Cindy R. Kent remembers the moment she was hooked on health care.
As a junior at Northwestern University, she was an intern at Eli Lilly & Co. and taking a tour of a manufacturing facility. A quality engineer held up a handful of powder in one hand. In the other, she held a capsule.
"'This will one day save your life or the life of somebody that you love'," she recalled the engineer saying.
Kent said she was bawling after hearing that.
"That was my hook for my life — that I can do work and commit myself to work that would one day save lives," she said.
Kent has followed through with that passion, building her career further at Eli Lilly before taking on leading roles in Medtronic's gastroenterology and urology division, and later 3M's global infection prevention division. Now, Kent has a new opportunity to help save lives as the chief operating officer at Austin-based digital health and diagnostics startup Everly Health Inc.
It comes at a transformative time for the company, which has recently made several acquisitions on the heels of two huge funding rounds in 2020. Following first two of its three acquisitions in March, Bloomberg reported the company had reached a $2.9 billion valuation, which Everly Health founder and CEO Julia Cheek recently said is on the low side of its current status.
Everly Health, which is the parent company to Everlywell, Everly Health Solutions and EverlyDx, now offers more than 30 health and wellness tests. It has nearly 600 employees following its acquisitions of national clinician network PWNHealth, self-collected lab testing company Home Access Health Corp. and, most recently, women's health startup Natalist. It expects to hire hundreds in coming months.
For Kent, joining Everly Health is a chance to bring her deep experience in health care to a maturing startup focused on consumer health products.
"I always think about opportunities in two regards: What can I learn? And what can I give?" she said. "Everly Health is a perfect combination of being able to come in and hit the ground running with 'How do I think about the clinical teams? How do I think about operations? How do I think about supply chain?'"
Kent said Everly Health reached out to her about the COO position while she was in her most recent role as executive vice president and president of senior living at Brookdale Senior Living. And it was immediately familiar, since Kent had used some of Everly Health's at-home test kits.
"The other thing is that I knew of Julia, not personally, for being one of the rare female founders in digital health tech," Kent said. "And so between those things, I knew the company and I knew its reputation."
While Kent has an extensive background in health care, she didn't rest on her laurels coming into the new role.
"I did a lot of homework," she said. "I did a lot of homework with people in the Austin community. I did a lot of homework with people who were investors in digital tech, not in Everly Health in particular, but in digital tech. And a lot of homework as it related to women founders and CEOs."
In her role as COO, Kent oversees human resources, clinical services, laboratories, compliance and regulatory clinical science. In her first week, she said she's largely been focused on better understanding what makes Everly Health successful.
"I think one of the most powerful things is spending the time to learn as much as you can," she said of her first week in the new role. "And it's one of those things where I say it's a little bit of going slow to go fast. Take the time to listen and learn about the organization to make a larger contribution in terms of overall impact at the appropriate time."
Kent said she plans to build on the inclusive culture on which Everly Health was founded.
"It's not just words on a page, it's not a glossy poster somewhere that diversity and inclusion and an equitable culture is the hallmark not only from what I've read but for what I've experienced the last seven days," she said.
Kent's also excited to keep doing what put her on this path as a college student – saving lives.
"I am excited about the growth trajectory that Everly Health is on and, specifically, to be able to contribute to the vision of scaling this company because there are millions of Americans and on a global basis eventually that can be served by our modern diagnostic driven care," she said. "And so to be a part of the team, at this point of its maturation, is super exciting – not just for me personally, but for Everly Health, for Austin and for the health care ecosystem."
