MedCitizens, Health Services

Founder’s Story: HealCo

Kirat Kharode is the CEO and Founder of HealCo — the Airbnb for medical office timesharing.

Kirat Kharode, HealCo CEO and Founder

Why did you start this company?

For almost 20 years as a health system executive, I experienced the pain points of independent physician practices looking to find medical office space while medical office owners and operators, like hospitals, struggled to lease underutilized medical office space. 

This resulted in physicians, often high-value providers, having difficulty expanding to new communities, and often taking on more office space and overhead than they needed. Despite most regions across the country having a massive physician shortage, the painstaking process of finding medical office space prevented doctors from entering communities that needed them the most.

What specific need are you seeking to address in healthcare?

Launched in 2019, HealCo is built by experts in the healthcare management and real estate fields who saw a need to revolutionize medical office leasing by creating a sharing economy for underutilized medical office space. 

Rising costs of medical office real estate have been a major challenge to physicians wanting to start a new practice, while medical office owners and operators are left with over 300 million shareable square feet in the United States that goes underutilized annually. 

It’s evident that medical office real estate is ready for an overhaul. As federal laws that govern provider referral relationships, including Stark and anti-kickback statutes, are poised to be upended for the first time in over 30 years, many factors that made it difficult for hospitals and physicians to timeshare space in the past are soon facing elimination. 

What is your product? How does it work?

We saw an opportunity to better serve providers by connecting them with medical spaces aligned to their practice’s use. I assembled a HealCo team united by the belief that the future of healthcare lies in the hands of providers focused on delivering cost-effective, quality care. Together, our team shares a common goal to help providers, their enterprises, and their communities excel.

Since 2019, we’ve partnered with over 2000 providers nationwide, timesharing over 1 million+ square feet of medical office space in 43 states across the continental United States. Combining our all-in-one technology with a nationwide marketplace, we’ve built the solution to medical office timesharing. By allowing physicians to utilize this vast professional network, they’re able to help each other grow their practices through sharing medical office space.

Is this your first healthcare startup? What’s your background in healthcare?

My educational background is in Public Health and Law, and I spent most of my career as a hospital system executive. It was the last hospital system I worked for that opened my eyes to the tremendous opportunities that exist to improve healthcare services through innovation. 

Having worked as the Chief Strategy Officer for a start-up that rescued hospitals out of bankruptcy, I also had the opportunity to create a care coordination company called CarePlus Concierge with the owners of that system who are serial entrepreneurs. Working with transformative people gave me a great respect for what it means to put it all on the line in order to bring much-needed change to an antiquated industry like health care.  

What is your company’s business model?

HealCo makes the journey to find, lease, and manage the perfect medical office space as seamless, transparent, and cost-effective as possible. We save time by match-making between medical office landlords and tenants, help avoid legal fees by handling the leasing and licensing contracts, and eliminate time-consuming administrative headaches by handling rent collection. Our customers only pay once they have a match — that’s our HealCo guarantee.

 Who is your customer? How do you generate revenue?

HealCo’s non-enterprise customers are mostly high-value healthcare providers looking to expand their practices into new communities, or physicians who own medical space that they would like to lease out for a few days per week, but are finding the experience frustrating and cost-prohibitive. 

On a larger scale, HealCo’s enterprise model drives the leasing, managing, and developing of medical office spaces for medical office building operators and hospital networks. This is also achieved through partnerships we’ve established with top medical office brokers and property managers across the country who are key third-parties fueling liquidity in our market network.

Once a lease is secured, both lessors and lessees pay a service fee based on total lease value. Service fees fuel HealCo features like on-demand customer support seven days a week, compliance alerts, marketing assets, continuous access to our nation-wide marketplace and so much more.


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