Parijat Bhattacharjee, Founder and CEO, Equipo Health

I’m Parijat Bhattacharjee, CEO and founder of Equipo Health. I’ve been in healthcare for over 15 years. Before starting Equipo Health, I co-founded two startups focused on continuous care in sleep and pulmonary diagnostics. Through that experience, I realized it’s not enough to just diagnose patients—we need to support them with continuous care, offering valuable insights to both patients and providers throughout their health journey.

That’s how Equipo Health began about seven years ago. Value-based care became more relevant back then, especially for physicians and primary care practices. We saw a niche opportunity to build a platform beyond just reports and dashboards—we aimed to solve real problems for providers, especially burnout. Providers face time pressure, lower reimbursements, and heavy documentation—managing care gaps, risk, and more. We realized that neither clinical nor non-clinical staff alone could handle all this, so we created a holistic, simplified platform that integrates real-time data from multiple sources to support better care—not just at the clinic but also at home.

Our platform covers multiple areas—what we call the “Circle of Care.” It starts with identifying patient risk, creating and executing care plans, and engaging through touchpoints like telehealth, screenings, remote monitoring, and referrals. Then, we track and measure outcomes for each patient to see how care is performed.

We designed Equipo to be EMR-agnostic—it sits on top of any EMR and continuously generates actionable insights for providers so they can focus on care, not paperwork. The goal is to improve patient outcomes and engagement. There’s a metric called Patient Activation Measure (PAM), which ranges from 1 to 4. Level 1 means the patient believes healthcare is solely the doctor’s job, while Level 4 means the patient takes shared responsibility for their health. Our goal is to move people from 1 to 4, empowering them to take ownership of their well-being.

To sum it up, Equipo Health is a healthcare CRM platform that manages all aspects of the care cycle—from office visits to home care and even hospice and palliative care. We aggregate data, run analytics, and provide insights—not just static reports—at every stage of care, whether the patient is at a clinic, hospital, or home.

Absolutely. All our clients are in the U.S., and we currently operate in New York, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, Illinois, Arkansas, and Puerto Rico. Our clients include physician practices, hospitals, and extensive primary care groups. We provide a full suite of services to help coordinate care and manage patients efficiently, mainly through automation that reduces manual work.

In Florida, for example, we work with Sanitas Health, one of the largest healthcare organizations in the U.S. and South America. Sanitas processes about 50,000 referrals a month across 27 primary care centers statewide. In Puerto Rico, we support MCS (Medical Card System), the second-largest payer, by managing their 24/7 nursing line to assist with symptom checks, triage, and care navigation.

We also support independent physician associations (IPAs), which are still essential despite consolidation in primary care. We help them with gap closure and risk management—key priorities for their success.

Beyond analytics, we’ve ventured into AI development with five models in collaboration with hospitals. These include:

• Malnutrition Detection: Often overlooked, especially during hospital stays. We use data beyond traditional bedside screenings to identify risks and prevent readmissions.
• Suicide Prevention: We monitor 36 data features using machine learning and natural language processing to assess suicide risk.
• Clinical Deterioration Detection: For emergency patients, we track lab results every few hours to detect deterioration and send alerts to clinicians.
• Fall Risk and Risk Scoring: In primary care, we review ICD codes, discharge notes, and documentation to catch coding gaps and missed complex cases. This practice gives a 360° patient view, especially for those treated across multiple centers, helping in risk-based contracts.

A major success story is with Sanitas. They faced inefficiencies in their referral process. Previously, it took at least 10–12 minutes per referral: post-visit, staff would manually request pre-authorization, contact the patient, and find a provider. We automated this entire flow. Now, we instantly receive visit data, generate the pre-authorization, identify the nearest in-network provider, and notify both the patient and specialist via mobile. Once the visit is complete, consultation notes are shared with Sanitas providers, ensuring seamless care. This closed-loop system improves efficiency and care continuity.

Yes. One key message I want to share is that healthcare has become more complex—for both patients and providers. Today’s distractions—technology, social media, and fast-paced lifestyles—mean people often don’t prioritize their health or rely solely on doctors to “fix” them. But true wellness requires active patient engagement.

For example, if I’m prescribed physical therapy and pain medication but ignore them, that pain could become chronic. People often delay care due to cost, time, or access, but with patient activation, outcomes improve. Like we track deliveries on our phones, we should be able to track healthcare events—appointments, tests, treatments—in real-time. Unfortunately, healthcare data is still siloed, making access hard.

For providers, the challenge is different. They face documentation overload, payer pressure, and information gaps, while patients come in saying, “Google says I have this…” These circumstances distract providers from delivering care for which they spent years training. They should focus on treatment, not paperwork or coding.

Equipo’s goal is to bridge these gaps—to share data, provide insights, and reduce administrative burden so providers can do what they do best: care for patients. Without this shift, healthcare will only get more fragmented and inefficient. We believe better coordination between patients and providers will drive system-wide efficiency.