Company leader
Ethan Bechtel
Co-Founder and CEO
OhMD
Ethan Bechtel is co-founder and chief executive of OhMD, a Burlington, Vermont company that takes routine calls off a clinic phone line.
A Vermont Childhood
He was born and raised in Vermont. His mother, an orthopedic nurse practitioner and x-ray tech, founded the first orthopedic clinic at Killington, a ski town in the state, while he was a child. "I just grew up in this entrepreneurial environment where I learned about healthcare," he said. He worked in that company as a child, then studied at the University of Vermont business school. A snowboard injury in his teens revealed a bone condition. He later counted a dozen broken arms, three surgeries, and a cancer scare, which is the patient side of the phone queue he builds for.
Co-founding OhMD in 2014
After graduation he joined MBA HealthGroup, the practice-services firm his mother had founded, and in the mid-2000s he focused on the electronic medical record. That work led to OhMD, which he started in Burlington in 2014 with his brother Nate.
The company began at the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies. After a surge of growth during COVID it moved to HULA, a workspace on Burlington's waterfront. The software takes calls that do not need a person, such as a refill, and leaves the ones that do.