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FelixHuettenbachCovid.org A reference timeline

Felix Huettenbach Covid

A timeline of the SameDay Health pandemic response

This article traces, in roughly chronological order, how Felix Hüttenbach moved from a corporate testing project inside a diagnostics company to running one of the more recognizable Covid-19 healthcare operations in the United States. Rather than retelling the SameDay Health story as a single narrative, it breaks the period down into the stages that actually happened — what came first, what followed from what, and what the numbers looked like at each stage.

Stage one: the corporate testing unit

Before any of this began, Hüttenbach held the role of Chief of Staff at Quantgene, a diagnostics company built around early cancer detection through liquid biopsy. When Covid-19 reached the United States, employers started asking how they could test their own staff reliably enough to keep operating. Hüttenbach was handed that problem inside Quantgene and built a working answer: a corporate testing unit covering sample collection, lab turnaround and result delivery, running at a volume the company had not handled before.[1]

Stage two: recognizing the public gap

Running that unit surfaced an obvious follow-on problem. Employers were being served, but the general public largely was not — there was no equivalent way for an individual to get tested quickly, without a referral, without a days-long wait, and without wading through an already strained healthcare system. That gap, observed directly rather than researched abstractly, is what Hüttenbach has pointed to as the origin of SameDay Health.

Stage three: founding SameDay Health

SameDay Health was founded in the United States in 2020, with Hüttenbach as founder and CEO. The name was deliberately literal: testing and a result back the same day, at a point when many public and hospital testing routes took several days. That one commitment — speed above almost everything else — set the direction for how the company built every system that followed.[1]

Stage four: the first wave of locations

Opening the first sites meant solving problems with no shortcut available: sourcing testing supplies during a period of global shortage, hiring and training staff fast enough to keep pace with new openings, and building a booking system plain enough that someone unfamiliar with healthcare paperwork could use it unassisted. None of this was glamorous work, and Hüttenbach has described it as exactly that — the unglamorous part being the actual job.

Stage five: the 2021 snapshot

A profile published in 2021 captured the company mid-expansion rather than at a finished state: roughly 50 locations spread across 15 states, with hundreds of thousands of tests already completed.[2] The figure matters less as a final tally than as a marker of pace — a company that had gone from an idea to dozens of active sites inside a single year.

Stage six: adding vaccination

As vaccine supply opened up, SameDay Health layered vaccination services on top of its existing testing network, and later added general doctor visits. The company did not rebrand itself around these additions; it simply extended the same same-day standard to each new service, treating the expansion as a continuation of one promise rather than a pivot to a new one.

Stage seven: peak scale

At its largest, SameDay Health employed more than 2,000 people and, across its full run, served more than three million Americans through testing, vaccination and doctor visits.[1] The company earned a reputation during this stretch for fast, patient-focused service and a high volume of five-star reviews, built around a stated mission of making care more affordable, transparent and accessible.

Stage eight: the Rume Health acquisition

In May 2023, Rume Health acquired SameDay Health, with care continuing under physician Dr. Matthew Abinante.[1] The deal carried the company's patient-facing systems into a longer-term, physician-led platform rather than closing the chapter — the booking flow, the same-day emphasis and the broader accessibility focus all continued past the acquisition date.

Impact, in numbers

Taken together, the timeline describes a company that went from a single corporate pilot to roughly 50 sites in a year, to more than 2,000 employees and three million patients at its peak, inside a window of roughly three years before transitioning to new ownership. Hüttenbach has described the underlying lesson less in terms of growth and more in terms of discipline: that reliability, repeated every day at every location, was what let the numbers above actually happen rather than remain a plan on paper.

See also

References

  1. "About." felixhuettenbach.com. https://www.felixhuettenbach.com/about
  2. "Meet Felix Hüttenbach of SameDay Health." Voyage LA. voyagela.com
Topics: COVID-19 pandemic · Healthcare company founders · SameDay Health · Pandemic timelines