There is no shortage of year-end proclamations to put 2020 behind us and never look back. The dumpster fire T-shirts, the quarantine TikToks, and the endless Zoom-themed memes – they all give a little comic relief to the fact that this was a really hard year. Hardest of all for the healthcare community.

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a tremendous toll on so many lives, impacting our health, our traditions, our economy, and our psyches. But, as we look back on the past year – as individuals, as a company, and as part of a much larger healthcare community – it’s important to recognize the monumental achievements that have come out of this period of historic adversity. For all the hardship and anxiety, there have also been some beautiful moments of truth and unification that put a spotlight on the resilience of people around the world to rally in the face of a challenge.

At Komodo Health, we shared these challenges. And as 2020 comes to an end, we are reflecting on the twists, turns, and lucky bright spots of a year that will define us for generations to come.

Komodo’s Values and Mission in Action

In many ways, the past year was a test of our mission to reduce the burden of disease. Despite the countless logistical obstacles involved with making our entire operation remote in a matter of days, our Dragons rallied around a clear purpose and rose to the occasion. We could not be more proud of the accomplishments we achieved together.

More importantly, though, it’s been incredible to see how quickly our team adapted to apply our mission, values, and unique assets and capabilities to the extraordinary challenges of COVID-19. With the entire healthcare system thrown into turmoil and the entire world focused on a cure, our team was able to deliver powerful solutions that made a significant impact.

Our research into the ripple effects of COVID-19 called out critical gaps in cancer care and routine screening that emerged during the pandemic. A team of our data scientists, clinical experts, and engineers developed a breakthrough new method of calculating COVID-19 drug demand and supply curves that was chosen as a “spotlight project” in the Pandemic Response Hackathon. We also exposed important racial and socioeconomic disparities associated with the growing use of telemedicine. We helped life sciences companies accelerate clinical trial recruitment and site identification – across a number of disease areas but also to accelerate the development of novel COVID-19 therapeutics – by pinpointing physicians who were seeing the most COVID-19 patients. We delivered a new playbook for Medical Affairs to navigate provider engagement in the digital landscape.

Best Year Yet in Growth

In all these efforts, we’ve stayed laser-focused on evolving clinical trends, building for the future, and finding ways to help move healthcare forward. Not only did we prove our mettle through these challenges – we also grew our business.

The path to this year’s growth was not what we expected. We started the year by announcing our Series C funding as we dove into product innovation and client expansion with best-laid plans for a predictable growth track. Then, everything changed.

Fortunately, the same core values and data-driven strengths that made us strong pre-pandemic became critical assets during the pandemic. Our Healthcare Map™, which delivers the world’s most comprehensive view of patient encounters, served as the foundation for breakthrough insights and powerful new product development. We added four new solutions and 10 new product features, which are more important than ever in the digital-first environment. We expanded into new market segments, launched a new brand, and when all was said and done, we grew our client base by more than 50% with the continued revenue hypergrowth to show for it.

Onward

We’ve come a long way this year, but it’s still just the beginning. As Drs. Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, the study of the COVID-19 vaccines safety and efficacy will not end with FDA approval. It will be critical in the coming weeks and months to continually evaluate how these products work in the real world using powerful software, data, and analytics like ours to spot trends, close gaps, and seize new opportunities. Likewise, we will need to continue to measure the ripple effects of the last year of deferred and delayed care and keep expanding our knowledge to inform our responses to future pandemics.

We will rise to these challenges with the confidence and collective sense of purpose that could only have come from having survived and thrived through the many tests of the last year.

To be clear, we are all eager to move past the struggles of 2020. The lives lost and families forever altered will serve as permanent reminders of the tragedy of COVID-19. But from that darkness, we have also been able to find some light. We’ll choose to remember both sides of the experience when we look back on this year, embracing that duality as an admonition to keep trying harder, building smarter, and coming together in our mission – to reduce the burden of disease.