“That was God’s way of telling me you had a job to do here, so you better show up.”
Amanda Baltz’s goal is to offer equitable health care, especially to vulnerable populations.
Amanda Baltz runs a health care start-up that is an innovative health care cardiac partner. She took some major steps to grow her business. While pregnant with her fifth child, Amanda traveled to Brazil and Mexico City and showcased a new “hand-held, electrocardiograph device to provide a heart reading on smart devices in seconds.” (Source: “Take ECGs In-Home,” Spaulding Medical, accessed February 21, 2021.) Her goal was to facilitate home health care. She wanted to see the potential for its use with patients who did not have autonomous access to flexible and convenient tools, yet truly needed the high-quality medical care Amanda’s product and company could provide.
She witnessed how this product will save the lives of the most vulnerable, who were isolated and afraid, lacking resources and support. She tells me when witnessing her product working on the trip, “I literally got weak in the knees and started crying. I realized that all this work we had been tolling away, heads down, in little West Bend, Wisconsin, is in the heart of some of these really vulnerable populations, doing really good things. That was God’s way of telling me, like, you had a job to do here, so you better show up.”
Amanda returned home from that trip, wrote the business plan, and spun off this product and service from the parent company. Her goal was to offer equitable health care. She created a new company called Spaulding Medical, which provides “cardiac insights for transformative patient care and research.” (Source: “Home,” Spaulding Medical, accessed February 21, 2021.)
When creating Spaulding Medical, Amanda became more fiscally conservative than her parent organization, Spaulding Clinical. That is, until recently, when a top-ten health care system contacted them to be an innovative cardiac partner, which converted Spaulding Medical into an innovation company overnight. She calls it a “thrilling and scary ride of an entrepreneur where (she) has to maintain partnerships, find the investments, manage an operational team, and maintain culture and morale.”
As this was not enough, this all happened during a pandemic with her five children having to be educated in their home. This was quite a challenge, yet Amanda remembered:
“That moment in Brazil, that moment in Mexico, and the mission of what we’re doing, I realize I have to keep showing up for it. When you work in health care technology and you see that the technology can save lives, you go. You know it’s worth it to step out of your safe little world of black and make yourself uncomfortable and go get the job done. It’s gonna be really hard but go and get it done. That’s the world that I live in now.”
Today, the Spaulding 12-lead ECG product line is in use in over thirty-five countries. (Source: “Take ECGs In-Home,” Spaulding Medical, accessed February 21, 2021.)
Information taken from my book, Surrounded by Awesome Women: Unlocking a New Model of Women’s Success in Business and Entrepreneurship for the Next Decade by Sheila Long and published by New Degree Press.
