Eren Bali, Carbon Health, on democratizing healthcare access
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In this episode, we chat with Eren Bali, the Co-Founder & CEO of Carbon Health and the Co-Founder & Chairman of Udemy. Carbon Health is a technology-enabled healthcare provider with a mission to make high-quality healthcare accessible to everyone. Carbon Health meets patients where they are, providing seamless, accessible healthcare to patients across a variety of access points including primary and urgent care clinics, pop-up sites, video, the Carbon Health app, and on-site at their employers. Late last year, Carbon Health received $100M in Series C funding from Dragoneer Investment Group, Brookfield Technology Partners, DCVC, and Builders VC, and is expanding rapidly, increasing its patient volume sixfold and clinic footprint from 7 clinics to 27 clinics across six states within the past year.
Key topics of discussion:
- Personal motivation for starting companies that use technology to provide access to essential services for more people
- Investing in the technology underpinning Carbon Health’s care delivery model to streamline the care experience and provide omnichannel care
- The need for decoupling employment status and healthcare access to address gaps in healthcare coverage in America
Start to 12:37: Overcoming adversity to found his first company
· On growing up in Turkey: Eren grew up in Malatya, a small village in southeastern Turkey. Malatya lacked many educational resources and employment opportunities and faced martial law and internal conflict. Despite these conditions, Eren observed many people in Malatya had a lot of talent but lacked the access to resources and opportunities to support their socioeconomic mobility.
· On finding chess and mathematics: Eren learned how to play chess when he was four years old. His passion for chess evolved into a love for mathematics. Access to the Internet enabled Eren to study for the International Math Olympiads despite lacking the educational resources to prepare. Eren ended up winning the gold medal in the Math Olympiads in Turkey, becoming the first contestant from southeastern Turkey to win and earn a spot on the national team.
· On entrepreneurship: Eren initially thought he would become a math professor. During his first year in college, Eren discovered an interest in building his own ventures and engaging in creative work. Eren started his first company in his first year in college.
· On what drives him: The core thesis behind Eren’s work is to leverage technology to make an essential need accessible to more people. Eren first started Udemy, the world’s largest marketplace for online courses with over 50 million users, after personally benefiting from an Internet-based education that enabled him to study and win in the International Math Olympiad.
· A personal motivation for improving healthcare: Growing up, Eren distinctly remembers the lack of access to quality healthcare was the most pressing need his village faced. His father and many other members of his family did not survive past age 65 from diseases that were largely preventable or treatable.
· Starting Carbon Health: After observing his mother’s care journey, Eren recognized the many inefficiencies in the healthcare experience that negatively impacted both patients and physicians. From this, Eren drew up some ideas for how he would design the patient experience from the ground up. While doing this, Eren surveyed the landscape of healthcare companies in the U.S. and was disappointed to find a lack of healthtech companies focused on bringing access to more average Americans instead of largely healthy and affluent patients.
“Opportunities are extremely unevenly distributed… I’m just as passionate about observing there are so many extremely talented people who are in areas where…[they have no access] to realizing their potential.”
12:37 to 32:25: On the vision for Carbon Health
· Carbon Health’s focus: Carbon Health is a technology-enabled primary care provider focused on delivering omnichannel care to the patient through a combination of telemedicine, in-person clinics, and at-home services. Eren chose to focus on primary health given the critical gap in primary care services in the U.S. Even in 2020, 25% of counties in the U.S. are in a healthcare desert where residents lack access to basic health services such as preliminary primary care.
· Reimagining the patient experience: The technology driving Carbon Health streamlines aspects of the patient experience including consolidating medical record storage, onboarding and scheduling patient visits, and insurance billing through machine learning systems that predict and sequence processes to reduce the amount of time spent in each part of the process.
· On creating sustainable accessibility: Carbon Health aims to provide the best healthcare possible given the conditions of today’s healthcare system by designing the optimal patient experience within current reimbursement levels across all types of insurance. By putting a hard constraint on the cost side of care, Carbon focuses on investing in technologies that reduce administrative inefficiencies to allow providers to focus on delivering patient care.
