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Sonny Hyare, CEO of ReMedi Health Solutions, poses for a portrait on Nov. 6, 2020. In August, Hyare moved into an office building and set up a virtual command center to better assist hospitals during the pandemic.
Sonny Hyare, CEO of ReMedi Health Solutions, poses for a portrait on Nov. 6, 2020. In August, Hyare moved into an office building and set up a virtual command center to better assist hospitals during the
Photo: Pu Ying Huang, Houston Chronicle / Contributor
Sonny Hyare, CEO of ReMedi Health Solutions, poses for a portrait on Nov. 6, 2020. In August, Hyare moved into an office building and set up a virtual command center to better assist hospitals during the pandemic.
Sonny Hyare, CEO of ReMedi Health Solutions, poses for a portrait on Nov. 6, 2020. In August, Hyare moved into an office building and set up a virtual command center to better assist hospitals during the
Photo: Pu Ying Huang, Houston Chronicle / Contributor
Dr. Sonny Hyare does not waste much time making big decisions, and such decisiveness appears to be paying dividends this year for his company, ReMedi Health Solutions.
The 40-year-old Humble native says he knew even before finishing medical school that he didn’t want to practice medicine and would pursue health care consulting instead.
“I knew in med school that I didn’t want to be a doctor, but I pushed through because my parents made the investment,” said Hyare (pronounced “hair”). “After residency, I was done.”
His three-year-old Houston-based company, however, appears to be just getting started. Founded and solely owned by Hyare, ReMedi has tripled its headcount to about 180 and is slated to double its revenue to about $4 million in response to the spike in hospital revenue as a result of COVID.
ReMedi is a far cry from his studies in internal medicine at Hungary’s University of Debrecen. After completing his residency in Chicago, Hyare worked for various companies as a health care consultant for about six years before founding ReMedi in 2017 as an information-technology company specializing in the electronic health record (EHR) sector.
The business was based on the premise that a team of former medical professionals such as himself would be best suited to provide on-site consulting for hospitals and doctors grappling with the task of managing the maze of government and insurance regulations related to medical records.
ReMedi tapped into a growing market. Between 2014 and 2019, annual U.S. EHR spending rose 23 percent between 2015 and 2019 to $14.5 billion last year, trade publication Healthcare IT News reported in May, citing a report from business-research company Freedonia Group.
As a result, by last year, ReMedi grew to about 60 employees deployed at hospitals across the country and its revenue was about $2 million, Hyare said. He declined to disclose the identity of his hospital clients.
With many nurses in the industry getting furloughed and much of ReMedi’s staff forced out of hospitals because of on-site COVID restrictions, the company, which shut down for about three months this year, tweaked its business model by expanding both workforce and workspace.
ReMedi, which had previously worked out of a single, 200-square-foot office because virtually its entire staff had been off site, opened an 18,000-square-foot “Virtual Command Center” in Houston’s Greenway Plaza in September.
“We were able to pivot because we don’t have that much overhead,” Hyare said of the pandemic. “What we saw was that there were nurses and clinical staff getting furloughed from medical centers. We were able to pick up these people to support the front-line nurses.”
Dr. Joseph Schneider, a pediatrician who practices at Dallas’s UT Southwestern/Parkland Hospital and is a founding member of the Texas Medical Association’s Health Information Technology (HIT) Committee, says there’s good reason for such growth within the sector.
“One of the challenges of electronic medical records (systems) is that many of them were largely developed in essence as glorified billing systems. It used to be that you could write brief notes,” said Schneider, who added that he hadn’t heard of ReMedi. “Nowadays, there is so much more required information, and (electronic medical records) companies in general haven’t learned to help filter it. So physicians are often spending a lot of time on administrative tasks that they didn’t have to do in the past.”
Those requirements for support are slated to increase. As the impact of COVID boosts hospital visits and as regulatory requirements continue to broaden, annual EHR spending will accelerate by 37 percent to $19.9 billion in 2024, with hospitals accounting for about half of that total, Healthcare IT News reported, citing the Freedonia Group report.
