alumni profiles

Chris & Fred Fey’s HealthScreen America promotes high-tech health screenings

Chris (left) and Fred Fey (HealthScreen America Photo)

by Luke Woodling

Two brothers, Chris Fey, PR 1973, and Fred Fey, PR 1972, have a brand of alternative medicine that is changing the way many people think about traditional healthcare. But their approach is far more high-tech than holistic.

The brothers, who are each 20-year veterans of the healthcare industry, co-founded the Jacksonville-based HealthScreen America in 1997. The company is devoted to preventative medicine and to empowering its clients to take health management into their own hands.

“Consumers, especially Baby Boomers, are demanding control of and more information about their personal health,” Fred said. “Our role is to arm them with information they can use to have a longer and healthier life.”

HealthScreen America, whose motto is “the earlier, the better,” offers customers direct access to CT scans, ultrasound and virtual reality technologies that screen for everything from diabetes to lung cancer and provide each individual with a comprehensive look at his or her health.

No doctor referral or HMO approval is necessary. Clients don’t even have to undress. “When you take your car in for a maintenance check-up, they plug it into a computer that reads all of the diagnostics,” Fred said. “That’s basically what we do with the human body.”

The firm’s most recent innovation is the “virtual colonoscopy,” a non-invasive and painless alternative to the dreaded traditional method of detecting colon cancer, Fred said. The scanning process results in a three-dimensional, virtual reality model of a patient’s colon, which specialists can virtually navigate to check for polyps.

In the time since the Fey brothers launched company operations on Jan. 3, 2000, HealthScreen America has been featured on the NBC Nightly News and MSNBC.com, as well as in the pages of USA Today, The New York Times Magazine, BusinessWeek, The Jacksonville Business Journal and The Florida Times-Union.

Last November, HealthScreen America was honored with the “Most Promising New Program” Award at the Excellence in Healthcare and Wellness Awards ceremonies for its “KidsHealth First” program. The program provides free health screenings for 10-to-17-year-olds. In its first full year of operation, more than 600 were screened.

HealthScreen America was a finalist in last year’s Rochester Institute of Technology/USA Today Quality Cup competition, which recognizes organizations making significant improvements to products or services by applying the principles of quality management.

The company’s success is being translated into plans for a national rollout of the company franchise to health systems around the country. Fred said that proposed cities include Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami and Orlando.

“We have the capability to pioneer the way employers, insurance companies, academic medical centers and others involved in healthcare address a population’s future health risks,” Chris said.