For Adelanwa Adesanya, "entrepreneurship has always been a calling and a mission to really solve challenges in society but at the same time, create economic opportunity for other people."

He grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, watching his father's entrepreneurial pursuits meaningfully impact his employees and other people's lives.

Inspired to start his own entrepreneurial journey, Ade decided to take on the leading cause of death in the U.S. — heart disease.

He co-founded Moving Analytics, a healthcare technology company that provides cardiovascular disease management programs “designed to empower people to teach them all the skills they need to have heart-healthy habits."

Ade was moved to this cause after realizing 30-40% of medical expenses could be avoided if healthcare providers got people to adopt healthier lifestyles. It would also cut down on the 40-50% of people who suffer a second heart attack within a year after their first one.

Cardiac rehabs have been around for 80 years, but with high barriers to care: there are few rehab centers close to people's homes or work and for elderly patients who don't live near a large hospital system, transportation is difficult and expensive.

These barriers mean only about 20% of patients end up attending cardiac rehab — but Moving Analytics' virtual care setting eliminated all of these obstacles.

Moving Analytics sits in the middle of patients, doctors, and insurance companies. Ade communicates with each stakeholder in a unique way: he handles patients with a compassionate bedside manner, and he takes a clinically proven stance with doctors, a cost-savings focus with insurance companies, and a partnership approach with healthcare providers.

"At our company, our mantra is empathy guiding expertise," Ade says. From Moving Analytics’ products to its company culture to how the team supports each other, it all comes down to empathy.

Prentice’s Challenger Takeaway👉 Ade’s culture of empathy ties directly into one of the winning challenger personalities from my book - compulsive servitude.

Moving Analytics is overdelivering to the extent that it becomes the very definition of their brand. Ade and his team are going beyond the ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’ to deliver a truly exceptional patient experience.

Featured Challenger👨🏿 Name: Ade Adesanya

⚙️ How he challenges: As the cofounder of Moving Analytics, Ade is challenging the traditional healthcare system with technology that revolutionizes cardiovascular disease management programs and helps give patients their lives back.

🏥 Company: Moving Analytics

💎 Noteworthy: Ade was named Forbes 30 under 30 in Healthcare in 2018.

🔍 Where to find Ade: Twitter | LinkedIn | Website

Challenger Wisdom 💡 It's not always about creating a new concept — fix a failing system"What we're trying to do isn't a new concept — cardiac rehab programs have been around for around 80 years now — but the challenge we're solving for is that less than 20% of patients do cardiac rehab in the U.S. today because the only people that offer cardiac rehab are very large hospital systems. So there are very few rehab centers that are close enough to people's homes or work."

💡 The possibility of being perceived as competition"Our approach really breaks down the traditional barriers to cardiac rehab. And, depending on where you are, some people look at us as a threat and as competition, but some people will come to us and say, 'Hey, this is a capability that can enable me to deliver care to more people with less data and less resources.' So it really depends on where you sit at the table."

💡 Breaking into healthcare tech takes a lot of time and patience"I think one of the biggest things about healthcare tech, too, is that it takes time to really be able to go to market because everything has to be based on science. We've been in business for about six years now and the first four years of that was really building up clinical evidence that our solution 1) is safe for patients, 2) is highly engaging and 3) we actually improved clinical outcomes."

💡 Focusing on one marketing theme per year"Each year, we've picked a [marketing] theme we want to focus on. So, as of today, a lot of our focus right now is in marketing to the health plans. So the health plans, when we get them on board and get them bought in from a business perspective … what they do is go to hospitals in their network that are doing the most heart surgeries and say, 'Hey, we're offering this new service to you to get patients into cardiac rehab.' Then we go sell them to the hospital, talk to the doctors to get them on board and coordinate the delivery of the program with the patient's cardiologist."

💡 How the company's focus has shifted since its inception"Initially, when we started the company, the focus was to build a patient experience that patients will be engaged in. Then we moved into doing studies to show the clinical safety and efficacy of the program, because that's what the cardiologist cares about. … Now, where we are with the business is actually demonstrating the health economics to health plans in terms of, if we get 80% of patients to do this, what does that mean to you in terms of your cost at the end of the year?"

💡 The journey to delivering to patients directly "The other thing we've learned in this journey is that, when we initially started out, we started out like a SaaS solution — with software as a service, where we're trying to sell our platform to the existing rehab centers to enable them to deliver care. What we learned in that approach was that many of them were actually afraid and thought of us as competition so they didn't want to go back to their own leadership and say, 'Hey, we want to implement this platform' because they thought it would disrupt them. We've had to essentially become our own provider and take on the entire delivery so that we can be more direct to the patient."

💡 Understand there isn't always one solution to your customer's problem"At our company, our mantra is empathy guiding expertise. One of the things we learned in the beginning of the company — we took this customer discovery course by Steve Blank, and the whole thesis of customer discovery is you actually spend time listening to your customers and understanding their problem is not one solution. So we've really carried that into the company."

💡 Find something that keeps you going through hard times"It's been a lesson in patience and perseverance and a lot of nerves but at the same time, what's made it rewarding for me personally is walking into a hospital and seeing the patient that's recently had a heart attack and they get put on our program. … A few weeks after, they send us a thank you note talking about how one of our nurses has really been a champion for them. For many of those patients, they're going home feeling rest-assured that if they have an issue or symptom, they can always reach out to one of our coaches … and that really goes a long way — that's always kept me going when we hit very hard times."

Top quotes from the episode (3-5)Quote #1

"For me, entrepreneurship has always been a calling and a mission to really solve challenges in society but at the same time, create economic opportunity for other people."

Quote #2

"Moving Analytics is a technology-enabled provider of cardiovascular disease management programs. And our mission as a company is to empower people to live lives free of cardiovascular disease."

Quote #3

"We feel like when you understand someone else, you then can be of service to them. It's a core guiding principle that guides everything we do at Moving Analytics."

Quote #4

"I'm very passionate about supporting entrepreneurs of color because, like myself and like my dad, I see the impact we can make in our own communities and in our own organizations."