Feb 8, 2019
I believe it goes without saying that growth is the ultimate goal of every organization. Regardless of the path a company takes, establishing the best course for success involves considerable strategic planning and a solid understanding of how and why a specific business not only achieves success, but maintains it.
We can also safely say that growth just doesn’t happen. Determining how successful businesses can grow and continue to succeed takes very detailed and comprehensive planning. Over the last three years, I’ve been fortunate to experience emids’ significant growth journey as CFO. We have grown close to three times in size since 2016, a direct result of what I like to call ‘purposeful’ growth. I define purposeful growth as a strategic combination of organic and inorganic investments in the technology and solutions that will solve current and future issues in the healthcare industry. It is also imperative that purposeful growth brings value to our existing and potential customers, eventually resulting in continued advancement for our organization.
Since I originally posted this blog, we announced a historic step in our purposeful growth story: our partnership with New York-based private equity firm New Mountain Capital, whose symbiotic growth mindset and vast experience supporting healthcare and healthcare technology companies innovate, scale and achieve next-level growth will propel emids on our journey as healthcare’s preferred partner for digital transformation.
On the organic front, while we are investing in fewer tech areas, we have put 100 percent full energy and focus into those areas to ensure added customer success. We’ve seen great results for our clients and our ability to stay focused in certain areas has helped them achieve higher outcomes. Our clients are extremely pleased with our intense focus and commitment to detail, which has undoubtedly helped contribute to client success, one of our core company values.
No better example of our organic growth comes to mind than the implementation of our Business Intelligence (BI) practice. BI is an excellent way to transpose actionable insights into data that can provide important information regarding decision-making in various healthcare settings. BI also provides the ability to influence patient and population health and cut costs by pulling business operations together to gain valuable insight into enterprise information and financial data. We recognized the potential of a BI practice and the need in the marketplace, and made the decision to create this system to anticipate our client needs. Our BI mission is to be a strategic data and analytics partner for healthcare enterprises to help them achieve a more in-depth understanding of data incorporating practical experience. Since its inception, the BI practice has grown immensely and now stands as one of our most extensive practices.
To be truly successful, inorganic growth must also be an integral part of any company’s business strategy. When a very large initiative takes much longer to build and grow organically, it makes sense to add it through acquisition. Inorganic growth comes from matching the business goals with what we see happening in the industry. We saw that in some cases, the lines of payer and provider markets were blurring and the future of the healthcare industry was transforming. With that, the decision was made that for us to continue to be successful in our market position for the long term; we needed to invest into the provider side of capabilities, to complement our existing payer and health tech offerings.
Case in point: Our 2017 acquisition of Encore Health Resources, a provider-system consulting company, has been one of the most critical milestones in our organization’s history. The thought process behind this acquisition was not just to add size, but to effectively provide the opportunity for us to steadily fuel future growth. We are now in a position in today’s healthcare IT market to have the expertise and thought leadership to serve the needs of both provider and payer markets, essentially allowing us to utilize our joint capabilities. In essence, this acquisition significantly enhanced our marketability, and provided a new level of growth and synergy.
Regardless of day-to-day roles and responsibilities or company growth, we are aligned on a solid platform of core values. Our focus on being purposeful transcends to our client relationships. Our exclusive focus on healthcare IT and providing superior value to customers through our thought leadership in healthcare and our technology expertise is our number one priority and drives everything we do as an organization. Our growth and client retention is a true testimony to the value we place in client relationships, because without the trust of our valued clients, we would not be the company we are today.
I’m excited to see all the great things in store for us this year, and how our purpose-driven approach to our client relationships and purposeful company growth will continue to serve us well in the months and years to come.
Gaurav Agarwal oversees finance, legal and secretarial functions at emids. He is an expert in mergers and acquisitions, finance, investor relations, negotiation, financial analysis and related areas. Gaurav works closely with other executives to build long-term and short-term strategies and help implement them, while also adopting the best standards of financial and operational disciplines. He is a chartered accountant in India and a certified public accountant in the U.S. Be sure to connect with Gaurav on LinkedIn.