No one ever told him, Dr. Ikenna Okezie, CEO and Co-Founder at Somatus, he was ‘different’ – at least not his white neighbors.
A pivotal childhood experience came when children were repeatedly called out of a swimming pool as he and his brothers ran to the community pool in their father’s apartment complex.
A pivotal childhood experience occurred when the neighborhood children were repeatedly called out of a swimming pool when he and his brothers ran to the community pool in their father’s apartment complex, Dr. Okezie wriote in an article for USA Today.
In his writing, he captures the confusion: “I was in elementary school when I learned my skin color meant something. I was confused. Had we done something wrong? Maybe they didn’t know we lived in the apartment complex and had a right to use the pool. It hurt.”
This was Dr. Okezie’s first direct understanding of racism, an awareness that would grow into a lifelong understanding of how it follows people into every corner of existence, fueling inequality.
“At that time, I didn’t know this would be one of many lived Black experiences I would have. I didn’t know that this was the type of experience many people of color would have during their life – be it at a pool, in a classroom, while applying for a job or seeking medical care.”
He was still native the fact that his bigotry was the same type of many people of color would have during their life – from pools to classrooms or while applying for a job or seeking medical care.
Decades later, that boy became Dr. Ikenna Okezie, founder and CEO of Somatus — a $2.5 billion health care “unicorn” revolutionizing kidney care. Its mission is to improve the quality of life for kidney patients by providing access to information and resources, specifically offering in-home dialysis care for those with chronic kidney disease.
“Our mission is to be the world’s best provider of integrated kidney and cardiovascular care” He told Black Ventures. “We are bringing that mission to life, one patient at a time.”
But the journey he had to learn to overcome the race and the migrant status that would always hang over him.
Foundations Forged in Detroit
Born in Nigeria, Dr. Okezie immigrated to the United States with his family at age 2. He was raised in Detroit
Medicine called early due to his family’s love of medicine. His attraction to the field was influenced by his father and elder brother, both physicians. But one event in seventh grade cemented Okezie’s desire to explore it.
One day, after his physician father was horrified to learn that his sons were riding their bikes without helmets, he was determined to provide a lasting impression and lesson.
When Dr. Okezie recounts the graphic lesson, he also found a morbid curiosity.
“Then he showed us images I’ll never forget: an X-ray of a child with a fractured skull,” he explained in USA Today. “As my father explained what anatomy was, my eyes followed the fracture lines. It was the first time I had ever seen anything like that."
Between the X-ray and pain of that unknown child made him determined to medically help people. “In that moment, I knew I wanted to help.”
DaVita & Ugly Truths
At Yale, he majored in economics while captaining the wrestling team, becoming the 1994 Scholar-Athlete of the Year and a Rhodes and Marshall Scholar finalist. He then entered Harvard Medical School in 1994, earning high honors and honors in all clinical rotations.
But three and a half years into his medical degree, the pull to follow his interest in business became irresistible.
“I knew I wanted formal training in the field so I could combine entrepreneurship with medicine,” Okezie explained to Africans In America. With the encouragement of his HMS advisors, he submitted an application to Harvard Business School where he obtained an MBA in 1999 with honours.”
He ultimately graduated with a joint degree in medicine and business from Harvard Medical School and Harvard Business School. Instead of caring for one patient at a time, he sought a career with impact at scale. Okezie wanted to be a different kind of practitioner.
His hiring at DaVita in 2010, however, revealed how broken the industry truly was. There, he led all strategic, operational and financial management for a $1 billion business unit with over 4,000 employees and 600 contracted nephrologists.
“I was able to be a part of a team that improved care for patients, allowing them to live the best lives they could,” he describes a mission with clear limits, he went on to tell Black Ventures. “Still, I was frustrated seeing patients receive treatment only after their kidneys were already failing. I saw inequities and racial disparity: Black patients and other patients of colour disproportionately affected by kidney disease, living on dialysis, waiting for a transplant.”
The scale of the problem was national. In the United States, kidney disease affects 15% of the adult population. He saw glaring racial disparities in the numbers: Black Americans make up 35% of all dialysis patients despite being 13% of the population. The financial burden is also immense, with some patients paying as much as $15,000 per month.
“Changing this systemic problem of racism in the medical establishment requires acknowledging the reality that many people of color have a lived experience that makes them distrust and mistrust the system itself,” he writes pointing to unconscionable programs like the Tuskegee syphilis study and the case of Henrietta Lacks.
“There’s a long history of racism against Black patients and communities of colour. Building trust will take time and effort.”
This deep-seated inequity, rooted in historical betrayal, became a core problem he felt compelled to solve.
Throughout his work, another troubling theme emerged from discussions with nurses, social workers and dialysis patients: Many patients were uneducated about their disease and, more importantly, their treatment options.
He discovered that despite being a more patient-friendly solution, most patients were not offered home dialysis as a treatment option, nor were they educated about transplantation as an alternative to dialysis.
These realizations compelled him to solve the problem his own way. He left the company in 2015.
Somatus
After leaving DaVita, he teamed up with Anthony Welters, a Tysons-based attorney, investor, and entrepreneur to launch Somatus in 2016. The current system primarily treated patients after their kidneys had already failed, focusing on costly dialysis rather than early intervention to slow or prevent disease progression. They aimed to flip that.
“I wanted to start a business that focused on delaying kidney disease progression and keeping people as healthy as possible,” Dr. Okezie explained to Fairfax County Economic Development Authority.
There is also a heavy focus on health education.
Okezie says, “Learning is personal. [That’s why] we find the right person on our team, it may be a nurse, a tech, a dietitian or the nephrologist, to communicate information to the patient,” he told Forbers. By educating 99% of patients, Somatus exceeds the national average for patient kidney education by nearly 70%.
In 2017, Somatus accepted a contract to manage traditional dialysis services for Virginia hospitals. While not at the scale he wanted, it created crucial revenue and built the company’s credibility.
But their big breakthrough came in 2018 with their first health plan contract—but it generated just 10% of revenue. By December 2019, Okezie faced what a Harvard Business School case would later identify as his defining decision: pursue the stable, traditional dialysis business or risk everything on the innovative preventive model. He took the gamble.
By 2021, it paid off as Somatus secured a strategic partnership with Anthem (now Elevance Health), gaining access to millions of patients. The company's results spoke for themselves as 35% of Somatus patients used home dialysis versus 9.7% nationally, with dramatically reduced hospital admissions.
By 2022, Somatus served over 150,000 members across various healthcare plans. That same year they secured over $325 million in Series E funding. This deal was ranked as one of the biggest healthcare VC deals of 2022, valuing the unicorn startup at over $2.5 billion.
“My goal for Somatus has always been to create a healthcare model that could be delivered to large populations of people in a way that was creative, innovative, and scalable,” he said on his website.
Somatus is just beginning, but if its performance thus far is any indication – including reductions in hospital readmissions and average hospital stays to 6.5 days versus 11 days nationally – a revolution is on the way.
So, what will it take to revolutionize kidney care? Forbes asked Dr. Okezie, “It will take a committed team that can withstand the heat from competition while trying to disrupt multi-billion dollar kidney care incumbents along with customers progressive enough and willing to take a chance on new care models and early stage companies like Somatus.”
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