Healthcare’s 800% Growth Champion

Healthmap Solutions Chairman and CEO Eric Reimer has spent more than 30 years building and scaling health care services companies. In this episode of Advancio Talks from Advancio, host Carlos talks with Eric about being named the 2024 EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® National Life Sciences and Health award winner, how he scales companies, and how technology and AI are changing kidney care at Healthmap.

A career built on high-growth health care companies

Eric started as a consultant, spent four years in strategy and finance roles at health insurers, and helped launch a venture capital fund in 1999. In 2003 he began running a division of a public company, later became its chief growth officer, and helped grow its newly acquired National Imaging Associates business eightfold in 18 months. As a standalone CEO starting in 2008, he tripled revenue at CareCentrix. From 2013 to 2020 he chaired four private equity-backed companies, all with successful exits. He became Healthmap’s chairman in 2015 and stepped in as CEO in 2020.

What Healthmap does

Eric described Healthmap’s work simply: helping people with chronic kidney disease (CKD) and end-stage renal disease get proactive care instead of reactive care. Members get free access to a nurse, pharmacist, social worker, and dietitian, paid for by their health plan. Healthmap helps them see their doctors, get their labs, understand their condition, manage diet, and stay on the right medications, which slows progression and avoids costly hospital stays. It also shares what it learns between visits with members’ physicians. (Learn more about our Kidney Health Management program.)

“It’s important in the system not to be trying to take value away from one side to get to the other side.” (Eric Reimer)

Winning EY Entrepreneur Of The Year

Eric said he was genuinely shocked when he was named the national winner in front of about 1,200 people. His wife had to nudge him to go accept the award. Now a volunteer judge for the program, he believes several things stood out: a track record of scaling very different health care companies, Healthmap’s mission and results, a differentiated strategy built on technology, roughly tenfold growth in a couple of years with strong unit economics, and value for members, doctors, and health plans alike. (Read the EY national award announcement.)

How to scale a health care company

Eric’s approach comes down to a few principles:

• A value proposition that holds up, with financial strength and proof points.
• A complementary team. Eric describes teams like a stock portfolio. He knows his strengths are vision, product, and finance, so he hires top technologists and operators. About half of Healthmap’s senior team has worked with him before.
• Design for scale from day one. Plan how the business will run at 10 to 20 times its size, and invest in the platform and team ahead of growth.

Technology and AI at Healthmap

Healthmap takes in far more data than was possible 10 or 20 years ago, and uses it to build customized plans for every member at scale. Eric said the Carium acquisition adds daily digital touch points, such as weight, blood pressure, sleep, medications, and diet, plus two-way messaging with providers. Compared with competitors that may send a nurse into the home a handful of times a year, that daily connection is a major advantage, complemented by phone, video, and occasional home visits.

On AI, Healthmap is starting with administrative work like call notes and summaries, so clinicians can spend their time on clinical care. It is expanding into next best action and has built tools that can review every clinician call and offer feedback, where today only a sample can be audited. Eric said Healthmap will follow, not lead, on AI giving clinical advice directly to patients. (See our technology and analytics capabilities.)

Advice for health care entrepreneurs

For people early in their careers, Eric recommends breadth and patience: follow great people, learn from different roles, and don’t expect the C-suite on day one. For founders, he warns against funding and hiring so precisely that you “catch the car” without the team or platform to handle it. And his one piece of advice he wishes he’d heard earlier:

“Follow the best people. Surround yourself with the best people.” (Eric Reimer)

Watch the full episode

Watch this episode of Advancio Talks on YouTube. Meet Eric and the rest of our leadership team.