Today we’d like to introduce you to Kayla Shawn Grimes
Hi Kayla, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I began my healthcare journey in hospice care, quickly transitioning to the corporate sector with a national hospital system. I gained experience in HR, hospital operations, and strategy and business development in corporate healthcare. During this time, I built strong relationships with healthcare executives, who really took me in as a mentee. I was truly able to learn from those at the top of their game at such a young age.
Professionally, I’m always focused on innovation, constantly asking, “How can this be better?” I saw a lot of things within the healthcare system that needed fixing and that’s truly what keeps me in the industry is knowing that there are endless problems to fix. I was never the type of employee who was fine with just coasting by, I always wanted more so I would consistently bring new ideas to the table, even when faced with resistance.
At the time, I noticed that patients often make un-informed decisions, face unexpected medical bills, and struggle with navigating the healthcare system. Knowing all of the industry knowledge I had about healthcare, I thought it was odd that industry experts had access to all this information that patients don’t have access to. Then I thought to myself what if patients actually had the information they truly needed to make an informed decision? And that simple idea took over my mind.
When I got home that night I was running around like a mad woman because I started having so many ideas as to how navigation can be applied to everyone in America. By the end of that night, I had half a notebook full of ideas that has now turned into a 7, and counting, notebook collection of ideas I have for what is now The Healthcare Navigator. From there on, I knew I would regret it if I didn’t try to execute, so I didn’t give myself time to back out, I just went for it and never looked back.
My goal is to create a convenient and user-friendly platform that serves as a go-to resource before making healthcare decisions. This platform aims to protect Americans from the pitfalls of the healthcare system, providing essential information to make informed choices and ensuring a stress-free experience. Everyone can use a big brother figure who knows what they’re going through and can tell you what you need to know in order to make better decisions. Before The Healthcare Navigator, we didn’t have an established platform like ours for everyday people. Patients were selecting procedures, not even knowing the price until they get the medical bill, picking doctors based on reviews on Google, and nothing else, not knowing the answers to really complex but critical healthcare questions, and overall being in a system that is not easy to navigate and continuously getting caught in this loop of medical debt and stress.
After a year of laying the foundation down by myself and garnering interest within the Houston community, I created a volunteer team to help me build the platform. I wanted to create something that was convenient and easy to use but its overall purpose is to be the thing that people go to before they make a healthcare decision so that they can go by the facts, not the fluff. I wanted to make something that can help protect Americans against the shortcomings and pitfalls that have existed in the healthcare system for so long. Knowledge is power and I wanted something that would help give people their power back in the healthcare system, in a convenient and stress-free way.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It hasn’t been a smooth road. Any goal worth working toward is going to be bumpy.
Beyond people management, the complexity of our platform was more than I expected. The barriers to entry were extremely high. The sheer volume of data required me to create several proprietary assets to ensure we had up-to-date information. Additionally, since we launched with five apps, our backend had to be robust and capable of handling everything. It wasn’t until then that I realized how crazy I was to launch with 5 modules on one platform. Looking back that was definitely insane. But I can’t lie, I wouldn’t change a thing because I got to see what I was truly made of and how much I actually cared about getting this to the public.
In the healthcare and technology space, many people give up after a few roadblocks. It was a struggle to motivate my team to push past this mindset. Society often believes that if something isn’t easy, it can’t be done, making it hard to find people who don’t think this way. And especially because my team started off with students, it was difficult because on top of dealing with regular college drama, I was dealing with very smart people who’d been taught their whole lives to just follow the textbook and nothing else. So even though they’re very smart, there was a learning curve in teaching them to come up with solutions as problems arise. Now, our team is comprised of full-time, experienced specialists, but I still carry the sentiment that being selective about who is on your team is extremely important to success.
I’ve also learned that it’s a great thing to be borderline obsessed with what you’re doing. You have to really care about what you’re doing because most times it’s so stressful that any rational person would give up. Especially when we were about to launch, I went two weeks with barely any sleep. It wasn’t until then that I realized how crazy I was to launch with 5 modules on one platform at once. Looking back that was definitely insane, but very much worth it in seeing the impact we’re having on people’s lives. Nothing good comes easy.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about The Healthcare Navigator ?
