Net Health hits its stride in wound care, hiring

Net Health in the Strip District has quietly navigated some choppy waters through the years only to prevail as a growing and resourceful firm that clearly knows how to hustle and have fun.

The company nearly imploded back in 2001 as a .com startup. Several pivots and a reboot later, the firm is back in a big way as a provider of clinical information systems for hospitals and healthcare providers in the growing field of outpatient care.

But it didn’t happen overnight, says Patrick Colletti, president. The firm started out with a three person team and chugged along for eight years, growing by 45% each year. In the early days, it was Colletti, Anthony Sanzo, CEO, and Chris Hayes, CTO. Then Net Health hit its stride went on a major growth spurt.

In the last three years, the firm has added 150 people to its dog-friendly office in the Crane building for a total headcount of 202. The company’s flagship product, WoundExpert, has been installed in thousand of hospitals across the country. They have opened remote offices in Altoona, Nashville and Jacksonville.

And more growth and hiring is clearly in sight.

“We like to pretend there was bravery in the moment (of near demise),” says Colletti. “We were pivoting left and right and chasing opportunities. The icing on the cake was we (the three) got to spend our days together growing a business into another Pittsburgh success story.”

Today more than 67% of wound centers in the U.S. use Health Net solutions. The key was concentrating on the one vertical—wound care—and building a name around it, says Colletti. Hospitals need a customized workflow tool to track and manage a patient’s wound health, a process that requires patient follow-up to facilitate healing.

For example, 20% of all diabetes patients in the U.S. will develop a lower extremity wound and “a big chunk may receive an amputation because they didn’t receive the right kind of care,” Colletti says. “WoundExpert allows clients to benchmark the outcome and compare it across many patients.”

With one vertical down, Net Health has launched two additional product lines for a total of five specialized care outpatient markets: ReDoc, which provides electronic medical record and management solutions for the physical, occupational and speech therapy markets and Agility for occupational medicine, urgent care, employee health.

While the growth has been a big part of the story, another is how much fun employees seem to be having from the looks of the company’s website. Creativity and culture is important, says Colletti. If employees aren’t meeting up to play flag football or take on a pedometer challenge, they might be stocking food at food banks or bow tie bowling.

“Clearly we win cool awards,” Colletti says. The company was recently named one of the Best Places to Work by Modern Healthcare Magazine and earned the same title for eight running years by Pittsburgh media.