Rick Lee, an MHA alum, reflects on his surprising journey to becoming a healthcare entrepreneur. His latest venture, Healthrageous, is an innovative meal-plan solution for seniors.
Rick Lee (MHA ’81), the CEO of Healthrageous and founding member of nine healthcare companies, has always been an innovator. In high school, he helped invent a game called J-ball that is still played today. After graduating from Harvard, he started a mini-school for patients within a psychiatric hospital. So when he arrived at the MHA program in 1979, he had his eyes set on great things.
“I was a fish out of water when I arrived in Seattle, and fortunately, there was a guy on the faculty named Tom Bice. He was into health policy, and he said, ‘You’re not a hospital administrator. You are so far from fitting it with that crowd that it’s not even funny, so let me take you under my wing, and show you the big, bad, beautiful world of health policy,’ and that’s what he did,” Lee explained during our call, while power-walking to get in his daily 22,000 steps. Soon enough, Bice helped Lee land an internship in D.C. in the office of influential congressman David Stockman.
Lee is a proud “dot connector” and serial entrepreneur who “thinks outside the box and colors outside the lines.” His zeal for starting companies stems from inspirations such as Daniel H. Pink’s book To Sell is Human, which argues that most people in a workplace are selling, whether they know it or not. Lee recalls impressing upon William Dowling, the then-director of the MHA program, the importance of students learning the art of persuasion.
“I said, ‘Look, these people are going to have to learn how to sell, because it’s not just salespeople who sell. When you’re trying to get a certificate of need or an MRI, you need to sell the community on why your hospital needs that. If you don’t know how to speak publicly, and you can’t tell a story like a good salesperson can, then you’re going to fail,’” Lee said.
The Path to Becoming a Serial Entrepreneur
Lee was soon recruited to join Value Health as one of the founding members, his first foray into startups. Value Health swiftly grew to a $1.5 billion IPO in three-and-a-half years, and this early financial success emboldened him to take more risks.
Lee recalled, “So then I’m going, ‘Wow, this is pretty easy.’ Then I learned the hard life of being an entrepreneur, and that everything you swing doesn’t go out of the ballpark. It’s a lot of strikeouts, but that one home run was launched at the beginning of my career, and it provided tremendous financial flexibility for me and allowed me to take risks.”
Since then, Lee has discovered his niche: founding companies that pioneer specialty health applications for employers and health plans, especially in the realms of disease management and mental health. His first startup was Accountable Oncology, which allowed cancer patients to receive empathetic and accurate information from nurses and social befores before their appointments. According to his bio for GoMoHealth, where he serves on the advisory board, “The company was patient-centric, long before that was in fashion.”
Lee ran divisions of mega-companies, too, including Magellan Health, where he unveiled a popular tool designed to boost employee mental health. But the free-wheeling, exciting world of startups kept calling to him.
“I hated reporting up, so that was the last time I had a boss telling me what to do and how to do it. That became the end of my big corporate expense account. But I just don’t see much value in being in a company with 5,000 or 10,000 people, where you’re simply a widget, rather than digging in deep and trying to make an impact,” Lee said.
Becoming Healthrageous
His newest chapter? Founding and running Healthrageous, a company that provides seniors with personalized dietary plans through Medicare. Its services include healthy meals delivered to seniors’ doorsteps, a concierge to advise on eating habits, and an online resource library.
“The target customer is me, so I’ve created a solution for me, and I’m pretty intimate with my needs, likes, and dislikes. So it’s pretty easy to create a company that meets your needs, right?” Lee explained.
In addition to his intuition, Lee capitalized upon a recent change in how Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) doles out services. In a mission to become less one-size-fits-all, CMS unveiled a new supplemental benefit for those with multiple chronic conditions in 2019. This “food is medicine” dietary benefit is available to Medicare Advantage members (more than half of seniors opt for a Medicare Advantage plan). Today, more than 4,000 plans offer the “food is medicine” benefit.
“We are at the tipping point of a new market opportunity, a new profit opportunity, and a new better-targeted solution for seniors managing their own help,” said Lee.
Reflecting on his multi-decade career in the “big, bad, beautiful” world of healthcare companies, Lee has learned just what it takes to be a great entrepreneur.
“An entrepreneur is a combination of a salesperson, a manager, an innovator, a cheerleader, and a really good judge of personnel. The ones who can be an entrepreneur with some acumen for selling are able to do two jobs in one: be a CEO who leads the company and team and creates a vision, and be the chief salesperson, who is able to delight others in joining the journey and joining the mission,” Lee said.