Episode 4: Stephen Hunter, ROMS Founder

In this special episode of Innovation Rising, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Stephen Hunter, Physical Therapy Administrator for Intermountain Healthcare Physical Therapy and founder of ROMS, which stands for Rehab Outcomes Management System, which he developed at Intermountain Healthcare in 2000 and which was accepted to go through the Intermountain Foundry Program in 2015. Stephens passion for the startup is palpable and I had a great time in my conversation with him. Stephen has been with Intermountain for over 31 years where he is the active administrator over 11 outpatient orthopedic PT clinics and a practicing clinician. Stephen is the Author and co-author to several articles establishing the value of physical therapy and has his Clinical Doctorate of Physical Therapy from the University of Utah.

 

In 2014, Intermountain Healthcare launched their Foundry Program in partnership with Healthbox. The Foundry is a part-time program providing resources and guidance to vet the business aspects of employee ideas that could either benefit Intermountain internally or have additional commercialization potential outside of the system. For more details on setup, genesis, and background of Intermountain’s innovation focus, have a listen to our previous episode with Jeremy Porter, the Director of Business Development at Intermountain Healthcare.

 

In this episode Stephen and I discuss:

• What ROMS is today and how it works
• How Stephen sees his product making an impact on the industry and improving the lives of patients
• Stephen’s experience in the Intermountain Foundry Program and what he got out of it
• Stephen’s thoughts around how being a physical therapist himself helped him in creating ROMS
• What advice Stephen has for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs who don’t have access to such dedicated resources as the Intermountain Foundry:
• • Who would be other people internal innovators should look to add to their team?
  • How can internal innovators obtain the executive support they need?
• How the ROMS solution helps achieve impactful results in a value based care model
• What obstacles Stephen faces as he continues to build ROMS as an employee-innovator
• What Stephen is most excited about in healthcare innovation right now

 

Connect with Stephen:

• LinkedIn
• ROMS

 

Learn more about Intermountain Health

• Website
• Twitter

 

Links mentioned in the show:

• Innovation at Intermountain
• Episode 2 with Jeremy Porter

 

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• Listen to his episode on iTunes, SoundCloud, or Libsyn