As Rachael Powell looks across the healthcare landscape, the CEO of Magentus doesn’t see a system lacking technology. She sees one drowning in it.
Hospitals, pathology providers, radiology departments, oncology services and specialist practices have all embraced digital tools over the past two decades. Yet many still operate in isolation, creating invisible barriers that clinicians navigate every day and that patients often feel without ever seeing.
“Technology is everywhere in healthcare, but we’re let down by the gaps between the systems and that is coupled with the complexity of ensuring patient data is secure,” Powell tells The CEO Magazine.
To her, this glaring disconnect represents one of the greatest opportunities in modern healthcare.
“Connection only happens when a company is willing to be vendor-neutral, to make information flow even to systems it doesn’t own,” she says.
“That’s the choice we’ve made – to be interoperable with many health ecosystem players – and it’s where we are trying to lead by example for the entire industry.”
From Xero to healthcare hero
After almost two decades building some of the world’s most respected technology businesses – including a decade at IBM and helping scale Xero into a global SaaS success as Global Chief Customer Officer – Powell could have easily stayed comfortable within mainstream technology.
Instead, she made a purpose-driven move into health tech, convinced that the sector is approaching the same transformational moment cloud accounting experienced a decade earlier.
“I’ve spent my career in industries at the point where technology stops sitting in the background and starts changing the actual work,” Powell says.
“I’ve spent my career in industries at the point where technology stops sitting in the background and starts changing the actual work.”
“In accounting, software went from recording what had already happened to helping people decide what to do next.”
Healthcare, she believes, has now reached that same inflection point.
“I grew up around a family of clinicians,” she reveals. “So I’ve always been aware of how important it is for them to be able to operate as efficiently as possible to ensure they can tend to the needs of their patients first and foremost.”
High stakes, high reward
This personal connection made Magentus, recognized as one of TIME magazine’s Top HealthTech Companies of 2025, impossible to ignore.
“Coming to Magentus felt like reaching a place where I could pull together everything I’d learned from my time working in various IT companies, while being passionate about improving healthcare outcomes for citizens everywhere,” Powell says.
Yet unlike in accounting, she quickly recognized that the stakes are immeasurably higher.
“If accounting software makes a mistake or misses something, you go back and reconcile it,” she points out.
“In healthcare, the consequence is a person’s health and welfare. You earn trust differently, you test differently and you accept that there is no room for ‘move fast and break things’ because the stakes are too high.
“I’m wary of anyone who treats healthcare as just another industry waiting to be disrupted. The opportunity is real, but so is the responsibility. Clinical safety and patient privacy is paramount.”
“Clinical safety and patient privacy is paramount.”
One of the biggest challenges both sectors share is that information rarely arrives where it’s needed most.
“The parallel I see most clearly is fragmentation,” she says.
“A decade ago, accounting data sat in silos, you would have the bank in one place, the books in another and someone reconciling everything by hand.
“Healthcare looks like that today. Enormous amounts of information, all held in systems that store it well but don’t make it available where a decision is being made. So we’ve ended up with a sector that became progressively digitized, yet still deeply disconnected.”
That is precisely where Magentus sees its role.
The human side of medicine
Operating across pathology, radiology, oncology and specialist practice management, the company has become one of the largest health technology providers across Australia and the United Kingdom. Instead of replacing existing systems, its ambition is to get them all communicating.
“Our strategy is ultimately focused on improving outcomes for patients,” Powell confirms.
“We do this by equipping clinicians with the right data, information and workflow tools to work more efficiently and make informed decisions at the point of care.”
“Our strategy is ultimately focused on improving outcomes for patients.”
By providing decision support capabilities that guide clinicians towards the next best action, Magentus helps enable safer, more coordinated and more effective care, she explains.
“The most important things we can do for patients and clinicians alike are to take out the admin and provide decision support, giving them back as much of that precious time as we can,” Powell stresses.
“They can then spend more time on the ‘human’ side of medicine. Connecting with their patients and ensuring their decision-making is founded on relevant information.”
Internally, Powell recalls facing a challenge very similar to the one confronting healthcare itself.
Magentus emerged from the consolidation of multiple specialist businesses, with deep expertise and long-standing reputations.
“Each of the brands that became Magentus carried real pride and deep domain expertise,” she says.
“The risk in bringing them together is that you could flatten all of that into something generic, losing the expertise and trust that made each part valuable.”
Minimizing the risk meant choosing alignment over uniformity.
“We’ve unified around a shared purpose and a clear set of values, but left the depth of clinical knowledge where it lives,” she explains.
“The thread that connects everyone also reflects what our products do, showing how we’re better together than as a set of disconnected parts.”
An unexpected advantage
Powell’s academic background in applied positive psychology has also become an unexpected commercial advantage.
“Positive psychology is often misread as relentless optimism,” she says. “It’s actually the study of what lets people do their best work, including clarity, a sense of meaning and enough personal autonomy to use their judgement.”
Those same principles apply both inside the company and within the products Magentus develops.
“When I think about the things I see that deplete clinicians, like losing their time and sense of agency to systems that don’t help, I see how it’s the same things that deplete any team,” she argues.
“So the discipline I bring to how we work internally is the same one we’re trying to design into our products.
“Take the friction out, make room for their strengths to flourish and help them dive into achieving a sense of purpose in their work.”
The future of healthcare
The same philosophy shapes how Powell approaches the company’s growth.
“One of the most challenging parts is holding the line on what you won’t do, despite the temptations,” she says.
“Growth generates enthusiastic ideas about new directions and possibilities and the new opportunities opening up with AI are exciting to explore, yet you still have to be disciplined about sequence and quality.”
“The success I care about is whether clinicians are spending more of their day on patients and less on systems.”
Commercial performance is important to any business. However, Powell is most interested in what it signifies.
“Commercial success matters, but I think of it as evidence rather than the goal, proof that people trust us with work that makes a difference,” she insists.
“The success I care about is whether clinicians are spending more of their day on patients and less on systems.”
If healthcare can finally organize itself around patients rather than institutions, Powell believes the industry’s next era won’t simply be more digital. It will be more human.
“When I see results reaching the right person when and where they are needed and when this transpires to better health outcomes, that’s our vision leading to real-world success,” she says.
“The longer arc is a healthcare system that increasingly organizes itself around patients rather than institutions, and uses information to prevent illness rather than simply respond to it.
“If Magentus is part of that shift, that’s when I will feel we have succeeded.”
