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Hippo Health: Working to restore joy to the modern day health care experience Kevin McGarvey, MD, MBA, Co-founder and CEO, Hippo Health
Please let me tell you about Hippo Health, a practice started by myself and a team of seven other physicians all working together clinically for over a decade. Born from our experience in a frustrating health care system, we have built a new way to deliver virtual care coordination that helps patients and clinicians truly feel cared for. Hippo Health seeks to transform care delivery to work for patients and clinicians, and we are excited about our potential shared journey with you ahead. Our team is passionate about supporting innovative and dedicated community physicians and we are busting our tails every day to create a superior integrated community care experience. To understand why we are so stoked about the future of health care in Colorado, let me share a story of a patient I got to take care of on our new care network platform last month.
An older gentleman and longtime smoker without an established primary care physician had hurt his neck at work. It got worse for over two weeks and then he started to get vertigo. He was afraid to go to the emergency room and didn’t want to get a huge bill with his high-deductible plan. So he reached out to our care team on our platform. After being able to assess him virtually, I was worried he could have a vascular injury like a vertebral artery dissection and that he needed an in-person exam right away. While assessing the patient, I was able to talk with a primary care physician whom I know, trust and had invited to our
platform. His care team was able to then reach out the patient directly and get him in that morning. The patient got the care he needed and loved his doctor, who got a new established patient from the referral. Without our clinician-centric care network functionality, I would have had to recommend the patient go to the ER, and he potentially would have gotten a CT angiogram of the head and neck, and then been stuck with a $10,000 bill.
Getting to that simple use case has taken our company three years to achieve.
Trying to successfully change health care for the better is the craziest, hardest thing I have ever tried to do. Many times I have felt overwhelmed and uncertain whether our tiny new business would survive, let alone successfully help patients. Similar to being on call for the first time in residency and facing your first critically ill patient without a clear treatment path forward, I have learned so much and been humbled with every major milestone we have achieved. As an mid-career emergency physician turned rookie entrepreneur, I had dipped my toe in the water of startups for about 15 years, but had never gone “all in.” The work transition felt like going from casually climbing a well known flatiron in the Front Range to spending the last three years fighting up an unclimbed, remote big wall in a foreign land. While every day has been stimulating and different with my new line of work, going all in on a startup has been incredibly difficult. The problem we were working to solve seemed simple enough: connect patients and local care teams virtually better than other solutions in the market. We just needed to build a new business model and new software network architecture that providers loved. Simple, right? With every setback and failure, I felt compelled to keep going because I knew we could give patients better care at a lower cost with a superior care experience. As a physician and son of a physician, I have spent the majority of my life around medicine. In my opinion, camaraderie, empathy for our patients, and trust between colleagues is the life-blood of our professional culture. This “life-blood” is why I love medicine and part of what makes our work so special. It’s also why I left medicine to try to start our company, Hippo Health. Let me tell you about a guy we all know – Hippocrates. We all took an oath. Unfortunately, health care has gotten complicated, leaving patients and physicians often disconnected. Sadly, the sacred care relationship has become more and more commoditized. We named our company Hippo to try to remind the care professionals we seek to serve to connect on a more human level.
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