Driving Change For Every Patient,
One Story at a Time
Who Are We?
The Patients First Foundation (PFF) is a patient-led initiative focused on empowering individuals to take control of their healthcare and advocating for systemic change.
Our team consists of healthcare experts, patients, and taxpayers who have firsthand experience navigating the broken healthcare system. Teammates have run small clinics, large hospitals and sat on the boards of national health systems. They have built and sold multi-million dollar companies that led the digital transformation of healthcare, and have worked within the Venture Capital and Private Equity firms that have funded all of this change over the past three decades.
Led by Steve Carbonara, a patient whose near-death experience inspired the foundation, we are dedicated to creating a healthcare system that prioritizes patient well-being via preventative measures. The goal is not to treat sickness, but to not get sick in the first place - while this may be a bad business model for corporations, it should be the goal of each one of us as people to not become patients at all.
Why Now?
For too long, patients have been sidelined in a system dominated by insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, and corporate health systems that
dictate clinical protocols to their clinicians instead of allowing them to practice their craft.
At PFF, we ask: Why do other stakeholders have more control over a system that patients and taxpayers fund?
Our mission is to give patients the representation they deserve while building solutions that add value to every persons’ life.
Building patient led technology or clinical care companies is how we break away from the existing model.
Our Why
We are building a national patient collaborative to identify the most common issues affecting patients and solve them at the root.
By developing technology that improves healthcare literacy we aim to arm patients to advocate for themselves at the local level while we develop a plan to empower all of us through systemic changes on a national scale.
For Patients by Patients:
- If we can unite
1M patients, we will have power to
create change.
- If we can unite
10M patients, we will be larger than most health systems, giving us a real
seat at the national stakeholder table.
- If we can unite
50M patients, we will be the largest voice in healthcare and have the power to
build the system that we desire.
Our Structure
After 2 years of non-profit structure we learned that shifting to a for-profit model would better allow us to 'build a way out' for patients. Extracting us from the current 'sick care model' of healthcare we all experience today.
Patients First Foundation has just finalized our pivot to a for profit organization. As a limited liability corporation, we will build a funding arm that will act as an umbrella to raise capital and then place funding into any project we deem exceptional and valuable to patients.
This approach may mean investing into existing companies, or building new companies from scratch. Either way we aim to solve any issue that plagues patients or where solutions do not exist today. In either scenario we are determined to create value for all stakeholders.
As a for-profit company, we are better aligned to the market and to every stakeholder, while delivering the same public benefit. We will run this new entity with the same level of transparency as we would have been required to do so as a non-profit.
