Heidi Raines grew up in Breaux Bridge in the 1980s, which had a population of fewer than 7,000 at the time. The town had one health care provider back then — a rural clinic that Raines went to work for at age 16, in part, to get better access to medical care. The experience gave her a unique perspective on the health care system and what she calls an “unwavering commitment” to improving it.
Today, Raines is CEO of Performance Health Partners, a health tech firm she founded in 2014. The firm got its start in the New Orleans Bio Innovation Center and provides customized software to health care organizations for incident reporting, performance measurement and assessing regulatory and compliance measures.
The New Orleans-based company, which has 35 full-time employees and dozens more contract workers, has more than 100 clients in 35 states, including clinics, hospital chains and Federally Qualified Health Centers. Annual revenue growth has averaged between 50% and 75%, and the company’s software beat out much larger competitors early this year, when it was ranked No. 1 by KLAS Research, a Utah-based industry research organization that Raines likens to the Consumer Reports of health tech.
In this week’s Talking Business, Raines talks about why she defied her investors and insisted on keeping Performance’s headquarters in New Orleans instead of moving to Nashville, Tennessee.
Interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What does Performance Health Partners do, specifically?
We provide a digital incident reporting tool that gives patients and employees in a health care setting a platform to submit observations and provide feedback in real time, which, in turn, improves safety and quality. If a nurse almost gave medicine to the wrong patient, they’re required to self-report that. This makes that process easier. Most medical errors occur because of systems, not people, so we focus, through our tools, on how we can improve the system. We don’t ask who did it. We ask what happened so the organization can look at the root cause and address it before any harm occurs.
For those not in the health care space, this is something that used to be done on paper and you have created like an app for your phone?
Yes. It’s an app on the phone and it uses a QR code. The beauty of it is that it allows for a real-time observation to be recorded. And it doesn’t always have to be negative. You could make a positive comment or give kudos to a nurse who was particularly helpful when you were in the hospital. We also have created a digital rounding tool, which monitors the environment of care. Just like EPIC, the electronic health record platform, follows the patient, this tool follows the health of the organization. It measures everything from hand washing to temperature checks to the temperature of the refrigerators. It’s big data analytics that is used to improve quality and compliance.
Can you walk me through a more specific example of how this really works?
One of the first organization to use our product was a nine-hospital system that was having problems administering medication. So, we implemented our system and started getting data in and within a month, we saw the medication error was happening on the morning shift in telemetry and then we tracked it further and discovered that it wasn’t a human error at all but a pharmacy error — a dispensing error. So, the hospital went back to the pharmacy administrators and made them aware of the problem and stopped the error. So, it increased morale, improved performance and patients didn’t get the wrong medication.
What inspired you to create this software and this company?
It came from working within health care … and what I kept seeing over and over again is that health care organizations had all sorts of regulatory and compliance burdens, but they didn’t have accessible and easy systems to address them. Large health systems have large software packages but regional and smaller systems didn’t. So, we started very small and we have grown over the last seven years into this huge government risk and compliance enterprise software.
Are your employees based here?
As we have grown, we have added people from all over the country and we are almost completely virtual now. I have had a lot of pressure to leave New Orleans. I have investors in Nashville, for instance, who have said, you have to move here, come to where the mothership is. I dug my heels in and said I’m staying.
Would it be easier to do what you do if you were in Nashville?
No. We have access to some incredible talent here and I think that idea has changed since COVID. I’ve seen a shift in attitudes with the VC and private equity firms. It used to be why aren’t you in Brentwood or Silicon Valley? Now it’s all about results.
Is there a lot of competition in your field?
There are global, billion-dollar companies that we compete against. We recently won Best in KLAS for our software. We really ruffled some feathers winning that award and surpassing them.
What keeps you up at night?
We’re growing a good business ecosystem here, but we put a lot of emphasis on the pitch and also on celebrating the ones who exit like Lucid and Levelset. Where we need more support is in the scale and the growth. We need to really educate our companies on how to scale and teach them about investing, banking, growing — the visualization of how to get to the next step. That’s the missing piece of the puzzle.