Humana Corporation's Growth in Private Enterprise and Welfare Care

 Humana Inc. was founded in 1961 in Louisville, Kentucky by David Jones and Wendell Cherry as a nursing home company. The decision to start the business came in a rather unusual situation. It was whilst both men were playing a game of golf in Louisville. Each of them put up $1,000 as their initial investment. The company soon became the largest nursing home company in the United States.

Learning that more profits could be made in running hospitals they divested from the nursing home chain and moved into purchasing hospitals in 1971. To reflect the company's new direction, the name was changed from Extendicare to Humana Inc. in 1974. Humana experienced tremendous growth organically.in the years that followed. Its takeover of American Medicorp Inc. in 1978 doubled the company's size. During the mid-1970s, a fast-track construction process enabled the completion and opening of one hospital a month. This accelerated construction schedule compressed time by overlapping processes thus allowing the development of hospital projects incredibly faster. Humana then moved into developing the double corridor model for hospital construction which minimized the distance between patients and nurses by placing nursing support services in the interior of the building with patient rooms surrounding the perimeter.

Humana in time became the world's largest hospital company in the 1980s. As the American health care system evolved in the 1980s, Humana developed an integrated health care delivery system by creating a family of flexible health care plans, tying up the health care service with a health insurance plan thus enabling them to begin marketing health insurance in 1984. .

Humana brought the pioneering artificial heart research of Dr. Robert Jarvik and Dr. William DeVries to Louisville under the newly-created Humana Heart Institute in 1985. Just in 1982 Clark, a 61-year-old retired dentist from Des Moines, Washington, became the first human to receive a permanently implanted artificial heart at the hands of surgeon William DeVries. For DeVries, then 38, that satisfying moment was the culmination of the three years he had spent perfecting the technique that made the implant possible, and waiting for a patient who met the rigorous criteria established for implant candidates by the Food and Drug Administration. For DeVries the 7½-hr. operation was "almost a spiritual experience. So acquiring such a man together with his collaborator was to bring much invention and life prolongation at the center of Humana.

In the 1990s Humana metamorphosed into a consumer health benefits company. Humana spun-off its hospital operations from the health insurance operations in 1993 and created the new company Galen Health Care Inc. Soon after, Galen merged with humana provider contracting /HCA. After United Healthcare's failed attempt to acquire Humana in 1998, Humana began pioneering work in consumer driven health care in 1999; launching its first services on September 11, 2001.The marketing and administering of health benefit consumer services. became a very profitable area of Humana's engagement run principally from its headquarters at the Humana building.

Through a partnership with Navigy, Inc., a subsidiary of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, Inc., in 2001, Humana launched Availity to empower physicians and other health care professionals with a business solution to conduct their daily health plan transactions.

Humana began marketing health savings account services to individuals and companies in 2003. The Business Health Care Group of Southeast Wisconsin chose Humana as its administrative partner to drive Southeastern Wisconsin health care costs to the Midwest average in 2005, through consumer education largely, providing cost and quality information on health care providers, structuring accountability of all stakeholders and collective purchasing. Today, this Group represents more than 200 member companies, including large and small employers representing more than 150,000 health care consumers in Southeastern Wisconsin.

Upon passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act in the U. S. Congress, Humana launched an aggressive education campaign to market Medicare Advantage and Prescription Drug Plans nationwide to Medicare eligible consumers in 2006. Through a cross country RV tour and strategic alliance with medicare distribution concerns such as Wal-Mart, approximately 5 million consumers got signed catapulting Humana to #2 in industry market share for senior products. Humana also launched Right Source, a national mail-order retail pharmacy business in 2006.