The Health Equity Dispatch
Washington, D.C.
Vol. I · Company Profile
Digital Health · Media · Trust
Grapevine Health
The company that decided trust is the missing prescription - and went looking for it on the street.
The company that decided trust is the missing prescription - and went looking for it on the street.
Here is a fact about American healthcare that does not fit neatly on a spreadsheet: the hardest part of medicine is often not the diagnosis. It is getting someone to believe you.
Grapevine Health is built on that inconvenient fact. It is a Washington, DC digital health media company, founded in 2019 by Dr. Lisa Fitzpatrick, and its entire product - videos, podcasts, street interviews, text messages - resolves to a single thing that is famously difficult to manufacture: trust.
The setup is worth appreciating. There is an enormous industry devoted to digital health. It builds apps, portals, wearables, and dashboards, mostly for people who already have doctors, insurance, and broadband. Grapevine Health noticed that this leaves out a large group of people - Medicaid enrollees, residents of underserved neighborhoods - and decided to build for them specifically.
That decision is less obvious than it sounds. Building for the already-served is where the money and the easy metrics are. Building for people the system has repeatedly failed means you inherit their skepticism, and skepticism is not a bug you can patch. It is the whole problem. So Grapevine treats it as the whole product.
The mechanism is trusted messengers. Grapevine leans on clinicians - with an emphasis on Black and Latinx providers - to have real conversations, in person and on video, about the things people actually worry about: blood pressure, diabetes, medications, what a diagnosis means. Then it uses technology to capture those conversations and distribute them at scale.
You could describe this as content marketing for health. But that undersells the sourcing. A lot of Grapevine's material starts as literal street-corner interviews, where the questions come from the public rather than from a marketing brief. The result is content that answers what people asked, in language they use, from faces that look familiar. It is a two-way exchange dressed up as media.
None of this works if the person delivering it has no standing. Which brings us to the founder, whose resume is the reason the whole thing is credible.
"Information doesn't change behavior. Trusted people do."
Dr. Lisa Fitzpatrick is a board-certified infectious diseases physician and medical epidemiologist, and her career reads like a case study in leaving the building where the expertise is kept.
She began her public health career in 1998 as a member of the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service - the disease-detective corps - and later served as a foreign diplomat in the Caribbean and an academic researcher. Before founding Grapevine Health, she was the chief medical officer for the DC Medicaid program.
That last role matters. Running clinical strategy for a Medicaid population is a front-row seat to a specific failure: good information exists, and it bounces off communities that have no reason to trust its source. Grapevine Health is her answer, assembled over roughly a decade of trying to raise health literacy where it is lowest.
• CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer (1998)
• Former Chief Medical Officer, DC Medicaid
• 2017 Aspen Institute Health Innovator Fellow
• MD, MPH, MPA - physician, epidemiologist, public health advocate
• Founder & CEO, Grapevine Health
Strip away the formats and Grapevine sells the same thing four ways: a trustworthy answer, delivered in a form the patient will actually receive.
A culturally appropriate, SMS-based platform sending plain-language health information and reminders to Medicaid enrollees and others largely omitted from digital health innovation. Supported by a National Science Foundation SBIR grant - because the unglamorous problems live here too.
On-the-street and virtual conversations that answer questions about acute and chronic conditions, clarify information, and correct misinformation - building trust between the medical establishment and communities.
Culturally relevant videos, podcasts, and blog content - including the "Ask the Doctor" series - delivered through trusted messengers rather than institutional voices.
A roster of clinicians and health experts, emphasizing Black and Latinx providers, who serve as the trusted faces at the center of the model.
"Relatable health content communities trust."
The model is B2B2C. The end audience is patients in underserved communities; the customers are the organizations that need to reach them - Medicaid managed-care plans, health systems, and community groups - supplemented by research grants such as the NSF SBIR award.
It is a sensible arrangement. Health plans are measured on member engagement and outcomes they struggle to move; Grapevine offers a way to reach members who do not answer the standard outreach. The company gets distribution and revenue; the plan gets engagement; the patient gets information they might actually use. Whether culturally relevant content reliably moves outcomes is the honest open question - and the one worth measuring.
Legal entity: Lisa Fitzpatrick & Associates, MD-PC, doing business as Grapevine Health. Competitors in patient-engagement and health-equity communication include mPulse Mobile, Wellframe, and Health Leads.
Fitzpatrick joins the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service, beginning a public-health career that will later include a stint as DC Medicaid's chief medical officer.
Named an Aspen Institute Health Innovator Fellow.
Grapevine Health is incorporated as a commercial business in Washington, DC.
Raises a Seed round to expand its health media and patient-engagement work.
Awarded a National Science Foundation SBIR grant to build HealthText, its SMS platform for Medicaid enrollees.
Washingtonian profiles Fitzpatrick's use of technology to improve health outcomes across DC communities.
Interviews and demos - the trusted-messenger model is easier to understand once you watch a conversation happen.
Before founding Grapevine, the CEO was a CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer - the corps that gets sent when something is spreading.
She also served as a foreign diplomat in the Caribbean, which is a fairly unusual line on a digital-health founder's resume.
Much of Grapevine's content begins as street interviews, so the editorial agenda is set by whoever walks up with a question.