Jeff Fisher Interview

In Pathologists Overseas' first podcast, PO's President, Dr. Tim Amukele interviews Jeff Fisher. Jeff is the Founder and CEO of Comp Pro Med, the makers of the electronic Laboratory Information System (LIS) called Polytech, which has had an outsized role in labs worldwide.  Jeff and Comp Pro Med generously donate their LIS, in collaboration with PO, to labs in low-and-middle income countries (LMICs). 

Transcript

Jeff Fisher Interview 

[00:00:00] Tim: Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the Lab Voices Podcast from Pathologists Overseas. This is Tim Amukele President at Pathologists Overseas. Lab Voices is a new podcast that highlights and celebrates the voices of Histopathologists and laboratorians from around the world. We want to shine a spotlight on the work, lives, and the stories of laboratories and laboratory professionals from Blantyre, Malawi to Blantyre, Scotland, and everywhere in between.

We also want to focus on the great things people are doing to move the field forward, especially in places that are challenging. In keeping with this, today I am interviewing Jeff Fisher, the founder and CEO of Comp ProMED, the makers of the information system called Polytech, which has had an outsized role in labs worldwide. For example, Polytech was selected for rollout throughout Ethiopia.

They were also chosen for the US funded $15 billion HIV AIDS initiative. And last but not least, Jeff has generously donated Polytech to pathologists overseas for decades now. So, this LIS is running in dozens of labs around the world. It is a pleasure to be chatting with you, Jeff. Welcome.

[00:01:25] Jeff: Hi Tim. 

[00:01:26] Tim: So this is, this is exciting. You are our first podcast. 

[00:01:31] Jeff: Who are, who are we? 

[00:01:33] Tim: We is Pathologists Overseas. 

[00:01:34] Jeff: Oh, cool. Good, good. 

[00:01:37] Tim: Yeah. This is a new endeavor to, to talk to people who've done work overseas and just see what the experience was like and their motivation and all that good stuff.

[00:01:48] Jeff: Good, good deal. I'm happy to participate. Awesome. Awesome. 

[00:01:52] Tim: Alright. So, Welcome to the Pathologists Overseas podcast. As I said earlier, you are our first interviewee. Um, can you tell us what your name is? 

[00:02:03] Jeff: Sure. It's Jeff Fisher and I'm the CEO of Comp Pro Med incorporated, the manufacturer of Laboratory Information Systems software. 

[00:02:12] Tim: Awesome. Awesome. You just answered the second question. Um, also tell us about what Comp Pro Med does.

[00:02:19] Jeff: Uh, well, we're a software development, deployment, support, and logistics company for clinical laboratory, and anatomic pathology laboratories, uh, mostly in the United States, but we have lots of international customers as well.

[00:02:36] Tim: Okay. 

[00:02:36] Jeff: So, what we do, if you, if you don't know, is we write software to automate all the functions of a clinical laboratory or a pathology laboratory.

Um, everything from the management of the laboratory and, workflows to processing of specimens, instruction to interface equipment and machines, the collection of that data, the quality control of that data, and the publication, and data basing of the patient reports and patient results. 

[00:03:07] Tim: Oh, that's, that's awesome. So, um, give us a sense of , I guess without divulging any company secrets, the sense of the scope of what Comp Pro Med does in terms of like a number of clients you service or different number of countries you're working in or something like.

[00:03:24] Jeff: Sure. Okay. Well, 50,000 foot overview of Comp Pro Med is...

[00:03:27] Tim: Whoa. 

[00:03:28] Jeff: Um, yeah. We have just over a hundred or so clients in the United States. We have a lot of clients in the Philippines. We have several clients in Canada. We have odds and end clients, in Southeast Asia, uh, and in Africa, as you're aware, through Pathologists Overseas.

 Most of these third world countries can't really afford, you know, first world laboratory information system software that ranges anywhere from 20,000 to $500,000. So, you know, we donate a lot of software and try to contain and donate time to help them deploy, you know, work out their workflows and deploy these systems and, get 'em, get 'em up and running. And then, hopefully they are able to service their patient populations, better in terms of quantity and quality of, laboratory, services. 

[00:04:22] Tim: Yeah, I, that's been my experience. Just so you know, I've been a volunteer with the Pathologists Overseas for going on 10 years now. 

