*This transcript is produced using transcription software and reviewed for quality. Despite our best efforts, some passages may be incomplete or contain errors due to audio quality or software limitations.*
Carol Cone:
I’m Carol Cone and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact.
What if getting quality health care were as easy as walking into a room? No waiting weeks for an appointment. No driving 50 miles or more to find a doctor. No sitting for hours in an emergency room. You simply walk into a private facility. It’s 8×10, and it’s called a CareStation. And healthcare comes to you. That’s the breakthrough idea behind OnMed, a company with a purpose as ambitious as it is simple. Access to health care anywhere. And its CareStation may be one of the most intriguing innovations I’ve ever seen in healthcare and healthcare access.
It combines advanced technology with something even more important: a real clinician, a real conversation, and real care. And it can be placed wherever healthcare is hardest to reach, from rural communities and universities and schools, to workplaces, to not-for-profit locations, such as housing for the unhoused, and other underserved locations. This isn’t technology looking for a problem. It’s technology taking on one of America’s biggest problems. Too many people in too many places simply can’t get the health care they need when they need it.
My guest today is Karthik Ganesh. He’s CEO of OnMed. And his company and the CareStation are really making big waves. OnMed has been recognized by TIME’s Best Inventions, Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies, the Edison Awards, CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, and Fierce Healthcare, among others. So today we’re going to explore a fascinating question. Could the future of healthcare be less about getting people to healthcare and more about bringing health care to people? Let’s find out. Karthik Ganesh, welcome to Purpose 360.
Karthik Ganesh:
Carol, thank you for having me on.
Carol Cone:
It’s a delight for me. So first, I just love a little bit about your background, and, you know, why do you do what you do and why is purpose so important to you?
Karthik Ganesh:
Just complete, full transparency. Why do I do what I do? I think I stumbled upon healthcare by happenstance. It wasn’t that I was passionate about healthcare when I was a new grad, joined Ernst and Young, and I joined their healthcare division in the early two thousands, actually late nineties. I think healthcare found me versus me finding healthcare. Spent a number of years on, I would say, I’m gonna say the more transactional side of healthcare. But the through line for me has been really two things. One, it’s been an obsession with access.
Not a political statement by any stretch, but I do believe for, arguably, the richest country on the planet, health care, not health insurance, health care, should be a fundamental right. That’s one. And the second thing for me has been mental health care. That’s been especially important to me over the last maybe twelve or thirteen years. But I believe the core to incredible societies comes from a place of resilience, and we need to do everything we can to build more resilient communities and humans.
Carol Cone:
You talk about something called the broken door. What is the broken door in our healthcare system?
Karthik Ganesh:
We realized that, you know, even with clinical trials, women were underrepresented, minorities were underrepresented. We know the numbers in terms of, you know, 120 million people without viable access to care. 80% of US counties have healthcare deserts in them. I feel complexity needs to be solved for, the chronic conditions need to be solved for, but we cannot ignore the fact that people need to have access to it to even know if they’ve got a condition.
If you don’t take care of the people who continue to fall sick, who are in the earlier stages, all you’re doing is you’re putting a band-aid on a dam that is already bursting without fundamentally going back and fixing the infrastructure. You know, and I think of—and I call it the front door because it’s akin to saying, “Listen, I am going to upgrade my master bath. I just don’t have a door to my home, or the door is semi-broken, but I would really love for you to see this upgraded shower in a master bath.”
Who cares? I can’t get in through the door. And we need to bring more people in through that door.
Carol Cone:
So this leads to OnMed and opening this door and going beyond telemedicine to something that is much more profound… and rich. And so for our listeners and viewers, can you explain and introduce us to OnMed and then to your incredible innovation, the CareStation.
Karthik Ganesh:
There’s two clear drivers for where we are as a society at large from a healthcare standpoint. One, brick and mortar clinics, hospitals, however you look at it, but especially clinics, too expensive to stand up. More importantly, we are running out of clinicians as a country. There has been nothing fundamentally done around policy to increase the number of clinicians we’re producing.
