Making world healthier place by streamlining contributions
At the back of a humid bus traveling near the Costa Rica-Panama border in 2010, an idea struck Chase Adam.
It began when a woman walked down the bus aisle, begging every person on board to make a donation to fund her son’s medical bills. Adam’s first thought was to turn away. But the woman carried a red folder filled with her son’s health records for anyone to peruse. Almost every- one on the bus, he said, ended up forking over spare change.
The notion of a community coming together to fund a stranger’s health, Adam said, lit a fire in him. He was working for the Peace Corps in Costa Rica at the time, and when he got back to his hut, he started drawing up business plans to scale and technologize what he saw on the bus. He named the nonprofit that materialized from the months of planning after the town the bus had
been traveling through, Watsi.
“I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why no one had done this,” Adam said in a recent interview in Watsi’s South of Market office.
On the most basic level, Watsi is crowdfunded medical care — the Kickstarter or Kiva of the health sector — for impoverished people in 22 developing countries throughout the world. Treatments funded by Watsi donations must cost less than $1,500 and have a high probability of success. Another requirement is that the conditions, if left untreated, would severely impact the patient’s quality of life.
Directly covering costs
Donations of as little as $5 can go toward the costs of treating an infant’s brain swelling or a woman’s cervical cancer or any of the other procedures almost 7,000 patients have used Watsi for since it went live in 2012.
The nonprofit guarantees that 100 percent of the donations go directly to the patient’s medical costs. Donors get updates on the patient — even on the rare occasions procedures don’t go as planned — and can inspect Watsi’s financials at a granular level uncommon in the nonprofit world.
“People are more likely to give if they can see and understand where their money goes,” Adam said. “That’s our hypothesis, and I think we’re proving it.”
Youngest finalist
At age 29, Adam is the youngest finalist for the second annual Visionary of the Year award, sponsored by The Chronicle and St. Mary’s College. He shies away from the title “co-founder” and redirects praise to Watsi’s investors, mentors and 11 other employees. Adam proudly said that he and co-founder Grace Garey decided to hire only people who were smarter than they are, who hired even smarter people.
“So by default we should be the least intelligent people in the whole organization,” Adam said.
With three months’ worth of savings, Adam quit his day job soon after Watsi opened to focus on it full time.
“He just kept developing the idea and never let it go,” said his mother, Kim Adam. “When Chase took that leap, he knew I could give him a bed, but that was it.”
Others soon followed suit, quitting their jobs to join the nonprofit.
SV Angel founder Ron Conway, who invests in early-stage startups, including Watsi, nominated Adam for the Visionary award because, he said, the nonprofit is creating global impact at the same level as Face-
book, Google or Twitter.
“He’s the Mark Zuckerberg of nonprofit leaders,” Conway said. “We need to honor these social entrepreneurs the way we honor company builders.”
A Marin native, Adam attended UC Santa Barbara but spent the bulk of his time traveling or volunteering, he said. When he graduated, he went straight to Haiti to work for a microfinance organization. While there, he began a micronutrients program in which loan officers going door to door through the community handed out vitamins as they went.
“We would always bring this first-aid kit with us, and half the time we were playing doctor and nurse,” Adam said. “Someone would have an insanely infected cut on their foot, like if it weren’t treated it would be amputated, and they just needed some antibiotics.”
Lack of bureaucracy
Watsi — the first nonprofit to go through Y Combinator, a kind of prestigious boot camp for startups — is a tech product at its core, Adam said. And it’s not exactly revolutionizing the traditional health funding model: pooling money and disbursing it to hospitals to pay for medical expenses. But what makes Watsi unique in the global health care sector, its backers say, is its absence of bureaucracy and intense focus on efficiency and data analysis.
“This isn’t something that’s new — the dynamic of people supporting other people when they need help,” Garey said. “But the Internet can be applied as a massive lever and democratize access.”
Last year was Watsi’s biggest yet, funneling $1.67 million from nearly 8,000 donors — double the amount it saw in 2014. The goal, Adam said, is to double contributions every year.
But ultimately, Adam doesn’t care if Watsi survives indefinitely. It’s the underlying technology he hopes governments, companies or nongovernmental organizations adopt to streamline their health funding processes and, someday, establish a universal health care system.