Why this man’s health care delivery startup is the first to access Microsoft’s $50m for small businesses

Derrick Miles is the founder of CourMed, a healthcare solutions company offering enterprise software and innovative concierge delivery of healthcare products and services. The company started as a crowdsourced delivery platform like Uber/Grubhub for health delivery.

Before that, Miles was a healthcare executive for over 15 years at academic medical centers. At the age of 31, he became the youngest CEO of a specialty hospital. However, due to a reduction in force, he decided to become an entrepreneur.

His decision to also venture into entrepreneurship was also due to the fact that innovation was not working in the healthcare system. It was those failed attempts to innovate the healthcare system that fueled his desire to start his own business outside the healthcare system.

“As a former healthcare executive, I had the opportunity to experience concierge medicine at its finest and am certain that more people would enjoy the benefits of it. The lion’s share of our customers today are 50+ years of age and affluent,” Miles told Techbullion.

“However, now that we have learned how to provide a 5-STAR concierge healthcare delivery experience, we are opening up CourMed to the masses in select gateway cities. Think of CourMed as the software that powers the delivery of healthcare products and services to your home or corporate office. If you currently leave the house for prescriptions, vitamins/supplements, vaccines, IV vitamin therapy, etc., now you don’t have to anymore. CourMed brings healthcare products and services to you; you can even get your COVID-19 vaccine in the comfort of your own living room,” he added.

Miles is a graduate of Bethune Cookman University and holds a degree in Medical Technology with a minor in Chemistry. He learned about the profession of hospital administration while working in a lab in Florida and expressed the desire of becoming a hospital executive instead of a technologist.

He was hired into his first leadership position when he was 26 after he got introduced to the CEO of UAB Hospital in Birmingham, AL. This was after he completed his internship in the summer of 1997.

In September this year, Miles became the first recipient of a $50 million capital fund from Microsoft, as part of the technology giant’s initiative to support Black businesses.

“The fund means a great deal to us as a startup,” Miles told Yahoo Finance. “It gives us the opportunity to go out and recruit A players. I believe that there’s a competitive advantage in the startup marketplace, and it’s the team that has the most A players who’s going to eventually win. So it’ll give us an opportunity to recruit marketing, IT, and sales executives to help us move a lot quicker,” said the startup founder, who recently got support from Google and Amazon.

CourMed, which officially launched in late 2018, grew its revenue by 300 percent between 2019 and 2020, even before the pandemic accelerated growth further, a news release said.