About the Guest
Karthik Ganesh is the CEO of OnMed, the company behind the OnMed CareStation, a “Clinic-in-a-Box” designed to expand healthcare access. Previously, he served as CEO of EmpiRx Health, where he helped scale the company from roughly $48 million to nearly $500 million in revenue before its private equity transaction in 2021. He’s also held leadership roles at QualCare, CareAllies, and Aetna, and advised healthcare organizations through Deloitte and EY.
Interview Summary
Before joining OnMed, Karthik held leadership roles across health plans, value-based care organizations, pharma, and care delivery, developing what he describes as an “unhealthy obsession” with healthcare access.
In Karthik’s view, the healthcare system continues ignoring the “broken doorway”: 167 million Americans delay care, and for 120 million of them, that delay is due to a lack of viable access.
OnMed’s response is an 8x10-foot “Clinic-in-a-Box” that combines elements of traditional, brick-and-mortar care delivery and telemedicine. Patients enter a private CareStation where remote clinicians can conduct exams, capture vitals, deploy diagnostic tools, and guide visits in real time.
The company operates as a B2B subscription business, partnering with payers, providers, employers, universities, and government organizations that sponsor access for their populations. OnMed has deployments across airports, prisons, homeless shelters, employer settings, and rural healthcare systems.
This model has produced strong early utilization metrics. According to Karthik, 86% of patients are able to be treated within the CareStation without needing to be redirected to a specialist, urgent care, or emergency department; 80% described the CareStation as their medical home, and 37% returned within 12 months after their first visit. OnMed is now active across seven states, anticipates deployments in more than 35 states by the end of 2026, and is targeting profitability while continuing to expand its physical healthcare access network.
Top Takeaways
Technology can bring patients in but the human touch brings them back. Patients approach care with their guard up. Convenience and automation can drive initial engagement, but retention depends on comfort and trust. Patients return when the technology doesn't overwhelm, the experience feels human, and they feel taken care of. In automated care models, removing the last human touchpoint to improve efficiency can impede adoption.
Brand and culture shape execution long before strategy does. Brand is the emotion you want your targeted market to feel. It’s critical to define it first, then let it shape your business strategy, product, and go-to-market plan. Culture delivers it from the inside: define winning, set clear expectations, and build roles around individual strengths and blind spots. Performance declines to the standard around it.
B2B healthcare traction comes from solving pressures your customers already feel. Payers, providers, employers, universities, and governments may all buy the same product, but for completely different reasons. One cares about ER diversion and another cares about access gaps. Sticky commercial adoption comes from understanding how each segment defines success, measuring ROI in their language, and deploying care into places people already trust.
Constraints force companies to become sharper and more inventive. Raising too much money can lead to a lack of discipline and poor prioritization. Limited resources push teams to find more innovative, lower-cost solutions — often resulting in an acute focus on profitability. Businesses without that line of sight are really just experiments.
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