About Palm Beach Biologix
Our journey into this industry was born from personal experience. Our commitment and drive to help others came from seeking better care for our own family.
Contact UsOur Story
We transitioned from real estate into healthcare when we were looking to place our 92-year-old grandmother into an Assisted Living Facility. We visited over 70 communities around our local area from Martin County moving south through Broward and Dade County. After touring all of these facilities, we didn’t feel comfortable placing her in many of these communities because the combination and synergy of care, life enrichment, and aesthetic appeal in each of these places was not up to our preconceived standards.
So, we decided to build and operate our own 150-bed high-end Assisted Living Facility in Boynton Beach, Florida for her. She has since moved in and is very happy with the quality of life and care our community has to offer.
The community’s vision is to create a managed care approach to Assisted Living by providing and offering to our residents a list of Specialists and Providers that can enhance the licensure of our community. Some of these include Primary Care Physicians, Podiatrists, Ophthalmologists, Dermatologists, Physical Therapists, Home Health Agencies, Hospice, Dentists, Psychiatrists, Wound Care Specialists, Psychologists, Urologists, mobile X-ray companies, mobile sonogram companies, among many others. All of these Specialists come directly to our community to offer our residents a higher level of care.
We opened our community in March of 2020, which was an extremely challenging time for our industry due to the pandemic caused by COVID-19. We were forced to learn and perform every position in our community including Executive Director, Business Office Management, Human Resources, Marketing Director, Life Enrichment, among others. Sitting at all of these desks gave us a real pulse on how the geriatric healthcare system actually works.
Advancing Therapeutics
When we opened the community, we saw there were two leading causes of death:
Falls
The community mitigated this risk by implementing a strong fall protocol and outsourcing a third party to offer a physical therapy program to the residents in our community. Resident participation in this program has drastically reduced the event of resident falls and has improved their quality of life to maintain much more independence.
Wounds
In the state of Florida, Assisted Living Facilities are regulated and governed by the Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA). This agency sets forth guidelines and parameters that outline the specific health conditions a given resident must have for admission into our community and discharge out of our community. No Assisted Living Facility in the state of Florida under standard licensure can treat wounds directly. However, the facility can recommend third party supplemental care such as a Home Health Agency, or a Primary Care Physician. In the instance of a wound becoming stageable in the ALF setting, if a wound is considered to be stage 2, the facility is required to monitor this wound for 30 days. If the wound does not improve or this wound becomes stage 3, the facility is required to discharge the resident from the community into a more appropriate setting.
An Anecdote
About eight months after we opened our community, we had a resident who had a stage 2 wound on his coccyx. After notifying the family of the condition, the resident’s family wanted a Home Health Agency that they previously worked with to come in and supplement care for this wound. After 26 days, this wound became stage 3, and our community sent this resident to the hospital. During his stay at the hospital, he received a skin graft the old-fashioned way. That is, they cut excess skin from another part of his body and placed it onto his coccyx wound. This procedure is very invasive, painful, and does not have a great success rate. After the procedure, this resident was discharged from the hospital to a Skilled Nursing Facility where he passed away weeks later.
We started thinking about this specific problem in our community and how many other residents in other communities are suffering from the same or similar conditions.
Research
From our own first-hand experience, we knew there was a major problem, and this is where we began our journey into wound care. During our due diligence period, and prior to becoming an FDA licensed tissue bank, we found every clinical study to be remarkable in improvement and patient outcomes. We then learned how the technologically advanced product was applied and discovered it was not painful or invasive to the patient.
After our thorough and long due diligence period, Palm Beach Biologix became an FDA licensed tissue bank and sold our first amniotic skin graft to a Provider who treated a patient with a chronic Diabetic Foot Ulcer (DFU) in our local area. The DFU on this patient was existing for 6 months at this time. The Provider did not know if the wound would heal as he deemed it to be chronic and necrotic. After four treatments with our amniotic skin grafts, the wound was 100% closed, callused over, and completely healed. After seeing the results first-hand, we knew that we could couple technology with wound care to offer patients tangible hope and relief to those who once faced uncertainty and despair.
If residents in our community – a community that prides itself on exceptional quality of care – have this problem, it seemed extremely probable for other communities, Providers, Facilities, and Agencies to experience or witness this problem with their residents or patients. After preliminarily discussing with other Home Health Agencies, Providers, and Assisted Living Facilities in our local area, we knew this could be an opportunity for us to help more people and expand our footprint.
This is where the inspiration for our go-to-market strategy derived.
Progress From the Ground Up
Our strategy let PBMC hire all W-2 bona fide employees to rep our product and utilized a generous commission structure for them to establish and hire other employees beneath them, coincidentally creating a marketing pyramid. The idea behind this marketing philosophy was to help as many patients in the proof-of-concept local market we approached, resulting in PBMC’s huge local market growth in the previous 12 months.
We established team leaders with the idea that we would train them by teaching these marketers everything we know about the product, marketing the product to providers, gaining access to patients with wounds in our local area and hiring / firing reps underneath them, resulting in huge growth to PBMC’s market share. These team managers would find great marketers underneath them that would approach patients in need of this product and refer them to a list of providers. If the patient or their power of attorney were in agreement to the treatment, the providing physician would then determine which treatment methods they deemed appropriate.
It worked, and PBMC proved a successful proof of concept in a very small geographic location. The company’s success grew PBMC’s NOI to $25 MM in the last 12 months.
Our goal is to invite the right equity partner into our company that has the scalability, track record and know how to penetrate the entire United States healthcare system and help patients gain knowledge and access to this product. We believe PBMC could be the largest database for wounds and providers in the country with the proper direction.