· A healthcare solution for all: Carbon Health intentionally lacks a premium concierge service given its mission to provide quality care that is accessible to all. Patients across the socioeconomic spectrum have high utilization rates for Carbon Health’s services, spurred by a streamlined care journey patients prefer to many traditional providers.
· Full steam ahead: After recently raising $100M in Series C funding, Carbon Health is plunging ahead to continue expanding its services across the U.S. During the COVID epidemic, Carbon Health increased its clinic footprint from 7 to 27 clinics, introduced virtual care to 16 states, and grew their patient base by roughly 10x within 2020. By 2025, Carbon aims to open 1,500 locations nationwide.
· On omnichannel care: Carbon Health aims to increase access points to care and meet patients where they are, blending virtual and in-person care. This allows Carbon to strike the balance to unlock healthcare access to meet a majority of the patient’s primary care needs while optimizing healthcare delivery. Patients can receive care from the same trusted providers at a wide variety of access points: clinics, pop-up sites, video, the Carbon Health app, and even on-site at their employers.
· Impact of COVID: Carbon Health was an early responder in the COVID-19 epidemic. In February 2020, Carbon Health started tracking and monitoring patients who tested positive for COVID. While some provider practices were shutting down or reducing physicians’ clinical time, Carbon Health provided more in-person treatments for COVID patients, developed at-home testing and treatment kits, deployed trailers in underserved communities, introduced COVID Ready to help business return to work safely, and developed a first-of-its-kind COVID Positive Care program helping people get care and recover from COVID-19. Through this, Carbon Health has facilitated 700k+ COVID tests, cultivated more ties to local communities, and sparked an uptick of applications from physicians and other care practitioners to work at Carbon Health. Carbon Health has also begun supporting local governments with COVID-19 vaccination rollout operations, beginning with Los Angeles.
“I think the common theme that you will find across almost everything I do is my brain always thinks about how to use technology to make an essential need accessible to more people.”
32:25 to 40:07: On implications for the U.S. healthcare system
· Shifting administrations: Healthcare is a uniquely bipartisan issue in that all parties agree healthcare needs to be more accessible to more Americans. Looking ahead, the Biden presidency promises to provide more centralized planning for America’s COVID response. This will help streamline efforts from providers such as Carbon Health to stem and treat COVID. The new administration may also improve the Affordable Care Act to enable providers to more easily offer care to Americans across states.
· Opportunity for meaningful impact: One of the biggest issues in the current American healthcare system is the tie between employment and health insurance. With COVID rendering millions of Americans jobless and in need of healthcare combined with an increase in gig economy workers, decoupling employment status and health insurance access is becoming increasingly critical.
· An optimistic outlook: COVID has united mankind across nationalities, professions, and other divisions to jointly tackle what may be one of the most pressing challenges of our time. As a result, we saw an abundance of healthcare innovation and a spike in funding in ways that did not exist before. This has the potential for fast-tracking longer-term innovation and improvements in healthcare.
40:07 to End: Career advice, opportunities at Carbon Health, and personal health
· Work on something you care about: When thinking about starting a company or joining a company, consider focusing on a problem that you wake up thinking about. When investors asked Eren to create a premium service within Carbon Health, he countered with “I’ve never woken up wondering how rich people can have better healthcare.”
· Surround yourself with people who care: Part of what makes Carbon Health successful is the orientation around the mission of making quality healthcare more accessible for everyone. This mission is embraced by everyone at Carbon Health, from the frontline clinical workers to the data scientists and finance leads.
· Career opportunities at Carbon Health: Passion for the core mission of delivering care to more people is an essential aspect of working at Carbon Health. Carbon Health is hiring aggressively and looking for diverse candidates who have a genuine interest in helping to fix healthcare disparities in the U.S. and across the world one day.
· On self-care: With three small children, Eren juggles a lot on top of his day job. To balance out his self-care, Eren organizes games such as virtual chess with his friends. He also ensures he spends sufficient time with family.
“And one of the views that really drives [Carbon Health] is that karma exists. Just believe that if you do the right thing consistently, it will come back [to you].”
For career opportunities at Carbon Health, please visit www.carbonhealth.com
