Ravi Ika
President & CEO
A consummate entrepreneur, health plan technologist and business
process expert, Ravi Ika founded ikaGroup,
companies that have been providing software solutions and consulting
services to Fortune 500 companies in the commercial, government,
telecommunications, insurance and financial sectors since 1992. In
1999, he launched ikaSystems with
the goal of creating an integrated, real-time platform for managed
care e-commerce that would bring insurers, brokers, purchasers,
healthcare providers and health plan members together online. Today,
ikaSystems is one of the fastest
growing providers of ERP software to the managed care industry and
winner of the prestigious Solution with Greatest Market Potential
Award at the Gartner Healthcare Summit 2007.
Mr. Ika has built a series of diversified businesses throughout his
career, including technology companies in federal government services,
commercial sectors and global IT project deployment. None of his
entrepreneurial ventures has required venture capital funding. In
1992, he founded Envitec Corp., New England’s premier provider of
innovative IT consulting solutions, and doubled its revenue every year
from 1995 to 2000.
Essential components of Mr. Ika’s leadership success are his vision
for what technology can accomplish, his hands-on approach to clients’
success and his ability build world-class development and
implementation teams that possess the synergistic competencies of
technical and business process reengineering expertise. Even today,
Mr. Ika enjoys being personally involved in implementation initiatives
and product demos.
Prior to his entrepreneurial career, Mr. Ika worked as a research
scientist at Harvard University. He has a master’s degree in
environmental engineering from Old Dominion University.
Robert S. London, MD
General Manager
A nationally recognized expert in healthcare management, benefits
design and medical informatics, Dr. Robert S. London is responsible
for ikaSystems market
responsiveness and revenue generation activities, including sales,
product development and marketing units.
Dr. London has spent more than 20 years in operational, clinical and
academic roles with some of the nation’s most prominent organizations.
He was formerly corporate chief clinical officer at TriZetto, where he
led the company’s cost and quality-of-care solutions business unit and
spearheaded development of the CareAdvance care management product
suite. In addition, Dr. London held executive leadership positions at
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield (WellPoint), where he directed
healthcare management for the organization’s western region, as well
as CNA Insurance, UnitedHealthcare and NYLCare Health Plans. Most
recently, he was chief development officer for D2Hawkeye, a provider
of medical data reporting and analytics solutions, with responsibility
for product development, marketing and revenue generation.
A frequent speaker at national and international conferences and the
author of more than 75 scientific articles in various medical
journals, Dr. London has served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins School
of Medicine and the University of Colorado School of Business. He
holds degrees from George Washington University and University of
Maryland School of Medicine, is board certified in Obstetrics and
Gynecology and is a fellow of the American College of Obstetricians
and Gynecologists and the American College of Nutrition.
Aruna Wickremeratne, CPA
Chief Financial Officer
Aruna Wickremeratne, who oversees ikaSystems’
financial operations, has a strong background in accounting theory and
practices as well as federal, state and international tax regulations.
Prior to joining ikaSystems, he
served on the management team of a regional public accounting firm,
where he led audits for several software firms.
Mr. Wickremeratne earned an BA degree in economics magna cum laude and
a master’s degree in accounting from Clark University, where he was a
member of the Beta Gamma Sigma honor society and received the Wall
Street Journal Student Achievement Award for academic excellence in
economics. He is currently a member of the American Institute of
Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and the Massachusetts Society of
Certified Public Accountants (MSCPA).
Solomon J. Zak, MD
Senior Vice President, Business and Medical Intelligence
For the past 15 years, Dr. Solomon J. Zak has guided medical
intelligence product development. An invaluable contributor to the
ikaSystems team, he brings to ikaSystems a degree of healthcare
industry knowledge and foresight possessed by few in the field.
Before joining ikaSystems, Dr. Zak
founded several healthcare companies. In the process, he identified
actuarially defined, case-mix adjusted and provider risk tiers for 40
health plans and insurance entities throughout the United States. His
most recent endeavor, DataMedica, created a primary care provider
quality assessment system, the Zak Quality Index (ZQI), consisting of
59 measures. The ZQI demonstrates that economic profiling of primary
care physicians is an excellent proxy for quality of practice.
DataMedica was also one of the first companies to offer solutions for
HEDIS reporting.
