What we talked about
Harry Soza traces a three-decade arc of health-tech innovation:from pre-internet pharmacy transactions to AI-assisted, patient-reported data that keeps people healthy between visits. He founded Preferred Solutions in the 1980s, adapting credit-card authorization technology to enable the first real-time formulary checks at the pharmacy counter and showing that simple peer comparisons could shift physician prescribing within weeks. He then built Resolution Health, which stitched together messy claims, pharmacy, and provider identifiers to surface “care gaps,” sending insurer-backed member reports that improved doctor–patient conversations and even exposed miscoding and fraud.
Show notes
Harry Soza built the first company to run a real-time prescription drug benefit transaction:in the 1980s, before the internet existed, using the same phone-line technology that powered credit card authorization at airline clubs. Thirty years and two successful exits later, he’s now applying AI and smartphone cameras to keep patients healthy between the four-to-six-month gaps between doctor visits.
What we covered
- Preferred Solutions, Soza’s first company, pioneered what is now routine at every pharmacy counter: checking whether a drug is covered by insurance, what the patient owes, and whether an alternative is available:all in real time over phone lines, with no internet. He describes it as adapting proven Visa and MasterCard transaction technology to a healthcare setting that nobody else had tackled.
- Resolution Health tackled the “master patient index” problem:the messy reality that the same person might have four different ID numbers across their hospital, doctor, pharmacy, and insurer. Soza’s team would link these records by birth date and name to build a complete claims picture, and in doing so uncovered fraud: a podiatrist who could only get paid for certain services if a patient had a diabetes diagnosis was coding 14 patients as diabetic when none of them were.
- Resolution mailed four-page pamphlets to patients showing their last 25 healthcare transactions, then flagged care gaps:things being done twice, treatments causing side effects treated by another doctor, or specialist care needed but unavailable. A Wall Street Journal article featured a patient who brought one such letter to her doctor; it turned out two doctors had each assumed the other was handling the same drug.
- At CAREMINDr, Soza argues that telling patients they need to “understand” their condition is the wrong approach. What works, and what his American Heart Association-recognized study confirmed, is giving patients a small number of specific, actionable prompts:“does food taste metallic?”:that surface meaningful data without requiring medical literacy.
- A 30-second smartphone selfie can now measure blood pressure, heart rate variability, cardiac stress, and parasympathetic index. Soza describes how combining this kind of passive biometric data with structured daily check-in questions creates a “motion picture” of a patient’s health that AI can analyze to alert clinicians before something goes wrong:in contrast to the 20-minute snapshot a doctor currently works from every few months.
- Half of all US adults have high blood pressure, and nearly half of those are in what Soza calls the red zone:dangerous levels. He contends that 60-70% of them could move to the green zone quickly if they follow their care plan, and that removing even half the resulting heart attacks and strokes would be worth enormous amounts to insurers under value-based care models, which he sees as the payment shift accelerated by the pandemic.
About Harry Soza
Harry Soza is the founder and CEO of CAREMINDr, a health tech company focused on remote patient monitoring and chronic disease management. He previously founded Preferred Solutions and Resolution Health, both of which were acquired by insurance companies, and holds engineering degrees from Notre Dame and Stanford.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrysoza
- Website: https://caremindr.com
Episode 27 of the PreVetted Podcast.