500 orders a month was manageable. 5,000 is madness! Embrace intelligent order fulfilment with ShipStation. The only platform combining order management, warehouse workflows, inventory, returns and analytics in one place. What used to take five separate tools, ShipStation does in one. Go to ShipStation.com and use code START to try ShipStation free for 60 days. This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Nicole Somarero. Nicole is a remarkable leader. She's going to talk to us about her latest business venture that she's driving and a lot more. Nicole, we're so excited to get to visit with you today. Can you tell us about your career and yourself and your latest venture? Absolutely, Scott. Thanks so much for making time for me today. It's great to spend some time with you. I am so excited to talk today about Carious Health, but way of background first. I have had the privilege of leading in healthcare for the past 20 years. As you know, we met really early on in my career when I was working underneath Barry Tanner's leadership at Physicians Endoscopy. Really spent the first 14 years of my career in healthcare working in the ambulatory surgery center space across starting in development, going into mergers and acquisition, Genovo Surgery Center development, and then into operations when I joined surgical care affiliates in 2015 and got to work under so many amazing leaders that we both know there. It was such an amazing experience. I mean, spending the first 14 years on the provider side, working across 46 states across the country really gave me this unique viewpoint of local market healthcare delivery, how that impacts costs, how it affects companies, how it affects people. I always say that I kind of geek out a little bit when it comes to what happens where people live related to healthcare. On that journey, when I was at SCA, after SCA was acquired by Optum, I started to get very, very passionate about healthcare consumerism. I had kind of put this stake and thinking in the ground that if healthcare was in a change and evolve in America, that people had to become consumers of healthcare. And I meant that in a way that everything in this world, people are able to price check, make decisions, and healthcare is one that we both know is not that easy. But I had this belief that, okay, could we help people to actually become consumers of care? And that is where I had the idea to start a company called Specialist Management Solutions, which is a large surgical point solution that the entire goal is how do we get people to understand that if they were to get elective surgery inside of an ambulatory surgery setting, they could save a tremendous amount of money and then obviously large employers, like some of our large employer clients, some of the largest employers in the world, that they could obviously save a lot of money inside of their health plan as well. And that was just an incredible experience. I loved building that organization, an awesome team, great mission, very successful. And back in 2024, I actually came up with the idea for Careus. I kind of saw a number of things happening inside the market that I had this burning desire in my heart to go and fix and step down as CEO of a company that I truly love to kind of better myself and bring a new category of healthcare and a new way of thinking into the market after making the decision to step down as CEO. So that's a little bit of my background in terms of career. And tell us about the company that you're leading now and a little bit about exactly who you do, who the customers are, how you're trying to serve. Absolutely. So Careus Health is the first of its kind platform that essentially brings together a health plan, cost containment and consumer experience into one singular platform that's hyper focused on serving kind of the under 5000 employer space. And when I say we bring together a health plan, cost containment and consumer experience, we kind of do that in a couple of different ways. So from a health plan perspective, we have a captive offering, which for those that are not familiar with captives, essentially bringing together multiple companies into almost a private insurance structure to be able to access more affordable self-funded insurance. And then we said we wanted to, we had this vision. We said, let's build a proprietary technology as well as bring together deeply human concierge to be able to serve those clients, members and their families end to end without having to have multiple solutions that are currently kind of fragmented in the market today. So the entire vision was how do you take the fragmentation of health insurance of digital point solutions that are very prevalent in the market, as well as this whole entire notion of getting people to become better consumers? How do you actually like lump that together into a singular experience? And that is what we have built in our leading and building at Carious today. Fantastic. And congratulations and talk a little bit about the Nicole. What are you most focused on and excited about this year? Where are your energies going this year as you grow the company? Absolutely. Well, our first 15 months of commercialization were just such a gift and such a blessing as soon as we entered the market. There was just this overwhelming market response to what we were building because right now there are multiple tailwinds that are facing, especially kind of small to mid-sized upper middle market employers. And that is just unsustainable costs, rising in insurance. So just the risk profile of these businesses are just in a tough spot. And then and then this whole entire, how do we help people actually make better care decisions before they are forced to just listen to whomever is telling them to do what they should do for the next decision? So when I think about what I'm most excited about, what we're building is our technology platform that is proprietary to Carious. We were so excited. But the first is we call it our K card, which is our digital