Medical Care Alert discusses company growth

YARMOUTH, Maine—PERS seems to have come up quite a bit this month. I spoke with Affiliated about its upcoming Catalyst conference and COPS Monitoring about its approach to mPERS.

I also spoke with Bryan Stapp, president of Medical Care Alert, a PERS dealer based in Northville, Mich. The company, started in 2008, has seen strong growth in the past few years and Stapp gave me some perspective on the PERS industry, both within his company and the market overall.

Medical Care Alert recently earned a distinction from Stapp's alma mater for its growth. The company has experienced a CAGR of 34.27 percent over the last three years, earning the company a spot on the Gator100, a list of the fastest growing companies owned or operated by University of Florida alumni.

This is the second time Medical Care Alert has appeared on the list, ranking number 68 this year and 88 in 2017. “It's a nice thing for the team here to see that our growth and our efforts are being recognized,” Stapp said.

Certain technologies have played a role in that growth, according to Stapp. “In terms of the product line, the mPERS devices—what we call the HOME & AWAY line—has really been our biggest growth engine, and that's clearly where people are headed,” he said.

Stapp continued, “Either because they're still really active or because we're hitting a younger demographic, or they've gotten rid of their traditional phone line, so there's no more POTS line or VoIP line to connect a traditional medical alert system up to—the HOME & AWAY has been really popular.”

Medical Care Alert uses two different devices under its HOME & AWAY category: the Numera Libris and a device manufactured by Micron. Stapp lauded the fall detection of the Libris device and the tracking abilities enabled by the Micron device. “The devices are great, they're rock solid, they're very reliable. We're very happy with the quality of the devices, and that's important for us, obviously, for customer satisfaction, for customer service, and then also for … keeping our return rate really low.”

Building out the company with additional sales people and customer service representatives has also assisted the company's growth over the past few years. The company had about four or five people three years ago, according to Stapp, and now it has 15.

“In general, we've been able to staff up with the growth and we've been very fortunate to have extremely low turnover,” Stapp said. “The folks that are with us tend to stay with us for a while. … That's been very, very helpful.”

Stapp pointed to the company's updated website as another recent improvement. Last year, Medical Care Alert made the website more mobile-friendly, revamped the ordering process and included a tool to help consumers with product selection, he said.

In the announcement of Medical Care Alert's second Gator100 recognition, Stapp stressed the company's focus on customer service. “For us [customer service] means a couple things. One is making sure that we are reaching out to our clients when we see events come through on their account,” he told SSN. “The other thing we do is, through our telephone system, we make sure that people are not on hold for long, if at all. That's a combination of your phone routing and your staffing.”

Medical Care Alert also recently recieved its sixth consecutive Angie's List Super Service Award.

Stapp is positive on the PERS industry's future. “I see the industry just continuing to grow. There seems to be a very wide acceptance of the product and the technology,” he said. There are some market segments want advanced features that are coming out—such as Wi-Fi tracking—and there is also still a large market of consumers looking for a more basic system that will simply get the user help when they need it, said Stapp.

“I continue to believe that, if you're truly viewing this as an emergency response system, that it has to be really simple. That's why we like things that have a big, easy to push button,” he said.