Why I Joined Everly Health

By Dr. Liz Kwo, MD, MBA, MPH

My desire to digitize and scale healthcare was born out of my fascination during medical school with how physicians practiced medicine. I loved the bedside skills we were learning, like differentiating a heartbeat with a defect versus one without; but, as all early stage medical students experience, I wondered: did I indeed hear that heart murmur? Or did we indeed see that radiology image that showed a slightly fractured bone? My mind raced to how we could improve our accuracy as disease-detecting physicians. How could we scale our skills to see 10 patients a day? 20 a day? In any given eight hour workday, how could I scale myself to see 1,000 patients a day? 

As I listened to my Harvard Medical School faculty lectures, my mind gladly accepted the learning, but wondered how we could merge the complicated worlds of public health, technology, private investments, and large scale businesses to create a rendition of the world that was the product of vast collective shared goals.

While in college, I moved in with an elderly couple for two years and traded the raucous undergraduate dorms for my home clinic that was the home of Dolly and Alvin. Every morning it was a medicine clinic, with an emphasis on pharmacology and drug dosing, where I helped to administer drugs and take their blood pressure. At the time, I wondered why it wasn’t possible just to test cholesterol or other important markers when they had physical difficulty getting to and from the clinic.

Medical school confirmed my desire to train in preventative medicine, as I found it more interesting and diverse than I ever imagined. I came to appreciate the management of chronic disease or infectious disease as essential for ensuring a high quality of life. These are the diseases that burden many of the most vulnerable populations of our world, who require attentiveness in the home with clear testing methods and telehealth to keep their bodies healthy. 

Thus, when an opportunity like Everly Health presented itself, where I can ensure that proper and efficient healthcare resources are available for patients in the comfort of their own homes, I could not pass it up. Adequate healthcare access and coordination by patients and doctors, and for patients, is essential to Everly Health’s mission and has been a personal driver for my own career. 

I currently teach residents at Harvard Medical School as a Faculty Lecturer, and it has shown me that our healthcare dilemma cannot be solved by new healthcare policies alone - it requires innovation from companies who advocate for changing the behavior and culture of the industry.

Reasons like these are why I cannot wait to join Everly Health in creating innovative ways to utilize technology to increase agility and social interaction, create care coordination programs to prevent readmissions, and so much more to close gaps in care. I am excited about the leading healthcare data and personal navigation tools that the company has created. Everly Health’s market-leading technology with at-home collection tests, telehealth, health care professionals and strategic partnerships with payers has the potential to transform how patients access and engage with care. 

I believe the company has a unique opportunity to deliver large scale innovation, not only to the payers, but also to accelerate the coordinated and personalized patient experience. I’m excited to build a continuum of care for patients who want to share results with providers, and help grant coverage for employers and payers to focus on wellness. 

In my prior roles, I focused on improving health outcomes and lowering costs, and I plan to continue this trend for our payer and employer clients. Using leading digital navigation and engagement capabilities, we plan to personalize care plans and engagement campaigns, while providing our care teams and patients with quality and cost data that will greatly enhance the patient journey. I cannot wait, because I can see clearly how, together, we will transform lives with modern, diagnostic-driven care.