Healthy Concern
SETUL PATEL’S FORMULAMED PRESCRIBES STEPS FOR BUSINESSES TO REOPEN
As a medical consultant specializing in advising firms on how to best minimize coronavirus risk in the workplace, Houstonbased FormulaMed dispenses with at least one long-held business tradition in the name of health and safety.
“We don’t hand out business cards,” said Dr. Setul Patel, its founder and managing partner. “Touchless is best.”
Founded in 2013 as a sideconsulting gig to Patel’s regular medical practice, FormulaMed in March pivoted its mission specifically towards advising firms on how to safely reopen or adjust their workplaces to best combat the potential spread of COVID-19.
For each of the approximately 15 clients FormulaMed has garnered within the past couple months, the firm has conducted all-hands lectures and questionand-answer sessions for all employees either in person or via Zoom videochat as well as meeting extensively with upper management to clearly articulate best practices.
From there, the job gets more specialized, depending on the client. For 50-person law firm BoyarMiller, that meant eliminating potential viral “hot spots” within its 25,000-squarefoot space by reorienting some of the office layout while developing company-wide protocols for when and where masks need to be worn at work. The law firm, which went “full remote” after Harris County’s first stay-at-home order, had Patel conduct an all-employee Zoom call on May 6 and reopened its offices on May 11. It continues to allow employees who wish to work from home to do so, according to BoyarMiller Chairman Chris Hanslik.
For municipal-bond financial specialist Masterson Advisors, which had scheduled a June 10 office reopening, the work has involved consulting on how employees of the 18-person firm conduct themselves with minimal risk at the extensive number of off-site meetings that are required.
At snack-maker Dishaka, the job’s a little more intensive, and has encompassed getting all 300 employees tested for COVID-19 and antibodies and devising protocols if a production shift needs to be shut down because of a positive test result.
With the Stafford-based company deemed an essential business, it never had to cease operations and has continued to run its shifts 24 hours a day for five days a week.
“I wanted a testing protocol put into place for the company, and within 24 hours, we felt like (Patel) had a gold-standard testing protocol,” said Dishaka President Rashim Oberoi, who’s known Patel for about four years through their membership with the Young Presidents’ Association. “The biggest part was having a third party come in. It gave this level of assurance, and there was a huge amount of relief.”
FormulaMed is working with companies in a Houston metropolitan area that has been less prone to the disease than much of the country, but still has a higher incidence compared to the rest of the state. As of June 4, about 13,600 people in Harris County had been diagnosed with coronavirus, while 247 people had died from the disease. By comparison, 415 Texans have been diagnosed with coronavirus.
With little expectation that a vaccine will be ready before the end of the year, FormulaMed is
attempting to take a layered approach to its consultation. From a medical standpoint, the lessons range from the now obvious – not touching one’s face, wearing masks in public areas, keeping six feet of social distancing, properly washing hands – to the more obscure, such as the ierdea that touching a doorknob puts someone in what Patel calls “a dirty space.”
“Look, it’s a virus. It’s not going away, it’s about learning to live with it,” said Hanslik, who said no employee testing was conducted at his firm and estimated that about 60 percent of his workforce has returned to the office.
There’s also the societal aspect, which involves training upper management to eliminate greetings such as handshakes and highfives in favor of a thumbs up signal.
Finally, there’s the psychological effort of empathizing with employees who are scared to return to the office, eliminating misinformation and providing reassurance for a relatively safe working environment, all while factoring in that worker attitudes run the gamut.
“We thought this would be easy. You buy hand sanitizers and masks, and put rules into place. Then we talked to employees, and it was a vast array of different opinions,” said Julie Peak, a managing director at Masterson Advisors.
“You can’t separate traditional medicine from psychology. It’s intermingled. In a pandemic, you have the perfect storm for things like anxiety, depression and substance abuse,” added Dr. Mahtab Moradi, a FormulaMed managing partner who’s practiced clinical psychology for almost two decades. “This gives me a chance to be a key person, set culture and ensure mental health is recognized.”
Still, despite what Patel and FormulaMed’s clients said is a comprehensive approach, he recognized the fine line he and his clients have to walk when updating operational standards.
“The first thing is health and safety. Second is making sure anxiety levels are controlled. The third is, how do we best help this company be productive,” Patel said. “There’s a negative connotation with ‘productivity.’ If people are dying needlessly, that’s bad. But if people are losing jobs and beating their spouses, that’s bad too.”
FormulaMed’s recent emphasis marks a shift in what Patel imagined for the company when he founded it seven years ago. He received his bachelors and medical degrees from the University of Virginia and his MBA from the University of Tennessee and named the company as a nod to his love of Formula 1 auto racing as well as a commitment to improving healthcare performance.
The original mission was to help companies develop health care programs that would reduce inefficiencies by emphasizing preventative behavior and enabling a broader use of virtual medical treatment.
“Our incentives are all wrong. The more tests I order, the more I get paid,” said Patel. “What are the ethical standards? The incentives should be to make the population healthier.”
FormulaMed is another in the ongoing effort by Patel to improve the U.S. healthcare system, which he calls “abhorrent.” It is a process that has be fraught with challenges.
He co-founded Neighbors Emergency Centers (later Neighbors Health) in 2007, and Patel helped grow the freestanding emergency center chain to more than 30 locations across three states. But falling health-insurance reimbursement levels and market saturation led to a 2018 Chapter 11 filing, during which the centers were either sold to various companies or shuttered.
“Companies like Neighbors utilized a hybrid model where we had urgent cares and ERs in the same building, but the patient confusion and bureaucratic, cryptic nature of medical billing did not allow for widespread success,” he said. “Our goal is to complete the initial mission – to innovate health care and deliver a cost-effective experience bypassing all of the profit centers that surround health care that take away from our patients.”
Going forward, Patel, who declined to disclose his consulting rates, believes FormulaMed’s focus will be on COVID-19 for the next 12 to 18 months, and his company’s clients concurred. Hanslik, who was introduced to Patel through a common friend, estimated that, with FormulaMed’s help, he’d be reevaluating his office protocol and conditions every 30 days.
Oberoi, who said he’d begun “casual conversations” with Patel when COVID’s impact on China became publicly known, said Patel checks in with Dishaka’s human resources department on a weekly basis, while FormulaMed randomly tests about 10 percent of Dishaka’s workforce every week.
“We found that it’d make more sense to self-administer (tests) rather than to go through insurance,” said Oberoi, adding that the longer-term impact of healthcare premium increases as well as the rates clinics charge to test made prospect of on-site testing relatively cheaper. “It made more sense to do that than to tell our employees to get tested themselves.”
Longer term, Patel plans to redirect FormulaMed back towards its original mission of comprehensive health programs, and hopes some of his current clients will switch gears with him.
“When you see your colleagues fighting this, we came together and said, ‘We have to help these folks now,’” said Patel. “What we’re hoping to do is to build strategic relationships with employers, then pivot to taking care of them on a more comprehensive basis.”
“What we’re hoping to do is to build strategic relationships with employers, then pivot to taking care of them on a more comprehensive basis.” Dr. Setul Patel, founder and managing partner of FormulaMed