From the kitchen table

BY HANNAH HERNER

he average person may not think about how physicians and hospitals get paid, how providers get contracted with insurance networks and, generally, how money ows through the health care industry.

“ at’s why we’re in business,” says Tammy Dawes, founder and CEO of Virsys12. “It is very, very complicated and we’re just trying to automate it as much as possible.” e Brentwood-based health care technology company doubled its revenue in 2022 for the second year in a row.

Hawes calls the last two years “the perfect storm” for the company’s health care software o erings. An increase in doctors o ering their services remotely plus added government regulation around storing provider data made Virsys12 in demand. e company o ers three software products that help with provider onboarding, credentialing and contracting, as well as accepting insurance. It’s all in an effort to streamline processes — something the health care eld is sorely in need of.

“ is administrative burden that is in health care drives all of us crazy,” Hawes says. “It’s what I call the boring stu . It’s not sexy, it’s not curing cancer. It’s not the next big thing in virtual care, but it’s eliminating this waste and this redundancy and [these] manual processes and this overhead that’s eating away at the health care dollar and the health care spend.”

Hawes says being a woman in the male-dominated tech eld is a big part of her story.

“I was at rst embarrassed about anybody saying, ‘she started this from her kitchen ta- ble,’” she says. “All these guys go out and they raise massive amounts of capital and that’s the story. Now that we have grown as big as we are, I own that. I own the fact that I started this on my kitchen table.”

Hawes is no stranger to success. Virsys12, which launched in 2011, had triple-digit growth in its rst two years. In its early years, Virsys12 reportedly became the rst female-led technology company in Nashville to acquire another business. In 2020, the company lost half of its provider customers and still broke even, she says.

“We’re going into a shaky economy on really rm ground nancially, and it’s because we were very methodical about how we invested money and how we spent money and focused on pro tability,” Hawes says.

In 2021, Virsys12 doubled its workforce to around 60 employees. About 50 percent are based in Nashville, with the rest remote, but Hawes says she wants to encourage in-person collaboration as much as possible. As the company grows, she would eventually like to see 80 percent of the workforce in Nashville.

“I’m a technology person,” she says. “Obviously we know how to use this technology, but I just think we’ve missed a lot without being in someone’s presence and looking them directly in the eyes. I try to push for that. We’ve gotten a lot of business done over the last two years by doing remote work successfully, so I can’t knock it.”