Two Wonks. One Spectacular Vision

How did Brad Smith and Bill Frist create CareBridge, the fastest-growing company in America? By aiming to solve not one problem, but two: how to rein in health care costs, and how to deliver better care.

- By Bill Saporito

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 Care Bridge to care for Medicaid patients who receive home and community-based services.