Jon Lensing, a 2020 Carver College of Medicine grad, delayed Match Day to pursue entrepreneurship. He co-founded Apollo, a web-based platform that allows health care providers to be more transferable between hospital systems so they could help cover shifts at other hospitals.
A Pella native pursuing a career in medicine has shifted focus to launching a business—one he and his co-founders designed to meet a need in the medical industry—and soon saw its numbers skyrocket due to COVID-19.
Jon Lensing, a 2012 Pella Christian alumnus, graduated from Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine in 2020 and now is a doctor. But this spring, while he and his classmates were finishing medical school, Lensing made the difficult decision to pause his residency plans and instead pursue efforts to get an innovative business idea off the ground.
Lensing is one of three co-founders of Apollo, a web-based platform that helps health care providers transfer more easily between hospital systems, allowing them to fill gaps where coverage is needed.
“It was humbling and exciting to watch how quickly people adopted our technology and wanted to use it during the pandemic. It’s been humbling to see something that started as a grassroots movement catch on this quickly.”
Over the course of eight weeks during the current pandemic, Apollo grew from facilitating partnerships between four hospitals and 80 physicians to 25 hospitals and more than 700 providers.
Lensing and classmate Matt Grossman, an Orange City, Iowa native, came up with the idea while discussing a problem they’d been learning about all through medical school: a shortage of medical providers in the U.S. that the Association of American Medical Colleges says may reach nearly 122,000 physicians by 2032.
Hear more about Lensing and the Apollo platform on today’s In Depth with Dr. Bob Leonard.