Cassie Choi’s passion lies in tackling social and economic disparities.
Choi, a registered nurse, is co-founder and president of healthcare startup Pair Team. On its website, the company states its mission is to “simplify healthcare for everyone.” Pair Team describes itself as a “virtual and community extension of the clinic” with the goal of “transforming how patients interact with the healthcare system to improve outcomes and lower the cost of care.”
In an interview with me conducted by email this week, Choi explained Pair Team’s origins trace back to 2019 when she partnered with a former colleague, Neil Batlivala, to lay the foundation for the company. She described Pair Team’s overarching goal of making quality healthcare more accessible to marginalized and vulnerable communities. The company focuses on people experiences homelessness, those with severe mental illnesses, disabled people, and more, and helps them navigate “a network of clinics, shelters, pantries and other community-based organizations.” These high-risk individuals are Medicaid beneficiaries; the government-funded program, founded in 1965, provides people and families with limited income and resources with healthcare coverage.
“Underserved and marginalized populations have greater barriers to accessing healthcare than other people—and we all know how hard it is to access healthcare as a ‘regular’ person,” Choi said of the barriers in accessing care. “We care for individuals who do not speak English and have a hard time understanding how to navigate the healthcare system, don’t have transportation to get to work or medical appointments and don’t have a refrigerator to store their diabetes medications because they’re living in a storage unit. These members of our community need and deserve extra attention, and our goal is to help enable them to succeed autonomously in the systems around them, long beyond working directly with Pair Team. This looks like rebuilding trust in those systems and learning how to advocate for themselves in those systems.”
Choi told me she’s long thought about how to improve patient outcomes by increasing the efficiency of care. In her time working hospitals, Choi saw firsthand how limited staff was in helping people after discharge; the same was true when she worked in a homeless shelter. Resources are a precious commodity—if they exist at all. “If you improve the delivery system at large and rethink who should be part of that delivery system, then that improves healthcare outcomes overall,” Choi said. “I didn’t become a nurse for the pay, I really care about people. I saw that patients not only needed better care, but that a lot of underserved communities lacked basic access to care and clinicians needed better support.”
Choi co-founded Pair Team “to address both” issues, she added.
When asked how technology plays a role in facilitating care, Choi responded by saying startups (like Pair Team) are sprouting up to address various needs as the healthcare industry continues to adapt amidst what she called a “digital transformation.” Piggybacking on her earlier comments about the inadequate number of available resources, Choi said things like housing, food, transportation, and more often are overlooked by the larger industrial complex. Technology, she added, does help solve these problems but things needn’t be so complicated. Pair Team addresses these pain points by leveraging a community-based network spanning clinics, food pantries, and more social services.
“It [technology] helps bridge care across not just clinical needs, but also social needs such as housing and food resources. It allows us to text and call our patients to allow people with technology barriers the ability to access our care, without any Wi-Fi, apps or other cellular add-ons needed,” Choi said. “By using SMS and phone calls to connect with our patients conveniently, our care team has actional interventions at their fingertips with our care plan library, while also being flexible enough to provide interventions specific to that patient. We are capturing data that was previously siloed within community organizations, and by combining that with clinical data such as a recent discharge from the emergency room, we can create a significantly better patient experience while better managing the cost of care to our healthcare system.”
However eager to acknowledge technology’s potential to push progress, Choi was just as eager to say technology isn’t a panacea. She’s a staunch believer in the idea technology, however advanced, will never replace clinicians because, she said, “healthcare is inherently human.”
In other words, an AI bot won’t obviate your doctor.
“People want to hear from someone they trust that they’re going to get the help they need; they want to know that they’re heard,” Choi said of healthcare’s humanness. “I do believe, however, that technology plays a critical role in making sure we do the right thing for the right person at the right time and doing the right thing consistently—that includes helping people with life situations that are not immediately clinical.”
Choi told me there’s a movement happening across the country in which people are “paying attention to the lack of health equity and are motivated to solve more systemic issues that impact overall well-being.” There’s no silver bullet to washing away everyone’s problems, however. Pair Team feels a responsibility to demonstrate that investing in health equity is a worthy endeavor that, Choi said, “has positive returns and creates a model that others can build upon.” She added it’s “rewarding” for everyone at the company to receive such positive feedback.
Choi went on to tell me about the excitement over Pair Team’s Enhanced Care Management, or ECM, program. The company receives testimonials from countless people who share their gratitude for participating in the ECM program because, as Choi explained, “they would have never been able to find or access support without our team” while adding the people report “truly see a difference in not only their health but their attitude, personal relationships and understanding of the healthcare system.” Moreover, Choi shared Pair Team hires workers from the communities they serve; these employees are able to empathize with patients on a deeper level because of their mutual lived experiences.
“Being part of our mission at Pair Team, they [the employees] are not only directly creating impact, but they get to be part of the feedback loop to see how that impact builds over time and put their fingerprint on what we’re building,” she said.
As to the future, Choi said the objective is on the betterment of lives.
“We see the opportunity to forge the path forward for how our nation thinks about caring for our most vulnerable community members, and if we do it well, how investing in these communities will reduce our nation’s ballooning healthcare costs without sacrificing outcomes along the way,” she said. “We will continue to expand our care across California while also bringing our model to other states. We’re excited to partner with stakeholders, communities, and states to influence and implement a new way of thinking about value-based care in Medicaid.”
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