In our recent interview with Lauren Patrick, we discuss her journey into computer science and subsequently healthcare technology. As the founder and CEO of Healthmonix, she is helping practice groups optimize their data and analytics in order to improve their quality of care scores and ultimately, help doctors provide the best care to patients. Our transcript has been edited, but you can listen to the full podcast episode here.
Can you tell me how you got into computer engineering?
So a long time ago in a place far, far away, my father was an electrical engineer. When I was looking at colleges, he suggested that because I was good at math and because he had had a very successful career developing computers as an electrical engineer, I should consider going into this new field of computer science. So I got my undergraduate degree in computer science and then moved into an engineering degree for my Master’s, where I actually built computers, soldered transistors together and made it all work from the ground up.
So you loved computers, and you understood them at a fundamental level. When did you get into healthcare technology?
About 10 years ago, I had had a pretty storied career developing a lot of systems for a lot of different companies, like General Electric, Goodyear, banks, and a lot of other companies, but I felt like it was a time when I wanted to take everything I knew and apply it to something where I could make a difference. I had moved to Philadelphia for personal reasons and knocked on the door of the University of Pennsylvania. They had a really great project they said I could help them with in terms of looking at physicians’ compliance to current standards and quality of care in the arena of diabetes. So that’s how I got into it.
[At that time], quality measurement and quality improvement were becoming the next big thing in educating doctors. Doctors have careers that span 40, 50 years, and what they learned in medical school at the beginning of their career is not always the current standard of care 10, 20, 30, 40 years later. So what we were really working on doing was taking the current standard of care and looking at how physicians were conducting their practices in comparison, and then feeding that back to physicians so that they could then work on changing their practices, improving quality of care for their patients and learning from this whole exercise.
What were the problems you encountered during this time and what led you to decide to start a company?
It was really interesting to see how doctors reacted to it. Every doctor of course, probably rightly so, thinks that they are providing the best care possible for their patients. And as we walked through some of the data that we collected, they were somewhat surprised to learn that perhaps the way they were treating patients wasn’t the current standard of care, and certainly, there’s a lot more to being a doctor than just knowing medicine. Just like there’s a lot more to building a computer system and implementing it than the technology. So then what we had to do was learn how to work with these doctors in a non confrontational manner in order to help them understand where some gaps in care were and how they could perhaps change their practices in order to do better, and that was super interesting and rewarding. I love working with doctors. They’re bright people, they learn quickly, and they all want to do a better job. I have not met a doctor that didn’t want to provide better care for patients where it was available. So it really instilled a love for the whole industry, and then we took what we learned from the diabetes model and we applied it not only to additional diseases and states for Penn, but we started working with other specialties as well. Other companies and organizations started calling me and asking me if I can help them do the same thing for their organizations.
I’ve got to say, I’ve talked to quite a few founders, and that’s a pretty unique story you’ve got. What year did all this happen, and can you tell me a little bit more about the journey?
2009
