Founders: Cait Larson & Bryan Wang
Founding: 2022
Mission: Taking care of underserved communities by mobilizing healthcare and social service organizations
Employees: 15 & 33% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $750k raised
Investors: Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Richard King Mellon Foundation & strategic angel investors
Key Customers: Rhode Island Medicaid
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M (assuming they sold ~10-20% of the company in the last fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Boswell is building software at the intersection of healthcare & social services to drive better outcomes for the healthcare system and our most at-risk patient population. This is a story about a relay race and flipping the script to get to the heart of some of America’s biggest systemic inefficiencies.
When Co-Founder & CEO Bryan Wang’s family first moved from China to the U.S., they depended on social services like food stamps to find their footing. These programs made a big difference in his upbringing. Wouldn’t it be great to give back one day?
Bryan started his career at Bain Consulting after graduating from Duke and experimented with startup life launching a retail property rental company too. Next he worked as a Product Manager for Intermountain Health, helping to increase rural healthcare access in Utah. He experienced our great big complicated American healthcare system up close before heading to Boston to study at MIT Sloan.
Originally incorporated in 2015 by Aristotle Mannan, Ari bootstrapped the company by trading biotech stocks and the two met through the customer discovery process when Bryan began working on a similar concept. Bryan grabbed the baton as he was finishing his MBA. Startups are a relay race, after all. Cait Larson, a healthcare veteran & registered nurse, joined him as the clinical co-founder to build out Boswell’s infrastructure in 2022.
Boswell is built on the premise that social services disproportionately drive healthcare outcomes. Boswell’s reason for being is that our healthcare system is limited in how much ground it can cover. We know healthcare spending is big – 17%+ of GDP (src). And we know that the spending isn’t all being done efficiently. For example, we can’t really solve patient outcomes before first addressing basic needs like food, water, clothing, sleep and shelter.
Boswell has data that 34% of Medicaid members have not seen a PCP in over a year, have a higher annual healthcare cost per member, and are at 2.2x higher risk of chronic conditions than the general patient population. Food and housing stability, by some estimates, end up driving 80% of clinical outcomes (src).
The clinically focused healthcare system needs to travel upstream in order to mitigate frequent emergency room visitors who are there because they don’t have anywhere to sleep. Especially for the Medicaid population, of which 70% have one or more social needs. Healthcare organizations are making an effort but they are still waiting for patients to show up in a clinic before taking action.
When people go hungry, they’re not calling up their health plan. They’re going to a food pantry.
Boswell is flipping the model by turning social service organizations into hubs to better understand and support at-risk individuals before they get to a clinical setting. Through software and a network of community health workers within social services organizations (like food pantries), they are working to better understand patients so they can take action to help them.
Let’s use the food pantry example. When someone steps out of the cold into a building for a warm meal, they’re not just struggling with food. Two Boswell Advocates will ask them “do you need help with anything else?” like their housing or their heating bill. If they’re interested, they can share a phone number and give consent to be reached the following day to take an assessment on different categories of assistance.
From there, Boswell can service them virtually like a telehealth provider, documenting and alleviating life’s most pressing challenges. Their Advocates help people with warm referrals to social services and handle healthcare coordination. The support they offer ranges from creating Medicaid benefits awareness to completing applications to scheduling & coordinating doctors appointments.
Boswell controls the whole process through their network of community health advocates. They give out their software to existing social service organizations and document records in a way that healthcare insurance plans are willing to pay for. This infrastructure has allowed Boswell to create a network where insurance plans can get access to “on the ground” community health advocates and (soon) send funding to underfunded organizations. Like an OpenTable for social services, they’ll be able to enable new funding streams for social service organizations.
In the fall of 2023 they launched their community outreach initiative in Rhode Island, partly due to a new Medicaid program the state launched. Boswell has served over 400 Medicaid members in Rhode Island, achieving six figures of revenue in 2023. They are starting to work directly with health insurance companies (payers) in 2024 to generate revenue from outcomes achieved instead of hours invested to better stabilize patient social situations.
Boswell’s grand vision is to become the infrastructure that pairs healthcare payers with existing social service organizations for the benefit of health plan members themselves. There are incredible non-profits out there and Boswell aims to help them on a larger, more sustainable scale that amplifies their work.
In 2023 their team grew from 3 to 15 people and they expect to grow to 30 by the end of this year. 20 of those team members will be in the community and the rest will be building in Product, Engineering, and GTM.
Operators to Know:
- Steffany Alvarez, Advocates Supervisor
- Sam Ennis, Software Engineering Lead
- Bryan Wang, Co-Founder & CEO
- Cait Larson, Co-Founder & COO
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Boswell team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
- Reach out to bryan@boswell.io if you’re interested in roles across Clinical Operations, Product, Engineering, and Business Development
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
- What are the key milestones Boswell is aiming to achieve in 2024?
- What are the biggest challenges as you scale the offering and team?
- What is the long term vision for the company?
- What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Boswell you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team achieve better outcomes for the segment of our population that needs it most. All citizens applaud your efforts. See you around Rhode Island and many other communities to come!