EP. 121 Inna Plumb on Being Fearless. Calculated, Cautious Risk Taking.
Laurie McGraw is speaking with Inspiring Woman Inna Plumb, CoFounder and COO of MedArrive, a company bringing healthcare to the home through both and EMT workforce and a connected platform. Inna conceived of this company when she was one of the original team members of ReDesign Health. Building out a de novo company idea like this may seem obvious today in a post pandemic world, but at the time, we were well before digital health tools were at the level of adoption they enjoy today. Making the leap to launching this company was a risk. Just as the leap from her “cushy” but comfortable job in finance before she made the leap to a different start up (Blue Apron).
For Inna, risk taking is a familiar friend. She came to the United States at age seven and often reflects on what it means to not have a safety net and starting from scratch. But she was brought up in a family where her greatest inspiration was her grandfather. He was said doing well at something was simply not enough. It was important to actually do more, be better, be different. That meant taking risks and ensuring you had an impact. For Inna it also means being cautious and calculated in that risk taking.
Inna brings that mindset to MedArrive. She considers delivering care to be a privilege and a serious responsibility. The company started with straight forward use cases, vaccinations, and then added episodic wellness visits. With their latest funding, significant growth is on the horizon. This includes adding new services such as delivering maternal care through their partnership with Ouma Health.
In 2023 as Inna works towards these large objectives ahead, she is also trying to be gentler with herself if everything is not perfect. Her advice to younger women is to go for it….you are indeed enough and there are many people here to support you.
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BIO
Inna Plumb, co-founder and COO of MedArrive, an end-to-end platform that connects health plans, healthcare providers, Field Providers, and patients to bring hands-on care to the home.
Before MedArrive, Inna was a founding partner at Redesign Health, where she helped to build a variety of companies across the healthcare industry and led the Venture Building team. Prior to that she held leadership roles on the Supply Chain team at Blue Apron, where she was responsible for national procurement and sourcing. She started her career in finance, first as an M&A banker at Evercore, and subsequently as an associate in the private equity group at Soros Fund Management.
She’s always had a strong desire to build things from scratch – she’s happiest when she can have a direct impact and create something new. She was working on a variety of ideas in early 2020 and the more she dug into the opportunity to help humanize healthcare, the more it struck her. She was overwhelmed by the unfolding global health crisis and deeply worried about its impact on her family, in particular her aging grandparents. The more she learned about the EMS space and saw an opportunity to tap into this underutilized labor force and enable them to treat patients safely in the home, the more it felt like absolutely the right thing to be doing. Not only was this a great idea pandemic or not, but it could have a powerful impact on the lives of people like her grandparents and help them feel safer and live healthier lives. She dove in with all of her energy, and she says it’s been an incredible journey ever since.
