Revive founder and former CEO Brandon Edwards is getting back into the health care industry — and he may be bringing a significant number of jobs with him.
The Nashville entrepreneur has launched Unlock Health, Edwards told the Business Journal, which will provide marketing, technology and consulting services to health care providers.
Unlock Health is backed by private equity firm Amulet Capital Partners and was formed through the purchases of two digital health care marketing firms: Houston-based Decode (stylized DECODE) and Bradenton, Florida-based Eruptr. Edwards, who is also Unlock Health's CEO, declined to disclose the terms of the deals or the size of Amulet Capital’s investment.
Unlock Health’s launch comes as the health care industry is challenged by many of the same economic factors the rest of the nation is facing, most significantly labor costs, as hospitals try to reduce their reliance on traveling nurses who demand premium wages. During earnings calls, inflation and supply-chain issues have also been cited by area executives, as factors cutting into their bottom lines. To compound the problems, of Music City's 17 publicly traded health care companies, all but three saw their stock price decline over the course of 2022.
Edwards said Unlock Health’s platform is aimed at helping hospitals, health systems and physician practices overcome many of those same pressures. The company’s technology offerings will fall into two buckets, he said, the first of which is enabling technology, such as data and analytics tools and customer relationship management platforms.
The second bucket is monetizable products, Edwards said. Unlock Health currently has two, one of which is a health risk assessment product that allows patients to take short questionnaires online to help them determine if they need a doctor, and if so, what kind. The second is still being developed and will plug into any customer relationship management platform or electronic health record to accurately measure marketing attribution and return on investment, Edwards said.
Combining those technologies with marketing and managed care consulting services is an idea born out of Edwards’ career in health care marketing, he said.
“What I saw over my 28 years in the health care marketing world is that you can buy all of those things today if you’re a health care provider organization of any kind, but you have to buy them almost exclusively from different parties and then figure out how to cobble that together. … What you can’t do is get all of those from one place and eliminate all the inefficiencies and the lack of data transportability between them,” Edwards said. I think there is a huge potential in front of us and a very significant market need. I’ve always worked in this space and I’ve never seen the (health care) industry under the pressure it’s under now.”
Unlock Health currently has 120 employees, 10 of whom work out of the company’s Cummins Station headquarters. Decode will keep its Houston office, while Eruptr employees will remain 100% remote.
Edwards said in five years Unlock could employ as many as 400 people, most of whom would be located in Nashville. He also didn’t rule out future acquisitions.
“We have the right thing for the right time, and now it’s just a matter of us executing it and executing it well,” Edwards said.
