Alum Connects Patients and Doctors
Jamey Edwards ’96, MBA ’03, is adamant about challenges.
That’s why the cofounder and CEO of Cloudbreak Health, one of the nation’s most widely used telemedicine platforms, is helping lead the way in changing how medicine is delivered. Cloudbreak’s mission is to humanize health care by developing technology to build relationships between doctors and patients.
“The industry is so broken and risk averse,” he said. “I can see how poorly it works and how unfair it is for many patients, so I am passionate about leveling the playing field for people who can’t level it for themselves.”
Edwards’ three-year-old California company, which now serves more than 830 hospitals and medical facilities, delivers more than 90,000 clinical encounters a month. One of their first offerings was video language interpretation services to help doctors communicate with patients with language or hearing barriers. Cloudbreak now also offers tele-psychiatry and tele-stroke diagnostics and treatment, with more specialties on the way.
“We have helped millions of people get better care,” he said. “That’s what gets me out of bed every day.”
“We founded Cloudbreak to humanize health care and help resolve health care disparities. We saw firsthand that physicians were suffering from burnout and the number one symptom of burnout is treating people like objects to be moved through the health care factory. We believed that we could put technology solutions in the doctors’ hands that would make their life easier. If we could do that, we could restore the joy of their calling and they would take better care of patients.”
Edwards said studying labor law, social psychology and employer-employee relationships as an undergraduate helped build his confidence as a leader and influenced how he has grown his company, which has more than 300 employees.
“I use my ILR education every day. Understanding social psychology and why people do the things they do is critically important to managing a business. At the end of the day, we transact as human beings, so my education helped me develop a deeper knowledge of how to influence desired behaviors and how to build a culture that would allow me to attract the best talent.”
Edwards’ ILR diploma hangs in his office. “It’s a daily reminder of the impact Cornell has had on my development.”
Read more stories from ILRie, ILR’s alumni magazine, here.