ANAND SURANA, CEO of ICEGEIN Part 1

A New Generation of Sight and Movement

Anand Surana is a co-founder and the CEO of ICEGEIN. The company is a Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) solution provider.  ICEGEIN offers enterprise deployments, as well as, integration services for Asia, The European Union, and the Americas in the industries of healthcare, banking, and manufacturing. ICEGEIN is an acronym, for Information, Communication, and Entertainment Generation Computing. 

ANAND SURANA, CEO of ICEGEIN 

Anand’s vision is, as it was, fifteen years ago when he helped found ICEGEIN.  “Build a global information technology company!”  ICEGEIN is a privately held company of the Surana Group, which is among the largest industrial businesses in India.  ICEGEIN is fully backed by the Surana Group and is part of a larger global strategy for healthcare.  With the resources of the Surana Group, he has leads ICEGEIN in making serious strides toward global growth.

The Surana Group’s industrial businesses include:

- Bhagyanagar India Limited – They produce ferrous and non-ferrous metals for motors, electronic panels, telecommunications power distribution, and solar energy components. 

- Surana Telecom and Power LTD – Aluminum and optical fiber for Telecom is its focus.

- Surana Venture LTD – Renewable energy production is its focus.

Anand and I met over Linkedin in 2010 as a result of me figuring out how to get something done on a shoestring budget.  Not only is necessity the mother of invention, it’s the father of necessary connections.  I faced a material shortage. I really couldn’t find the right material to effectively communicate how RTLS could help improve workflow in our medical center. YouTube, embedded multimedia ads, and other content were not readily available as it is now. I looked to help from my connections and their connections to fill that need. 

Nursing had been part of our overall strategy development.  Only, our initial implementation was for asset management.  That’s where intense focus had been, implementing centralized asset utilization and temperature monitoring.  The time had come to move toward the broader applications, like patient transport. This approach was written into our acquisition plan. It included some concepts not found in many acquisition plans.

First, I wrote the manner in which we would make key decisions about hardware and software expansions all the way through a three year useful life-cycle. Second, making those key decisions meant taking intellectual ownership of outcomes. The plan did not contain the words intellectual ownership. I built the concepts intrinsically and inextricably into the plan.  These concepts guided the very first slide bullets in every presentation given throughout the project.   

For example, the opening statement of the plan read, “We need a better way to understand the condition of our assets and how to minimize their effect on our cash flow.” This statement may sound like a sales pitch.  Indeed, it was used to help sell the idea to leadership.  That doesn’t mean that the team wasn’t intensely driven to make it happen.  And taking intellectual ownership was established in the minds of those involved by the words better, way, understand, condition, our, how, and minimize. All of these words can require both cognitive and physical involvement.  By briefing these words over and over again, I hoped that they would plant the seeds of intellectual ownership.

The vendor’s Vice President of Marketing was very helpful in guiding our approach, as well.  She more than helped me not to forget to reengage nursing through the nursing education department after our initial implementation. 

Our team chose not to use only the vendor’s material.  We looked at other slide presentations, a few well-polished talking heads videos we found, and white papers.  None of them really worked. These were fine for supporting the effort.  We needed something better with which to lead.  Around October 2010, a link to an ICEGEIN video came through my Linkedin connections.  I watched the video then forwarded it to my nursing contact. 

The ICEGEIN video showed RTLS use in a large, real world clinical setting outside the United States - not simulated, real world and everything that comes with it.  That’s what I really appreciated about the video. 

I found Anand’s contact information on Linkedin. He was happy to let us use the ICEGEIN video for training.  The video went over very well with the nursing education department and other key nursing staff.

Coming Soon:

In Part 2: The origins of ICEGEIN

In Part 3: Healthcare Integration, Greater moves than an EMR integration