Health Tech: Erica Jain On How Healthie’s Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Overall Wellness
Keep your mission at the center of what you do. Building a company is a marathon, and through tough times and easy times, if you’re lucky to have customers doing good in the world, you’ll rise above the day-to-day and do everything you can to support them.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Erica Jain, co-founder and CEO of Healthie.
Erica Jain is the Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder of Healthie, where she empowers health and wellness organizations to launch & scale their businesses and build long-term relationships with their clients to deliver personalized, preventative care to improve health outcomes. Previously, she was a Healthcare Consultant at The Boston Consulting Group and an Analyst at the Clinton Health Access Initiative. Erica graduated from Duke University with a BA in International Health Disparities and Infectious Diseases. She attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania as part of the Health Care Management Program.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
I grew up in California, and from a very young age, the existence of healthcare inequality — and how we go about closing that gap and improving access to basic health services — has been something on which I’ve focused. While in high school, I participated in Model UN and quickly gravitated toward the World Health Organization. Like many people interested in healthcare, my first instinct was to become a doctor. But as I matured–learning more about the various career paths within healthcare–I realized I could impact and improve the system in other ways. And perhaps, if I did it well, I’d be able to make that difference at scale and have an even more significant impact.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
As a non-developer CEO of a tech company, learning the engineering process has been eye-opening. The product team operates much differently than I’m used to with my consulting, operations and marketing background — and I’ve learned so much from the process. Unfortunately, you cannot build a product overnight — no matter how much effort, sweat and blood you put into it. You can’t pound the pavement, hire 100 engineers, and develop a tech solution for your problems.
That fact affected how I formed the company and guided each step I take. I am building for the long-term. There’s no such thing as an overnight success. Businesses take years to build, and require endurance and a great team. Reality differs so much from the headlines we often see.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
My co-founder and the CTO of Healthie, Cavan Klinksy, has been hugely inspirational and instrumental in getting us to where we are today. Cavan and I met while I was attending Wharton’s MBA program, and he was a college freshman at UPenn. We were attending a pitch competition together and started talking about our shared interest in preventative health. Cavan’s story is truly inspiring: he is a two-time open heart surgery patient and his patient experience drives him to build a company that transforms the healthcare system. He understands at a personal level the life-changing impact of preventative care — and the importance of making it easy and accessible to as many people as possible.
We are so lucky to have met in this very random circumstance because I’m not sure Healthie would be where it is today without our specific skill sets and backgrounds. We’ve worked together for six years and are aligned on our vision for the company while balancing each other out in all the ways you need to be a successful team.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“With great power comes great responsibility.”
This is one of the values with which I lead Healthie. We store more than a million patients’ medical records, and we must do so with integrity. This concept has also made me committed to a pathway to be independent — something I think every founder should have regardless of how much venture capital they raise.
Healthie is about building a product and company that people love alongside a team that believes in our mission. The fact that our values guide us is reflected in our utilization and revenue.
As we continue to grow to more than a million patients’ lives on our platform, we’ve helped more than a million people get better care. We’re building this company with a vision toward long-term impact and creating trusted relationships with healthcare providers and digital health startups.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Resilience: There is always the next move, as long as you don’t give up. You may feel backed into a corner or unsure where to go next, but in the end, you are in control and with grit and resilience, you can come through.
Kindness: This is both a business value on top of a personal one. I am a mom of a one-year-old and I preach this at home and work: be a good person, care about what you do, and do good in the world.
Hard Work: In the end, you must put in the work to succeed. There is no workaround or hack for it. We started Healthie in 2016 and became profitable two years later, and we did this without any significant investment or funding for several strategic reasons. There has been no substitute for hard work in getting us this far.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our wellness. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?
Every healthcare company delivering virtual services needs the same feature set to build back-office operations and deliver care rooted in long-term relationships. The last wave of digital health companies (Omada, Ro, Hinge, Ginger.io) each spent considerable resources building core feature sets that are neither unique to them nor contribute to their value proposition.
Historically, these solutions were delivered as separate tools that companies were forced to integrate with, or each company built this technology on its own in-house. The feature set required to provide this type of care is distinct from how healthcare has traditionally been delivered, and, therefore how legacy EMR platforms were built. Our product is uniquely tailored to usher in and support an exploding virtual-first, relationship-based care industry.
We serve a wide range of businesses, including behavioral health companies, women’s health startups, weight management companies, meal delivery services, grocery stores, universities, medical clinics, nonprofit organizations, and thousands of practitioners that deliver needed care. Our clients’ primary reasons for using Healthie include building long-term relationships with their clients (asynchronous and synchronous), offering virtual care services, seamlessly integrating with other business and clinical tools, needing a robust and specialized healthcare scheduling and client onboarding experience, or appreciating a consolidated dashboard to review remote patient monitoring data.
How do you think your technology can address this?
We offer a feature-rich web and mobile platform that spans practice management, client engagement, and EHR capabilities, enabling health and wellness organizations to build long-term relationships with clients and scale their provider networks.
