind of lost its way and and was almost going out of business.

And um and kind of, and we were intrigued by, by the technology and by the clinical data enough uh that we decided not, we decided to, to step out of our comfort zone uh to become actually active investors.

So we invested in the company, gave it capital to pay off its debt, uh gave it capital to invest in innovation and um and, and took board seats and, and very shortly after that investment, I stepped in uh also to operate the company and uh and, and that, that's the transition from wearing purely the investor hat to wearing both the investor and the the operator hat our audience, our current and future healthcare professionals uh at osmosis.

What advice would you give to somebody considering a career as a healthcare professional, especially given all that's happened this year with COVID and, and then, and moving forward medicine is intrinsically interesting.

Uh It's an intrinsically rewarding profession. So it requires a lot of effort, a lot of uh time, uh a lot of kind of um dedication to go into, but it's an intrinsically rewarding one, I think both because it's a, it's fascinating, human biology is fascinating.

Um and, and because kind of uh it's rewarding to, to treat disease, um uh I think kind of coming from the, from the industry side, what I'd say is that uh technologies only get improved due to the learning and the interaction between scientists, developers and good physicians.

If you have the kind of interest in it, it's great to kind of to be involved to try to kind of see how to put on like an investor.

Ha how do you think your field of medicine is going to evolve over the next 1015 in years? Right?

Try to kind of uh uh find the innovators that are working on those types of technologies and then try to kind of handle them down that path.

And it really kind of real progress only happens when the two work together in a, in a good fashion. Thanks for watching this preview of Raised Line to hear the full interview, check out all of our podcasts and subscribe to the series.

Please go to osmosis.org/raised Line podcast or listen wherever you get your podcasts.