Beyond the Prize: Reetam Ganguli and Elythea’s Work Still Focused and Driven After Receiving the Patient Safety Technology Challenge Grand Award
Type: Profile
Focus Area: Patient Safety
Note: JHF is launching a new Q&A series spotlighting winners of the Patient Safety Technology Challenge, reconnecting to see how their innovations have evolved since receiving the award. These conversations offer an inside look at the progress, impact, and future potential of technologies advancing patient safety.
Reetam Ganguli is a rising force in healthcare innovation, driven by a passion for patient safety and transformative technology. As the founder and CEO of Elythea, a pioneering company leveraging AI to reduce maternal mortality and improve pregnancy outcomes, Ganguli is aiming to reshape how care is delivered in one of the most vulnerable areas of medicine.
He is a previous winner of the Patient Safety Technology Challenge-sponsored prize at the Fowler Global Social Innovation Challenge at the University of San Diego and St. Thomas University in 2023 and received the 2025 Patient Safety Technology Challenge Grand Award in the Growth Category, which was awarded at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. His vision and leadership are featured in the documentary The Pitch: Patient Safety's Next Generation, which highlights trailblazing innovators working to make health care safer and more equitable.
In this Q&A, Ganguli discusses his journey, the evolution of Elythea, and his mission to create a healthcare system where every patient—especially every mother—receives the care they deserve.
Q: Explain your innovation in your own words.
A: Elythea uses machine learning models to understand which pregnant patients are high risk at the point of care to enable earlier intervention and preventive care. We've recently seen success in partnering with Medicaid systems and Medicaid managed care organizations to use voice AI technology to reach out to all patients, uncover which patients are high risk, and dynamically pair them with appropriate clinical care and social resources.
Q: What specific patient safety issue or personal experience inspired your innovation?
A: When I was an academic researcher at Brown, I would notice that a large proportion of our pregnant patients would deal with complications that were by and large preventable. It was frustrating to see how clinical care was fundamentally reactive to these morbidities instead of being proactive. A lot of the standard of care is what you would consider "damage control" due to the scarce clinical resources that we have and the difficulty that rural patients face in having reliable access to clinical care.
For example, for a case of preeclampsia with severe features, clinical teams remediate that by inducing an early delivery, or in cases of severe postpartum hemorrhage, clinical teams remediate that by using tamponade and oxytocin. But at the end of the day, these are just reactive damage control after the complication has occurred and hurt the patient and/or baby, as opposed to proactive means of predicting risk for these complications and preventing them eight months before they even happen. That proactive type of care where care teams are almost peeking into the future to inform their current decisions is the course that medicine should be headed in.
Q: What are the major challenges you’ve faced and are facing during development, and how did you (or will you) overcome them?
A: One of the biggest challenges we faced initially was in our go-to-market sales motion. I started this as a complete novice with virtually no knowledge of health care as a business, and no amount of knowledge of academic literature could have prepared me for the sentiments, challenges, and priorities of the business world. A lot of our initial journey was trying to understand who really buys the solution, how much they are willing to pay for it, and do they see it in their list of their top two or three priorities?
One of the biggest mistakes we initially made was doing a lot of our user interviews with physicians. While this was paramount for developing a solution that was clinically sound and had clinical utility, it was only about 10% of the battle. 90% of the battle was then translating this into something that the administration wou1ld be willing to pay for and then understanding who the decision makers were and what the decision-making process was with each respective health system. As we went through this, we realized an unfortunate truth in the majority of hospitals that are currently fee-for-service. There is limited financial incentive for proactive and preventive care as it limits the charge for services rendered and can actually be counterintuitive to top-line profit, even in value-based systems.