Healthie replaces multiple, disparate tools that health and wellness organizations have been separately building or buying with our comprehensive brandable and API platform. Because we offer both an out-of-the-box solution and API, we can support customers at every stage of their company, with developer resources or without.
Other record systems amplify their impact (and scale) by building a broader ecosystem of business and clinical tools that their customers need. As we scale, we have even more opportunities to help our providers engage with their clients. Unique to Healthie is that clients log into our application on an ongoing basis to communicate with their provider, log data, and handle payment for care. There are a myriad of ways in which we can build out this tooling — including partnering with meal delivery companies, distributing products, and much, much more.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
I’ve been passionate about increasing access to basic healthcare for as long as I can remember. However, through work internationally and in America alike, it has always been frustrating to me that there are such disparities in how needed, basic care is made available.
The inspiration for Healthie came from watching my parents — like most Americans; they struggled with weight management for years. Finally, they received access to nutrition education through a corporate wellness program and lost 35 pounds each — I credit this experience as being the reason they are living fundamentally healthier lives today. I saw how they worked with a care team of nutritionists, nurses, and doctors alike and realized that this was the type of care that everyone needed to receive.
I knew that increasing access to preventative health — shifting sick dollars to well dollars within the healthcare system — was where I wanted to make my impact, and that was the inspiration for Healthie. We started within the nutrition space but have since moved on to serve healthcare practices and digital health startups across all industries.
It’s been exciting to think outside the box on how to effect change within healthcare, shifting from considering a career in medicine to leading a tech startup. Entrepreneurship is an incredible pathway to create systemic change and is something people should not be afraid of jumping into if they have solid and innovative ideas about making change.
How do you think this might change the world?
Our organizations work with over one million clients today, and we’re just getting started.
Unfortunately, we as a society spent decades focusing on disease treatment over prevention.
For the sake of health care outcomes in this country, it would have been fantastic if Healthie existed ten years ago! But, unfortunately, the healthcare industry long overlooked two things: The importance of care delivery that partners medical care with non-medical care and the need to facilitate long-term relationships between providers and clients.
Until recently, legacy software in a highly regulated, hospital-centric industry also delayed innovation in healthcare.
We are providing the infrastructure for the next generation of healthcare delivery. As reimbursement for recurring-based healthcare services increases, prevention becomes more central to healthcare, the utilization of remote patient monitoring tools and wearables increases, and COVID-19 accelerates digital transformation in healthcare, there is an opportunity to transform sick dollars to well dollars and improve long-term health outcomes at scale.
The technology we have developed, Healthie is quite literally the infrastructure for this change. We power the next wave of innovators and builders in this space, so they are not spending the first few years and millions of dollars building out their functionality. Our customers are facilitating long-term relationships between providers and experts and the clients who need them most. As the “Shopify for healthcare,” we are making it easier for qualified professionals to create digital healthcare systems.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
Healthie is an antidote to this very issue. HIPAA compliance is a Day 1 decision built into Healthie’s DNA. We provide stringent guardrails for how client data can be accessed and utilized to ensure that we exceed rigorous security and privacy standards. This commitment provides our organizations, as well as their clients, with the assurance that we respect the right to privacy in this day and age. It’s more important than ever to be transparent in how data is utilized, and how it’s not being utilized.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
- Keep your mission at the center of what you do. Building a company is a marathon, and through tough times and easy times, if you’re lucky to have customers doing good in the world, you’ll rise above the day-to-day and do everything you can to support them.
- The best technology cannot be built overnight, no matter how many resources you pour into it. This can be a challenging reality for founders, particularly if you are non-technical like me. Realize that any software takes time and patience and is also never done. Taking care of your team for the long haul, which means personally and professionally, is core to long-term success.
- Build for the customer. If you are working with and for customers that are conduits of your mission, serving them will be at the core of everything you do.
- If you want to go fast, build alone. If you want to go far, build together. Healthcare is undergoing an unparalleled transformation — modern health tech companies are learning from EMR Giants of the 90s like Epic and realizing that closed systems, where patient data cannot flow freely, is terrible for patient outcomes. Accordingly, modern tech stacks enable interoperability and coordination of care, including integrations and partnerships, to facilitate the right way of care delivery.
- Build a sustainable, enduring business. Assuring customers we’ll be around in ten years remains the most powerful thing we can do for them. In addition, we understand the trust they place in us by leveraging our platform as the infrastructure for their businesses. Accordingly, the needs of our customers and our need to remain independent inform how we choose to scale.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
We’re only in this world for a certain number of years, and it’s so vital for us to leave the world better than how we came to it. This core belief came into fruition for me when I became a mom, shaping my perspective on how important it is to be a positive force in our society and our environment.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)
Judith Faulkner, CEO of Epic Systems
How can our readers further follow your work online?
https://www.linkedin.com/company/get-healthie/
https://twitter.com/gethealthie
https://www.facebook.com/GetHealthie/
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