Then we look at telemedicine. It’s been around for about 20 years. We all love the fact that, you know, it was perceived as a silver bullet as we went through COVID. But in the absence of vitals, scans, biometrics, and in a country where 75 million Americans have less than optimal broadband, 45 million Americans have no broadband, telemedicine, to put it bluntly, becomes a little bit more like a phone chat with your provider, because if they don’t know if you’re running a fever, they can’t even begin to do a lot of things with you. They don’t know your blood pressure, they don’t know your pulse ox, there’s—your oxygen levels, they don’t know a lot of stuff.
You can’t throw the baby out of the bathwater. Both of these modalities have a value to them. And that’s where the OnMed CareStation comes in. We have taken the best of in-person care, the best of telemedicine, put it into a CareStation, and we neutralize the weaknesses. The CareStation is an 8-foot-by-10-foot clinic in a box. You walk in or you roll in, based on whether you’re—it’s wheelchair accessible. You get in, the bulk of the floor is your roll-on scale, it knows how to deduct the weight of the wheelchair if you’re in a wheelchair. It can check your weight, check your height, your blood pressure, your pulse, oxygen. There’s a 65-inch screen in front of you.
We’ve kept it extremely easy for anyone to use it. You press the start button, which is front and center on it, and you’re on the journey. The clinician shows up, she asks if you’re ready, the door closes, the glass fogs, you’re now in a private, secure consultation.
There’s a simple consent form that needs to be signed. It’s a third-grade-level consent form, so from a health equity standpoint, we have catered to the markets we’ve deployed the CareStation, the rural and the urban markets. The clinician shows up on the heels of that. She’s got a stethoscope at her disposal. She’s got a high-def camera, infrared scans. They’re not in your face, so you’re basically in the midst of that visit, consultation with the clinician. Comprehensive. 80% of the people who come into the CareStation will tell us we’re their medical home.
54% tell us they would have gone to the ER. So you’re going through all of that, when you’re done with it, she writes your e-prescription, she gets you your referral script if you need one, confirms you’re done with the visit. And then you step out, the door shuts, and then we use UVC to completely disinfect every surface of the CareStation. For all of that, and this comes back to the first question you asked me, Carol, what excites me with all of that and the fogging of the glass and the disinfecting and everything is, we are going to come out of 2026 with mental health at the CareStation.
Carol Cone:
Really? Oh, this is new. This is new.
Karthik Ganesh:
This is new. So if we think about the single largest reason for people avoiding mental health, and mental health care, it is a stigma, it’s a stigma associated with it. Once you go into the CareStation and the door shuts and the glass fogs, you could be there for a sore throat or a mental health consult. You are in a private, self-contained place where you can be yourself and have a conversation with a clinician. Truly the first fully integrated physical and mental health, whole person care platform that we would deploy in the market. And that then comes back truly to purpose meet soul.
Carol Cone:
And the number one social issue from all of our research, the number one, no matter if you’re—we did it after, when President Trump was elected, Democrats, independents, Republicans, is health, is mental health. And it’s interesting because you say that 37% of people return—
Karthik Ganesh:
To the CareStation.
Carol Cone:
But I bet if you start having mental health consultations, it might go up.
Karthik Ganesh:
But 37%, Carol, is a higher percentage of engagement than any facet of our healthcare system. The only thing that beats it is the pediatricians. But that is more school-mandated for the most part, because they’ve got to see the pediatrician, they’ve got to get, you know, wellness checks, vaccinations, etcetera. And if you’re sick, let’s say you’ve got cancer, good relationship with your oncologist, you keep coming back, right? Outside of that, unmotivated, unprovoked, untriggered, no mandate, there is no other patient-provider relationship that draws a 37% return rate within the first six months.
Carol Cone:
And so I love that you’ve got the technology, but there’s so much humanity built into this.
Karthik Ganesh:
There is a very core design constraint to the way we built the CareStation. It is a human last mile.
Carol Cone:
Human last mile.
Karthik Ganesh:
So while you’ve got a number of things, a number of technology, AI, etc., amplifying the experience, the last mile is human. And it’s fascinating, right? Because I see the CareStation essentially re-engineering the first mile of healthcare, because this should be the entryway from where you can go to the ER, you can go to a specialist, you can go to wherever you need to go. So it’s re-engineering the first mile with a sacrosanct design constraint that the last mile will be human.
