A “clinic in a box.” That’s the premise of health tech company OnMed.
The company, founded in 2011, offers care stations that provide medical check-ups anywhere, from health system facilities to homeless shelters to prisons.
“The purpose for us is simply healthcare anywhere,” OnMed CEO Karthik Ganesh told Healthcare Brew.
Both traditional brick-and-mortar clinics and telemedicine have “hit a logical ceiling,” Ganesh said. Where in-person care can be expensive and limited due to staffing shortages, telemedicine is restricted by broadband internet access (around 12% of people in the US were living in households without internet access in 2023, according to government data). Telehealth alone, Ganesh said, “doesn’t feel like a comprehensive clinical experience.”
OnMed’s care station is meant to address these challenges, as it’s designed to provide primary, urgent, and postacute care, he said.
The company operates 17 care stations in the US, according to a spokesperson who declined to disclose how much revenue it made last year. OnMed has 44 employees and is working to have 200 stations in operation by the end of 2025, the spokesperson said in an email.
How it works. The care station turns on when patients hit “start,” and a live clinician appears on a 65-inch screen.
“The person is literally as big as a human being would be standing in front of you,” Ganesh said.
While standing and speaking with the clinician, the box takes the patient’s weight and uses thermal scanning to do a temperature check.
On the other side of the exchange, the clinician operates a “command center” with tools that allow them to conduct the appointment, like a high-definition camera to look more closely at a rash or a stethoscope for patients to hold to their chest.
All clinicians are nurse practitioners and are mostly contracted by OnMed, according to Ganesh.
“[The clinician] can do a complete diagnosis. She can give you a health record,” Ganesh said. “She can prescribe an e-prescription to your local pharmacy. She can send a referral to a specialist.”
When the appointment is finished, ultraviolet lights sanitize the interior of the station.
Chris Lew, a principal at health research and consulting firm Rock Health, told Healthcare Brew patients are interested in convenient and modern primary care “that more reflects the experiences that folks are having outside of their healthcare world.” In other words, people use smart phones and new technologies often, but adoption of new tech can be slow in healthcare. This trend, he said, is pushing care station models like OnMed’s. Health tech company Higi also designs care stations with a similar model.
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Compare and contrast. Part of OnMed’s goal is to reach people who traditionally struggle to access care, Ganesh said. The company put one clinic in Florida homeless shelter Tampa Hope in November 2024, for example, through a partnership with Tampa General Hospital and volunteer-run nonprofit Catholic Charities.
This sponsorship model is key to the business, Ganesh said, and sets it apart from competitors like subscription-based startup Forward, which shut down suddenly in November last year.
OnMed develops partnerships with payers, providers, and universities—entities that are already tapped into a patient base—that then cover the cost of appointments for patients, according to Ganesh.
“We have sponsors picking up the subscription on the care station for every patient walking in. There is no additional fee,” Ganesh said.
It’s mutually beneficial, he said, because OnMed’s care stations may help patients stay out of the emergency room, which for hospitals and payers, can be costly and inefficient.
“We do see health systems and payers continuing to seek partnerships with companies that are helping expand care access and improve continuity of care—which for the health systems, really helps them drive patient acquisition and retention, and for payers, can help them activate members with limited access to care or who typically haven’t been engaged in care,” Lew said.
OnMed also made the technology as simple to use as possible, Ganesh said.
“Tech for tech’s sake has not worked in healthcare. There has to have a very strong human element to it,” he said. “Even some of the others who tried this care pod/care station concept in the last three to four years, the tech was overwhelming. You cannot have an AI-driven experience to drive healthcare in underserved America.”
OnMed and other care station models also differ from retail care, Lew said, because there isn’t as much overhead as traditional brick-and-mortar sites. Companies like Walmart Health and Walgreens have shuttered their primary care sites in recent months due to high operational costs.
“The ‘clinic in a box’ could be a more feasible way of capturing the opportunity [to reach patients and pull in revenue],” Lew said. “That’s an interesting potential [and] I’d like to see how it shakes out in the market.”