Kent Dicks

Entrepreneur

Arizona Governor's Celebration of Innovation
Innovator of the Year - Startup
November 2016

Edison Award Winner (Silver)
Edison Awards - 2011

World Economic Forum Finalist (Davos)
World Economic Forum
MedApps was selected as one of the top finalists in Innovation by WEF at Davos
February 2010

Small Business Administration (SBA) - Entrepreneurial Success
April 2000

Entrepreneur Magazine Hot 100
Entrepreneur Magazine
May 1998

Top IT Innovator for 2007
FierceHealthIT

Governors Celebration of Innovation Award Finalist
The Arizona Technology Council
September 2007

MedApps was a Finalist for the Innovator of the Year Award
Nokia Mobile Rules Winner
MedApps received the prestigious Mobiles Rules Award from Nokia. MedApps CEO was flown to Finland to meet at the Nokia Headquarters.
March 2008

2008 North American Technology Innovation Award in the field of Wireless Point of Care
Frost & Sullivan

Dell's 2008 Global Small Business Excellence Award
Dell / NFIB

X-Prize Tricorder Visioneering Invitee
X-Prize - May 2011

2010 E-Tech Award Winner
CTIA

Named to America's Most Promising Startups
BusinessWeek

2009 Innovation Award
Mobile Healthcare Industry Summit

ABBY Award Finalist
Adaptive Business Leaders (ABL)
October 2009

2011 Connected Award Winner
Connected World Magazine

I Award (Innovation, Insight and Initiative) Finalist
TripleTree
May 2009

2012 Arizona Innovation Challenge
Arizona Commerce Authority

2009 M2M Evolution Product of the Year Award Winner
Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC) and Crossfire Media

I want to change the world.

Frustrating: It’s always funding, especially here in Arizona. We have tried to overcome some of those barriers by going into some very strategic partnerships, like BioAccel in Phoenix and BioInspire in Peoria. This helps get us into circles of funding and leadership in Arizona. But funding is still a major problem in Arizona, even for experienced teams like ourselves.

My team and I started working in remote healthcare ten years ago. One of my first companies was a staffing company that worked with companies that did top secret work. It was here I realized we needed to do more with managing people from a distance. That morphed into remote healthcare, and reducing healthcare costs, which is where MedApps came from. We sold MedApps in 2012, but the last ten years represent remote healthcare efficacy—which solutions work and don’t work. The next few years are going to be focused on scalability, and that is where Life365 came from. We need to reach more people in a cost-effective way in order to reduce healthcare costs, while also increasing quality of care.

Kent E. Dicks is a successful serial entrepreneur with 30 years of experience providing dynamic and strategic leadership in new and emerging markets. Too often, the word “innovative” is used without the credibility to back it up – but Kent Dicks is a driven leader with the tenacity it takes to get results even in the most challenging environments. 

While Mr. Dicks has a broad range of experience across several business sectors, he has most recently established himself as one of the true thought leaders in the emerging mHealth (Mobile Health) space. In 2006, Dicks founded MedApps and immersed himself in the world of healthcare technology, specifically dedicating himself to improving telehealth systems which had shown much promise to benefit the chronic care population worldwide with patient-centered solutions that could provide relief to an over burdened healthcare system.

Although Telehealth demonstrated success in improving patient outcomes, widespread adoption was elusive. The existing technology was expensive and complex – especially for the patient population that typically consumes the most healthcare dollars. Ubiquity of cellular technology with increasingly lower costs inspired Dicks to atta­­­ck the problem head-on by developing more automated and cost-effective remote patient monitoring solutions that could benefit the Medicare and Medicaid populations who need the most help – a notable 20% of the US population that consumes 80% of all healthcare dollars spent.

Dicks was a leading pioneer in the evolving mHealth field, using dedicated M2M cellular “hubs” to connect patient, providers and electronic health records.  His lower cost mHealth solutions provided the industry with a much-needed alternative to enable a proactive healthcare model. The consistent flow of accurate, real-time data provided with the MedApps solution gave healthcare professionals the ability to better track the conditions of individuals with chronic disease in order to keep them out of the hospital, intervene when necessary, and avoid expensive admissions and readmissions. Dicks implemented a strategy centered around ease of use, allowing healthcare providers to be “clinicians instead of technicians”, focusing on the care of the patient, rather than the care of the equipment – a strategy that maximized professional resources while keeping costs low and increasing patient compliance. Dicks’ philosophy was disruptive to the large established players in the remote monitoring space – and it was also at odds with the growing number of tech companies eager to enter the emerging field. 

Dicks realized that “one solution does not fit all”, envisioning a dynamic cloud-based architecture that was completely agnostic to the types of monitoring device, their manufacturers and the clinical back-end systems that the data would be integrated to. His mission was to build out and prove his newly conceived CloudCare Platform. It was a monumental task for a young start-up competing in a deeply entrenched healthcare industry. Even though the US faced one of the worst economic times in history, Dicks raised the capital necessary to keep his company competitive in an ecosystem of well-heeled, international corporations – putting innovation and quality first – investing in 17 issued patents and a UL and ISO certified Quality and Regulatory System. His perseverance proved out the model in numerous chronic care pilots and important programs centered around reducing hospital readmissions.

With the MedApps team, Dicks built a strong track record of performance in building his vision and business model for the emerging mHealth field. He was recognized as an industry innovator, thought leader, barnstorming the US and abroad, advocating patient engagement using innovative “connected health” solutions. As a subject matter expert, Dicks has authored numerous articles, given a vast number of media interviews and demonstrated the efficacy of his vision for Congress including his testimony before the House regarding the utilization of mHealth to improve Veterans Health affairs. Mr. Dicks and his MedApps System garnered many awards and accolades over the years, notably recognized with a nomination for the prestigious Davos Technology Pioneer Award, and culminating in an Edison Award for Best New Product in Health, Wellness & Safety.

While steadily building sales, Dicks, the MedApps team and shareholders were given a opportunity to expand their vision of a truly cloud-based healthcare platform in July 2012 through an acquisition by Alere, Inc., a global rapid diagnostics company with $3B in sales in over 100 countries worldwide, 17,000 employees and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. MedApps became an Alere R&D division called Alere Connect, which was a key driver in the Company’s growing Connected Health Global Business Unit, which then was designated as a Corporate Strategic Imperative for growth.  In July 2015, Alere made a decision to discontinue its Connected Health initiatives, divesting of its Connected Health assets, including the MedApps team. 

Mr. Dicks now leads Life365. Life365 is a highly scalable, hardware agnostic Digital Health as a Service (DHaaS) Software Platform – driven by machine learning to enhance the user experience.

Life365 integrates devices, systems, applications, education and incentives to align with specific user needs to enable maximum engagement. This alignment promotes greater adoption and adherence, which results in lower healthcare costs and increased return on investment (ROI) for enterprise clients.