Carol Cone:
And 86% from your research of the conditions that people go to it are handled in the CareStation.
Karthik Ganesh:
And we expect those numbers—those numbers will go up with mental health because we think, again, there’s so much undiagnosed, right? There are so many things that we exhibit from a physical health standpoint that are really—you know, a person walks in, says, “I’ve, you know, I’m running a fever, I’ve been sweating profusely, I’m not sleeping very well.” As soon as you hear “I’m not sleeping very well,” it should trigger a flag for the clinician in the CareStation. “Are you having panic attacks? Can I take you through…?” At that point the clinician should do a very cursory, we call it—it’s called a PHQ-9, which is a mental health questionnaire, without alerting or alarming the patient at all.
Are we dealing with someone who’s got something going on from a psychiatric standpoint that is manifesting itself as a physical health constraint? And then allowing that clinician to then bring on a psych nurse who can then take on the rest of the conversation and then very fluidly have a care team that takes care of the patient. There is a very, very overrated percentage of people who realize they have a mental health care need, but when given the time, talk themselves out of it. But if you are captive in the CareStation, our hope with introducing mental health care inside of it is you are there, you are safe, you are secure, you—we know you’re safe and secure because you come back 37% of the times. Right? So you feel safe, you feel the psychological safety inside of it. Now open up and have a conversation and maybe we can take care of you as a whole person versus just what your symptoms show up as.
Carol Cone:
So in addition to growing to more locations, you’re also growing with support. So what has that been introduced, the mental health?
Karthik Ganesh:
We are going to bring it in later this year, this December. But we’re actively working on it right now. But we’re very excited about it. I mean, we haven’t really talked about it openly, but arguably this is the most exciting—this is the most exciting part of what we’ve been building thus far.
Carol Cone:
Fantastic. Okay, so let’s talk about scale because, you know, and I know that the rural—the new appropriations act, that is what, $50 million for rural health care.
Karthik Ganesh:
$50 billion, yep.
Carol Cone:
Sorry, $50 billion, you’re absolutely right. God, don’t shortchange that one. And rural health care is a challenge. Talk about rural and how this can be a result, and how’s the uptake happening?
Karthik Ganesh:
Yep, so I’m gonna talk about rural, but I’m gonna talk about underserved more broadly as a part of rural, which is—because it’s interesting, 80% of underserved—our underserved population in America resides in urban locations, not in rural America, because rural America just does not have enough people, right? But the rural story is an amazing one, Carol. I mean, I believe one of the toughest jobs in our country today is a rural hospital CEO. You’re strapped for resources. Your margins continue to shrink. You are seen as a cornerstone of your community. And you’ve got to show up as if you’ve got more means than you actually do.
For us, we really have shown up as an extension of the hospitals in a lot of cases where if they’ve got one facility that spans two or three counties, in a lot of cases they don’t have the ability to stand up facilities in those counties. So we have CareStations wrapped with their brand that then gets deployed in those communities, because the best way—we’ve known this for the longest time, but I think a lot of people continue to ignore it. Healthcare in America especially is not a field of dreams. If you build, they will not come. You have to show up where they are.
And the beauty of the CareStation is it’s a six-week lead time from the time you sign a contract to having a CareStation in the ground. Six weeks. That’s it. You can bring healthcare into a community in six weeks.
Carol Cone:
Right. And isn’t—isn’t the cost—they’re not buying it, isn’t it a subscription model?
Karthik Ganesh:
It’s a subscription, it’s a lease, it’s a subscription model. You don’t have huge capital outlays as a hospital. You don’t have to worry about how am I gonna staff this thing, where am I gonna go out and recruit? Because these are all challenges these hospitals are having. Versus that, wrap your brand around the CareStation, put it into the community, let OnMed take charge of it and go. And Hospital XYZ has just brought their brand into their catchment area, if you will. And we’ve done this, as an example, in partnership with Hartford HealthCare in Central Connecticut. Central Connecticut has large areas that are just extremely rural.
