CEO and Co-Founder Ben Albert didn’t expect to be an entrepreneur, but his experience watching his father build a paper company was the start of an adventure that, years later, led to founding Upfront Healthcare.
Albert shared these details and more this week on the Day Zero podcast, which highlights stories from healthcare entrepreneurs. Host Nathan Bays, Healthcare M&A at Citi, dug deep on Ben’s journey – which began with a stint broadcasting for minor league baseball in a startup league and ultimately led to starting two healthcare technology companies: Care Team Connect and now, Upfront Healthcare.
He saw the need for creating care management experiences that were not fragmented, but instead rooted in community, so patients have a more positive outcome. After Care Team Connect, Albert sought an opportunity to apply these learnings from higher-risk populations to help all patients.
“You look across the universe in the population health world, or even in the fee-for-service world, and it doesn’t really matter what payment model a patient is being supported by,” said Albert. “All patients need to be guided and navigated to the care that they need, not just those who trip a wire on some analytics platform.”
This led to the creation of Upfront Healthcare with Co-Founder and COO Carrie Kozlowski. After years of market leadership and growth with major hospital and health system clients, Upfront recently acquired PatientBond. But when Albert looks back at his professional career and moments that stand out, his early days at Upfront are among them.
“When Carrie and I sat down after we really won some of our first big contracts, and we were delivering on the contracts and the clients were expanding, we thought, ‘Wow, we’re really doing this. This is delivering on the vision we had.’ Those are the moments that I love – when you can take a step back and look at the body of work and how it’s creating value. That’s why you do it and that to me is what this is all about.”
