"I Know How the Story Ends:" Interview with Paytient Founder & CEO, Brian Whorley

For over a decade, Brian Whorley worked at a non-profit, community-owned 400-bed hospital in Columbia, Missouri and loved every minute. In reflecting on his time there and the needs he witnessed within our healthcare system, Brian says,“I felt a great deal of pride being a very small part of a place full of really talented, mission-driven people who provided great care during life’s most uncertain moments. The challenge is to satisfy a near infinite need with finite resources — how our country figures that out is consequential.”Fortunately, lightning struck one afternoon as Brian rode his bike along the Missouri River. He returned home with the idea to help expand access and affordability at lower cost; an idea that would lead to the founding of Paytient. The company was first to market with a triple-sided product, the Paytient app, that 1) allows employers to pay less for lower cost health plans, 2) enables employees to more easily pay for care at time of service (without interest or fees), and 3) help providers to cure uncompensated care and receive payment in full at the time of service.Since founding the company in 2018, he has been walking toward a single North Star: not just helping people pay for care but to help people & health plans pay less for that care.Today, Paytient works with nearly six thousand employers, insurers, and providers, serves over 26 million members, and has raised more than a hundred million dollars in capital.What drew me to this conversation wasn’t the scale of what Brian has built — it was how he thinks about building it. We got into what it means to operate from a place of deep conviction when most of the world can’t see what you see yet, how Brian feeds his soul and his spirituality so he can show up as his best self, the tension of transitioning from founder to CEO, how he’s learning to release control, and why he believes the worry-driven voices in our heads are almost never the ones worth listening to. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 90percentmental.substack.com