The Healthcare Navigator is an online platform that helps guide people through the healthcare system to make better more informed decisions, reduce their unnecessary healthcare costs, increase health literacy, and provide users with their own personal healthcare advisor all on their phones. It’s similar to bookings.com but for healthcare so we provide you with a one-stop shop for all of your healthcare needs and give you critical data so that you can make more informed decisions. In a nutshell, we are the trusted platform people turn to before making healthcare decisions, ensuring they rely on facts, not fluff.
We are extremely comprehensive in our product offerings with 6 modules plus affordable labs and medications through strategic relationships with companies like Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs. All 6 of the modules cover your everyday healthcare needs from finding providers to accessing procedure prices to learning about healthcare news and helping negotiate your medical bills. On average it takes our users six minutes to find their doctor that is a perfect match compared to them spending hours on the Internet trying to find a doctor. Additionally, an average user who needs to get a procedure done can save an average of $3480 per procedure with our cost compass. Secondly, we are extremely user-centered so all of our modules are built around what our focus groups like, and don’t like. We never go to market without asking people what are their needs and their preferences. If you’ve ever gone to our site and become a user, you know that our platform is extremely to use. We’ve made sure that our offerings are true solutions to large pain points, addressing the issues that employers and individual families are having from interacting with the healthcare system. I mean, anyone can tell that from the labs, medications and our 6 modules, our focus is on giving people their power back.
Lastly, we are driven by transparency and constant innovation. We don’t believe in keeping vital information to ourselves. There are some navigation organizations where the client relies on their in-person navigator to tell them who to go to. We don’t do that. Instead of waiting weeks for an appointment, you can get all the information you need in just a few clicks. We provide you with everyone’s quality scores and data so that you can make a decision for yourself in less time. When it comes to innovation, that is our bread and butter, this company, and this platform were built on the love for bringing new things to light and being bold in daring to find better ways to do things, so we are constantly creating new apps, making more partnerships to provide more solutions to every American. In fact, we have four additional apps coming soon, that are complete game-changers, in our product pipeline.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
People have told me that I always acted like a grown-up when I was young. I attribute that to just being around adults my whole life, since I am an only child, but I’ve always been told that I had the mind of a 50-year-old woman in a young persons body. So never was able to grasp the hierarchy between grown-ups and young people, I had always thought that like I was just as tall as a grown-up, or you know, there was never any difference between me, and a grown-up, which a lot of people thought was comical.
I was and I am still a very competitive person. I was really into sports and anything that had teams. I loved winning that was my favorite thing and so I would always just chase that high so much so that I even found competition within academics. I liked competing for the top grade in the class, I was that kid who was up at 6 AM in the teacher’s office working on her corrections because I got some questions wrong and I wanted to make sure that we were not test come. I wouldn’t make those mistakes again.
But I love spending time with my friends and family. My mom and my grandma, Sweetie, is her name, were my best friends growing up, which sounds weird to say when you’re young but it’s true. I loved hanging out with them. We all get called the triplets in my grandma’s hometown because we were always together. Honestly, my grandma is a big reason why I created this platform because I see what she goes through as a patient. Kind of just accepting high medical procedure prices, and feeling like there was not much she could do about it. I hate seeing people helpless and I feel like her sentiment parallels that with a lot of Americans nowadays because we’ve just gotten so accustomed to the shortfalls of the healthcare system that we’ve kind of just become numb to it and I don’t think that’s okay.
Pricing:
- Special Pricing for Employers and Organizations: Contact support@thehealthcarenav.com
- Free Trial is Now Available with Coupons when you go to website
- $15.99 for Starter Plan
- $19.99 for Standard Savings Monthly Plan
- $180 (25% Discount) for Smart Savings Yearly Plan
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.thehealthcarenav.com/
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kayla-shawn-051b2b212/
Image Credits
Credit to The Healthcare Navigator
