Scaling Medical Management by RFID with Monica Villanueva

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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, San Diego's tech ambassador and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle.

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And welcome back to the Tacos in Tech podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom and I'm joined today by Monica Villanueva of intelliguard. Maka, thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Sure, thanks for having me.

Yeah, we're excited to get to know you, get to know Intelliguard a little bit. You guys are working on some pretty phenomenal things in the healthcare industry. We just had World Health Day, which kind of brought to light how important San Diego's industries are in, you know, protecting us, keeping us safe. And man, over the last year, we sure got that hard reminder to us, that's for sure. Do you want to give us a quick overview of what IntelliGuard is?

IntelliGuard is an automated cloud based medication management platform that uses RFID technology to facilitate the tracking of pharmaceutical inventory. With Intelliguard, everyone from drug manufacturers, hospitals, pharmacists and anesthesiologists can track and trace medications from start to finish. They can know where the medication came from, who administered them, to whom, and how much. The key here is that we use RFID tracking. Teleguard is the first and only company in the world that offers RFID enabled management products for healthcare. We have competitors like Pyxis and Omnicell who do something similar to what we do, but they use barcode scanning. With RFID technology, our system is more efficient and allows clinicians to focus on patient care rather than the tedious tasks of managing medications. I can also, I think it might be helpful to illustrate just what that difference is between the barcode and RFID technology. And I heard this good example of it's like for anyone who's ever run a 5k or a marathon, you get a bib that you wear on race day. That bib has an RFID tag on it. What that means is that when you run your race without even thinking about it, your RFID tag is getting scanned. As you reach certain milestones, that RFID tag information allows the organizers to one, to know that you're not cheating, and two, to give you your accurate time. So if you imagine that rather than an RFID tag on your bib, you had a barcode, you'd have to stop at certain points in the race and scan your tag. You know, line up your bib to a barcode reader and make sure that it's getting scanned properly. So that just kind of illustrates, I mean, obviously that wouldn't work in a race. Like, it wouldn't be your accurate time. There'd be slowdowns. You might have to wait in line to get in front of a barcode reader. So that just kind of illustrates what the difference is between an RFID tag and a barcode. When we use these RFID tags within our system, it allows clinicians to perform their jobs without really thinking about it. Because the RFID tags and the scanning, it's just working without them having to think too much about it.

Yeah, that's a huge game changer, that automation. As a runner, I totally appreciate running over those pads and it just does the work. So that's great. We're looking forward to kind of hearing all the tech that goes into this because we know it just doesn't just happen. And I think a lot of people just kind of show up to their doctor and now show up on a video screen telemedicine with their doctor and just kind of expect things to work. But we know that's not the case. So excited to dive into that. But first, want to get to know a little bit about your background because I know you've had an interesting path to get here. You want to tell us a little about where you grew up and where you first started?

Yeah, I grew up in a small neighborhood called Los Serranos in Chino Hills, California. So I'm a Southern California girl. Chino hills is about 35 miles east of Los Angeles and it's about an hour and a half, two hours north of San Diego. My neighborhood was this small, low income neighborhood in a mostly middle to upper class city. This was fortunate for me because it meant that the schools in my area were well funded. There was a really strong focus on getting all, all the students to go to college. And that really was my foundation for valuing an education and knowing that an education was going to be my key to get out of the poverty that I grew up in and just to find a satisfying career.

What'd you go on to study then and where'd you go to school?

So I ended up going to UC Berkeley and got a degree in English Literature.

Go Bears. So I'm curious, I mean, that you know, English Literature, Berkeley, now you're writing code. Take us through kind of that path. Where did you go? How did you end up, you know, on the tech world?

So it was quite a path, you know. After college, I ended up taking a little break. I had never done a study abroad program and I thought it would be valuable for me to take some time off. I went to Mexico City and I wasn't expecting to find a job so quickly, but within about a couple weeks I found a job teaching at a private prep school. I taught English there for a little bit and then came back to San Diego and was really just looking for a job so I could pay my bills. And I ended up getting a job as an administrative assistant at Scripps Research, which was fine, but I wasn't happy. It wasn't what I had imagined for myself. I had imagined myself using my analytical and critical thinking skills that I had learned in my literature classes in a career that challenged me and allowed me to grow as an individual and as a professional. So I was unhappy and I had to do a lot of soul searching. I started reaching out to alumni from my university to get their advice, and a lot of them had recommended that I take the Myers Briggs personality exam. So I did that. And I can't tell you what my personality type was or is, but I can tell you that I got a career report with that and it gave me a list of careers that would match my personality. And one of the top items was database developer. I also got a couple other things like nutritionist and molecular biology. But the computer programming was something that stood out to me because I knew that I could learn those skills fairly quickly and find a job. And that's what ended up happening. I went to what was then called Coleman College, it later became Coleman University and unfortunately it no longer exists today. But at the time it was this pillar for the community. It was a place where people who were looking for a good paying job in the tech industry could go to and learn the skills and then apply those skills fairly quickly. So after eight months I had learned enough skills, I got a certificate, and then within two or three months I got my first job working as a software developer. And then from there it's just been all about gaining experience and staying up to date and maintaining a good reputation by doing good work. Since we are a small community of developers, we all kind of know each other, we all run into each other. So just maintaining that reputation is important.

