It’s a serious problem in the healthcare industry: Healthcare organizations struggle to recruit and retain enough staff to effectively serve their patients. Meanwhile, eager young clinical students are struggling to get experience in their field – but the overburdened providers have no bandwidth to manage more interns.
Enter Grapefruit Health, a new company that is recruiting, training, onboarding, and managing clinical student workers, providing healthcare organizations with the resources to do what they otherwise cannot. This includes critical patient follow-up, particularly with low-income and senior patients, who may be having trouble adhering to medication regimens, dietary restrictions, physical therapy, and more.
In June, Chicago-based Grapefruit Health was one of 5 entrepreneurial companies named winners of the 2nd Annual Health Equity Innovation Challenge (HEIC). The Challenge, sponsored by Atrium Health- Greater Charlotte North Area and administered by the Flywheel Foundation, targets early-stage businesses focused on addressing healthcare inequities.
Air Force veteran and healthcare management expert Eric Alvarez founded Grapefruit to build a business that provides what universities, healthcare organizations, and students can’t find on their own: Connections. The ultimate result is better outcomes for patients.
Connecting and Supervising Students
Grapefruit Health’s employees and a network of mentors – many of them retired pharmacists, nurses, and other healthcare specialists — step in to perform a saleable quality assurance program that includes supervision and mentoring. They also listen to healthcare organization’s needs and concerns, and then tailor services that ultimately benefit patients.
Ballad Health Care, which serves mostly rural patients through 14 hospitals in Tennessee, is one such client. Ballad was struggling to keep its patients focused on taking their medications. So Grapefruit Health provided a small army of students to help.
The students spent many hours calling the patients and figuring out ways to help them if they were not taking their medication properly. If the problem was financial, they helped connect the patient with programs that provided waivers and discounts. If the patient lacked transportation to go pick up the medication, they arranged for transportation or delivery. If the patient complained of side effects, they connected them with a pharmacist who could help them get the prescription modified.
“We brought in a group of pharmacy students, we trained them and we onboarded them, and they performed all the work. And then we use retired pharmacists to perform all of our quality assurance,” Alvarez said. “There are a lot of organizations that need to do this and can’t because they don’t have the staff to do it. There are a lot of people who have bad health outcomes because no one is checking in. A lot of them are isolated and don’t have family members or others to help them. We helped a lot of folks and the students just had a great experience. Some of those students still work for us today.”
Great Students + Experienced Mentors = Success
Alvarez’s recipe for healthcare success begins with recruiting only the brightest, most reliable, most promising students in nursing, pharmacy, and a host of other clinical studies. The company pairs those students with retired, experienced clinicians who can be mentors and, when needed, critics and teachers.
Grapefruit Health employees contact the patients primarily by telephone for two reasons: It’s the communication method that almost all Americans have access to, and many older, lower-income patients are more familiar with telephones than computers, smartphones, or other communications that can require internet service. The calls are recorded and can then be reviewed carefully by the mentors, who determine how well the student is performing and coach them if needed.
Grapefruit Health’s customers, including health insurance companies and major healthcare systems, provide the funding to pay the students to do the work that helps patients manage chronic conditions, maintain medication schedules, follow through on physical therapy, and a host of other situations that can make the difference between good and bad outcomes.
A graduate of Rush University in Chicago, Alvarez learned about the staffing problems of healthcare firsthand when he became an adjunct professor in health administration there. He knew that universities want the best for future graduates, but the reality was that they were too short-staffed to match them with internship opportunities.
“At Grapefruit Health, we do all the onboarding and recruitment and training and managing the students, because our clients could never do that if they’re already overwhelmed just trying to manage staffing. They just don’t have the capacity,” Alvarez said.
Matching Students Regionally
Alvarez launched Grapefruit Health in Chicago in 2022. He knew his program could be a hit when 5,000 students applied for 120 positions. The fact that the work is done remotely has allowed him to use students from 300 different universities and programs nationwide.
Students who join Grapefruit can learn and help their communities while making between $15 and $40 an hour for the work they do. They can set their own schedules, a flexibility that is required for clinical students with inconsistent schedules.
Their work frequently helps people in lower income groups, older people, and mentally ill or isolated people who are often beyond the reach of conventional healthcare.
Grapefruit Health is careful to tailor its workforce to the needs of a particular region or healthcare provider. “We match our students to patients based on language and culture and proximity,” Alvarez said. “By doing that, you really drive trust. In the Appalachian region, for example, you don’t want somebody with a Chicago accent calling patients. We utilize students that are born and raised in the client’s area, who know the particular challenges of that community.”
Launching the Model in N.C. and Beyond
Grapefruit Health’s reach currently stretches as far west as California and as far east and south as Florida. The HEIC award will help the company get a toehold in North Carolina and put it in touch with experts inside and outside the healthcare industry, Alvarez said.
“HEIC is this incredible opportunity for young companies like ours to get access to the experts at Atrium Health Care and the resources and health systems in the area. Without the Health Equity Innovation Challenge here, how would we otherwise meet these people? They are opening a lot of doors.”
HEIC gives his company a chance to try systems, modify those that don’t work, and find ways to scale the ones that do. “You also get to meet and talk with other startup entrepreneurs who are friendly, driven, and have a lot of things in common. You’re joining a cohort, a community.”
The program also links entrepreneurs like Alvarez with potential investors. For Grapefruit Health, which has largely survived so far on investor funding, this is crucial. On a recent afternoon, Alvarez had already held three virtual meetings with potential investors, a demand that can be exhausting while juggling so many other challenges of a growing business.
Alvarez foresees the company expanding far beyond North Carolina or even the United States. There is potential for his company to scale internationally as well. “We want to help as many students as possible get experience in this kind of work, while helping as many patients as possible, thereby helping as many clients as possible, and just seeing how far we can take this idea.”
In addition to building a profitable business, Alvarez is fulfilling a mission that drives many HEIC participants: The desire to make a difference.
