Female Founders in Healthcare: WellBeam CEO Amee Devani on Building WellBeam

About This Episode

WellBeam Co-Founder and CEO Amee Devani, in conversation with guest host Jennifer Maxwell, on bringing physician order signing inside Epic, Cerner, and eClinicalWorks — and her path as a founder.

Transcript

Jennifer: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Last Visit First podcast. We are remote here in Orlando, Florida at the Home Care Home Base Users Conference, their 20th year. Super excited to be here and grateful for all of this opportunity to talk to vendors such as this young, beautiful woman I have next to me. I am filling in for the infamous Tom Maxwell today, but super excited to have this conversation with Amee, being a female CEO and founder — I'm excited to have that little discussion. But welcome, Amee. She is the CEO and founder of WellBeam. Amee, tell me a little bit about WellBeam, what your role is with helping the post-acute care space and helping patients.

Amee: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be on Tom — and your — second podcast, my second podcast with you guys. Our solution is used to support longitudinal care between a home health organization and then their health system and physician team on the acute setting that will follow the episode of the patient's care. So specifically what we mean by that is, traditionally, home health has had to engage with physicians' teams to get them to sign care plans and orders, and to communicate when there are clinical complications or issues related to that patient. And then the role of the physician is to manage and oversee the episode of care. It's crazy — in 2026, when we're talking about AI and all kinds of modern technologies, it turns out that because of a lack of interoperability, that workflow has historically moved through fax, through the phone, or through third-party portals. And so WellBeam was kind of born out of the problem statement all of that generates, for us to bring it within the EMR — for the physician to be able to sign and manage care from within Epic or Cerner or eClinicalWorks, and then have it all mapped back into Home Care Home Base. So what it means for the home health agencies, as an example, is they can get orders signed within half a day versus often 21 days by paper.

Jennifer: And having a sales rep run through the neighborhood with a briefcase full of paper and inked pens, right?

Amee: Exactly. Yeah, exactly — you should hear the horror stories. Physicians will say, "we have five duplicate orders from home health," because home health is just trying to get their orders signed. So yeah.

Jennifer: Exactly, exactly. Well, that's such a much-needed solution in this space. And one of the questions I've been asking people today too is, with AI and everything that's kind of come its way, what do you think is probably the biggest hurdle that agencies are trying to navigate during a conference such as this?

Amee: I think that we're on this precipice of a whole new kind of raft of use cases that AI helps to unlock. I think it is about prioritizing which of those is the most important use case to start with — whether that's starting with rev cycle, or staffing and managing the staffing shortages and struggles, or it's about patient care delivery and quality of care delivery. I think for us, as we think about AI applications, one of the core use cases is — we really rely, when a patient is before they're crashing, there's a whole lot of clinical information that provides insight as to the fact that they're on a decline, and yet we rely today on clinicians to have to communicate that with a physician to keep the patient out of the hospital. Our vision, our future, we believe, is about elevating those insights to the physician early, so that the two care teams can coordinate care in advance of that patient crashing.

Jennifer: That's awesome, I really like to hear that. What has been your biggest moment here at the Users Conference that you're gonna take away from this week?

Amee: This is our first user conference, and I was saying to my coworker — normally we're out scouting for home health agencies that use Home Care Home Base. It's been like a breath of fresh air that every single one here is a Home Care Home Base user. For us, it's been exciting because we've had such tremendous interest from the market, where we realize there's so many agencies that have very large referral partners that are on Epic or Cerner and have always struggled with interoperability between HCHB and those EMRs. And we really offer now the infrastructure to be able to support such a range of use cases, where we're being approached for use cases that we haven't historically addressed, but we know we can support. So I think that's been a real aha moment, where we realize our vision was always: build the pipe, build the infrastructure, and then we will be able to layer more use cases on top of it. And I think now we're starting to see that really come to life.

Jennifer: That is awesome, that is so cool. So I have a little selfish question to ask you — being a female entrepreneur and CEO, what made you decide to start WellBeam? What was your vision, what was your passion? I think, being female CEOs and entrepreneurs, there's always that spark and that fire, and I always like to hear what yours is.

Amee: It's an interesting backstory — it maybe even originates from my grandma. She had nine kids and lost her husband really early, so she went back to work to put them all through school. She set up a garment store and sold saris to be able to send her kids to school. So she was like the original entrepreneur in our family, and then all of her kids, it turned out, went on to be entrepreneurs of their own — so my dad as well built his company. I think it was just what I had always seen. I remember working initially in investment banking and management consulting, and kind of losing my mind — it was so dull, it was so dry, I just felt like a monkey moving a cog. And I realized, I think at that point, my DNA was to be an operator and to build. So I've always enjoyed it. But it is also the most stressful journey, I think, for anyone to take. But I've enjoyed it.

Jennifer: It does age us a little bit quicker than most, but I think, between some good Botox and facials, it works out pretty good for us.

Amee: There you go, there you go — that's an answer for those things.

Jennifer: But no, I think it's great. I love seeing more and more women entrepreneurs really taking the threshold, especially in healthcare. For me personally, having had health issues along my journey, having females at the helm — being able to give our voice, and knowing that humans are not all alike, and how do we provide the right care at the right time and have the right voices in the room.

Amee: So important. I think too, it changes the way that you run your company, maybe. I had a son — he's eighteen months old, so I had him while I was building this company — and I think it's made me really conscious. We have a team that's relatively young, and everyone has very young kids, so we're really conscious of people shutting down to go do bath time and dinner time with their kids, and that's fine. And if everyone needs to come back and pop back up and do a little bit after work and after the kids are down — I think there's just a way of embracing that we're fluid, and we know what we need to achieve, we'll get it done, but there's also the family component that we really value and want to balance as well.

Jennifer: I agree, I'm of the same mind. I'm like, I don't care when you do it, how you do it, we know what we need to get done. We all have the same mission, we all have the same vision, and we're here to change the future of healthcare together as a team. And our families are our biggest support groups and our biggest strengths behind us, and cheerleaders. So if we don't value that, then are we really valuing what we are providing into the industry, right?

Amee: A thousand percent, yeah — fully agree.

Jennifer: Yeah, well, thank you so much. Thank you to Home Care Home Base for allowing us to have this moment. Super excited, and I look forward to the white party tonight. Thank you to Amee and to HCHB, appreciate it. Thanks, Amee.

Amee: Likewise, thank you Jen, and to HCHB, appreciate it. Thank you.