Meet The Disruptors: Reza Amin Of Bastion Health On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Ideate: Always looking for a smarter solution
Learn: Always ready to learn new things
Execute: Not just a planner but a doer
Risk: Ready to take risks but smartly
Persist: Continue in spite of difficulty and opposition
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Reza Amin.
Reza Amin, Ph.D., founded Bastion Health in 2018 with a vision to provide private, simple, accessible, and comprehensive at-home support for men’s care to bring men’s health to a 21-century experience. Reza has more than ten years of experience in Medical Devices and Health Technologies. He has published several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has founded two medical device companies.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
When my wife and I were on our fertility journey and trying to get pregnant, we quickly realized that there was a big disparity in the number of technological solutions available for men and women. There was no male reproductive health technology available to guide me through essential preparations for fatherhood.
My difficulty with finding accessible solutions on male reproductive healthcare was symptomatic of something much larger. The truth is that male reproductive healthcare as a whole subset of medicine is severely underserved. Being a researcher in healthcare technologies and medical devices, I made it my mission to build a solution, and so, my team and I created Bastion Health. As we continue to grow, we expanded our vision to bringing men’s reproductive and prostate health care to a 21-century experience with innovation, technology, and care.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Our goal is to bring men’s health to a 21-century experience, and provide better health care that is comfortable, comprehensive, simple, and accessible. We use deep learning algorithms to provide personalized comprehensive outcome-focused men’s health services using our programmatic treatment experiences and patented diagnostic tools that are centered around men. Our men’s telehealth mobile application works in tandem with our at-home diagnostic kit. You can download our app from the Apple or Google Play store (we are easy to find ― the only men’s fertility and prostate health app there). Once you sign up, you have access to our men’s health treatment programs for fertility and prostate health. On the app, you can schedule a consult with a men’s health expert, get diagnosed, and receive a personalized treatment plan. The plan removes the guesswork and gives you a structured approach to improve your fertility and/or prostate health, and it comes fully loaded. Your prescriptions and follow-ups happen on the app itself, plus your medications and supplements get delivered right to your home.
Our fertility test kits (in FDA trials now) can be ordered through the app or picked up from the pharmacy. You can apply the semen sample (in the comfort and privacy of your home) to the device and within 10 minutes, the results are ready to be analyzed. Using our app, take an image of the color changes on the device, and our deep learning algorithm deciphers those results instantly and sends them back.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Being an entrepreneur is not like having a job. Being an entrepreneur is choosing a lifestyle.
Binary logic is the logic governing electrical systems (a light can be on or off). An electrical and mechanical engineer by training, when first I started my entrepreneurial journey I was looking for a binary answer to the challenges that made decision-making difficult. In the enterprenal world, there is not much certainty. You are building something that does not exist from 0 to 1. Soon I found that even my mentors and advisors might have different suggestions for the next step, there is no one path for success, and as an entrepreneur I need to learn from all different advice and build the path myself. So I needed to choose a lifestyle that fuzzy logic was governing it and not binary logic — to deal with partial truth, where things may range between completely true and completely false.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
Since the day one I had the luxury of having seasoned mentors and advisors with different experiences ranging from:
- Successful entrepreneurs and business owners
- Scientists and futuristic designers
- Academic business advisors
- Investors
There are a lot of ups and downs in every entrepreneur’s journey and there are a lot of decisions that need to be made with all the uncertainties around. So you need advice from different perspectives to make the optimal decision, and therefore we were lucky to have mentors helping us see the challenges from different angles.
At Bastion Health, we built a digital health platform and at-home testing solution that could be applied to different aspects of health. There are a lot of cool applications, but from Day One our mentors and advisors wanted us to laser focus on one opportunity, and warn us when we were getting distracted. That helped us focus on men’s health and become the first specialty telehealth for men’s health on App Store and Google Play.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
By definition, disruptive companies are small companies with fewer resources that successfully challenge established incumbent businesses that focus on providing products and services for their most demanding/profitable customers, by successfully targeting those overlooked segments then gaining a foothold by delivering more suitable functionality. In this process the disruptive companies/products that are user-centric would be considered a good disruptive solution. Companies/products that are not designing their solution around users and users’ needs are not going to get adapted by users in the long run and fail.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
Being an entrepreneur is not like having a job; being an entrepreneur is choosing a lifestyle and in this lifestyle you need to continuously:
Ideate: Always looking for a smarter solution
Learn: Always ready to learn new things
Execute: Not just a planner but a doer
Risk: Ready to take risks but smartly
Persist: Continue in spite of difficulty and opposition
During my entrepreneurial journey, I went through 5 different critical stages. I was looking for a solution to bring men’s health into a 21-century experience. I started learning about users’ needs and the current state of men’s health, and then I started executing the plan/vision that we had to reimagine men’s health. Implementation of any disruptive idea requires risk-taking, therefore entrepreneurs at some point in their journey should make a decision ― take a risk ― to put all their energy, focus and resources into bringing their idea to life. Entrepreneurial journeys and building a product or service have a lot of ups and downs. The only rule for success is persistence. You will face a lot of closed doors, and as an entrepreneur you need to keep knocking every single day to find your way to success.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
We are working on our at-home diagnostic kits for reproductive health and prostate health to be launched in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Our men’s telehealth mobile application is designed to work in tandem with our at-home diagnostic kit, health tracker, and personalized health insights to create a comprehensive ecosystem to improve men’s health from the comfort of their homes.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore is the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to larger markets. Moore explains that the adoption of groundbreaking products can be broken into five segments: innovators (who are the first to adopt), early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards, and the challenge for innovators and marketers is to narrow this chasm and ultimately accelerate adoption across every segment.
At Bastion Health, as a disruptive health tech company, Crossing the Chasm is a great guideline and game plan for us for strategizing our product development, marketing, and sales to scale up and grow our business.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
In today’s world that is changing so quickly, the risk of not taking risk is more than taking any risk. With years of research in Medical Devices, Artificial Intelligence, Microfabrication, and Health Technologies, after completing my Ph.D. in 2018 I could continue my career in academia or industry. I decided to choose a third option, which was not the safest path, but more impactful: I started Bastion Health with a vision to provide private, simple, accessible, and comprehensive at-home support for men’s care. And now after two years of research, product design and development and beta testing, we launched our telehealth service for men’s reproductive health and prostate health.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
The scientific literature on men avoiding medical care is well established. We know the problem. Studies have shown that men use less preventative healthcare services than women, and do not seek immediate treatment for many of their unique health problems. We even know why the problem exists. Masculine norms ― the assumed behavior of toughness and pushing through pain ― motivate men to avoid seeking healthcare services.
The transition to a digital world offers the healthcare and healthtech industries a fresh start. To break through the stigmas men face around engaging proactively with their own health, a more male-centric approach is needed. A movement that encourages men to be more proactive about their health to adapt men’s digital health platforms would improve men’s health
How can our readers follow you online?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/reza-amin/
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Reza Amin Of Bastion Health On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
