NIU Degree Bridges Business Acumen, Technology and Healthcare for Dr. Sarjoo Patel, '03
By Lia Kizilbash Gillet
Dr. Sarjoo Patel, '03, Beam Healthcare Founder and CEO (Photo: Beam Healthcare)
Serial entrepreneur and Beam Healthcare founder and CEO Dr. Sarjoo Patel, ’03, credits his NIU Operations Management and Information Systems (OM&IS) degree for his successful transition from a medical doctor to a health tech entrepreneur and executive.
“People ask me about my switch from physician to starting a health tech company, and I tell them it was easy with my combined healthcare provider experience and my NIU OM&IS degree,” Patel said.
Founded in 2013, Beam Healthcare offers telemedicine to hospitals and specialty clinics. Beam reduces the need for patient transfers, improves operational efficiencies, and addresses disparities in rural and urban healthcare access. Accredited by The Joint Commission, Beam serves healthcare organizations nationwide, including the Mayo Clinic Health System, Encompass Health, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Hawaii Health Systems Corporation.
In addition to Beam, Patel launched Flow, a human resources and management app designed to help organizations simplify and automate how they manage, educate and engage with their teams — all in one tool. From background checks to onboarding and training, Flow automates administrative and redundant tasks, saving its clients time and money.
“At Beam, we were running into problems with people management, especially being in the healthcare industry, there's so much paperwork and operational demands,” Patel said. “We created our own software internally to support our needs, and now we've gone from hiring folks in weeks or months to literally hours. We made it into an all-in-one platform to help other organizations streamline their operations.”
Continuing to innovate, Beam is currently developing a direct-to-consumer model that focuses on proactive versus reactive healthcare.
“We are driven by the commitment to ensure every patient gets the care they deserve, and every organization has the tools they need to innovate and grow,” Patel said.
NIU Paves the Road to Business
Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Patel was drawn to business and technology at an early age. When it came time for college, he was drawn to NIU specifically for its OM&IS program.
“I liked the balance of business and informatics,” he said. “The ‘O’ in OM&IS was a big piece. There were a lot of MIS programs out there, but the emphasis on the operations side was of interest to me.”
At NIU, Patel was active in student organizations, including serving as student government president, but described himself as a laid-back student who thrived on the relationships he built.
“Relationships were most important to me,” he said. “Barsema Hall had just opened, and for us, that was just amazing. To see an alumnus give that, I think, was good motivation for a lot of us to do well. Not only was the facility amazing, but the faculty were also highly invested in their students. They truly developed relationships with their students to help move us forward.”
Patel fondly remembers Professor Chang Liu, Ph.D., Jack Marchewka, Ph.D., a retired professor and founder of the Business Information Technology Transfer Center (BITTC), and Nancy Russo, Ph.D., former chair of the OM&IS department, as well as his counselor, Sue Goade. He recalls working with companies like eFollett on projects to solve real-world business problems. Now, as an alumnus, he wanted to pay it forward and has returned to NIU to speak to students in the College of Business and the College of Engineering and Engineering Technology.
In 2020, Patel received the College of Business Social Impact award for his entrepreneurial vision to advocate for healthcare without barriers.
Triggers to Healthcare
During his senior year at NIU, after experiencing the unfortunate loss of one of his best friends and other loved ones who were critically ill, Patel was inspired to find a path to healthcare.
“Those personal experiences were a trigger for me,” he said. “I spent time in hospital ICU settings and saw how hard nurses and physicians worked to take care of my loved ones.”
Patel graduated from NIU with his bachelor’s degree in OM&IS and began taking science classes at night while working as a software business analyst before deciding to pursue a medical degree. He completed his residency at Latrobe Area Hospital in Pennsylvania.
“I was hired as chief medical officer at a rural hospital to evolve their inpatient program to keep sicker folks locally instead of transferring them out to Madison, Wisconsin,” Patel said. “So, we created a program with all these on-site physicians, but I quickly realized financially this was not viable for our small hospital to have physicians on-site 24/7 for such a low volume of patients. Plus, we were losing patients for some specialty needs. So, long story short, that's where the idea of Beam came about.”
One day, on the way to work at the hospital, Patel had a near head-on car collision where the other driver died.
“I realized that if that had been the end, my obituary would have read that I was a good brother, son, friend, etc.,” he said. “I realized I hadn’t given back enough in terms of service and social impact. And so, for me, it was a realization that I need to pursue everything that I want. I don't want to live a life of regret.”
Offering Patel both social impact and personal fulfillment, and bridging business, technology and medicine, Beam was born. Patel built the company based on the lessons he learned at NIU.
“I built Beam based on my OM&IS experience,” Patel said. “First, we were going to leverage tech, the ‘IS’ part. Second, we planned to leverage core team members rather than gig-industry-type team members to serve clients in these communities. That’s the management part. Lastly, we were committed to being a paperless company from day one, especially since we were entering the tech-enabled service business. We had to be efficient if we wanted to scale, which is naturally the ‘O’ in all of this. Those were the three simple pillars. It's not rocket science, but we've just executed it really well as an entity. And that is what's brought us to where we are now — a premier telemedicine entity that is highly focused on quality and how we deliver care.”
The Right Equation
Patel credits his problem-solving approach, along with strong partnerships with larger healthcare organizations, as key factors in Beam's success before the widespread acceptance of telemedicine post-pandemic.
“I would rather fail forward; that's always been my mentality,” he said. “Try, pivot, figure it out, and just keep going.”
Patel also highlights a balanced approach to entrepreneurship as a contributing factor to launching Beam and Flow.
“I feel like whatever I pursued evolved because there was a pretty decent balance between passion and talent on the team,” he said. “You can have a lot of passion, but if you don't have the talent to support it, you won’t execute it. Or, if you truly just have talent and grit, but you don't have the passion too, then you won't persevere.”
“Finally, probably the most important lesson I learned is patience,” Patel continued. “Initially, especially as a young entrepreneur, you want to push forward and keep pushing. I realized that if you push too hard, you’ll push people away from you. There will be people who disagree, and that's okay, and let them. Walk away. Educate and nurture, then let people join you at their own pace.”
Patel has a personal litmus test to assess his life balance. He knows when he doesn’t have time for his hobbies of writing, illustrating or gardening that there is something he is not doing right.
“You need to know what recharges you,” he said. “When you step away is often when your creative ideas actually come. So, instead of pushing forward, step back to see the big picture.”
That’s just what Patel did when starting BeamUp, a nonprofit supporting orphanages in Mexico and Papua New Guinea. By empowering local healthcare providers and facilitating access to medical care for these orphanages, BeamUp demonstrates the potential for telemedicine to effectively serve at a non-profit level.
“I want to move healthcare — and access to affordable healthcare — forward,” Patel said. “Instead of watering the seeds of hopelessness or frustration, I focus on watering the seeds of possibility.”