No. 01
CAREBRIDGE
Executive chairman: Brad Smith
Category: Health Services
Three-year revenue growth: 157,144%
Inc. 5000
BILL FRIST WAS ALREADY THREE OR four careers deep—surgeon, senator, venture capitalist, environmentalist—when Brad Smith showed up at his doorstep in 2008 in Princeton, New Jersey, where Frist was teaching. Smith was then a 26-year-old whose first job out of Harvard was chauffeur. ● Not for a limo service, but for Bob Corker, who was running for Frist’s former job, U.S. senator from Tennessee. For two years, Smith drove Corker around the state, absorbing politics at the ground level. Following his election, Corker thought Frist might be a good person for Smith to know, particularly since both were interested in education policy, which Smith had studied in grad school. “I went to see him, even slept on his couch, which saved me the hotel room,” says Smith, who got a gig researching a book out of the meeting. ● But the meeting’s big payoff, 15 years later, would be a place at the helm of the fastest-growing private company in America. In 2019, the two men co-founded CareBridge, a value-based health care management company whose revenue expanded a feverish 157,144 percent last year, to nearly $873 million, putting it atop the 2023 Inc. 5000. With revenue likely to surpass $2.5 billion this year, CareBridge may have a chance to defend its title. That’s because some of the country’s largest health insurance companies are hiring CareBridge to care for Medicaid patients who receive home and community-based services.
It’s a growing business. These clients often have physical, intellectual, or developmental challenges, and require a lot of resources. In the past, many would have been institutionalized. In recent decades, the emphasis has been on helping them stay within their community, either at home with a family caregiver or in group homes with a paid caregiver. But the change hasn’t necessarily improved their lives or contained costs. Medicaid spent $162 billion in 2020 on home and community-based services (shorthanded as HCBS), up from
