Making healthcare safer

Nate Mazonson is the CEO of Alara and has spent his professional career both operating and investing in mission-oriented, data-driven companies. Prior to creating Alara, Nate was a co-founder of unicorn Plenty, which he helped grow to a team of 180 employees. Investors in Plenty include the venture offices of Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, and Softbank’s Vision Fund. At Plenty, Nate contributed to the operations, management, strategy, business development, legal, finance, and team expansion efforts. Prior to this operating experience, Nate was an Associate Investment Director at Cambridge Associates, where he advised client endowment investment portfolios worth a combined $3.5B. Nate graduated with honors from Dartmouth College and holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Rebecca Smith-Bindman is Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Obstetrics Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, and a member of The Philip R Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California San Francisco and has led the Radiology Outcomes Research Lab for 25 years. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Engineering, attended UCSF Medical School, and completed her Radiology, Epidemiology and Biostatistics training at UCSF.

She has authored landmark studies that document profound variation in the radiation doses that are used for CT and that quantify the harm of radiation as an environmental carcinogen. Dr Smith-Bindman has also published standards and interventions that can minimize these harms. She has testified before the US Congress and FDA, worked with leading national and international professional societies, and communicated with media to help focus attention on the need to improve the safety of imaging.  

Dr. Smith-Bindman recently led a large multi-institutional epidemiological project focused on medical radiation funded by the NIH. This project collected radiation dose metrics associated with CTs from over 160 hospitals in the US, Europe, and Asia, and demonstrated that providing educational feedback to physicians and hospitals results in lower doses.

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Dr. Marc Kohli is a product and technical advisor to Alara and the Medical Director of Imaging Informatics for UCSF Health. He is also the Associate Chair of Clinical Informatics for the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging.

In his role at UCSF, Marc recently led a PACS replacement project valued over $9 million. Dr. Kohli also leads the Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA)/Enterprise Imaging strategy for UCSF, including cardiology, ophthalmology, and point-of-care imaging for several departments.

Dr. Kohli has an extensive record of informatics service, including Chair of the Board of Directors for the Society of Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM). He also participates on the Radiology Informatics Committee (RIC) for RSNA as the co-chair of the joint RSNA/ACR Committee on Common Data Elements (CDE) (http://radelement.org).

Dr. Kohli completed his medical training and residency at the University of Indiana

Dr. Simon Rascovsky is the chief technology officer for Alara Imaging. In addition to being a trained Radiologist and Biomedical Engineer, Dr. Rascovsky has spent his career building and operationalizing tele-radiology and medical informatics technology companies, with extensive experience in medical imaging software development, healthcare product management, digital imaging deployments, healthcare IT systems and standards, and medical imaging edge-to-cloud platforms.

Prior to Alara, Dr. Rascovsky was Director of Informatics at Nucleus Health, which was acquired by Change Healthcare. While there, Simon led the creation of a data analytics pipeline to provide advanced insights to the teleradiology services division of the company, capturing over 100,000 data points per day to drive operational decisions.

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