Why We Started Beterra

In September 2016, we officially “launched” Beterra and it felt strange at first since we’d actually been at this for five years, working with over 200 hospitals to help measure and improve quality and patient safety as a part of the Synensys team. Our tools were and still are, being used in seven countries to help leaders and frontline caregivers improve patient safety. Thanks to their work and guidance, it became clear that performance measurement and improvement is too time-intensive, complex, and costly. Beterra’s work is to develop solutions to these challenges.

So there’s the “why” behind our launch, but the chief motivation for our work is the “who.”

We started Beterra for you.

Healthcare has a long way to go to deliver on our promise of providing high quality care for every patient. Healthcare leaders must facilitate change in boardrooms and at the bedside. Today’s leaders are burdened with disparate data, endless meetings, and unclear objectives. We started Beterra to build tools that provide simple, actionable data that frees you and your colleagues up to do the real work: improve.

We started Beterra for caregivers.

Every day we are struck with how difficult it is for caregivers to do their job. They live in an endless environment of friction, where even the simplest of tasks can take hours and endless frustration to accomplish. These caregivers are also the key to improvement—they know exactly what needs to change. We want to enable caregivers to have a voice in improvement, and to free them up to do their best work.

We started Beterra for patients.

“We are all patients” is a cliché used by everyone from hospital supply companies to insurance agencies; however, it’s familiarity doesn’t make it less true. This statement is pressing for my cofounder Kapil and I. Within three months of our soft launch of Beterra, both of our families gave birth to a special needs child. In the midst of our client visits, sales calls, and product development meetings, we have spent countless hours at children’s hospitals in multiple states seeking care. I’m writing this blog from a patient room at Children’s of Alabama. We started Beterra for Naveen and Luke… and for your children, parents, and loved ones.

We started Beterra for us.

We are incredibly thankful to our current team of visionaries, dreamers, and doers. These clinical and non-clinical teammates are united by a passion: to make healthcare better. They approach each day with persistence, patience, and kindness. We started Beterra to provide an environment for these incredible people to come together and solve complex problems. We love every time we get to add to this team.

We started Beterra for a vision.

Our vision is a world where health and care are better than they are today. Our name is the Old English word for “better.” We aren’t the solution to all of healthcare’s problems; we simply want to be a part of the community of leaders making a difference. We want to see healthcare get better, and we’re devoting all we have to that end.

So there it is – the “who” behind our long days, long nights, and endless meals of airplane peanuts. We couldn’t be more thankful to our clients, teammates, and friends. We look forward to many more years of walking this road together.

Daniel and Kapil