Continuing Medical Education with Poetic Style: Outcomes Inc. Founder & President Grows Successful Business and Finds Fulfillment in Poetry

Sixty-two-year-ancient Linda Casebeer seems to be going only up from here. Working within a variety of industries including education and medicine, she has made a research methodology and company-assessing the outcomes and effectiveness of continuing medical education-that keeps growing despite a struggling economy. Her clients include the who’s who of huge pharma-Pfizer, Genentech, Abbott and health advocacy groups such as the American Heart Association.

Now that all of her children are grown, Linda has been able to take both entrepreneurial and personal risks, including getting her book of poetry, The Last Eclipsed Moon, published. Though her passions early in life involved being in the classroom and later upon the medical field, she found ways to incorporate entrepreneurism with her like for education.   

After graduating from North Carolina State University with a degree in political science, Linda first started working as a 3rd-grade teacher.  Linda was fired from her teaching job because she was pregnant, a representative sign of the times in America and a then-commonplace practice against women in the workplace. Striving to be her best, she returned to school to get a master’s degree in education from The Citadel as well as a master’s in Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University.

While finishing her coursework for a PhD from Indiana University in 1985, Linda started working in a large teaching hospital, where she was promoted to its academic affairs division devoted to educating healthcare professionals. After 10 years, Linda was recruited to conduct research at the University of Alabama Medical School in the division of continuing medical education. While at the university, she conducted randomized educational trials to see what continuing medical-education programs were most effective. At the time, she was part of a team compiling years worth of data that often went unread, and the largest spenders-the large pharmaceutical companies ($1 billion to $2 billion a year)-were paying small attention to programs that worked and those that did not.

In 2001, this research led Linda to found what is today known as Outcomes Inc. Though her company has succeeded in large part on its own merits, she acknowledges that governmental policies helped make a market for her services. The business accelerated when the Office of the Inspector General advised pharmaceutical companies to split their marketing activities from educational programs. Yet past the early stages of starting her business proved to be some of the most hard, particularly extending work beyond the initial startup phase. She had to relinquish some control: “Due to expansion, I could no longer personally make sure that everything going out the door was high quality.” Even today, she laments that “systematizing the business model continues to be more complex, intricate and demanding than ever.” Managing growth remains the largest hurdle with her company.

Despite setbacks, Linda reveals that she is still hooked on the adrenaline of the entrepreneurial spirit, feeling that she never knows who she will interact with on any given day. In addition to learning aspects of herself in the process, she has also learned how to better keep close to her family. Having her daughter as her first employee had its benefits but also drawbacks. Though comforted that she could completely trust her daughter in hard business decisions, she acknowledges that being with family so often can be a challenge: “By the time Thanksgiving comes, we don’t have to argue; we have already been through all of that.” She warns anyone who works with family to recognize that “the things you appreciate about your family sometimes get lost in the daily shuffle.”

Outcomes Inc. employs 30 people, while revenue has consistently doubled in each of the last three years to over $9 million. While such growth speaks for itself, Linda cautions other entrepreneurs to make sure to “have a complete and consistent business plot from beginning to end and don’t skimp on working with excellent advisors.” She credits a part of her success on the changing state of the economy, asserting that her business helps people to spend money more efficiently, telling companies where and how they should target their spending. Though still excited with entrepreneurism, she feels that among her most life-changing experiences has been with poetry. She feels that poetry has been “an artistic piece of the universe that is central to my soul and being.”

The highly educated president of a multimillion-dollar company, world-renowned clients, a mother of four and published poet… what have you done today?

Popularity: unranked [?]