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Zac Ziegler: Rural Oregon is in a health care crisis. Most parts of the state do not have enough appointments with primary care doctors to meet the needs of residents, and for some rural communities, seeing a doctor requires a drive of somewhere between 20 and 60 Minutes. Given the field’s current condition, it may sound unusual to hear that there’s a company that has opened six clinics in rural locations around Western Oregon in recent years, and it’s looking to grow. That’s where Orchid Health finds itself today. Its locations range geographically from Oakridge to Sandy. Its CEO and founder, Orion Falvey, joins me in this episode. My first question to him, How did he find himself getting into opening rural healthcare clinics?
Orion Falvey: So about 15 years ago, I was a student at University of Oregon studying social entrepreneurship. It was kind of a newer program at the time in the business school, focused on using business as a force for positive social change in the world. And so that sparked my my personal interests, my values, wanting to be my own boss and make a difference. So, this field of social entrepreneurship interested me, and I was in Eugene for a summer between my junior and senior year, and there’s an opportunity to form a U of O team to present at the first Social Business Challenge, which was taking place up in Portland. So at that point, I didn’t have really any interest in healthcare, although I had been a patient myself, and I grew up in a rural community up in Alaska- Haines, Alaska, and I knew that there was a lot of need for creating a better system that served the key stakeholders in healthcare. But I didn’t envision myself at that time going into healthcare in any way, but my team and I, we met. There were about five or six of us. We met twice, brainstorming what kind of solution did we want to present at this social business challenge. And we brainstormed ideas from like, environmental sustainability, food waste reuse, and then healthcare came up as well as like, this is a major need in our country. And I spoke up and said, I think if we focus on healthcare, let’s look at rural communities where people don’t have the same access to quality care. And oftentimes- as it was for me- it was a small sea plane or a small flight to Juneau, oftentimes, to get health care…