Capital Technology Information Services, Inc. (CTIS) was founded by Raj Shah (d. 2022), its long-term leader and visionary in designing health information technology systems to improve the quality of peoples’ lives and their health. The CTIS story is very much the story of Raj’s journey, professionally and personally.
Raj grew up in Gujarat, India, where he maintained family and professional ties for his whole life, returning as often as he could manage. As a young man, with degrees in chemistry and physics in hand, Raj traveled to the US, first to Detroit to complete a master’s degree in chemistry then to Boston for further training at the Harvard Business School. His professional journey in the early days of CTIS allowed him to combine his love for health and health science with a passion for innovation in the still-emerging field of information technology.
CTIS was incorporated in 1988 as a privately held Maryland corporation under the umbrella of Capital Surini Group International, Inc. (CSGI), a company also founded by Raj Shah. CSGI was a government contractor which had a had a general services portfolio that included business lines in information science, communications, event and publication management, and clearinghouse services. CSGI and CTIS operated as a boutique information technology (IT) company that provided information services to the federal government and a range of commercial customers. With 1994 yielding revenues of $3M, Raj decided to focus his work solely on CTIS, and, more specifically, to provide informatics and business intelligence solutions in the healthcare industry. That decision allowed CTIS to emerge as the primary delivery vehicle to the health informatics sector, refining its vision to focus exclusively on utilizing information technology to improve the efficiency of clinical trial processes in clinical research settings.
Since 1999, CTIS has been the leading supplier of clinical informatics solutions to the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program, which supports a national network of academic centers that collaborate to test hundreds of cancer therapies. Other Institutes of the National Institutes of Health soon became clients of CTIS, including the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases(NIAID). Later, with the CTIS focus on addressing the gap in minority health as part of its overarching mission to promote equity in healthcare, CTIS was awarded a major grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities to work with a team toward understanding social and environmental factors underpinning gaps in health outcomes across communities.
As CTIS continued to receive major government contracts, totaling over $500M, Raj became a frequently sought after speaker, giving more than 100 lectures and talks at major conferences and workshops over the years on health information technology as a critical factor to improve health systems and health outcomes. Most recently, as Raj managed a number of chronic diseases himself, he spoke out on the need for informatics solutions for patients suffering from multiple conditions, recognizing that better information technologies were needed to help patients like himself manage complex drug regimens and treatment paradigms.
Raj Shah served on the National Advisory Council of NIH’s National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and was invited to the 2010 G20 Health Summit on his publication related to global health and information technology. During his tenure as Chairman and CEO, CTIS received countless awards and recognitions for its work and its vision. These include awards from the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, CIO Magazine, Computerworld, The British Medical Journal and the Office of Management and Budget of the White House. CTIS was named for 8 years in a row to Deloitte and Touché’s “Fast Fifty,” an award given to the fifty fastest growing companies in Maryland.
On May 17, 2022, Raj Shah passed away after a long, courageous battle to restore his health. He left behind his wife, Bharti Shah, now CTIS CEO, three daughters, Suni, Rina and Nicky and their families, and countless friends and colleagues, all of whom revere him still for his passion for life, his love for humanity, his gift for seeing beauty in people and in his surroundings, and his enduring impact on the health of people globally.