And Hartford HealthCare has basically put CareStations out there with the Hartford HealthCare brand, where we see patients on their behalf and we take care of them. And if they need a specialist consult, they come back to Hartford for the consult. We are deploying actively in urban populations that are underserved. We are starting to gain a lot of traction with corrections. So we’ve been deployed inside of correctional facilities. I don’t believe there is any facet of life and living and communities today that don’t have a need for health care now.
Carol Cone:
Right, that you can—I know that you’re in—so in Florida, which I thought was the Jackson Health System.
Karthik Ganesh:
We just announced with Jackson.
Carol Cone:
That you’re also—and with the Salvation Army.
Karthik Ganesh:
Salvation Army.
Carol Cone:
So that’s a cause. Talk about—yeah, talk about that collaboration.
Karthik Ganesh:
Wonderful. I mean, it’s wonderful, right? I mean, the Salvation Army, Jackson Memorial is an iconic facility. It’s an iconic brand. They talk about purpose, wearing it on your sleeve, front and center. They’ve always—that’s who they are. And in the same breath, that’s exactly what the Salvation Army represents as well. So for us, watching these two come together and deploy a CareStation, which the traction on that and the traffic on that has been phenomenal into the CareStation.
Carol Cone:
So do you feel—I mean, that’s an interesting model because it’s the three of you coming together. Is that something that you’re gonna try and develop in other cities and locations?
Karthik Ganesh:
We are. And we’re doing that today. So as an example, it might not be the Salvation Army, but even with the Hartford HealthCare as an example in Connecticut, we’re deployed inside of a foster care center. We’re deployed in—there’s other places where we have been—you know, we’ve partnered with—we had at one point partnered with Tampa General and Catholic Charities, and we were deployed inside of a homeless shelter.
Where it’s placed is important, because that’s where the traffic’s coming in, but it continues to amaze us, in terms of the kinds of folks who are coming to the table together to place these, because again, I come back to the fact that, whether you are an insurer or a provider or healthcare system, if you are the state, if you’re the government, state, local, federal, if you’re an employer, this is just everywhere. The state of Georgia has deployed this in the state capitol building in downtown Atlanta for their employees. They’re going to put another one in the ground in short order.
Carol Cone:
Yeah, I’m assuming most of the time you get a yes.
Karthik Ganesh:
Yes, we do get a yes most of the time. We don’t get a no. We are two years into our commercialization.
Carol Cone:
Oh, it’s only two years.
Karthik Ganesh:
Yeah, so the company’s been around for a while, but we really actively started commercializing about two and a half years ago. And I feel we are in our first innings.
Carol Cone:
So what are barriers to scaling, besides you’re only two years old in terms of commercialization?
Karthik Ganesh:
There’s no barriers. I mean, from a structural standpoint we are built to scale. We have been very deliberate about that. We train, we have our protocols, but we don’t recruit clinicians, because we want to be focused on getting these in the ground versus recruiting and spending our time doing that, right? So we have built an extremely powerful ecosystem that can expand as we continue to scale. And if we look at scaling where it has worked historically for companies, the hub-and-spoke approach has always been the path to success, and we build a perfect hub-and-spoke operating model.
Carol Cone:
You have won a tremendous amount of awards. I mean, Fast Company Most Innovative is great, Time magazine Best Invention, but others—when the reviewers, or you, when you were told by Time and they cover you in their magazine, what did they say about OnMed and the CareStation? I’m just curious about, in their own words.
Karthik Ganesh:
I think you will appreciate this as the Purpose Queen. The consistent through line is purpose for good. Infrastructure deployed for the greater good. That has been the consistent through line. This is not aspirational. This is not a pilot. This is deployed, active, in communities, making a difference, part of our public health infrastructure, or growing to be part of our public health infrastructure in a lot of communities.
Carol Cone:
I want to ask about your book, because you wrote a book. So talk about your book and how that influences your work.
Karthik Ganesh:
So 2012, I lost my daughter to cancer.
Carol Cone:
I’m so sorry.
