Flight nurse Joan Sullivan Garrett never envisioned herself as an entrepreneur and certainly never as the head of a multi-million-dollar company with global assets and Fortune 500 clients. But that’s the way it turned out, and 18 years after she founded it, her company–MedAire–is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange and was expected to bring in revenues of more than $25 million last year.
The idea for MedAire was born of a tragic accident on a dusty Arizona country road in 1983. Garrett, then Joan McCorkle, was chief medical officer on a helicopter emergency evacuation flight operated by Samaritan Health, responding to an accident in which a boy had been injured. Five minutes out, an ambulance team on the scene reported that the boy’s injuries were not immediately life-threatening and the helicopter was ordered back to the center. Garrett argued that they should continue on and do their own diagnosis, but was overruled. While still en route back to the center, they received another call saying the boy had taken a turn for the worse. The Samaritan crew returned to the scene of the accident.
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