A fast-growing University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) start-up was recently honored as one of the top 500 fastest-growing companies in the nation.

Guideway Care, a company that partners with hospitals, health systems, payers and provider organizations to resolve barriers to care for patients and caregivers, came in at No. 47 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list overall, and was the 11th-fastest-growing company in the Life Sciences category.

The Deloitte Technology Fast 500 is a ranking of the 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, fintech and energy tech companies in North America. The list is now in its 28th year.

Heather Bradley, right, Senior Director of Care Transitions at UAB Medicine, looks over a file with a patient. Bradley is the Guideway Care program sponsor at UAB. (Photo credit/Guideway Care)

According to Deloitte, Guideway Care saw growth of 3,500 percent between 2018 and 2021.

Guideway Care was one of only two Alabama companies on the list. The other, Fleetio, is also based in Birmingham.

Guideway CEO Craig Parker said he was “pleased” for the recognition, which is considered a prestigious honor.

“Start-ups are hard, and earning some recognition for growing in a way that causes others to notice is definitely a nice reward for our team,” he said. 

A DECADE IN THE MAKING

The recognition comes after a 10-year journey from idea to fast-growing business, during which Guideway has been at the forefront of health equity.

In 2012, Edward Partridge, M.D., a professor in the UAB School of Medicine and part of the UAB Health System Cancer Community Network, worked with a team of researchers to test the idea that lay navigators in cancer care would be effective at determining and addressing patients’ social determinants of health.  Funded by a $15 million grant from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the pilot, called Patient Care Connect, lasted three years and comprised more than 6,000 patients.

The study, which was published in JAMA Oncology in 2017, showed that the program made a marked impact, saving $19 million per year.

Following the results of Patient Care Connect, Partridge and Parker founded Guideway Care in 2017, licensing the original structured workflows used in the Patient Care Connect pilot through the UAB Harbert Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Parker said Guideway Care uses advanced software and trained care guides to accomplish its mission and help organizations solve their most pressing problems.

“Once we understand the problem the organization wants to solve, we start to build a solution that uses humans – care guides – to interact with patients or plan members in ways that help better understand both their personal circumstances – social determinants of health – as well as condition or disease-specific symptoms,” he said. “By reducing non-clinical barriers that can disrupt a patients’ journey, and by helping patients to better understand and assess their symptoms, we can help patients better stay on track in their own health plan.”

Parker said that Guideway Care was able to stay on the cutting edge of health equity developments due to the contributions of Partridge and Mona Fouad, M.D., current Senior Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion in the UAB Heersink School of Medicine.

Their work has “made an incredible impact in the healthcare community understanding that resources and motivation are inextricably linked with social and cultural factors,” Parker said. 

UAB is the “birthplace” of Guideway Care’s mission, and the university’s continuing support is essential to the company’s national growth. As Guideway expands, the company is sharing UAB’s story as well, Parker said. 

“I think the Guideway story is really a phenomenal success story for UAB. We’ve had the chance to tell the story about UAB’s leadership in the pursuit of health equity quite literally across the country,” he said. “Having a platform to talk about UAB’s innovation, its status as the fourth largest academic medical center in the country, its nearly 30 years of work in social determinants – these are all really impressive, and Guideway works as a vehicle to promote UAB’s accomplishments every single day.”

Guideway Care recently partnered with UAB on the GuideSafe platform, a set of online tools designed to mitigate the risk of exposure and spread of COVID-19.