Major hospital systems across the country are some of the highest earning companies in the country. Based off the 2019 listing, 41 of the Forbes 500 companies are designated as healthcare companies, all of whom combined for a total of $1.8 Trillion dollars in earnings. In 2017, the healthcare sector of the U.S. economy accounted for 17.9% of the overall GDP. What does this mean? Healthcare is a highly lucrative and highly competitive industry which is motivated by earnings.
From January of 2017 through February of 2019, I had the privilege of working on the IT team of one of the largest healthcare companies in the world. During my time there, I was able to work with highly skilled and influential medical and IT professionals to help improve many aspects of our companies ability to provide patient care. I am grateful for my time working with these people and executing these projects.
I cut my teeth in healthcare IT as a rookie project manager hoping to help implement solutions which would improve patient care. During my time, the two longest running projects were a scheduling tool designed to maximize surgery cases at all 7 of the division facilities and a billing platform designed to maximize how quickly and easily providers can bill for their services. Sure, I was able to help replace monitoring systems which helped monitor critical patients or deploy a facilities services tool which helped support staff maintain hospitals. But of the two dozen or so projects I helped implement, the two which received more sustained attention were both aimed at cutting physician time with patients and increasing physician earning potential.
After having been promoted and managing a team of 9, I built solid relationships with my leadership and had seen success with several efforts I was charged with. I was making plenty of money and had all the benefits that come along with employment from a Fortune 100 company. I had no obvious reason to leave my role. But in February 2019, that is exactly what I did. I left the security of a low level management position at a large, publicly owned company to work for a small Healthcare IT company with about 12 employees. I took a leap of faith with Eon.
Why would I make such a drastic change? The answer is obvious and two fold:
- Politics should not dictate how healthcare is delivered.
- Patient care should be the only thing that matters.
When I moved to Eon, my entire understanding of healthcare was flipped upside down. No longer would petty politics and individual provider bottom lines dictate how my team and I operated. At Eon, patient care is the center of all things, not earnings.
Let’s start with the product. EPM is a tool designed to find patients who need care and keep them coming back to the hospital to receive that care. For example, our lung platform is aimed at the management of Lung Cancer Screening patients who are enrolled in a screening program as a preventative measure. The end goal of these programs is to identify disease early, minimizing cost and maximizing life expectancy among patients at a higher risk of developing cancer. Branching away from screening, Eon does it again, identifying patients with ‘incidentally’ identified lung nodules, which in many cases would go untreated without the follow up mechanism Eon provides. The end goal of this functionality is literally to identify patients who could have lung cancer, or be at an elevated risk, and ensure they receive care that they never knew they needed.
Unlike the old institutions of healthcare, Eon does not settle for ‘the way it has always been done’. We are continuing to expand our possibilities and the possibilities of our patients by developing new tools that will help identify different types of disease. With the newly developed Aortic Aneurysm module, EPM is identifying patients who could have an untreated aortic aneurysm which if ruptured, could easily be fatal. In fact, aortic aneurysms are the 14th leading cause of death in the U.S. and are often only identified by accident in the radiology reporting EPM is designed to analyze.
Simply by looking at the product, Eon sets itself apart from the average healthcare IT company looking to only feed the profit machine. Eon has aligned itself on the side of the patient, designing tools and processes aimed at direct intervention and preventative care.
Moving beyond the product sphere, Eon is a disrupter of norms. We as a company have decided not to stand by and accept certain injustices such as the common practice of paying for physician endorsement. We have decided not to simply coexist with our competition, but rather directly challenge their positions and the status quo. We do not rely on relationships, politics or blind anonymous capital to find our way into partnerships with our clients, but rather we utilize a level of expertise and technical knowledge to ensure that trust is built and our clients are cared for to ensure the best possible outcomes for as many patients as possible.
Why did I bet against the safe play and move to Eon? Because the status quo was not appealing, no matter how lucrative. The opportunity to play a role on a team that is striving every day to improve the lives of thousands of patients across the country was in itself too lucrative to pass up.