Karthik Ganesh:
She was five years old, thankful, I mean, this—that’s part of life. She passed away from her tumor. As you can imagine, I mean, there’s just a lot of questions about life and living and, “Why me?” that crops up as a part of that. You know, my favorite book of all time is The Alchemist. When you are really fervent about your questions and you’re willing to take the journey to get them answered, the universe conspires to get the answers to you. You know, for someone who’d grown up in India, you know, one of the oldest civilizations in the world, I grew up probably more transactional than spiritual, even though my home was more—was very different. And I found myself drawn, and I think it found me versus me finding it, as I was looking for these quest answers, I found myself drawn to Eastern philosophy that started my journey within. And I found that a lot of the answers I was looking for I would not be able to find without. I needed to go deeper and deeper within.
That was over 13 years ago, nearly 14 years ago. And that’s been my journey. That has reframed the way I see the world. That has reframed the way I interact with the world. It’s reframed the way I lead. It’s built an overdose of dispassion into the way I think about things. Do things get to me? I still think things get to all of us, but I think the window from “what” to “so what?” has continued to shrink for me, which tells me that with each step that I go deeper within, that continues to shrink.
The obsessiveness with the fact that the way we’re going to be judged in this lifetime is going to be not what we did for ourselves or our family. It’s going to be what we did for others who we had no reason to do anything for. So that—as it’s almost single-minded in the way I approach life. Extremely blessed that that’s exactly how my wife thinks as well.
All of that’s ported to the book. I wrote the book in 2017, and the idea was grief comes in a variety of different ways. Right. You part ways with a partner who you’ve been incredibly in love with at one point in time, there’s a level of grief to that. Losing your parents, grief. Losing your child, grief. Losing your job, for some people. Losing your pet. Right? Grief comes in a multitude of different ways. So this book, at the end of the day, this book is about resilience, and it is about finding happiness. It’s called The Happiness Model.
But happiness—the way I’ve really talked about happiness is not as something that is on the outside, but happiness as being a place of calm on the inside.
Carol Cone:
Hmm. Lovely, thank you. It’s The Happiness Model. And so you’re also very special. Having that soul and that feeling from The Happiness Model and your life experience, you also lead in your company in a different way, don’t you?
Karthik Ganesh:
I do, and just like most things in life, I’m very transparent with the way I lead. Very plain-spoken. Some people like it, some people don’t, but I feel there is nothing that is more important in life than just being able to show the person sitting across from you a level of respect and a level of understanding that they’re an adult and they should be able to handle a tough conversation. You don’t have to sugarcoat the conversation. The thing that I absolutely dislike is when people leave a conversation not knowing exactly what the conversation was about. So I lead with that. Purpose is a very big part of how we approach work. For me, if you have a purpose as a company, if you have a North Star as a company, you have to keep repeating it again and again and again and again.
It has to become a part of your being. It has to be a part of who you are. And when it becomes a part of who you are, work in a lot of ways ceases to be work. It becomes a means to an end. It becomes a means to delivering value. It becomes a means to satisfying that purpose, it becomes—it becomes purpose-driven. Purpose-driven, just like when I talk about happiness and peace being on the inside, purpose can’t sit parallel to the way you operate.
Carol Cone:
I’ve seen the purpose of OnMed in a long form, but I’ve also heard you say it in a few words. What is the purpose of OnMed?
Karthik Ganesh:
Healthcare everywhere.
Carol Cone:
That’s so well stated, crisp, distinct. How do your employees feel when they understand the crispness of your purpose, and ultimately that you are providing access to over—so, you know, over a hundred million, you know, the 120 million people that really don’t even have viable care, how do they feel about it?
Karthik Ganesh:
Extreme ownership. I think it was the World Championships. It was a 4×100 meter relay, women’s. The US team, I think, you know, the first leg was fantastic, the second leg was fantastic, the third leg, it was a lady who holds the world record for the 200 meters. From—she’s from Texas, I forget her name, Gabby Thomas. So she’s on the third leg. She has to hand it off to Sha’Carri. And Sha’Carri’s reaching for it, the baton’s not quite in her hand yet. And Gabby, instead of just giving it and saying, “Listen, I’m done,” she runs about 10 meters with her to make sure that the baton is firmly planted in her hand and she can go. That’s extreme ownership. That is a woman and a team operating as one.
