Grapefruit Health Targets a New Way to Address the Field’s Workforce Shortage

Ballad Health in Johnson City, Tennessee, recently completed an interesting pilot to improve communication around medication adherence. It worked with Grapefruit Health, a startup focused on addressing health care’s staffing shortage by creating a workforce solely comprising clinical students.

Beginning in April, Grapefruit recruited, trained, onboarded and managed a workforce of 13 pharmacy students from the immediate region in just four weeks. Over the 10-week pilot, more than 1,000 patients were contacted about their medications through Grapefruit’s platform, which is designed to use college students in clinical programs to assist with essential telehealth services.

Assessments were completed on about 50% of the patients, 40% of whom were referred for additional services or escalated conversations. The top three reasons for poor adherence were medication side effects, medication prices and forgetting to take the medications. Ballad Health teams followed up to address patient concerns and find solutions. The result: Patients’ medication adherence improved and Ballad was able to conserve clinical resources by addressing barriers outside the clinic setting. In addition, students received valuable opportunities to improve their patient communication skills. About 10% of these calls require a pharmacist interaction, in which case the student will perform a warm handoff.

Grapefruit Health’s Value Proposition

This is only one of several pilots in which Grapefruit Health has engaged as it continues to scale its business and tech platform nationally. The company’s model involves using exclusively clinical students from areas like pre-med, nursing, pharmacy and social work to perform repetitive tasks that don’t require a license to perform — work that otherwise would consume significant clinician time. They seek out tasks that are high in volume and lower in acuity.

The students work remotely through Grapefruit’s proprietary software called The Grove, performing duties like isolation and loneliness outreach calls, postdischarge follow-up, annual visit scheduling calls and more, says Eric Alvarez, Grapefruit’s founder and CEO.

Students perform the work around school hours and are paid well above minimum wage for the calls they make.

Getting any health care startup off the ground and funded can be difficult today, but Alvarez is optimistic the company is on the right track and making the proper connections with health care organizations.

The Funding Challenge

Alvarez, an Air Force veteran and former hospital administrator at the University of Chicago Medicine and Northwestern Medicine, and his team raised $1.3 million in a pre-seed financing round and gained recognition and support by being selected in March for Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) health care workforce accelerator program.

The accelerator program proved invaluable, Alvarez says, in helping the company refine its business model and gave the company access to AWS information technology architects who could examine the Grapefruit platform.

Since the accelerator program, Grapefruit has announced results from its program with the Sinai Urban Health Institute (SUHI) to improve National Diabetes Prevention Program (NDPP) enrollment. SUHI, an NDPP provider, faced a difficult challenge to increase enrollment in its NDPP cohorts. SUHI began collaborating with Grapefruit in October 2022 to revamp and test a new enrollment strategy.

Grapefruit deployed 12 nursing students from the Chicagoland area within four weeks to initiate connections with prediabetic patients. Over an 18-week period, the team successfully engaged with 1,046 out of 1,651 unique qualifying patients. Assessments were completed for 683 patients, with 286 expressing interest in joining the NDPP program offered by SUHI.

Programs like this give Alvarez confidence that his company will succeed, but he wants to perform larger projects that engage hundreds of students in these types of initiatives. With roughly 1 million students enrolled in health care education programs today, Alvarez sees the potential to create up to 1 billion new patient touchpoints every year.

His goals for 2024 include completing more than 100,000 patient interactions and having 1,000 students working with the company — objectives Alvarez says his firm is on target to surpass. For now, he’s thinking about the future and what his company can achieve in health care.

“We still have a long way to go, but when this is done right it’s a win for the students who can learn while they earn, patients can now get the care they desperately need and health care organizations can do what they need to do for less,” Alvarez says.