Charles Boicey Co-founder and CIO, Clearsense
I ran the trauma unit at LA County USC Medical Center for about 15 years.
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Updated November 2026. This was first published on 4 August 2022. The idea is the same. Any number below is what the original piece said then. It is not a new count. This is a record of a conversation from that day. No new quotes were added.
Key takeaways
- I consider myself a clinician technologist.
- I ran the trauma unit at LA County USC Medical Center for about 15 years.
- During that time, my research was bound around medical informatics, medical data, and biomedical engineering.
Let’s start with your clinical and research background #
I consider myself a clinician technologist. I ran the trauma unit at LA County USC Medical Center for about 15 years. During that time, my research was bound around medical informatics, medical data, and biomedical engineering. My research interests then were extracting data from physiological monitors, ventilators, infusion pumps, and different diagnostic modalities.
I went to Steven’s Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, to understand new and emerging technologies. I started applying these technologies from a healthcare perspective, leading to adopting electronic medical records in other systems. I always had trouble with enormous data sets working in relational models where queries would run forever, and they would die off. I found that large clinical data sets, genomic data sets, image data sets didn’t operate well within the confidence of technologies we had during 2006-2007.
What are the motivations that led you to start Clearsense? #
These cool companies were up-and-coming Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and Google, which was indexing the internet. A LinkedIn profile is very similar to a pathology report, oncology report, or a patient’s history and physical fitness. If you look at a Twitter message, it’s very much like a laboratory message sent through a live stream. Then most importantly, Facebook has a temporal aspect to its underlying architecture. Healthcare data is delivered episodically over time. Your Facebook postings are created and presented over time, so I can go back and look at what happened in the 1900s or 2021, very similar in healthcare. So, I got to think that I have something because I can queer LinkedIn and could have billions of records and get back to them in half a second. I could do the same in the Twitter and Facebook environments.
I reached out to these companies and queried if can they help me bring these technologies to healthcare?
Don’t protect yourself in a box; you might be required to continually re-platform every few years.
I met some people in Florida that were very successful in EMR implementations, and they knew that data analytics and health care were going to be the next thing. We collaborated and in 2015, it was the birth of Clearsense.
Could you talk about your mission and how did you implement it with the Clearsense platfor #
There’s a quote by Thomas Edison, “The doctor of the future will give no medication. will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, diet and in the causes and prevention of disease”.
It’s my mission to ensure that emerging technologies get applied in healthcare to benefit the industry. Before I embarked on any commercial venture, I had a condition: We have to develop Clearsense affordably. We were targeting small academic centers and smaller city hospitals that have to wait a lot to adopt the technologies considering the higher costs. We wanted to ensure that healthcare technology is evenly distributed. There’s really no reason we can do this inexpensively. We didn’t want Clearsense to be profit-centric.
We went forward with the plan and built Clearsense as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) data platform for healthcare. It’s not a replacement for anything in the current healthcare service data ecosystem. Its objective is to help the electronic medical records. It serves the EW; it serves all of the various constituents in the clinical, financial, operational, and research components of a healthcare company. What we do is we’re able to bring in all data that are relevant to health care, patients, and relative to citizens.
You mentioned the importance of data for a healthcare system. Can you talk about the vario #
For our clients, we bring in all of their historical legacy data for a few reasons. First, make it available in a new system. second, they can turn off the old systems and avoid additional expenses. Third and most importantly, as AI progresses in healthcare, the larger the data set, the better the results.
If we have 15, 20, 25 years’ worth of data, we could do much better when building data science products. So, we bring in all the data historically. We can also bring in data from streaming instruments, monitoring systems, ventilators, and anything in a healthcare company that sends out a signal to the Clearsense platform. We could also bring in genomic data and imagery data. Also to that, we bring in social media, what we call social determinants of health data. And exposome data, i.e., temperature, humidity, pollen counts, air quality, traffic patterns, everything in a geographic area that a healthcare company may find themselves in.
Last but not least, the data generated by a patient. So, think about sensors or wearables on patients that bring in data 24/7. It is essential to have a full 360 from a data perspective of everything pertinent to the patient’s prior and current medical interactions with the healthcare company. Healthcare data is 80% of what occurs outside the healthcare company. We now have 80% of the data that makes the entire patients experience.
What we’re doing right now is helping healthcare from where they are now to where they will be in the future. You only come to see us if you are ill or have had an accident. If you got a bacterial or viral infection, you’re genetically predisposed. We can know certain risk factors and check on patients occasionally to ensure their well-being. To do that, we need to build data models. Clearsense is helping the future of healthcare using these data models.
