This CEO Is Solving Healthcare’s Most Expensive Problem

Scott Schnell, Cofounder and CEO, built MedZed by reaching the people healthcare can’t — and staying long enough to change outcomes. He leads a team of compassionate, hardworking caregivers who help our country’s most vulnerable Medicaid patients. 

Schnell has always been the kind of person who says yes. As a kid growing up in New York, he loaded fresh-squeezed juice into a little red wagon and knocked on his neighbors’ doors to sell it. At eight years old, he had already figured out something most adults spend decades learning: showing up — literally showing up — is the foundation of entrepreneurial success. 

Decades later, Schnell is putting that same principle to work in one of the most broken corners of American life - healthcare. He leads MedZed’s field team of clinicians and Community Health Navigators, or CHNs, who do something the rest of the healthcare system has largely given up on: they find the people no one else can find, and they stay long enough for new healthcare habits to take hold.

The Navy SEALs of Healthcare

Here is a number that should stop you: insurance companies routinely classify between 15% and 20% of their most vulnerable Medicaid members as “unable to contact.” These are people who are often cycling in and out of emergency rooms, driving enormous costs, and quietly drowning in poverty, in isolation, in a healthcare system that was never designed for them. Most outreach organizations call, get no answer, and MedZed goes into the community and finds them wherever they are. 

By combining boots-on-the-ground community outreach with digital support and phone contact, MedZed finds upwards of 40% of member referrals that other organizations never reach. Their well-trained CHNs  — many from the very communities they serve, often carrying their own stories of struggle — meet members where they are. Literally. In their homes, shelters, encampments, clinics, or community spaces.

“We go where no one else goes,” Schnell told me. “We’re the last mile.”

Once MedZed’s CHNs find someone, they stay — often for six to twelve months — helping members get to doctor’s appointments, secure medications, find food, access housing, and navigate the everyday barriers that determine whether care actually happens.

While compassion and building trust are the cornerstones of the field team’s success, the work requires more. MedZed prepares its CHNs to recognize risk in real time, de-escalate complex situations, and make decisions independently in the field. It also treats sustainability as part of the model — building in time to recover, flexibility when life intervenes, and support systems that recognize this is emotionally demanding work, not shift-based task execution. 

In one unforgettable case, a navigator walked into a home that smelled like rotten eggs, recognized the danger immediately, evacuated everyone, and called the gas company. The family would have gone to sleep that night and might never have woken up.“We do things like that,” Schnell said, simply. “And I hear stories like that with regularity.”

The Mission and the Margin 

Schnell thinks of the people MedZed serves through the metaphor embedded in the name of its technology platform, Tapestry. Each of us, he explains, has a rich, dense, multicolored weave — our lives, relationships, and resources. MedZed helps people with lives that have become worn tapestries. There are frays, gaps, and the colors have faded. 

“We seek to bring a little more color to their lives,” he said. “So they can thrive.”

It is a beautiful framework and a business model. MedZed is paid by insurance companies to reduce hospital utilization — and they deliver. Its health plan clients report hospitalizations reduced by as much as 50%, and emergency department visits are down about 40% among the populations MedZed serves. The mission and the margin reinforce each other. 

Helping people stay out of the hospital is both the right thing to do and what makes the model scalable. Over 12 years, MedZed has served close to 100,000 people and currently supports around 10,000 members at any given time. The company has grown 35% year over year, and Schnell projects 50% to 60% growth in the year ahead.

The Man Who Keeps Saying Yes

What strikes me about Schnell’s career story is not any single business win, though there have been many. It is the consistent posture of openness that runs through every chapter. After graduating from the University of Michigan and spending five years in public accounting, he moved to Georgia on a hunch, built a baseball card company from zero to $80 million in four years, then co-founded a home improvement services business with a childhood friend that grew to 5,000 employees across 40 states. He ran garden centers. He worked in the building materials industry, traveling back and forth to China.

The thread connecting those wildly different industries was more than expertise. It was curiosity, persistence, and the willingness to keep asking questions until he found better answers. “There’s no question I won’t ask,” he told me. “And I’m relentless about driving to an answer.”    

When a friend brought him a business plan with the words “MedZed” at the top, Schnell did not reinvent the name. He took the opportunity, leaned in, and over 12 years, gave that name its own meaning.

Balancing Humanity and Productivity

The hardest part of Schnell’s job, he told me, is not the logistics of community health, sales cycles, or insurance contracts. It is showing up every day, regardless of what is happening behind the scenes, in a way that inspires confidence rather than anxiety. “It’s taken me a long time to realize that the organization feeds off of me one way or another,” he said. “And doing that through thick and thin — in moments of real uncertainty — that’s really hard.”

His answer to that pressure is, characteristically, physical. Three years ago, he decided to become a triathlete. Last year, he completed a half Ironman: a one-mile swim, 55 miles on a bike, and 13 miles of running. Six-plus hours of forward motion. There is a metaphor there, too, though Schnell is too grounded to belabor it.

What He Wants You to Know

MedZed’s paying customers are insurance companies and at-risk provider groups. But the people who ultimately benefit are those whom the Medicaid system has most consistently failed — the elderly, children, people living with addiction or behavioral health challenges, people isolated from care, and people without the support networks that make navigating healthcare possible.

If you want to help, Schnell says, volunteer at a food bank. Give time through your church or a local nonprofit.“The need is huge,” he said. “We can all do something.”

His life lesson: be relentless, stay curious, and enjoy the journey, because it is the only one you get.

His leadership lesson: how you show up matters. Your team is always watching. Let joy and humor be part of every day.

From a little red wagon full of juice to a healthcare company improving lives in communities everyone else passes by, Scott Schnell has been showing up his whole life. He built a company that does the same.

If you are curious about what it takes to join Schell’s team, explore opportunities here. And meet other leaders making the world better here.