- Carbon Health, a Silicon Valley business that merged with a Berkeley-based urgent care provider during the summer, has secretly opened medical facilities around the Bay Area.
- Carbon Health provides same-day visits, clear test reports, travel immunizations, and certain in-house pharmaceuticals.
- The new network is swiftly establishing itself as a competitor to established health companies such as One Medical and Forward — except that it does not charge an annual subscription.
When the entrepreneur Eren Bali would tell his colleagues about his idea of constructing a physical health clinic to go along with the medical software the doctor had created, they'd dismiss it as absurd.
Since the beginning of this year, the 34-year-old Bali has started to make his dream come true. He began working with Caesar Djavaherian, an emergency medicine doctor who established an urgent care network. Clinics.
In this week’s episode, the doctor is pulling back the curtains for the venture they developed with each other: a network of seven clinics in the state’s Bay Area where patients can have checkups and treatments for anything from broken bones to illnesses and UTIs.
The company is dubbed Carbon named Carbon what created the new business out of the merger between Bali’s tech-based startup — which is a complete medical application known as Carbon that lets you communicate to your doctor to request prescriptions and look up the results of your lab tests — as well as Djavaherian’s clinics previously called Direct Urgent Care.
Carbon isn’t just the sole clinic startup that’s on the scene. One Medical, Forward, and various urgent care centers have all been competing to attract the same patients. The private equity company Carlyle Group invested $350 million in One Medical this summer as a bet that customers and businesses will choose more convenient and less invasive methods to see doctors.
Contrary to other companies, Carbon doesn’t charge subscription charges and will accept most types of insurance, which means that it’s typically less expensive.
Since Bali and Djavaherian started working together in 2013, more than 100,000 customers have visited their clinics, as explained to Business Insider.
It’s currently working alongside NorthBay Healthcare and El Camino Hospital in addition to three other health facilities they still need to be ready to mention. The third One is not part of the state, their founders declare.
Carbon isn’t just the sole clinic startup that’s on the scene. One Medical, Forward, and various urgent care centers have all been competing to attract the same patients. The private equity company Carlyle Group invested $350 million in One Medical this summer as a bet that customers and businesses will choose more convenient and less invasive methods to see doctors.
Contrary to other companies, Carbon doesn’t charge subscription charges and will accept most types of insurance, which means that it’s typically less expensive.
Since Bali and Djavaherian started working together in 2013, more than 100,000 customers have visited their clinics, as explained to Business Insider.
It’s currently working alongside NorthBay Healthcare and El Camino Hospital in addition to three other health facilities they still need to be ready to mention. The third One is not part of the state, their founders declare.
With Carbon, you can do everything from booking a doctor’s appointment to viewing your lab results to scheduling a live video session with a provider — all via a single app.
Carbon Health has $9.5 million in venture capital from investors, including Javelin Venture Partners, Two Sigma Ventures, Elad Gil, co-founder of the personal DNA testing startup Color Genomics and the former vice director of Corporate Strategy at Twitter.
But Carbon isn’t the only tech-savvy medical startup on the block. Two other Silicon Valley firms — One Medical and Forward — offer a similar range of services and apps to complement them.
But they differ in important ways: both charge an annual cost of between $150 and $200 (Carbon does not charge charges). Furthermore, Forward cannot take insurance (Carbon accepts most of the major providers, except for Kaiser).
When I tried out Carbon’s app and visited one of its clinics in Oakland and another in San Francisco’s FiDi neighborhood, I was blown away by how seamless the experience felt.
At the Oakland office, I was relieved to find lots of natural light — a welcome departure from most of the hospitals I’ve visited.
What pleasantly decorated the space with minimalist-style furniture.
One wall was painted a deep, calming shade of blue, and small potted plants sat on white tables that looked like they were about to be outfitted with iPads.
When I arrived at the reception office, I was pleased to see no glass wall that separated me from the receptionist. Instead, she sat at an ordinary counter and then set me up in front of a therapist within a matter of only a few minutes.
I was seen and treated for what turned out to be a sinus infection in just a few minutes and got my lab results within a few days via the Carbon app.
My physician also utilized the app for communicating with me. Another advantage is that there are no additional costs. I paid my insurance’s regular copay for the appointment and a few bucks for medicines. That’s all.
Bali (right) and Djavaherian (left) met by chance, owing to a nurse practitioner who applied to both firms.
On her first day at one of Djavaherian’s clinics, she suggested he contact Bali because the two appeared to have similar interests.
Djavaherian was sold on Carbon’s strategy the moment he witnessed a demonstration of it.
He’d previously spent months collaborating with numerous other software businesses to attempt to solve what he viewed as one of contemporary healthcare’s main problems: there needs to be a single center for all of your medical-related activity.
“There was no hub for health — no area where all of your health information is centralized,” Djavaherian explained.
But none of the previous tech platforms he tested proved to resolve that issue.
Each of these was only a component of the broader solution he had in mind, which was essentially a platform that assisted patients with everything from scheduling an appointment to following up.
“Wow, this is what we’d been trying to cobble together with all these various technologies,” Djavaherian said of Carbon’s display.
“It was the first program that addressed all of the holes in care we were attempting to fill,” he noted.
The engineers who manage the app have their workspace at the San Francisco facility, allowing the two teams to collaborate closely.
“There’s no wall,” Djavaherian pointed out, pointing to an open path.
I saw a similar look to the Oakland office in the San Francisco location: basic yet thoughtful furniture and areas of the characteristic blue hue around the office.
The only change was a giant glowing screen in each therapy room that displayed a patient’s history and current health conditions through the Carbon app.
