STAT+: Patients loved Carbon Health’s diabetes program. That couldn’t save it
Patients loved Carbon Health's telehealth-based program for managing diabetes. That couldn't save it.
A diabetes diagnosis was not what Jason had in mind when he set out on a cross-country road trip with his family in the fall of 2021. He had been heavy since he was a kid, but he always had felt pretty healthy — until getting home to the San Francisco Bay Area, when he started to notice his body doing strange things.
“It kind of came out of nowhere,” said Jason, who asked to keep his last name private. All of a sudden, he had to get up to pee five times in a night. Just a few weeks after his trip, he was having a hard time walking around the block. He went to get checked out at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, and on a Thursday night in November, the blood test results popped up in his patient portal: He had type 2 diabetes.
“I was freaked out,” he said. “I was in legitimately bad shape.” It would take months to see an endocrinologist. So that day, he signed up to try a novel, telehealth-based approach for managing diabetes with a young company called Steady Health. Jason knew the company through his Bay Area startup connections — as well as Carbon Health, the primary care startup, reportedly valued at more than $3 billion, that had recently acquired Steady.
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