In a year marked by ApolloMD’s extraordinary organic growth and expansion in several states with new health care partners, I can’t help but shake this feeling: we are winning the lottery.

Hear me out, please, and let me start with a question based on the concept of “precision,” especially as it relates to leadership, patient care, and health care delivery at ApolloMD.

What is the difference between someone who buys a $5 lottery ticket every day using a random set of untested lottery numbers hoping to win a million dollars…

…and someone else who earns that same million dollars by consistently investing $5 a day at 8% return over 42 years?

Precision.

Precision makes the difference, because a lottery win is a random event. But a million-dollar investment portfolio? That’s the result of a precise and predictable path to guaranteed returns if the normal rules of investing are consistently applied, monitored, improved and followed.

At ApolloMD, I think about precision as a leadership principle. It means that every single ApolloMD associate of this employee-owned health care company is delivering the best possible health care to every patient with as little variability as possible — from state to state, department to department, from clinician to clinician. Every time.

High-quality health care is a requirement in today’s ever-evolving health care environment. And with the bar continuously rising and changing, precision is the concept that helps us reach our goals and deliver exceptional results.

Precision: From Concept to Reality

Precision as an underlying principle also meshes with our company’s embrace of Servant Leadership, a time-tested business philosophy and decision-making model that incorporates an inverted pyramid operational structure.

Servant Leadership is built on intentional listening, empathy, merit-based persuasion, forward-thinking innovation, stewardship, and a desire to build and improve communities within and outside of the organization.

A corollary focus on Precision Leadership at ApolloMD positions us for even more growth and success, especially as our industry emerges from COVID-19 into a health care market defined by ever-changing regulations, constantly evolving industry players, new payment/reimbursement structures, quickly evolving technologies, and rising patient expectations and health care needs.

ApolloMD’s longevity, aided by a focus on precision leadership, helps us meet and overcome the challenges that await and the opportunities still to be discovered.

What Defines Precision Leadership?

I think of precision as the subtle-but-grinding effort and practice to reduce variation, enable consistency, improve continuously and exist constantly “in the work” of health care.

In fact, ApolloMD has been building on precision over our company’s 41-year history. As a leading provider of emergency medicine, we are powered by a professional team that is able to consistently adapt to and meet the ever-changing expectations of the hospitals, health care partners, patients, and communities we serve.

Moving forward, the power of precision leadership touches on numerous aspects of our company’s operations, growth and success:

Focusing Attention on Excellence by Our Employees/Associates

We’re weaving the concept of precision leadership into our hiring practices because we want associates to come here for a purpose, not just a paycheck. We want professionals eager to make a difference with a healthy respect for precision-inspired, constant execution. Accuracy is an expectation of every person who joins the ApolloMD team in any role. Embracing precision as an underlying operating principle demands constant work and attention to everything we do. We know that we’ll miss some goals along the way, but we’ll fail together and then collectively commit to learn, adapt, improve and continue to believe in our purpose as a team. I hope that our unique approach to work means that employees will stay with and retire with us at ApolloMD.

Honoring Our Patients’ Expectations

As health care changes around us, so do our patients. Our patients come into our emergency departments with rising expectations of how quickly they should be seen by a health care professional and how they should be spoken to, respected, understood, evaluated, diagnosed and treated. That’s why we think of ApolloMD as a group of dedicated, like-minded caregivers who happen to be a company rather than as a company whose mission is to be caregivers. With an intentional focus on meeting our patient’s needs, we aim precisely and consistently to meet their expectations.

Focusing on Learning & Continuous Improvement

Being precise in medicine also requires ongoing improvement and knowledge. At ApolloMD, precision is powered by the expectation of constant learning – being willing and able to explore new ideas, gain new skills, adapt to change, and to share, teach and mentor our colleagues, coworkers and health care partners. My hope is that by embracing this concept of precision learning, every ApolloMD associate continuously becomes an expert in their field through ongoing professional development and mentoring.

Committing to Reliability

We are the trusted, highly reliable health care provider to our industry partners, our patients, and the communities we serve. When we make a commitment, we want our partners to feel confident in the expectation that we’ll be there to provide care, solve challenges, improve care, innovate, fix what’s broken and make it work, whatever “it” is.

Embracing a Shared, Companywide Vision

ApolloMD is unique to the health care industry because we are a clinician and employee-owned company. At ApolloMD, every individual has a voice and understands that we are stewards of a sacred health care mission. Regardless of where employees work, what they do, or where they exist in our company’s hierarchy, the expectation is that we’re all constantly moving toward the same goal with precision. We learn together, we accept challenges together, and we know that tomorrow’s a new day.

24/7 Improvement Through Communication

Communication does more than build opportunities to learn and share with each other. It reduces variability when a successful idea can spread seamlessly throughout a large organization. And as our internal communication improves at ApolloMD, so does our precision as an organization.

Looking to the Future of Precision Leadership

ApolloMD’s 2024 embrace of Servant Leadership – boosted by a companion focus on Precision Leadership – deepens our role as stewards of the health care we provide to our patients, our partners and the communities we serve.

Both concepts together, we know that both concepts will position us well for continued growth, pursuit of ever-innovative protocols and success, positive patient experience scores, adeptness at navigating the ever-changing health care industry, and the delivery of exceptional health care.

We’re here to care for our patients, care for our communities and continue to provide care with our health care partners — precisely, and as a lifelong mission.