We Make Bad Days Better
By Keith Butler, MD, CEO, MBA, FACEP, CEP
There have been many proud moments in my career in Emergency Medicine. The most recent is the formal launch of TECHealth. You may know the TEC name from our freestanding emergency rooms. The TECHealth brand represents a comprehensive view of emergency medicine and how every component of the company is designed to make patients’ bad days better.
Many companies proudly boast they are value driven, but TECHealth puts its money where its mouth is by truly living our values every minute of every day. These aren’t aspirational values – they describe who we are. Our culture and our values are intricately intertwined. From the first moment we started practicing emergency medicine, our goal was to create an experience for the patient like the one we would want for ourselves. We put ourselves in the patient’s shoes and designed our approach to care accordingly.
It took us two years to hone our values into the foundation for our culture. We realized our four values boiled down to simple, but meaningful concepts – accountability, do something good, empathy, and zeal. While seemingly simple, for many organizations they are extremely difficult to put into practice. Accountability means we take responsibility for our words and actions consistently demonstrating a high level of dependability. Seeking to do good means we actively look to create positive experiences for those with whom we interact, beyond what is required. Having empathy means we understand the vulnerability and fear associated with being injured or ill, so we encourage a culture of compassion and support to alleviate suffering. Finally, having zeal means we work as a team with enthusiasm, dedication, and a passion for living our mission, vision, and values. These core values guide our business decisions, from how we treat our patients to whom we choose as our business associates. Our hiring and evaluation decisions are also guided by this philosophy which has created our strong company culture.
Whether we’re recruiting physicians for a hospital ER, or hiring staff for a freestanding ED, we interview based on culture and we are deliberate in matching individual values to our values. We probably spend more time interviewing and screening talent than any other emergency medicine group.
Our efforts caught the attention of the executives of a large health system in Arizona. They contacted us knowing what we were doing in Texas. After beginning our engagement, we employed our three-pronged physician recruitment strategy — to create a facility where quality physician leaders want to work and where they know they will be successful, to encourage respected physician leaders in the community to join our client’s organization, and to build on the reputation of the physician leaders to attract top physician talent.
Early on in our emergency medicine practice, we realized the ED was a unique environment that required a specially designed electronic medical record platform. So, TECdoc was born. The system’s proprietary software mirrors and optimizes the patient journey through the ER. It provides real-time data, and it is the only EMR that records physician discharge instructions for patients and their families to review at their convenience. TECdoc also interfaces with most hospital EMR systems.
We continue to be contacted by potential business partners interested in management contracts or operating their own freestanding ER using TECHealth’s business approach. TECHealth Partnerships offers interested parties a variety of options to get into the TECHealth emergency medicine sphere.
We’re excited about TECHealth’s future. We want to be a dominant force in emergency medicine in Texas and Arizona and we want to grow in other parts of the country. We also want to continue to make more ER patients’ bad days better by expanding our culture and core values to hospital EDs through staffing agreements. We want to keep growth steady and keep a laser focus on our core values. With TECHealth, we’re taking a leadership position in the industry. Our goal is to provide high-quality, comprehensive, convenient emergency medicine care using our proven approach to successful facility operations.
Keith Butler, MD, CEO, MBA, FACEP, CEP
