our team

Gregory Jacobson MD | Co-Founder and CEO

Greg graduated from Washington University in St Louis in 1997 with a BS in Biology. He attended Baylor College of Medicine from 1997 to 2001. From 2001 to 2004, he completed a residency in Emergency Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center where he then stayed on as faculty. Starting in 2004, it was his observation and research of operational inefficiencies and unrealized improvement opportunities that resulted in the creation of a rudimentary software tool at VUMC and, ultimately, the founding of KaiNexus. Jacobson is co-author of Kaizen: A Method of Process Improvement in the Emergency Department published in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine.

Matt Paliulis | Co-Founder and CTO

Matt graduated from the Olin School of Business at Washington University in 1997 with a BSBA in Marketing and Finance. He then began his IT consulting career with Price Waterhouse. Over the years, he has worked for Price Waterhouse, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and IBM as a data warehousing and business intelligence consultant, where he bridged the gap between business process and IT. Matt has been a part of numerous successful projects at Fortune 500 companies in the financial services sector, creating and integrating software to solve business problems.

Mark graduated from Northwestern University in 1995 with a BS in Industrial Engineering and later earned an MS in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is author of the Shingo award-winning book Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Engagement (2nd edition) and his second book, Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Continuous Improvements will be published in July, 2012. Mark has worked as a consultant to healthcare organizations throughout North America and Europe, teaching and implementing kaizen and other Lean management practices. He was previously a Senior Fellow with the Lean Enterprise Institute and the Healthcare Value Network and continues as an LEI faculty member. Mark is also the founder of the popular LeanBlog.org and its podcast series.

Mark Graban | Chief Improvement Officer

Steve Good | Principle Architect

Steve has been developing web-based applications since 1999. He has experience ranging from telecommunications and offline analytics to online tax preparation and advanced foreclosure workflows. Steve has also been developing applications with Flex and AIR and integrating them with CFML backends since 2007. He now dedicates most of his time to working with Grails backends with either Flex or javaScript front ends while still evangelizing the CFML language. In addition to developing software, Steve is a regular speaker at both the DFW CFML user group and the DFW Groovy & Grails user group. He is also involved in a number of open source projects both as a contributor and as lead developer. Steve regularly posts to his blog as well as twitter.

Jim Prevatte | Strategic Business Development

Jim has Bachelor of Science degrees from Georgia Institute of Technology in both Textiles and Industrial Management and over 30 years of experience in executive roles in manufacturing, consulting, software and lean healthcare education. Jim is the past Chairman of the Board of the Strategic Information Group, Founder of Future State Solutions and a consultant/educator in the area of lean healthcare. Jim’s passion is to enable people to improve their performance and processes through the application of lean thinking and the appropriate use of technology.

Mark Jaben MD | Lean Specialist

Mark graduated from The University of Miami School of Medicine in 1981 and completed an Emergency Medicine residency at University Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida in 1984. He has over 25 years of community Emergency Medicine practice. During this time, he discovered how Lean principles are used to improve health care. He has implemented these improvement principles in multiple hospital systems in the United States and New Zealand. Additionally, Mark has spoken at conferences on this topic and has written extensively on how individuals and health care systems can pursue continuous improvement with Lean and kaizen principles.

Maggie Millard | Research Intern

Maggie graduated from the College of William and Mary in 2010 with a BA in History. She is pursuing a career in healthcare with an emphasis in quality improvement. Maggie is utilizing and improving upon her previous research expertise to work toward this goal.

Jamie Flinchbaugh | Member of the Advisory Board

Jamie is the co-founder of the Lean Learning Center, an advisory and education firm for lean transformation. He is also the co-author of the popular lean book The Hitchhiker's Guide to Lean: Lessons from the Road. Jamie spends much of his time coaching executives on leading lean transformation in their organization. In addition to investing in KaiNexus, he is also a regular investor in both manufacturing and startup companies through Old Dutch Group, LLC. He regularly blogs at JamieFlinchbaugh.com.

Mike Muhney | Member of the Advisory Board

Mike joined KaiNexus in late 2008 after being recommended to Greg and Matt by Dr. Harry Jacobson, the recently retired Vice Chancellor of VUMC. A graduate of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he received his B.S. Degree in Finance, with Honors, in 1974. He began his career with IBM as a Marketing Representative selling mainframe computers. He is the co-founder of Contact Software, the multi-million dollar developer of the globally recognized ACT! Software. Contact Software created the Contact Management category of software, which fostered today's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industry. Presently, Mike is CEO & Founder of VIPorbit Software Int'l Inc., a software development firm focused on the mass market of device-enabled users of smartphones, tablets, and cloud computing, providing them the core functionality of relationship management universally valued.