Miles Romney started his career in health-tech, building the first EHR for wireless, mobile devices in-clinic. He then moved heavily into security, architecting solutions for secure data transmission and storage to satisfy what were, in those days, the ‘new’ HIPAA requirements.
From there, Miles moved into entertainment, building packet-streaming encryption systems for secure video and audio broadcasting. He spent fifteen years in that industry: running an animation studio and pioneering ‘digiclay animation’; building a media company that ran online ops for some 1,500 newspapers and TV stations before they sold it; then running a tech-enabled film distributor. “I loved all that!” Miles Romney recounts.
“But I got to a point, running the film distributor, where I felt like I was one of many people talking a lot about the world’s problems without actually doing anything to solve them—I wanted to move the needle. Healthcare was my likely choice, given my background. And I peg the high cost and uneven availability of healthcare as the second-largest problem in the world,” he added.
He connected with Bret Larsen who had spent his career in telehealth, and who had a compelling thesis on what the industry was doing right, and what it was doing wrong. Bret sold Miles on that vision.
Together, they determined that telehealth was also the ‘wedge’ technology that would enable literally everything else because it decouples care from the point of care, and it introduces a tech intermediary between the patient and provider—an intermediary that can build over time to facilitate care in ever-evolving ways.
eVisit was born!
Miles Romney was appointed the CTO and Bret Larsen became the CEO of the ambitious and visionary organization—eVisit.
…and then, Cometh the Pandemic
The onset of COVID-19 in the United States in 2020, of course, was like knocking over a beehive; and telehealth was right in the thick of it. It was a busy year for eVisit (putting it mildly).
The eVisit team hit utilization 12 times that of their previous peak almost overnight. At one point, the company onboarded around seven thousand providers in a matter of ten days, and by year’s end, it grew its revenues by nearly 600%.
“We got into telehealth confident that an inflection would come. We didn’t know it would be a pandemic, we’re sorry it was,” said the CTO, regretfully. “But 2020 ended with America’s health systems in a considerably more prepared position for the next major challenge than they were a year before.”
“We deeply lament the challenges and loss of life imposed by COVID-19, but we believe in making lemonade out of lemons, and we’re pleased to have been a part of not only surviving the pandemic but also in leveraging its lessons to future preparation, for the future preservation of life and health,” he further added.
The very low impact COVID-19 has had on children, for example, sets it apart from all of history’s other major outbreaks, rising to the level of miraculous. The team at eVisit has had, alongside everyone working in healthcare, an opportunity to discover where their vulnerabilities lie so that they can be prepared for the next one—which may be much worse.
A part of that preparation is embracing remote-care workflows in the widespread deployment and adoption of hybrid care. This is where eVisit’s passion lies. Sure, eVisit can help patients and providers connect for the isolated cold and flu—and it does that. But the real power of its platform lies in holistic care and wellness, connecting every episode of care to a patient’s lifelong health.
And this is what the healthcare industry has to get good at in order to efficiently and effectively service a billions-large global population in an uncertain future.
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