When Tami Wilson-Ciranna joined Curative in April 2020, the assignment came with what now looks like a spectacularly optimistic assumption: three months.
“I met with Fred on a Tuesday and I started on Thursday,” she recalls. Fred Turner, Curative’s co-founder and CEO, was leading the company’s response to COVID-19, and Wilson-Ciranna—who had retired and become bored—figured she would help with the pandemic. Three months became three years. Curative ultimately administered 36 million COVID tests.
Then came the harder question: What was phase two?
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Curative wanted to remain in health care, but its leaders concluded that influencing care meant becoming the payer. The result was an employer health plan built around zero deductibles and zero copays, with members encouraged to complete an early baseline visit and engage in preventive care. Curative rolled roughly $500 million into starting the insurance business.
For Wilson-Ciranna, now president and CFO, the experiment is increasingly about what the data says. Medical loss ratios, provider costs, network economics, member behavior and wellness programs all come under scrutiny. Assumptions are expendable: Curative originally thought one health plan would suffice; market feedback convinced it to offer three.credentialing that Wilson-Ciranna says went from six months to 24–48 hours.
Perhaps that helps explain her operating philosophy: build, measure, fix—and keep moving. For the coming year, that means supporting Curative’s capital needs, expanding its provider network, entering additional states and adding members.
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CFOTL: Tell us about Curative today. It’s very different from the Curative you arrived at. Would that be correct?
Wilson-Ciranna: Absolutely. When I arrived, it was a COVID company. We had one lab. We grew very fast during COVID and ended up with three labs, a bunch of locations, and 36 million COVID tests. We were looking at, what was phase two for Curative? We really wanted to move health. But in order to move health, you really need to be the payer, because what people pay for, people do, and what they don’t pay for, people don’t do. That’s how we came to be at Curative. It’s employer large-group health insurance—zero deductible, zero copay. We want people to engage in care.
CFOTL: What made that pivot to health insurance possible from a financial standpoint?
Wilson-Ciranna: We had done a capital raise early on in COVID, and after that we were pretty much self-funded. Our investors believed in us and what we were doing, so we used some of those funds to fund this insurance startup. We probably rolled $500 million over to start the insurance entity. Insurance entities are not easy to start. You have to have a significant amount of capital to get and maintain your A-minus rating from AM Best.
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CFOTL: Curative has been putting AI directly into the member experience. Is it creating meaningful value there today?
Wilson-Ciranna: AI is amazing. Across the company, people have definitely embraced AI. One example would be credentialing. Credentialing was traditionally outsourced. We built a system with an agent that now does all the credentialing. It’s very automated, very fast. It’s 24 to 48 hours to get someone credentialed. Everybody loves the agent—it’s responsive, updates the provider directory right away and gets back to you.
CFOTL: What are your priorities as CFO for the coming 12 months?
Wilson-Ciranna: Continue to support the capital of the company, really grow our network, continue to grow into other states and add more members. People need to be able to engage in preventive health and take care of themselves.