Let me take you back to 2017. 

I was sitting on my desk at Apax Partners on 601 Lexington Avenue in New York City, when my phone rang. It was Ben, one of Stellar’s original co-founders, who I’ve known since business school and he had some news to share. He was leaving McKinsey and taking on a new role to lead a ~50 doctor rural primary care practice. I remember congratulating Ben and thinking to myself: what an exciting move to go from behind the scenes to the front lines.

Ben and I of course stayed in touch and his new organization continued to intrigue me. Their model did not fit neatly in a traditional fee-for-service arrangement. In fact, they were practicing a unique form of value-based care. They were taking on risk, finding early patient outcome success, and uniquely dividing their surplus profit to the providers themselves. This was only 5+ years ago but at the time for value-based care, this was a novel approach. It seemed to work because it was intuitive for providers and their care teams: follow a value-based care playbook with a specific set of care delivery activities, get patients better, and subsequently receive financial benefits at scale.  

This “win-win” ethos (provider + patient) captivated my interest and not long after, Ben (and another former McKinsey colleague, Ari) made the decision to build upon Ben’s learnings – and work together to take this early concept to the next level.

On January 19th, 2018, Stellar Health was officially born.*

In our first commercial year of 2019, we experienced the challenges and tribulations that many digital health startups experience eg. pitches that didn’t go anywhere, technology challenges, and overall, potential customers who got the novelty of it but just couldn’t believe the simplicity of it all would work as intended.

As we brought on new members and a new Co-Founder in Octavian, we immediately started to learn and adapt quickly. As I look back, this early trial and error rigor was essential to what Stellar has become today. From our pitch to our product, we realized what worked and what we needed to build.  Our embrace of “simplicity” also resonated with the market, most acutely when a now-customer and CEO of a market took me aside one time and said “Do you mean if we just pay each physician to do the things we want them to do and get better patient outcomes at the end of day, they’ll do it. Wow. That seems simple and makes so much sense, (almost incredulous that we had all underemphasized this point).”   

To this day, one of Stellar’s chief reasons to exist is to simplify healthcare for all. We aspire to integrate seamlessly into the workflows of providers and care teams who do the front line care work daily. We don’t believe in actually doing the work for practices in the form of endless outsourced support and the 1099 model. Rather, we aim to enable and empower our practices and point-of-care partners  to have the technology and tools to be successful and deliver great outcomes-based care.

I’m proud to be leading a growing company that is truly making an impact in healthcare. Our platform has over 10,000+ providers and impacts the care delivery of over 1 million people nationally. We are in the early days of operating our own MSSP ACO and initial results in reducing the total cost of care are very encouraging. Our mission is realized every day as we unlock alignment of actions across stakeholders. We have a long way to go but with our team, technology and momentum in the market, I’m excited and optimistic for Stellar’s next chapter.  

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*Fun fact: In 2019, our founding team came up with the name Stellar but the company naming happened to coincide with my daughter’s christening and her given Chinese name, Meng Fan Xing, 孟繁星, which in Chinese, translates to “sky full of stars” ✨

About Michael Meng: Michael Meng is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Stellar Health. Michael has invested in healthcare companies for the past decade and has years of experience working in the field. Prior to Stellar Health, Michael was a Principal at Apax Partners, a large-cap global private equity firm where he deployed C$3bn of capital. He has served on the board of companies including Vyaire Medical, Medicomp, One Call Care Management, and TriZetto. In addition, he also serves on the board of the CUNY School of Public Health and Global Language Project. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and his MBA from Wharton.