Kenneth Kessler, Physician and Medical Entrepreneur, Retired

I'm Ken Kessler, I've had several careers, I'm retired now. I started my professional life as a doctor, practiced psychiatry for about 10 years, left that in '83. Took about a year to launch a new company from scratch. We started out in behavioral health, morphed into disease management, focusing on the five major chronic medical diseases. Got recruited to be on a board, be an in-house entrepreneur. And, finally after a year of looking at various businesses, found one I really liked. Was originally gonna be a roll-up of methadone clinics, opiate treatment methadone clinics. We changed the model into doing inpatient and outpatient, and we bought our first one and they were kind of a primitive operation, and I got there at five in the morning. I stood behind the glass window where the nurses were and I noticed that there was long lines out into the parking lot at 4:30 in the morning. And then there's just stacks of charts, and the nurses have stickies, as they dose each patient, put a sticky on. And of course stickies fall off. And so the first thought I had is, "Okay, this is a lawsuit waiting to happen." And so we looked into automating, computerizing, and so that there was a machine that dosed the patient, and the nurse, and it would also record everything. And the nurse just had to check and make sure everything was lined up correctly. That was the first big change. And then we of course put in security to create lines outside so it wasn't just a mass, a rush to get in when we opened the door. And little by little, we've built up a much more professional operation and that helped us change our model from buying existing clinics to starting de novo clinics, getting licensed, and we, by then, had mastered how to grow them once we got open.