Carol Cone:
That’s great. That’s terrific. Oh, that’s a great story. Okay, so let’s—two things. One, I want to give you the last word, but I also—I’ve got listeners who are looking for great ideas. That’s one of the things that my superpower is connection making. What do you want to say to them?
Karthik Ganesh:
I would say it doesn’t matter if you are responsible for employees or you’re responsible for students, you’re responsible for faculty, you’re responsible for communities, you’re responsible for inmates in the prison, or if you’ve just got responsibility for a state at large. This is inexpensive. It’s not even one-tenth the cost of putting in brick and mortar. You can have healthcare delivered in six weeks. You can make a difference. We all want to make a difference. We all want to be able to wear a cape. So if you’re passionate enough about wanting to wear a cape and making a difference, the only question after this conversation should be, “What color is the cape?”
Carol Cone:
As we come down to our final conversation, we always like to ask a series of rapid-fire questions. In your own words and a few words, let’s ask, okay, what’s one word that describes your work?
Karthik Ganesh:
Hopeful.
Carol Cone:
Now that, interestingly, it bridges to our second question. What keeps you hopeful on the days the work may feel heavy?
Karthik Ganesh:
Faith.
Carol Cone:
What’s one lesson you’ve learned from your work that you couldn’t have learned anywhere else?
Karthik Ganesh:
Meaning.
Carol Cone:
Okay, what’s one small action people can take today to advance purpose or create impact in their own communities? What can other people do?
Karthik Ganesh:
I believe people are fundamentally good. I believe people want to make a difference. I believe the biggest barrier to making a difference is inertia. Get off your behind. Go make a difference. And even if it’s the smallest thing, you’re going to sleep a heck of a lot better knowing you changed someone’s life today for the better.
Carol Cone:
I love that. I love that. I wanted to answer a question, and I wrote this down, which is because it strikes me as very strange in our society. You’ve got MacKenzie Scott. She was married to Jeff Bezos, you know, they got divorced. I actually worked with Jeff—I worked with Jeff’s mom, Jackie, and she’s passed, but she was such a wonderful human being. And then you’ve got Jeff, you know, brilliant, what he’s done, et cetera, et cetera. But you look at the women who are donating and doing incredible things with their billions. And the guys, whether they’re the tech—a lot of tech bros, I mean, one guy could take a billion of his dollars and say, “We’re gonna create, I don’t know, many thousands of CareStations in this country.” What do you say to those guys versus the women? No, the women, I think they get it, and they’ve done wonderful things. But what about the tech bros?
Karthik Ganesh:
I look at all of these tech bros and all of the things that are going on from a technology standpoint, and you look at the fact that, you know, even with this whole data center debate that’s going on across the country, you’re going into these communities. These communities are, you know, they’re obviously concerned—noise, water, etc. They’re concerned about power. They’re concerned about those things. But if you’re in the midst of it, you’ve got the money, you’ve got the means, you’re building these data centers, what if you told those communities, “Here’s what I’m going to do for you. I’m going to bring healthcare to you.”
Carol Cone:
Right.
Karthik Ganesh:
How does that neutralize some of the conversation? How does that now allow you to have a dialogue with that community versus you saying I’m bringing the data center to the community, saying, “No, I don’t like it”?
I mean, it feels like an adult and a toddler having a conversation, it’s going nowhere, versus that, bring something to the table, make it a collective bargaining conversation, if you will, and that something could be healthcare. I mean, what’s more powerful than healthcare in a community?
Carol Cone:
I think—hopefully somebody who’s listening to this is gonna, like, connect. I’m a connection maker—connect the dots.
Karthik Ganesh:
I appreciate you, Carol. That was a wonderful question. Thank you.
Carol Cone:
So Karthik, this has been great. We’re gonna have you back because—once you get the mental health up and running and then you’re, like, in 50 states, we will have you back. We’re going to talk about the impact that you are having on our population. Keep up the great work, the clarity of your purpose. Give a big hug to all your employees.
Karthik Ganesh:
Likewise, thank you.
Carol Cone:
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I’d love to thank them. Anne Hundertmark and Kristin Kenney at Carol Cone ON PURPOSE. Pete Wright and Andy Nelson are our crack production team at TruStory FM, and you are the listener. Please rate and rank us, because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available, so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
