Company leader
Adnan Iqbal
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Luma Health
Adnan Iqbal is co-founder and chief executive of Luma Health. Luma's Patient Success Platform texts patients to schedule, confirm, and fill open visits, so a clinic can use appointment slots that would otherwise sit empty.
Early life
He studied biology as an undergraduate and in graduate school, then worked as a biologist at Genentech in the San Francisco Bay Area. At the University of California, Berkeley, he played soccer and tore his ACL in his sophomore year. The clinic told him an MRI would take three weeks, so he called back ten times until a slot opened.
Business
In business school that MRI wait was still on his mind. He reconnected with his college roommate, Tashfeen Ekram, who was in a radiology fellowship and whose patients were waiting six weeks. They found waits of 2.5 to 12 weeks, and clinics with 15 to 30 percent of their capacity unused. They brought in Aditya Bansod, and the three built text messaging between a clinic and its patients. Luma's first customers were using it in September 2015.
During the COVID vaccination campaign, Cook County Health in Chicago used Luma so people could book appointments, including a stretch when about a million people needed to get through the scheduler at once. He said those appointments were written back into the electronic health record.
He has since added Navigator, a patient concierge for voice and text, and Fax Transform, which reads referral faxes. Both run on Spark, Luma's own AI, so staff spend less time on hold and less time typing faxes.