front door. It is not a mobile application. It's actually a proprietary workflow through a contact card. And even more exciting to that is we actually came up with this incredible idea around creating a guided what we call guided care intelligence platform through what we call faith AI and faith is our virtual caregiver that will be going along with our members inside of their visit, listening on their behalf, actually helping them next step, actually helping them to formulate next steps. There is summary in the moment that they're at the provider's office and our entire goal when we think about everything we're building at Carious with our technology platform, Scott is related to timing. I have on this journey realized that one of the most challenging issues to solve in healthcare is timing. And what I mean by that is if we look at healthcare costs and spend and what employers are faced with today, you have a lot of people being proactive versus reactive to their care. You have people that when they go to the doctors, they end up making a decision that might be really costly because they don't have education in that moment. And then obviously we have a lot of people out there that don't necessarily understand or can regurgitate back what their doctors saying. And between the K card and faith, we are really trying to solve this issue of timing of how we educate people sooner, how we get them to make decisions on their next steps of care in a more coordinated informed fashion, which is really exciting. That's remarkable. And talk a little bit about you've had this great professional career, an amazing entrepreneur, amazing leader, brilliant and great personal skills. What advice would you give to emerging leaders? What do you tell emerging leaders about building their career and what they should be doing? Yeah, I think, you know, I've been so blessed in my career to interact and be mentored by some of the most influential leaders in healthcare. And I think so much of it is how you seek out people. And I think that a lot of it's a luck at the same time of who gets placed in your path. But I think it's not being afraid. It's being passionate about whatever you're about to set on embark on in your career, like really thinking through what do I want to do to make a difference in this world? And whether it's healthcare or anything else, I think that's the first that's the first thing that you need to do. And oftentimes when you're emerging as a leader, you need to be able to kind of have fortitude to reach out to leaders that are in higher level positions to ask them and get curious about their journey. And I think that when they when people do that, and I did that very early on in my career, it's really cool because I think that people like myself and leaders like Barry Tanner that you know really well and Jason Strauss and Caitlin Zula, like some of the goats of leadership. I mean, all of them are incredible at telling their story. And it all started with positions that were lower levels in companies that they worked really hard to continue to grow, but that they also kind of the sought out those leaders to get advice from. And I think hearing other people's stories are so inspiring when you're early on in your career. That literally remarkable in a call. Next steps for the company. We're yet on next steps. You built the technology platform and started to commercialize. What are the next steps? Yeah, so we're just in this really exciting time frame when we originally commercialized. We were very focused on, you know, the hundred to a thousand employer space, which Scott, you know, I this is not a joke. I joke around sometimes because people will be like, well, why did you start that such a hard part of the market? And I guess I was like to do hard things, but I think the reality is is I look at those companies and there's over a hundred million Americans that work in that size. And they truly are companies that are like the heartbeat of America as dramatic as that sounds. I mean, we have companies that just industries that I didn't even know existed like cleaning waste off of a cruise ship and a Sprinkles company like Jimmy's that go on ice cream cones. And these are family owned businesses that have been around forever that were actually able to go in and help. So what we realized with our platform, though, is we are getting a tremendous amount of market to man demand to go into larger companies. So as we look at our 2026 commercialization, we are looking in going up market to companies as large as, you know, seventy five hundred employees to be able to bring our offering to that part of the market. And then with the addition of the technology, we have already launched our MVP for faith. The K card has been out in the market for many months now that has had just great utilization. I mean, we have 70% of our members saving the K card, like within the first week of getting it, which is pretty remarkable when you look at multiple digital health data points that are out there. So getting faith, you know, continuing to accelerate the product roadmap on the technology. We have a very bold roadmap that has incredible features that are going to truly change the way that patients are able to interact with their health care. So that is absolutely a focus as well. Fantastic. Nicole, it's amazing what you're doing. And I appreciate you taking the time to share a little bit of it with us on the Becker private equity and the Becker business podcast today. Remarkable leader. Thank you so much for taking the time of saying continued good luck and your growth in what you're doing. It's remarkable. Thank you. Thanks, Scott. We really appreciate it. 500 orders a month was manageable. Embrace intelligent order fulfillment with ShipStation, the only platform combining order management, warehouse workflows, inventory, returns and analytics in one place. What used to take five separate tools, ShipStation does in one. Go to ShipStation.com and use code START to try ShipStation free for 60 days.
