Becoming Patient Advocates:
Becoming patient advocates followed a long history with healthcare. In mid-2015, Jeff and Heather Byars thought they had a good grasp on navigating our healthcare system. After all, Heather is a biologist and Jeff had spent his entire professional career in and around healthcare settings.
Jeff had been a licensed Emergency Medical Technician for 23 years providing patient care in both for-profit and nonprofit settings. As an accountant, he had worked for Alabama’s largest health insurance carrier for 14 years. He conducted reimbursement audits for both private and governmental insurance. He had also worked for the state’s largest hospital system reimbursing clinical trials. Essentially, Jeff had set foot inside almost every hospital in Alabama and had also done work in various hospitals across the country.
The couple had even navigated the system as patients a few times: Jeff is a cancer survivor and Heather had recently given birth to their first child. With all of this experience, they believed they were knowledgeable regarding our healthcare systems and how they worked.
And then their 7-month-old daughter, Claire, required an emergency trip to the hospital.
What transpired over the next several months left them shocked, confused, and despairing. The path to healing for Claire included a misdiagnosis, incompatible treatments, medical errors, conflicting answers from multiple sub-specialists, difficulty in coordinating care, and even an attempt to defraud them out of money raised for medical expenses.
But it wasn’t all bad. During this time, they witnessed some of the world’s best practices in medicine. From working with doctors, nurses, facilities, diagnostics, and treatments, they cultivated a grassroots understanding of healthcare systems. All in all, they witnessed the good, the bad, and the ugly of healthcare while accumulating over $5 million in healthcare charges.
It was during this time, the concept of what would later become Sun Back Moon, LLC began to evolve. It seemed there had to be a better way to get the very best care in the most efficient manner. Jeff pursued this idea and obtained a healthcare-concentrated Lean Six Sigma certification learning techniques used to improve the process of healthcare. During his research, Jeff discovered the newly formed Patient Advocacy Certification Board and sat for, and passed, the very first offering of their certification exam. As these pieces began to fall into place, Claire’s health continued to improve meaning the time was right to launch Sun Back Moon, LLC in 2020. In 2022, Jeff was named the Healthcare Advocate Summit Independent Advocate of the Year.
Our goal is to offer help to patients, their families, and their healthcare providers.
As for the name itself, Sun Back Moon stems from a phrase Claire would use as she began to learn how to communicate. Rather than saying she loved us to the sun, moon, and back, she would simply say “Love you sun back moon.” The phrase stuck and is still used daily in the Byars household.