The Pulse by Wharton Digital Health
00:00:09 · Chase
[00:00:09] S0: Welcome back to The Pulse, the podcast where we explore the latest innovations in digital health and the leaders driving change across the industry. I'm your host Chase, and today's guest has a very special connection to the show. Doctor. Arpan Parikh sat in this very chair as an MBA student in Wharton's Healthcare Management Program several years ago and also served as a cohost of The Pulse. Since then, Arpan has built his career where psychiatry meets healthcare operations. He's a double board certified psychiatrist in general psychiatry and addiction medicine. He served as chief medical officer of SOL Mental Health, co led the launch of Ro's direct to consumer psychiatric treatment platform, and served as the national director of behavioral health at CareMore, an integrated health plan and care delivery system for Medicare and Medicaid patients. Today, he's the co founder and CEO of Kin Health, a mobile app that helps patients record their doctor visits and turn them into a plain language summary with clear next steps. Arpan co founded Kin with his brother, Amit Parikh, who serves as the chief product officer, and Kyle Alwyn, who serves as CTO. Kin launched this past May with 9,000,000 seed round led by Maveron. In our conversation, we dig into what changes when the patient, not only the provider, owns the AI listening, how Kin earns trust with sensitive health data, and how a consumer facing app can build a real business without ever charging the patient. So with that, welcome back to The Pulse, Arpan.
00:01:35 · Arpan Parikh, Chase
[00:01:35] S1: Thanks so much. It's, it's awesome to be here and to to come full circle. So thanks for having me. I appreciate it. [00:01:40] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Of course. I feel like this is somewhat of a rare occurrence here, so very excited to to be doing it. So we can dive right in starting with some, you know, personal background just to kind of set the stage. We always have a tradition of asking our guests this icebreaker. What did you wanna be when when you were growing up? [00:01:59] S1: Such a good question. I have two answers to this question. Answer one is I wanted to be a baseball player. So I grew up in Akron, Ohio, which is a suburb of Cleveland. When I was growing up, the Cleveland Indians were a relatively good baseball team. And, you know, a couple of my childhood idols were some of those incredible players from the nineties, and I always had a unachievable dream that that could be my life one day. Clearly, that's not how things panned out. So I then had a second dream, which was much more grounded in reality and much nerdier, which was, I think I've always wanted to be a doctor. My dad as a doctor grew up around it, saw the joy and fulfillment he had from choosing that profession, and ultimately that is what life had in store with me. So here we are. [00:02:45] S0: Yeah, wow. So one of your dreams came true. [00:02:48] S1: That's right, just one.
00:02:48 · Arpan Parikh, Chase
[00:02:48] S1: That's right, just one. [00:02:50] S0: That sounds like a success story to me. Okay, cool. So I guess I'm curious how you got interested in the psychiatry field in particular, and then how that kind of fueled some of your next career steps going to work more on the business side of psychiatry and and then getting to where we are today.
00:03:08 · Arpan Parikh
[00:03:08] S1: Good question. So my dad was actually a psychiatrist, so the story gets a little more interesting there, right? So not only did I see him as a physician generally growing up and seeing what he did, but specifically psychiatry. That being said, I told myself I would keep a very open mind, right, as I went to college and medical school around the specialty I decided to choose. I didn't want to just sort of like follow in the footsteps for the sake of following in the footsteps. So those of the listeners who have been in med school or know how it works, the first couple of years of medical school, at least back then, were more classroom based and generalized, and then third year is when you actually go to the clinic, right? You start actually doing the stuff. And as I went into third year, I was like, I'm gonna have an open mind, I'm gonna see what I like and what I don't like. And oftentimes the suggestion or recommendation medical students get is choose the specialty where you get along with the people as a med student, right? Because there's something about personality and that is partially what draws folks to specialties over the other. Did my pediatrics rotation at Nationwide Children's Hospital, that was the second or third rotation of the fall of my third year, that's when I loved it. Then there's something so fun about taking care of kids, right? And I love the people at the hospital and on the teams I worked with. And I was nearly convinced that that's what I was going to choose. My next rotation was psychiatry. And I remember this one vividly because it wasn't any old psychiatry rotation. I, by my choice, ended up doing my third year psychiatry rotation at a hospital called Twin Valley. Twin Valley is a forensic unit in Columbus, Ohio that takes care of patients with very, very severe debilitating psychiatric illness, and also folks who have been sentenced by a court of law to psychiatric treatment, right, in lieu of imprisonment. So I fell in love with that. The fact that I could go to work and I could actually sit with a patient for thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, eighty, ninety minutes, like what other specialty does a doctor get to spend an hour and a half with a patient, like zero, and just hear their stories. And like me listening to their stories was therapeutic, like what an incredible job.
00:05:26 · Arpan Parikh, Chase
And on top of that, I certainly felt a pull to this specialty and this field because it felt mission oriented and driven, right? Like in medicine, psychiatry, I think, I can say confidently is the most stigmatized specialty, and the patients we care for are often the most marginalized in the healthcare system. So not only did I find the clinical work interesting and engaging, I also felt like I was doing something good for the world. So that is ultimately what clinched the deal. I decided I wanted to apply to psychiatry. In fourth year, you get to do elective rotation, so I ended up doing a bunch more of electives in different subspecialties of psychiatry and ultimately applied to training programs and it worked out. [00:06:09] S0: Yeah, no, that's great. I have sometimes said that in another life, I'd love to be a therapist, So I I definitely understand the the draw to wanting to just hear people's stories, and and I I think that's that's really cool. So I guess slightly pivoting now that you, you know, served as chief medical officer of a behavioral health company and now you're a cofounder of a consumer health company, what sort of... You know, what were the steps that you took to get to each of those places, and and how did you end up where you are today in in being a founder of a company?
00:06:43 · Arpan Parikh
[00:06:43] S1: Yeah, for sure. It certainly wasn't a linear path. And if we rewound the tape here, like ten or twelve years and told me this is what my life would look like, I probably would have told you, you should see a psychiatrist, because I wouldn't have thought that was possible in reality. So I started my career as a regular doctor, quote unquote, right? I trained in New York City in adult psychiatry, I ended up developing a clinical area of interest and expertise in addiction medicine, as you noted. Taking care of patients at this intersection of folks suffering from substance use disorders who also have comorbid psychiatric illness, like depression, anxiety, trauma, bipolar disorder, etcetera, and was treating patients full time in the clinic in New York City, which is where I trained. And what was interesting about that first job I had, which is at Mount Sinai, out of training is while around 80% of my work was seeing patients and managing their psychiatric and substance use disorders, around 20% of that job is actually running a clinic. I fell into this job as a medical director out of training, and I was responsible to manage the six to eight psychotherapists who really ran most of the treatment programs in this clinic. And I was ultimately responsible for the performance of the clinic and its growth. And what I very quickly realized was medical school and residency had prepared me very well to diagnose and treat psychiatric disease. It had prepared me very poorly for anything else that had to do with healthcare. And this is not unique to me. Like I think there are very few physicians in this country who come out of training with any semblance of understanding how our health system actually works, which is kind of insane to think about, right? Like we're supposed to be the folks who are the shepherds for our patients through a system, and like most of us don't understand how it works. I honestly could not have told you the difference between Medicare and Medicaid when I was a first year attending out of residency, which is incredible. Right? So that got my wheels turning around, like, how do doctors actually, like, figure out the system? Right? And then very serendipitously at the same time, my fiance at the time, who's now my wife, was applying to business school because it was always part of her career trajectory. Right?