And so I've gotten to see poly on the ground, from the other side, and it certainly does. It's just an incredible gift. It just, it helps improve quality by just making everything more, much more systematic. And, uh, patients now have reports that look professional and, and every, if, if they lose the, the little slip of paper that comes out of the computer, they can always come back and get another print out.

And so it's really, the impact is really great. So, I wanted to just dig a little deeper. Um, I know that, so poly, your laboratory information system is currently working in, as far as I know, at least 25 labs in Ethiopia, I think maybe more, and a whole bunch more in Bhutan, and several others in Eritrea, Nigeria and many other countries.

And these are the countries I'm naming are the ones where I know you've donated your software through Pathologists Overseas, but I know you've also then donated outside of Pathologists Overseas. Um, how did this all happen? How did you, how did you start donating software worth, you know, tens of thousands of dollars for free? Yeah, what was the story behind that? 

[00:05:38] Jeff: Uh, well, there's not much of a story, you know. I came out of the laboratory, local laboratory here, private clinical laboratory and, and, you know, doing, this, running a company, creating software for the lab... 

[00:05:51] Tim: Sorry, to interrupt you. What were you doing in the lab before you created the company? 

[00:05:57] Jeff: I worked for a private reference laboratory here, uh, local regional laboratory called Redwood Medical Laboratory that later sold and became the largest toxicology lab in the world, Redwood Toxicology Lab. They still are. 

[00:06:10] Tim: Okay. 

[00:06:10] Jeff: Um, they're still around and, uh, the guy I worked with, Bob Mount over there. He took portion or, or percentage of the sale cuz he was a part owner of that laboratory as were, uh, a couple of local pathologists at our local hospital. You know, they were the directors and part owners and he took his money and started Redwood Toxicology when they sold Redwood Medical Laboratory off to, um, it was MetPath Laboratory at the time, which is now Quest. Because Quest bought them up somewhere along the line. But I left there. Yeah, I left there. And, just prior to all of that occurring, we had started a software development company, this company, Comp Pro Med.

[00:06:50] Tim: Just computer professionals in medicine?

[00:06:53] Jeff: Yes, that's right. Yeah. It's an acronym short for computer professionals in medicine. Yeah.

And so, yeah, we hired programmers to, to write code and a lot of it was, the motivation was for you know, our own purposes. This is, this is a long time ago, back in 19 80, 19 81, when the original IBM PC was introduced to the world.

So, you know, we saw the value of that PC and what it could do in a laboratory or what it could do for a, a modern laboratory. So, we hired a programmer. We ended up having several programmers, and they started writing code. And we were using it, and then we sold a copy or two to a couple of hospitals, local hospitals, and began working with them to, you know, continue developing it, and flushing it out. This was way before anybody else is, before PCs, this was the mini computer era. It was an ending of the mini computer age. 

[00:07:46] Tim: Wow. 

[00:07:47] Jeff: Anyway, when the lab was sold, I took the software and Comp Pro Med, and I spun it off as a separate organization and this is what I've been doing ever since. And that was like 1984 or 5. I've forgotten exactly when. But uh, yeah, so that's what I've been doing ever since then. And so, back to your original question, we did get involved with lots of people doing this both nationally and uh, internationally. Boehringer Mannheim had a worldwide distribution, exclusive distribution right, for the Hitachi chemical analyzer, which was the only real alternative back in those days. Their flagship analyzer, the Hitachi 7 0 5 to what was, the predicate big bruiser in the industry, which was, uh, Baker's CentrifiChem, the centrifugal analyzer that was developed by Union Carbide for the Gemini shop. Believe it or not, and yeah, I know. 

Oh, yeah, yeah. I sell was the, you know, the SMAC 12 and later SMAC 15, 18, the sequence analyzers. That was the big, you know, chemical analyzer in the industry at the time. And if everybody else had a, you know, a centrifugal analyzer like the Union Carbide or later Baker Industries device. 

So, anyway, when they sunsetted it, there was really no chemical analyzer to compete with Hitachi 7 0 5. And it was a great random access. It was the first random access analyzer.

[00:09:15] Tim: Okay.

[00:09:16] Jeff: And so it was a big deal. The problem with the 7 0 5 s is it didn't produce a charitable patient report and the Union Carbide's CentrifiChem did. And so it was kind of a step back in that regard. And everybody and their brother was clamoring for a report. Well, we were the only company. 

There was one other small company that had interfaced the original Hitachi 705s. They had serial port in the back and we plugged into it and deciphered what was coming out of the damn thing. And, you know, turned electronic data into a patient record in what is now Polytech. And we're able then to turn out a report. 

