Had the founders of Ozark-based home care software company HealthMedX been looking for a new CEO in late 2011, they likely would have thought an industry veteran such as Pam Pure out of their league. As it happened, Pure selected HealthMedX.
The former president of McKesson Technology Solutions, a division of global health care services company McKesson Corp., Pure was listed in 2008 as one of the highest paid women by Forbes Magazine – No. 16 with earnings of $10.2 million, including her severance package.
After 25 years of climbing the health care technology career ladder as a marketer and administrator, Pure decided to take a year off to spend with her family. She says she never dreamed she’d manage personal care plans, but that’s what happened when her mom began treatment for Stage 4 cancer, her father-in-law suffered a heart attack and her mother-in-law had a stroke all within a few months of each other.
“While I was going through that process, I realized there had been progress with automating hospitals and physician offices, but for the most part, the post-acute environment was still pretty paper intensive,” Pure says.
With her family experience, she knew enough about the industry to aid how technology could improve the way patients and families monitor the care of their loved ones.
For 18 months, she studied the market with Spectrum Equity Investors and Trident Capital to acquire a company that could fill the niche she saw in the market. She says HealthMedX stood out from the crowd of “vertical” software providers that specialized in serving the needs of a particular care environment.
“At HealthMedX, the goal of the system was to manage the patient and not the location, and that allowed us to hit the ground running in terms of having a system that really supported a patient-centric view of the world,” Pure says.
In December 2011, the equity firms purchased HealthMedX for an undisclosed amount and named Pure CEO. And she is making an impact, in much the same way she did at McKesson.
During her tenure at McKesson Technology Solutions, the company grew its revenues from $900 million to $3 billion, with profit margins increasing to 10.7 percent from 5.8 percent. In her first year at HealthMedX, Pure increased its staff by nearly 35 percent and sales jumped by 30 percent.
She expects 2013 to continue on the same growth path as government regulations strengthen the requirement more that hospital systems follow patient outcomes.
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