Oil companies spend a huge amount of money and devote massive resources to exploring for oil and pumping it out of the ocean floor.

But, nothing lasts forever. When an off-shore oil well dries up, oil companies don’t exhibit quite the same zeal for plugging the well and dismantling and removing the massive drilling platform. That job is given to a third-party company. Off the coast of Louisiana, that company is likely to be The Couvillion Group.

The Couvillion Group is owned by the company’s President and CEO, Timmy Couvillion. Beside dismantling oil wells, Timmy and his 70 employees work on a wide range of ocean-based projects, including marine construction, port and vessel maintenance, and disaster recovery.

Timmy started the company after Hurricane Katrina. His first project was salvaging over 500 sunken boats that went down in that storm.

It’s not just hurricanes that cause disasters. In most workplaces, stuff goes wrong constantly. Hosting a podcast, it’s no big deal. I can apologize for mis-pronouncing your name or asking a dopey question. Other than a bit of embarrassment, the fallout is pretty minimal.

In healthcare, things aren’t quite so easy-going. If you’re a healthcare provider – a practitioner, a clinic, or a hospital – you have to take every possible precaution to eliminate every possible mis-step. But, if you’re a doctor or a medical administrator, you don’t have time to be constantly checking that the systems and people supporting you are working the way they should.

That’s where a company by the name of Performance Health Partners comes in. Performance Health Partners is a healthcare software company that specifically focuses on patient and employee safety.

For every single healthcare incident that causes harm, there are an estimated 299 near-misses. Performance Health Partners records as many of these 299 close-calls as possible, to determine their root cause and eliminate them before harm occurs.

The company was founded in 2015 here in New Orleans. Today they’re in 35 states across the country, in 16 different sectors of healthcare - from behavioral and home health to dialysis - and they’re moving into veterinary care.

The founder and CEO of Performance Health Partners is Heidi Raines.

When we record this podcast, our technical director, Eric Murrell, sits behind us with headphones on, quietly making sure we all sound good. The only time we hear from Eric is when something goes wrong.

Heidi Raines and Timmy Couvillion are both the Eric Murrell of their industries. If everything is ticking over the way it’s supposed to, it’s because they’re quietly going about your day-to-day business.

When we go to the hospital and leave happy because everything worked like clockwork, or we watch the news and there’s not a story about oil leaking from an abandoned well in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s because The Couvillion Group and Performance Health Partners are delivering on their obligations.

To the public, they’re never going to be the hero in the spotlight. But to people in their industries, and others familiar with what they do, they’re vitally important and enormously appreciated. And the number of people who appreciate them now includes of all of us who have gotten to meet them on this edition of Out to Lunch.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.