I recently had the pleasure of chatting with MediCircle co-founder, Jack Schaeffer, during his self-inflicted 1-day break during Brown’s winter vacation. After our talk, he was on his way back to the MediCircle office in Providence, RI to get back to work.Â
I quickly fell in love with MediCircle’s simple business model. They are solving a familiar problem in American healthcare - fragmentation mixed with misaligned incentives.
Jack and his co-founder, Eliza, started MediCircle during their junior year at Brown. Eliza interviewed 100 anesthesiologists while doing research for another project - over 50% of them said that medical waste was a serious problem. She grabbed Jack, and as he described it, they “drove around to every nursing home and hospital in the area.” While on these visits, they interviewed patients, doctors, and staff - all of whom said that a) medicine is being wasted, and b) medicine is prohibitively expensive.
Now focusing on cancer patients, Jack and Eliza found that 25% of all prescribed oral cancer medication gets discarded, yet over 60% of patients struggle to pay for these same medications!
With the problem in scope, the pair pitched their solution at the Brown Venture Prize competition: partner with doctors, patients, and health systems to collect unused medications, vet them, and redistribute them to patients in need at a stark discount. They won the $25,000 first place prize and began to build!
In under a year, they’ve raised their first round of funding, attracted an extremely high quality advisory board, and begun to discuss national partnerships with large health systems (all while attending Brown University).