Courtney Bragg, MBA | 2024 Emerging Leaders in Healthcare

Courtney Bragg, MBA

I grew up in South Florida in a majority-minority high school and was fascinated by the divisions and opportunities that dominated my high school, Cypress Bay High School, in Weston, Florida, one of the largest in the U.S. My favorite teacher, Dianne Farbiarz, opened the world and, therein, my complacency during English, both in the level of reading and writing rigor she expected but also because she pushed me to give back to my community. I planned to study business at Washington University in St. Louis but transferred to urban studies and education my freshman year after having student-taught, thanks to Ms. Farbiarz.

Now my work has come full circle. After earning my MBA at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, I co-founded Fabric Health, which exists to improve the health and well-being of families by partnering with health plans to provide trusted, last-mile engagement to their hardest-to-reach members.

Please describe a turning point in your career — an event, a eureka moment, an encounter or a salient piece of advice from someone.

After college, I was an early team member at KIPP DC College Preparatory in Washington, D.C., and founded the college counseling department.The school had the worst college graduation rates in the country, according to the Gates Foundation. Even though we were busy ensuring our students graduated and had the right postsecondary path for them, we hosted HIV screening. Ninety percent of the students got tested. Our approach was simple but not easy: Get the most popular student to get tested first. He set the bar. Everyone followed.

Healthcare has so much to learn from the user experience and insights in education. Fabric is predicated on these kinds of insights, trust building and teachable moments that have a clear, demonstrable impact
and return.

What are you top two priorities as a leader in you organization and in healthcare?

First, hiring great teammates and supporting them. Second, shifting the paradigm from ineffective, legacy outreach of sending mail to outdated addresses and call centers autodialing while someone is in the middle of a shift at work to one of meeting families where they are, in the time they have and listening to understand their needs and priorities to create trusted, longitudinal relationships that improve their health and well-being.

If you could chnage on thing about U.S. healthcare, what would it be?

I would radically change the incentives. U.S. healthcare is a massive, profitable business, but it works terribly for most patients, particularly in the Black and Latino neighborhoods I’ve spent my career working in. We make it too complex, too difficult to navigate and too unfocused on who the actual customers are: patients and plan members.

Name a book or article that everyone in healthcare should read.

“When Breath Name Becomes Air” humanizes the agony of illness, and “There Are No Children Here,”decidedly not a healthcare book, about poor families’ lives that should be required reading for everyone taking care of people who are dealing with Medicaid.

How do you strike the right work-life balance?

I don’t know that I do. I work a lot. Co-founding a start-up is all-consuming (it’s also filled with tremendous learning and gratification), but laundromats are busiest on the weekends, so I certainly don’t work a 9-to-5. I can’t say the system has to operate around those it serves and then work Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. But I do this work in deep partnership with my cofounder, Allister Chang, and a remarkable team building trusted, last-mile engagement to serve our country’s busiest families.

I have an incredible husband and family (my three sisters and seven nieces and nephews), along with lifelong friends who keep me grounded and sane. And then there’s always boxing and walks with my husband and dog, Pumpernickel.

If you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?

Nelson Mandela. Having lived in Johannesburg in 2016 and seeing South Africa’s diverse promise, as well as its deep inequities and all the country has been through and could be — Mandela’s impact is everywhere