We’re not there to rip and replace systems and things that you’ve purchased already. If you have data science tools, you can plug them into Clearsense. If you have data visualization tools, you can plug them into Clearsense. With Clearsesnse, we optimize the products you already have invested in to use them in a better way.
You have to be multi-cloud to be able to interact with AWS or Azure, or Google. You may have clients that you need to burp all of your technology to their on-premise environment. There are private cloud environments as well. Clearsense’s multi-cloud interacts with every single one of those types of environments. We may have a client who wants us to contain all of their data, yet they would like our tools in their environment for certain data sets. So, we can push our tool in our environment; we can push data in their environment.
What are your scaling strategies? If you go to the United States, it’s a data-rich place c #
Clearsense has marked its territory only in States yet. But we have goals and aspirations to go global; we do have folks interested in it. There’s more data in India than people are aware of. Mobile phones are the point of connectivity no matter where you are. Remember that 80% of data is from outside the healthcare company, and if we can collect that, it puts us in a better place.
I’ve done some work earlier by taking advantage of the cellular network in both India and Africa. It was a text-level data diagnosis, monitoring, and prescribing treatment. From a strategic perspective, it’s about getting enormous data and using it to make significant changes.
What are your thoughts on the ethical and responsible use of AI in healthcare? #
Healthcare companies need to make their data available for research purposes. What needs to be in place is the assurance of the identification and the tokenization of that data. Let’s consider that while developing a predictor model for hypertension, we find patients who are already hypertensive and have not been detected. We better have a mechanism in place and reach out to those patients. We need to ensure that patient-generated data is used ethically and responsibly. AI does hold promise for everyone, but we need to use it properly. If AI could be used ethically and responsibly, I am sure more patients would sign up to allow their data for research purposes.
Now, as a CIO of any product or service-based company. What do you think should be his/her #
I think number one should be understanding technology trends and their application to your vertical. There’s a difference between something that is a trend and something trendy. Flying cars are trendy, but the cloud is a trend. You must differentiate between the two and be ready to understand how a trend could be applied to your vertical.
Secondly, I think it’s essential that the CIO understands talent trends and skillsets. I’m now seeing CIOs bringing in data science teams without understanding why a data scientist team is needed and, more importantly, finding the right team for their vertical. Suppose I had a choice between a top Ph.D. data scientist who never experienced healthcare versus a pharmacist/clinician/physician with a master’s degree in data science. I would take that person that has a master’s degree in data science. It’s essential to bring on these data science teams and other highly talented teams if you can get them from your subject matter/vertical.
One of the other things is absolute strategic alignment with your company. You are there to serve the mission and objectives of that company. Strategically ensure that the CIO is thought of as a strategic partner and not a cost center.
I also believe in lifelong learning continued education.
How do you retain talent? Does it not have any relationship with the culture of the compan #
Retaining talent, that task begins at recruitment. Your hiring has to equate to the culture. Although you are hiring team members, they need to work independently and need some latitude to be creative within their domain. The leadership style has to be a servant leader model for an company to be successful. That means I am there to support my staff. If you look at my hierarchy, there isn’t one; it’s an inverted triangle that points down to me.
You better have a tiered company with levels one through four for employees to advance rapidly.
Then, you can have Town Halls and one-on-one meetings to have constant communication and have an environment where nobody is afraid to talk.
What is it that keeps you motivated in the morning? #
I would answer that from an application perspective. When COVID came along, everybody was transferring to telehealth. We were able to provide telehealth services to the providers that were physically close to them. So, if things go south, they would be able to follow up with them even in person.
There were some disparities based on economics and race. we were able to help US Congress understand the need for corrective measures with the data we have.
And then last but not least, if you build an algorithm that helps the clinician understand and identify something within a patient. It would help get the patient get treated sooner and result in better outcomes.
Can you suggest some books to our readers? #
The first one is by Daniel Kahneman; it’s called ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’. It relates to how clinicians need data to make decisions at the right time. The second book is about how people understand where we came where we were and where we are now from a genomics perspective. It is called the Codebreaker by Walter Isaacson.
The last one is another colleague; her name is Amy Webb. Her book, ‘The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could’ is a must-read for everyone. It contains ten emerging technologies and their applications.
Questions and answers #
What are your thoughts on the ethical and responsible use of AI in healthcare? #
Healthcare companies need to make their data available for research purposes. What needs to be in place is the assurance of the identification and the tokenization of that data.
What is it that keeps you motivated in the morning? #
I would answer that from an application perspective. When COVID came along, everybody was transferring to telehealth.
Can you suggest some books to our readers? #
The first one is by Daniel Kahneman; it’s called ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’. It relates to how clinicians need data to make decisions at the right time.