• Students Consult for Targus
• Unlocking the Door to Successful Entrepreneurship
• Web Developers 2 Go
• The Business Power of Social Networking

• Register for the FREE newsletter
• Submit ideas for future articles
• Become a partner with the eBusiness Center

• Newsletter Archives

• Contact the editor of the eBusiness Center Newsletter:

Rachel Finley
574 TNRB
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
(801) 422-3598
prspecialist@byu.edu

Unlocking the Door to Successful Entrepreneurship

Amy Rees Lewis, CEO of Mediconnect, digital medical records company, makes no claims of having planned on being her own boss, but when life circumstances opened an entrepreneurial door, she enthusiastically crossed that business threshold.

As a young mother of two, Lewis’ financial situation made working a necessity. The decision posed a dilemma: she wanted to be able to stay at home with her children, but she needed to provide for them. In the end, she compromised and began working out of her home.

Initially, Lewis worked from a 10 by 10 room in her home as a medical software reseller. But with her success as a businesswoman—selling a few million units and hiring almost forty employees in the first year—she had to move to an office. It was then she realized she had ‘accidentally’ found her way into the entrepreneurial world.

“Most women entrepreneurs I’ve met are in the same situation,” she says. “They started a business and it got bigger than they thought it would, and they had to expand. That’s how I got into the business world.”

Her involvement with medical software opened yet another door for Lewis as she looked for ways to expand her business. She co-founded Globerian, an off-shore outsourcing option for hospitals and insurance companies who need medical records analyzed and coded. Lewis funded the company first from the donations of family and friends. Then, two years later, she began raising venture capital.

“I didn’t plan on being an entrepreneur,” she says. “It wasn’t my intent, but I definitely became one.” And the key to her successful entrepreneurship has been paying attention to the right opportunities and maximizing them.

Lewis has been maximizing her opportunities since she was a teenager. During high school, she participated in a work-study program and began working in dental and health care offices.

“I learned the industry there,” she says. “I had a view of what was broken, and an understanding of the technology that could fix it.” She saw doctors who worked just to keep up with new discoveries in medicine and treatment, fall behind in an increasingly technology-driven world. Everything in healthcare, from scheduling and billing to patient record keeping, was decades behind the rest of the world in terms of technology-assisted efficiency.

Years later, when Mediconnect asked her take over as CEO, she saw a way to help fix the problem. Mediconnect specialized in technology that offered patient treatment records in a digital form. “They had this great technology but hadn’t figured out how to use it to make money,” she says. “So I focused on taking that technology and using it to facilitate medical record retrieval for legal practices and insurance companies.”

Now, Mediconnect is quickly becoming the hub of medical record retrieval. They began by offering their services to insurance companies and legal practices as a way to expedite claims filing. Then, when Hurricane Katrina struck and thousands of people lost their medical records, Mediconnect leaders threw open its virtual doors and offered to provide otherwise destroyed records to patients. Recently, the company has finalized plans to go global. The new parent company Mediconnect Global, Inc., it will open offices worldwide, add members to its board of directors, and expand its range of clients to include hospitals and patients.

The journey from her 10 by 10 home office to heading up international companies has not been an easy one for Lewis. But ethics and integrity never fail in business, she says.

“Do the right thing always,” she says. “Even if things didn’t end up how I wanted them to, I never regretted doing what was right. It gets scary when you start a business and you want to make it work. Don’t make trade-offs, don’t trick yourself into thinking you don’t have a choice. Always do the right thing and it will always work out the right way. It’s hard and scary, and you will be tested when you’re most fearful.”

But it’s important to push through even when what lies beyond an open door may be unfamiliar, she says.

“Don’t make your choices by fear,” she says. “No one can say they don’t have what it takes if they have passion. Being an entrepreneur means you get to do something you’re passionate about,” she says. “And work is so much more fun when you’re passionate about it.”