Only the brave and brilliant can take on the complexities of care management. It’s only fitting then that Dr. Lissy Hu, an MD and MBA from Harvard, has been charging forth and succeeding in her quest to solve the lack of coordination in our healthcare system.
Her quest started with an important question, why is it that we have all the information we could possibly need about restaurants, but when it comes to finding a nursing home for our loved ones we are relegated to phone numbers and zip codes.
While still a student at Harvard, Dr. Hu entered a business plan competition and won enough money to launch a pilot, which she was able to test with a hospital. She was later able to raise venture capital and angel funding to found the company now known as CarePort.
Today, CarePort provides a software platform that connects multiple areas of the health system, ensuring patients have a smooth transition of care from one facility to another for one stage to the next.
“I had always been really interested in the delivery of healthcare, and how hospitals are working together with physicians and nursing homes, and really sort of across the continuum how sort of those relationships and care coordination are really being done,” Hu says. She adds that a key disconnect was bridging what happens in the hospital or physician’s office with the post-acute care facilities such as nursing homes and hospice care.
Just three years after launch, in 2016 Allscripts acquired her company. Hu mentions she had a difficult time deciding on whether to sell. She had invested all of her time and energy, her whole being into the company and she worried her organization would not mesh with a much larger corporate culture. Fortunately, the combination worked out well and she retains complete autonomy in operating as an independent business within the Allscripts umbrella.
And by 2018, Dr. Hu and CarePort assumed control of the Allscripts Care Management solution and services portfolio, which were rolled under the CarePort name. She continues to drive the business forward with strategic thinking and a background in medicine.
