Eran Orr: The Art of Disruption

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By Princess Jones Curtis

Boston, MA — Founder of VR Health and Former F-16 pilot Eran Orr’s career move resulted from an uncomfortable pang in his hand. “Four years ago, I started to feel pain in my right hand. I was diagnosed with suffering from whiplash, due to active flight,” he explains. His rehabilitation led him on a journey to improving the rehabilitative process, beginning with his idea to combine Virtual Reality and rehab.  Before moving to Boston, Orr began to raise funding for his new company in his native homeland, Israel.

Based in both Israel and Boston, and partnered with high profile organizations like Facebook, AARP, and Cigna, VRHealth collects and analyzes user interactions in the virtual environment, to provide real-time data analytics for use in healthcare environments.

“Every time someone is using our applications, we are monitoring their performance. Once a patient puts a VR headset on, they basically become an element in a computer-generated environment. This enables us to quantify everything [the patient] is doing inside that digital environment. It’s not like any other wearable, because we can manipulate the environment and generate a far more valuable [tool] than any other sensor device.”

While his personal experience propelled his journey, Orr also finds motivation in the art of disruption. “I was always fascinated [by] the fact that we human beings like to stick to routines, even though there are better solutions out there. I think that’s what motivates me to unlock the potential of new technology, which, I believe, will completely disrupt the healthcare system and, at the end of the day, provide tremendous value to the entire market.”

Not for the faint of heart, entrepreneurship requires a steady hand and an unwavering drive. Orr believes that finding the right path to success is the most difficult task for startups. “It’s not always the fastest one. You need to make a lot of hard decisions on an ongoing basis, and you can never know if one decision, or another, will make the difference.”

Nevertheless, when the challenges of entrepreneurship are more difficult, success is that much sweeter. “Short-term success is every hospital that joins our platform or any customer that wasn’t a believer before he met us but becomes a believer. Long-term success [is] five years from now, we’ll do the same interview and see that VRHealth is the gold standard in the industry. I think that would be a success.”