In previous positions, Dr. Zak served as medical director of SHARE
Health Plan of Minnesota and co-corporate medical director of Share
Development Corporation until it merged with UnitedHealthcare. He was
also a consultant to Humana Hospital Corporation in its acquisition of
IMC and initiated the licensing of UCARE, a successful University of
Minnesota HMO.
Dr. Zak graduated from the University of Minnesota School of Medicine,
and he has taught hematology, conducted research and has been
published in many peer-review journals.
Cynthia Burghard
Senior Vice President, Market Intelligence
Cynthia Burghard, who spearheads ikaSystem’s
market strategy, is a renowned expert in the health insurance
industry. She has spent over 30 years in the healthcare information
systems market, holding market research, consulting and analytic
product development roles for healthcare payers, employers, providers
and regulators.
Before joining ikaSystems, Ms.
Burghard was a research director for 14 years at Gartner, a leading IT
research and advisory services firm, where she authored over 100
publications on topics such as care management, consumer engagement,
magnetic card and underwriting automation technologies. She was also a
consultant and market researcher for Charles J. Singer & Co. and held
management positions at Bay State Health Care, Blue Cross Blue Shield
of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium. She
holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado.
Raghu Ramaya, PhD
Senior Vice President, Sales
Raghu Ramaya brings to ikaSystems
a proven record of success in rapidly growing sales and formulating
and implementing new strategic business initiatives in competitive
environments and compressed timeframes. His experience spans a number
of industries, including insurance, information technology and
investment banking.
At one of the world’s leading specialty insurance companies, Mr.
Ramaya helped start and rapidly grow a consulting business that
assisted clients with proactively managing business losses that
resulted from major capital equipment breakdown. In Wall Street, as a
trader and market maker for an investment bank, he started and built a
large emerging market currency options book in the Mexican peso. He
has also worked for a number of information technology companies,
where he helped build and grow various industry practices in record
time. His entrepreneurial experience includes starting a management
consulting practice with leading industry experts to provide process
efficiency improvement solutions to healthcare organizations and
improved risk selection procedures to insurance companies.
Mr. Ramaya completed his undergraduate degree at the Indian Institute
of Technology, New Delhi, and MBA and PhD degrees at Syracuse
University, where he was awarded the School of Management’s
distinguished alumni award for exemplary academic achievement. He also
taught undergraduate chemistry as an assistant professor in the State
University of New York system.
William
Wetmore
Vice President, Relationship Management
William Wetmore has more than 20 years of experience in the
healthcare field in project management, training, sales and product
development. At ikaSystems, he
focuses on developing partnerships and full integration with clients.
Mr. Wetmore is a noted expert in developing and implementing
successful project/product strategies and in process improvement. He
also has extensive experience developing strategies to positively
incorporate technology and manage change in the workplace. In 2000, as
a member of the management team implementing an electronic medical
record at Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare/Atrius Health, he earned the
Davies Award, a national award for excellence in implementation
quality. He has also held senior positions with such companies as
Fidelity Human Resources Health and Welfare Plan Outsourcing and Blue
Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts.
Mr. Wetmore completed an undergraduate degree in history from
Merrimack College and an MBA degree from Boston College. Additionally,
he has earned certificate awards in Six Sigma, Agile development
methodology, project management, requirements analysis and product
development.
Bijendra P. Malik
Vice President, Technology
Bijendra P. Malik, who drives ikaSystems’
technical direction, has 20 years of experience in industries such as
insurance, finance, manufacturing and telecommunications. His
versatile background, strong management and leadership skills, and
experience in creating strategies for disaster recovery and processes
to improve and maintain high security and service levels provide
ikaSystems with the solid foundation
necessary for architecturally designing various hardware and software
applications. His technical leadership has also been invaluable in
guiding health plans interested in migrating from legacy to
next-generation systems.
Mr. Malik has held strategic positions with companies such as GE
Silicones and LG Electronics, a Fortune 500 company. His extensive
experience includes providing over 99.9% uptime and operations and
security leadership for multiple datacenters, designing and
implementing disaster recovery plans using highly integrated blade
servers, creating WANs using “Delta changes” technology, and SAN
strategies. He has hands-on experience with redundant Cisco switching,
Cisco PIX firewalls, data protection using replication, performance
and availability monitoring, Safeword Secure Tokens Cisco-based VPNs
for remote and mobile users, Oracle 10G and SQL Server databases.
