How these healthcare innovators are fighting for their patients

Some of the most innovative companies in the healthcare space right now have found success by catering to communities that have been left behind by an entrenched system—one that has failed to adequately serve the most marginalized patients in the U.S.

There’s Cityblock Health, which provides primary care and behavioral health services to those on Medicaid, while Hazel Health offers telehealth services through schools, with the intent of reaching children who face housing insecurity and financial hurdles to getting the care they need. Other companies, like Folx Health and Maven Clinic, partner with employers to provide gender-affirming care and comprehensive reproductive health services to a wide range of patients.

But even as these disruptors have scaled, bringing their services to more and more patients across the country, they continue to face political headwinds and broader cultural obstacles beyond their control, from shrinking school budgets and Medicaid budget cuts to mounting attacks on abortion access and trans healthcare.

At Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies Summit today, leaders like Cityblock cofounder and CEO Toyin Ajayi talked about what it’s like to navigate those ongoing challenges, particularly at a fraught moment in public health. “We’re fighting an uphill battle,” Ajayi said, “and we feel that everyday.”

Both Ajayi and Travis Gayles, chief health officer of Hazel Health, noted that even shifting the conversation around healthcare to focus on prevention was no small feat. “So much of our pediatric services—particularly those services reimbursed by insurance companies and the payer community—rely on the child getting sick before [they] step in,” Gayles said. “I argue that if we can create a healthy generation of children who arrive at adulthood with a good baseline of health, we can start to chip away at these chronic disparities.”

Still, these leaders are optimistic that they can make a difference. Ajayi argued that innovative healthcare companies can drive change through an “aligned set of incentives,” by emphasizing the economic impact of steep healthcare costs rather than focusing on ideological shifts. “We spend way too much money on healthcare—it’s inefficient, ineffective, and it drives terrible outcomes,” she said. “We can build companies that prove there’s a sustainable and scalable business case to invest differently, providing a different quality of care to marginalized populations, and in so doing create an economic incentive to perpetuate that work.”

Maven founder and CEO Kate Ryder said that while the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was a “complete tragedy,” it also presented an opportunity to prove just how crucial it is that patients be able to access reproductive services. “There’s going to be years of suffering for a lot of those families, but in the same vein a lot of data is going to be generated to show how these restrictive policies make maternal health outcomes worse, particularly for lower income communities and communities of color,” she said. “Not only is it a clinical and healthcare and equity issue, but it’s an economic issue as well.”

Perhaps most important, the current political climate only serves to underscore the mission of these healthcare startups—and that their biggest responsibility is to do right by their patients, even under the most challenging of circumstances. “[We] focus on the 11,000 members whose lives we’ve literally saved,” said Folx CEO Liana Douillet-Guzmán. “I don’t think it’ll happen by leaps and bounds, but I’m hoping it’s a little by little and then all at once thing, where we’ll look back in 30 to 40 years and think: ‘We did it. We actually created a more equitable system.’”