So, yeah, so lots of people bought it, yeah. So it was after that part. In fact, we eventually OEMed the product. We let Boehringer Mannheim sell it under their own trade name, but it was our product, and we owned all the rights to it. And they sold it as an adjunct to their chemistry analyzer. 

Uh, and we did that with Boehringer Mannheim, United States. We did that with Boehringer Mannheim Canada. We did that with Boehringer Mannheim Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. 

[00:10:19] Tim: This is so interesting. 

[00:10:20] Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. So, we got placed all over the place and, you know, they were a difficult company to work with, to say the least. We were young and, still had pie, pie eyed about all the good we could do in the world.

And, and here we are hooked up with this monolithic German company that, you know, would mow the competition over to get to the dollars. We kinda learned the ropes the hard way and the business end of the model from a harsh task master, I should say, so put it that way. 

But, so we, we did learn It and eventually they were bought out by Roche, as you know, you probably know that part of the history. 

[00:10:59] Tim: Yeah. 

[00:10:59] Jeff: And yeah, we continued to, you know, manufacture and develop and forward develop our product and sell it. And, you know, I got to see lots of places in the world that would benefit by a laboratory information system.

And, by then PCs were pretty well established in the world, so it just didn't, didn't make a lot of sense to me to not give them copies of our software, at least in the hopes that they could figure out how to use it and better their own lots in life. 

[00:11:24] Tim: Mm-hmm. Uh, How did you justify making this gift? Since I happen to know that the early days were not easy for you as they're not easy for a lot of businesses. 

[00:11:32] Jeff: Um, no. 

[00:11:33] Tim: How did you get to the point where you decided that that donating your system to many of these countries was worth the sacrifice because it's, it's not just a donation, right? The LIS donation is not a one-time gift. You get calls for updates and other supports from the various laboratories. 

[00:11:51] Jeff: Uh, yes. 

[00:11:52] Tim: Yeah. How'd you handle that process? For example, Bhutan? Yeah. They just reached out to you like last week and the initial donation was 12 years ago or maybe 15 years ago.

[00:12:02] Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:12:04] Tim: So, yeah. How has that process been for you? How do you make it work with the rest of your business? 

[00:12:09] Jeff: Well, you just do it. I don't, I don't know. You know, there's no master plan. We're a small company, so no, there's no real master plan here. You do what you can as you can, and like most people in the world do, you put your pants on one leg at a time, you know, you just deal with it on a every day as it comes basis and, you know, know that it'll all work out, correctly in the long run. You just have to believe that, you really do have to believe that. 

Um, so yeah, we just do the best we can as we can. You know, it doesn't mean that we don't push back, like, you know, cause some of it doesn't feel good sometimes, you know, when you donate and kind of like what happened in some of the places in Africa where lots of bureaucratics got involved

[00:12:49] Tim: they'll go, they'll go un mentioned where, um, yeah, it didn't, didn't go well because of bureaucratic reasons or people didn't understand it or people were, felt they were in competition or whatever. Yeah. 

[00:12:59] Jeff: Yeah, yeah. I don't fully understand it myself cause I'm not very politically, you know, astute and I don't have a lot of patience, nor sympathy for the political side of the equation, of course.

But, uh, but yeah, you know, politics is a, is part of the real world, unfortunately, and very often it steps right into what's going on. And there's not a lot you can do about it. You just roll with the punch and you just keep plugging away and don't let it deter you.

You know, it's just sometimes it's a slap in the face, but you know, in the real big picture, Tim, we're all gonna be dead pretty damn soon, sooner than we hope. And none of that other stuff matters. What really matters is how if you left the world a better place or a worse place than we found it when we entered it.

And that's it. Nothing greater than that. Yeah. 

[00:13:47] Tim: Great. I think I might close with that one. 

[00:13:52] Jeff: Oh, thank you, Tim. I appreciate the opportunity to do this. Alright, sir. You take care. 

[00:13:57] Tim: You too. 

[00:13:57] Jeff: Bye. 

[00:13:58] Tim: Okay, bye. Thanks. Bye.

That was Jeff Fisher. Thank you for listening to the Lab Voices podcast. I am your host, Tim Amukele. To find out more about Pathologists Overseas and our projects, visit www.pathologistsoverseas.com and follow us on social media. Podcast edited and produced by Taylor Harris. Theme music by Tim Amukele.