Mr. Malik has a BS degree in electrical engineering and numerous
certifications that include Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE),
IBM’s Certified Lotus Professional (CLP), Cisco Certified Network
Associate (CCNA), Checkpoint Certified Security Administrator (CCSA),
Certified Novell Engineer (CNE) and Citrix Certified Administrator (CCA).
Randall L. Morrison
Vice President, Portal Sales
Randall L. Morrison brings to ikaSystems
over 30 years of successful payer, TPA, physician, clinical, hospital,
pharmacy and lab related sales and sales management experience as well
as project management and business development expertise. Before
joining ikaSystems, he was a
national sales executive with Connecture, selling portal sales
automation solutions into the payer market.
Mr. Morrison has held sales leadership positions at a variety of
leading organizations, including GlobalCare, IntelliClaim, MedUnite,
TriZetto, ProxyMed and N.E.I.C. (before it became ENVOY and ultimately
WebMD). In addition, he spent 13 years in executive management and
sales positions at the FoxMeyer Drug Company, which specialized in
retail pharmacy computer systems for drug stores and hospital based
labs/pharmacies.
Mr. Morrison was one of the original founders and creators of
ClaimsNet.com, the first recognized Internet-capable claims processing
solutions for hospital and physician claims.
Laurence Gunsberg
Vice President, Medical Management Sales
Laurence Gunsberg has over 20 years of sales, marketing and team
management experience working with insurance companies, hospitals and
other provider groups, hospital risk groups, managed care
organizations, national health plans and Blues organizations. He is
well versed in organizations’ hardware and software needs in the areas
of quality improvement, provider profiling, risk management, decision
support and data warehousing.
Before joining ikaSystems, Mr.
Gunsberg was a national sales director for several large providers of
medical management decision support systems, including Computer
Science Corporation and Ingenix, a division of UnitedHealthcare. He
was also a personal lines insurance agent. His focus is on
understanding client needs, then bringing together the right team to
respond to them while managing the sales process — particularly
important in today’s complex and client-driven sales environment.
Steven Georgiadis
Vice President, Claims and Enterprise Sales
Steven Georgiadis has over 14 years of senior-level sales and
management experience with advanced software systems for the payer
market. Before joining ikaSystems,
he was a senior sales executive at TriZetto, responsible for selling
the Facets enterprise-wide core administration system to health plans
with fewer than 500,000 members.
Mr. Georgiadis was also a regional vice president at OAO Healthcare
Solutions, where he sold 12 complete systems to health plans such as
UPMC Health Plan, Johns Hopkins Healthcare, Martin’s Point Health Plan
and the American Postal Workers Union. In addition, he was
instrumental in developing, designing and managing the company’s
inside sales department. During his last years with OAO, he was
responsible for sales of a new payer product, Resolution; he later
spearheaded the sale of Resolution to Definity Health, which
eventually sold it to UnitedHealthcare.
Mr. Georgiadis began his sales career with HBOC, selling nurse triage
software to call centers.
Sandy Cummings
Vice President, Marketing
Sandy Cummings, who guides ikaSystems’
marketing strategies, is a 20-year veteran in healthcare
communications. Before joining ikaSystems,
Ms. Cummings was a vice president at Aria Marketing, a marketing and
public relations agency focusing exclusively on the healthcare
industry. There, she led account teams, spearheaded thought leadership
programs and ensured the clear and consistent communication of
clients’ unique value propositions. Her experience runs the gamut from
payer to provider technologies, including business intelligence,
claims performance, care management workflow, evidence-based medical
decision support, electronic health records, computerized physician
order entry and RFID-driven location systems.
Over the course of her career, Ms. Cummings has held management
positions at the IT consultancies IDC and Gartner, as well as at
organizations in healthcare delivery, environmental consulting,
pharmaceutical sales training and trade publishing. She holds a BA
degree in English from Amherst College.
Karen Mandelbaum
General Counsel
Karen Mandelbaum has over six years of experience in the healthcare
industry and possesses a strong background in the contracting,
compliance and regulatory affairs issues that uniquely affect
healthcare organizations. Before joining ikaSystems,
she was an economics consultant to healthcare organizations, served in
the Law and Health Policy department of an insurance company and
practiced law, representing clients with medical malpractice claims.
Ms. Mandelbaum earned a BA degree in history at the University of
Minnesota, a JD degree at William Mitchell College of Law and a
master’s degree in managed healthcare administration at the University
of Minnesota Carlson School of Management. She is admitted to practice
law in the State of Minnesota.
