Toyin Ajayi

Company: Cityblock HealthTitle: Co-founder & CEOIndustry: HealthcareNotable in 2024: Ajayi continued to expand Cityblock's reach and grow the number of Medicaid patients it serves, opening new community clinics in Brooklyn, Indianapolis, Columbus and Cincinnati, and launching new partnerships with five large insurance plans.

As debate continues in the nation's capital over how to wisely spend government money, Toyin Ajayi, co-founder and CEO of Cityblock Health, could teach the pols and Silicon Valley bros a thing or two about improving outcomes, dollar for dollar.

No one argues with the fact that the government spends a lot, and health care is at the top. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, at roughly $1.5 trillion in fiscal 2024, represented a bigger chunk of budget dollars than Social Security, the U.S. Treasury, or the Department of Defense. And with over 68 million Medicare beneficiaries and another 80 million enrolled in Medicaid, the stakes for the American population are high.

Ajayi, who is a medical doctor and had community health nonprofit experience before launching Cityblock in 2017, has devoted her career to improving patient results. It was her firsthand experience, in particular, with marginalized patient populations, that led to her conviction there has to be a more efficient way to deliver health care. "You're almost set up to fail for that person," she said in a 2022 podcast interview.

Approximately 86% of Cityblock's more than 100,000 members are Medicaid or dually eligible members of it and Medicare. Roughly 83% of its members have two or more chronic health conditions. The majority are people of color.

Offering clinical care, behavioral health services, and social care through virtual, home and community center visits, the company partners with major Medicaid health plans in states including New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Florida. Cityblock Health has twice been named to the CNBC Disruptor 50 list.

"What we know is that your diagnoses, your organs; your hearts, lungs, kidneys, brain is only a small part of what it means to be healthy," Ajayi told CNBC last year. Community and surroundings, mental health, having enough food to eat, access to education and transportation, "all of that matters so much when we are trying to get people healthy and keep them healthy," she added.

Cityblock Health booked $1 billion in revenue in 2023, the most recent year for which it has provided full data.

"When we first started this company there were lots of questions about whether you could make a market in Medicaid, whether you can scale and create profitable margins, and we are here to say you can do these things," Ajayi told CNBC.

Ajayi laid out a simple premise from which Cityblock derives its mission back in a 2023 interview: "Health is local," she told MobileHealthNews. "That's one of our one of our favorite slogans."

She also warned back in the 2022 podcast interview that focusing only on what the government gets wrong isn't necessarily going to solve patients' problems. "I think there is absolutely a risk that if we throw out the baby with the bathwater, focus on some of the negative, unintended consequences of a system like this, that we forget that we have at least an approach, or v1 [version one] of an approach that needs to be iterated on, to ensure that we are funneling the right level of resources and investments to achieve the outcomes that we hope for – for the folks who are most marginalized, the folks with the most complex needs, for the folks who have the most to gain from that."

"It is both possible and in fact fundamentally necessary to deliver more cost effective, more high value services in the health care system by taking better care of people, and in delivering care in ways that respect them and dignify them, and that meet their needs," she said.