Dr. Parth Patel ’11 has had more schooling in his short lifetime than many people around the world. A lifer at GA, Patel graduated from the University of Miami in three years, headed back to Philadelphia to earn a dental school degree from University of Pennsylvania, then completed his MBA at Penn’s Wharton School. He has taken the skills acquired from each stop to become an edupreneur – building dental clinics in several areas of the country and creating software that will very soon teach dentists to offer superior patient services.
“Dentistry, and healthcare in general, is my family’s business. I have learned from watching my family and starting several of my own dental clinics that dentists need to focus more on patients and not worry about the other stuff that comes along with owning a business,” said Patel. “So I set off to build an operating system that allows doctors to run their clinics autonomously and with high efficiency.”
Automating the tedious work – dealing with insurance, payroll, revenue cycle management, banking, staffing – has been Patel’s focus for the past year. While he is not a practicing dentist, his training in dentistry, finance, and healthcare management, along with his incredible work ethic and interest in helping others, have combined to create a successful businessman who attracts talented workers from across the country.
“My Chief Technology Officer worked at Google for five years and used to work for Microsoft,” Patel said. “I feel that healthcare is ten years behind the rest of the world in terms of technology so I went out to find someone that can help bring technological innovations easily to the end user. It’s fantastic that GA has a computer science curriculum now. Regardless of what you want to do, everyone should have exposure to computer science. Kids are so smart now at school, and fortunately for me, the talent pool is ridiculous.”
While gaining maximum leverage with his software solution to enable more doctors to practice efficiently and provide patients with high quality care is the goal, Patel would not be enjoying his journey as much without the people he met during his days at GA.
“One of the cool things about GA is that I’ve kept a lot of really close relationships with a lot of my best friends – many of whom weren’t even in my grade,” Patel explained. “I just spoke with Austin Kevitch (2010) and Alec Korman (2013) and Nick Berman (2011). We help each other out in our businesses and life, exploring our passions together, investing in each other. Obviously, people in your grade are your core, but through sports or clubs that you are involved in you get to be a part of the community as a whole, which is really cool.”
Patel states how fortunate he is that his family has supported his dreams of entrepreneurship from the beginning and that has allowed him to delve into other passion projects.
“I am really passionate about investing in various startups, protocols, ecosystems, etc.,” said Patel. “I am interested in centralizing finance protocols and investing in blockchain technologies so I’ve done a lot of research in those areas the past few years. I think the world is going in the direction of community owned insurance protocols and decentralized medical and dental protocols and that is where my excitement and my experience will hopefully find success.”