In some respects, with its name on the tallest building in Doña Ana County, Electronic Caregiver has owned the Las Cruces skyline for years. As of Wednesday, the telehealth technology company can say it literally owns the building.
Electronic Caregiver solidified its presence in the Land of Enchantment and made official the purchase of the Las Cruces Tower from Coronado Tower LLC for $8.9 million, according to ECG President Joe Baffoe. The 10-story, 105,000-square-foot building was listed out of El Paso, Texas, by Best Real Estate Management and acquired through Pioneer Bank. Baffoe said Kiel Hoffman, market president at Pioneer Bank, led the effort.
“A year ago [Kiel] said he would make this deal happen,” Baffoe said. “And he made good on that promise. This is a big move in the right direction.”
The Las Cruces Tower, built in 1962, has been home to the growing telehealth company going on 5 years and also hosts three long-term tenants. ECG bought the naming rights in 2018 for the building which has donned “Electronic Caregiver” on its 121-foot-tall facade.
The company plans to officially rename the building Electronic Caregiver Tower. Baffoe said ECG has big plans to renovate the interior and bring the aesthetic up to 2022 standards.
The building acquisition came after years of significant company growth and impactful innovation within digital health care. EGC leads the virtual and telehealth industry through digital health monitoring, medical alerts and other telehealth services to patients across the country. Since 2018, Electronic Caregiver has added 20,000 customers, and the company now anticipates onboarding more than 100,000 customers in the next 18 months. It will do this through partnerships in its chronic care management program.
The company’s most recent and perhaps most innovative tech is a virtual caregiver named Addison. The virtual caregiver, according to EGC’s website is a 3D animated, connected caregiver designed to provide chronic care management, rehabilitation, behavioral health and care coordination. Designed to be hardware agnostic, the proprietary care platform could be in 200 homes by the end of July in advance of a soft launch, Baffoe said.
Over the last five years, ECG’s revenue has increased exponentially which played a role in the purchase of its new home, Baffoe said. An increase in revenue and square footage has kept ECG’s hiring and retention rates on an incline, he said.
In 2017, the company moved into the tower with 25 employees and now has close to 300 full-time employees and “extremely low turnover” according to Baffoe. What's more, ECG employs a variety of health care professionals and computer scientists in the southern part of the state. With close proximity to New Mexico State University, ECG built bridges with the Aggies over the years by funding research projects and creating space and opportunity for graduates in the STEM fields. “We didn’t buy the building as an investment per se, we bought it because we wanted to invest in our Las Cruces community because this is our home.” Baffoe said, who added continued growth will lead to continued opportunities to provide experience and jobs.
“The people of Las Cruces are very important to our success and growth," he said.
Philip Post, the interim associate dean at the NMSU's College of Health and Social Services, helped lead a virtual reality research project funded in part by ECG. He said through the partnership with ECG, students were able to gain tangible work experience in computer science and coding which isn’t easy to come by in the area.
“It’s great to see a private-public partnering on research endeavors like this one. Our students were able to apply what they've learned to work that is truly innovating the health care industry,” Post said. “We don’t necessarily have many industries focused on tech in our vicinity, they (ECG) are providing those opportunities.”
