The Pulse by Wharton Digital Health
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?
00:08:58 · Arpan Parikh
She was a banker and PE gal. And as I was going on interviews with her, like we would make weekend trips out of her campus visits and interviews. I would like pop into the admissions offices and like pick up their brochures and some schools had these like healthcare majors or programs. I was like, Oh, this is actually kind of interesting. Like, this is the stuff I'm realizing I actually know nothing about. And it would be quite intellectually interesting to, like, learn some of this. So in collaboration with my now wife, made a relatively late decision, which I would not encourage other folks to do, of applying to business school in round three and just applied to, like, the handful of schools, number one, that she had gotten into, and number two, she was, like, interested in potentially going. I wasn't, you know, excited enough about business school to, like, say we're gonna do long distance for two years, but I was like, if I get into the school that she ends up wanting to go to, then, like, that could be interesting. Then lo and behold, again, serendipity, it worked out. We both... Well, she was already in at at Wharton, then I ended up getting in. And that is what then, you know, meaningfully changed the trajectory of my career. And I often get asked by folks like, so what was it like being, you know, attending physician in business school? And I kind of have like three answers to that question. Number one, it's way easier than medical school. So academically, it didn't feel too, too intense, which is good. Number two, I actually feel like I learned way more than the average Wharton student or business school student. Right? Like, my wife went to Stern undergrad and had been a banker and private equity investor. And all the stuff we were learning in all these classes was like stuff she had literally learned seven or eight years ago. I, on the other hand, had never seen a supply and demand graph in a textbook in my life, right? It was like, actually, I was learning these foundational things, which I think was super value add for me. And then the third thing I have as my main takeaway from business school is I really fully realized how little doctors actually know about healthcare, which I know is a pretty hyperbolic statement to make, but I think it's absolutely true, right? Physicians are world class experts at diagnosing and treating disease.
00:11:15 · Arpan Parikh, Chase
Like, that is what we know. And there's no one on the planet better in that than... Better at that than us, at least for now. Maybe AI will change that. But we don't learn anything else. And and business school and Wharton and HCM in particular really opened my eyes to that, right? It's like, there's so many facets and nooks and crannies and niches of the American healthcare system, and unless you actually know what those are and you know your unknown unknowns, like there's no way to be an effective advocate for patients. So I think it was like an incredibly valuable couple of years and ultimately enabled me to make this pivot in my career, pivoting away from being a full time patient facing physician and pivoting to spending more of my time or most of my time building, you know, initially it was service lines and business lines and then companies, and then starting a company with the aim of making access to care more efficient and making the quality of care better. [00:12:12] S0: Yeah. Yeah. No. That that journey makes makes a ton of sense. Jumping now to to Kin, the company that you you just co founded. So I think two things about just the sort of origin story are a bit unique. One is that you have three cofounders, and the other is that one of them is your brother. [00:12:32] S1: Yeah. [00:12:32] S0: So I guess a two part question here. How did you how did you come to have three of you that were starting this business, and how do you kind of go about that day to day? And then what has starting a company with your brother family been like?
00:12:47 · Arpan Parikh
[00:12:47] S1: Two good questions. So the way we came together is super interesting. The idea for Kin came to me while I was sitting in this exact chair, this exact desk in mid August of twenty twenty five, right, so thirteen, fourteen months ago. You And know, one of the first folks I called up when I had that idea was my brother, Amit, who's now my cofounder. There's three siblings. He's... I'm the oldest. He's the middle. And then we have a younger brother in San Francisco. Amit had just moved back to LA from New York, like, literally weeks before. So, again, you know, talk about serendipity and and things being unplanned. It was like we were now back in the same city for the first time in a couple of years, and we just started jamming on this idea. Right? I I had become obsessed with it. And then I slowly, you know, show... Showed him the light and he became obsessed with it as well. And we ultimately made the decision that, like, we have to... Like, this is the time in our personal lives and our professional lives and our career from a macro perspective, to take this bet, right, to take the leap. So we decided to go all in on this, ultimately wind down and resign from our full time jobs at the time and do this. We're both physicians. He's also a double board certified psychiatrist. And as you said, he's also been a digital health executive for the last five to six years running a couple big venture backed mental health companies. Neither of us is technical from an engineering and development perspective, right? Or technical from the perspective of medicine, but not from software, and Kin is a software business, right? So we knew that was something we were going to have to solve for in a very robust way. And, again, serendipity, know, came into our lives. We... I should say, I got connected to Trevor Bezdek, who is one of the cofounders, and he's the former co CEO of GoodRx and lives just up the road here in Santa Monica. There was a Wharton student, Max Drescher, who, at the time was doing his summer internship in LA between first and second year at Wharton. And I haven't cleared this with Max, but I'll just tell the story here. So, Max had reached out to me maybe like four or five times and I not intentionally had blown him off. You know, I was busy building SOL and like, who's this Wharton student who wants my time?