There is an urgent need for profitability, specifically for maternal health solutions, as obstetrics is frequently a cash flow negative of the hospital, so there is reluctance in adopting solutions that will take 9 to 12 months or more for a financial ROI. We were able to overcome this by focusing really deeply on which entity has the most financial risk for the highest risk patients. Unsurprisingly, some of the highest risk maternal patients end up being on Medicaid since they're low income and rural populations. Medicaid managed care organizations are a really unique part of the healthcare ecosystem in that they are at financial risk for these patients and often see maternal health as one of their top priorities because they are graded specifically on their maternal health outcomes, and this uniquely impacts how much money they make. Furthermore, the entire pregnancy process is fairly expensive, so preventive care means a higher profit margin for these companies. I personally hate thinking of pregnancy and maternal health in terms of profit margin, as most of my academic background was in thinking very deeply about how you can have better culturally centered care or evidence-based initiatives to improve access, but it is an incredibly important part of scaling. This also meant that we didn’t integrate into health systems; we would work directly with Medicaid managed care organizations that took financial risk for managing these Medicaid patients directly.
Q: How will you integrate into current health systems?
A: : My initial assumption was that since these organizations are financially liable and exist solely to manage these patients, if you have a large patient pool of about 100,000 patients, the average Medicaid managed care organization is able to contact roughly 90% of patients regularly, and stratifying based on risk at that point can help them focus on who to target. The reality I was met with was that the vast majority of patients actually remain unengaged and are extremely difficult to contact. The actual numbers are closer to only 20%–30% of patients being actively engaged and able to be contacted, whereas 70%–80% remain unengaged and uncontacted.
Given that almost all of our patients are high risk in some capacity, can you actively reach them and get them care when they weren't going to pursue it otherwise, or weren't aware that it existed?
We were able to bypass integration almost entirely because these health plans operate on using member lists, which come in spreadsheet format and contain information on all the members they need to reach alongside their engagement status. We configured our back-end AI system to be able to read these exact lists that they use and use voice AI to reach out to them to contact patients throughout all times of the day through multiple modalities in multiple languages to be able to actually reach them and guide them to care.
Within these calls, we also do health risk assessments to uncover deep food or housing insecurity and proactively deal with these social needs to help lower risk for our patients. In many cases, we're connecting patients who haven't had postpartum care with a provider to get much-needed postpartum screening, and these often uncover undiagnosed complications. Or in many cases, we're getting prenatal care to patients who haven't had prenatal care yet, and uncovering complications proactively that clinical teams are able to manage patients who they would not have seen until a life-threatening complication occurred six months later.
Reetam Ganguli and Karen Feinstein at the Grand Awards at CES.
Q: How has the Patient Safety Technology Challenge, The Pitch, and the Grand Awards influenced the trajectory of your innovation?
A: The Patient Safety Technology Challenge and Grand Awards were helpful for funding our research and the other clinical trials, where we were able to demonstrate direct clinical evidence of our solution. This meant that we were able to have the most rigorous evidence-based randomized controlled trial to show potential partners to substantiate our solution, which was able to fuel adoption, specifically when serving patients of one of the largest managed care Medicaid plans in the country that's a Fortune 25 company and engaging with larger plans that are Fortune 10 plans and more. We're incredibly grateful for the support from the Patient Safety Technolog Challenge and the Jewish Healthcare Foundation and the incredible reception that the film has brought. One of our mentors directly found us through the film, and the film was helpful in establishing our ethos and credibility, which helped us get introductions to get in front of the CEOs of some of the largest health plans in the country and began the contracting process to work with their Medicaid population.
Q: What is next for Elythea?
A: We are continuing to scale with Medicaid managed care organizations across the country and serve as many pregnant patients as possible. We've recently been expanding beyond just the maternal population to see if we can be a general solution for all Medicaid and even Medicare patients to help our most vulnerable citizens get access to potentially life-saving care before they have a fatal event.
One of the biggest bottlenecks in the healthcare ecosystem is engaging patients, alleviating their critical needs, navigating changes, and helping route them to preventive care. Currently, this is almost done entirely on a call center model, where either nurses or outsourced call centers are calling numbers one by one, which understandably misses the vast majority of patients.
We are trying to use an AI-native approach where we can reach over 9 times as many patients, over 20 times faster. Our early clinical results demonstrate that we are over 9 times more effective at engaging Medicaid patients than these traditional call centers or clinical teams reaching out in predominantly high-risk Black/Brown/Indigenous communities.