Absolutely. Well, congrats on that career trajectory. You do mention the tight knit developer community, which is very true. I'm curious if you from that community itself, how are you feeling it's doing during COVID with not as much meetups? Because I know that's the core. A lot of the developer communities thrive on meetups and hackathons. Are you seeing that still? Are people still keeping in touch?

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely not the same as being in person, but we do like I am part of the Women who Code organization and we have maintained the monthly meetups and you know, there's still a ton of activity happening on that meetup.

That's great. And you mentioned obviously Coleman too, which was a great source of talent in the community. You know, really like talent that's ready to be impactful and work on things. Where are you seeing talent come from locally now?

You know, my trajectory does sound very unique, but I do run into people with these very unique trajectories. You know, there's people who don't even have a college degree who never went to college, but they've learned how to code on their own. Such a great variety of experiences that can lead you to software development. Mainly what it comes down to is that you have a passion or this strong desire to solve problems. And as long as you have that desire and you have the willingness to stay up to date on the new technologies that are coming out, you can be successful in software development.

That's great. And I think something you started to touch on is the diversity of your background. It sounds like as you worked through a few different companies in San Diego, you found your way to Intelliguard drawn by a few different reasons that you said working with previous employees and the kind of work that they were doing and the kind of technology stack. Take us through some of the products you've been able to work on, especially given that most of the time you've been working there, it's been during the pandemic. And I got to imagine healthcare based companies really leaned in and worked on supporting the global effort at this pandemic.

Yeah. So working at. On the software side, I tend to work more with the data that's collected by the RFID tags and the workflows that occur when an event takes place in one of our stations, like our pharmacy, anesthesia station or smart cabinet. On the software side we do encoding, which is associating IDs stored on the RFID tag with a product in our system, work with the workflows like restocking the trays so making sure all the right items are in there, detecting when items are loaded in and out of anesthesia stations, when drawers are open and closed, and tracking when items are moved around the hospitals in carts and trays. One of the interesting projects that we got to work on recently was on decoding RFID tags. So that means that the medications were coming with the RFID tags already on the medications from the manufacturer. We had the opportunity to work with global healthcare company Fresenius Kabi. They launched what they call the Plus RFID portfolio last year and Intelliguard was the first hardware and software company to be able to read those tags. It was exciting because it means that these huge companies see the value of RFID and they see it as a way of the future. Something else that came up specifically because of the pandemic was the opportunity to assist with storing the COVID 19 vaccine. So IntelliGuard has been a long standing partner of Rady Children's Hospital and their VP of operations, Chris Abe had reached out to us when they got word that they'd be receiving the first of the vaccine distributions and storing them at their facility. Since they have the low temperature freezers required to store the vaccine, it was a big deal to get that first batch. There were a lot of concerns about security and having had a good Experience working with our products. Rady Children's asked if we could help. So intelliguard provided the hospital with the hardware and software to effectively secure the COVID 19 in its freezers and enable automated access and control to those vaccines. We can provide reporting on when those vaccines were removed, who they're administered to and stuff like that.

Wow, that's pretty great. Because of the nature of going virtual, not just work, but healthcare itself, how it's administrated, how we're dealing with our doctors and other healthcare officials. How are you seeing that going forward? How to build new products for the healthcare industry? You've seen that already in how you guys are designing the future pieces of your products.

Yeah, I'd say we were able to build very quickly. The fact that we do everything in the cloud facilitates doing things quickly because you don't have to deal with the expensive infrastructure, the troubleshooting of that infrastructure. Having those on site, that on site equipment that you have to deal with really can slow down how fast we get things out. And so we were able to respond quickly to this request from Rady because we're able to move so quickly.

That's great. I know you've been a Southern California native, you've lived in Mexico. You've got to have an eye for Mexican food. And this being the tacos and tech podcast, we got to know, do you have a favorite taco spot?

Well, I always say that the best tacos in San Diego are in Tijuana. So I like Taco Naso. They have a couple of locations. And then for fish tacos, there's a place in Playas de Tijuana, it's called Tito's and they have the absolute best fish tacos. But if you are not privy to crossing the border, I'd say Lola 55 in East Village, they do tacos and cocktails and like they have a modern spin on tacos, which I really love.

Love that. Great ones, I think. All new to our taco database too. So thank you for that.

Sure.

Monica, thank you so much for being on the podcast. But more importantly, thanks so much for what you're doing to build great tech products for our healthcare industry. Super important. So thanks so much.

Thank you.

Thanks for joining us on the tacos and tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest coworking in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eelbloom as well as fresh brewed tech and tacos in tech pod on Twitter too.

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