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In Downtown Denver, a building that has been occupied by entrepreneurs since 1909 tells the story about the changing the face of Western entrepreneurism. The leather boots and the Saddlery that used to occupy 1500 Wynkoop have now been replaced by a health-care application company of 101 heath-conscious employees who ride their bike to work and meet in conference rooms labeled 'Sane' and 'Genius'.
In 2008, Dr. Pete Hudson and Dr. Wayne Guerra decided to trade in their stethoscopes for Macs and undertake solving the inefficiency of the healthcare system. Now the doctors have grown the company and have upgraded from the suburbs to the historic building downtown. But still, the ask-me-anything culture that started between friends persists.
“We have an open-door policy, so people come in all the time and say, ‘Hey, I have an idea,’” Guerra said. “We are at 101 people, but still it’s, ‘Come talk to me if you have an issue or if you have an idea for the product.’ Everyone has impact on the product.”
Even non-employees regularly impact iTriage, Guerra said, mentioning that an entrepreneur in Texas recently reached out with an idea just as students from University of Denver lectures often do. iTriage’s biggest influencers, though, are its users who have shared over 90,000 reviews leading the iTriage team to constantly improve (they’ve put out over 100 software releases just this year!). The user feedback not only impacts the product, but also shows the impact that the product has on its users.
“There have been some incredible stories: everything from saving their own life or their kid’s life to finding the right doctor to understanding their medical condition better than anyone has ever told them, or taking better care of themselves,” Hudson said. “It’s been really, really rewarding; that’s embraced by our employees.”
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iTriage Employees Volunteer a Day for Habitat for Humanity
The Denver-based team is indeed rewarded by working on a product that not only affects 9.5 million users and their families, but also the healthcare industry as a whole.
Through working with over 50,000 patients throughout their 20-year careers as emergency medical physicians, Guerra and Hudson said they recognized that one of the industry’s largest problems is patients struggling to make medical decisions without the appropriate information to make them. Then, when patients make the wrong decisions -- or even make the right ones just a bit too late -- it’s costly for everyone.
“We started looking at healthcare waste: $750 billion wasted every year, that’s a third of all healthcare dollars,” Guerra said. “That’s a huge opportunity; if you remove that number, you can give everybody health insurance. How can iTriage help bring that number down?”
Despite healthcare being an industry that Guerra said gives all entrepreneurs “a little bit of gray hair” because of its complexity and many problems, Guerra and Hudson are working to “bring that number down” by currently partnering with over 600 hospital partners to give their patients an easy-to-use app with unbelievably thorough medical information and decision-making tools.
“We looked at iTriage and said, ‘How can we help people make better decisions to get more cost-effective, higher-quality care?’” Guerra said. “And then we watched them do it through those 90,000 reviews.”
