By Deborah Borfitz 

October 15, 2026 | A startup precision medicine management company is “cracking the code” on how to make cutting-edge treatments more accessible to patients and at the same time financially sustainable for all stakeholders. The approach of 3-year-old Medzown collapses the boundaries between clinical care and clinical trials to create a unified care pathway, according to founder and CEO Jennifer Levin Carter, M.D. 

If her name sounds familiar, it may be because the first company she started nearly two decades ago, N-of-One (now owned by Qiagen), pioneered the field of molecular oncology decision support. It ended up writing the somatic sequencing and clinical interpretation reports for major diagnostic labs, national health networks, and world-renowned cancer centers, says Carter. 

An internist by training, Carter practiced only briefly before embarking on a quest to create a more unified health system that tailors medical care to the needs of individuals. The rise in expensive but highly targeted specialty drugs, including cell and gene therapies, enlarged the mission to better managing the associated costs by connecting the dots between pharma companies, covered employees, healthcare providers, and the organizations (e.g., health plans and self-insured employer groups) at risk for the cost of care, she says.   

Medzown became the “elegant solution,” aligning the financial and quality incentives of all parties while maintaining a highly patient-centric focus. “This is what we wanted to create ... [and] should be the future of healthcare,” says Carter.   

Key features of the model include algorithms that scan claims data to identify patients at risk of failing standard treatments, precision medicine scientists to review all flagged cases, personal navigators to assist and support patients on their care journey, and attention to high-cost specialty drug claims through partnerships with major insurers and stop-loss providers. “We are basically building a platform to democratize precision medicine, advanced therapeutics, and clinical trials.” 

Cancer is a primary focus due to its high prevalence and financial impact. But Medzown works across 5,000 diseases, including rare, neurodegenerative, autoimmune, and cardiometabolic conditions, she says. “We’re pretty disease-agnostic.” 

Once Medzown identifies patients it believes would have a high probability of success with the support of the company’s “first and last mile high-touch” model, it surrounds those individuals with a team of precision medicine scientists, navigators, and clinical trial experts to manage the entire trial enrollment process in collaboration with their existing healthcare team, says Carter. The service is a never-before-seen approach to accessing care that is highly valued by health plan members, she adds.   

Patient/Cost Dilemma 

Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, Carter was initially a consultant for financial service companies where she sought investment opportunities in the pharma and biotech sectors. This was in the early days of targeted therapies and inspired her interest in cancer drug development and the molecular diagnostics directing the treatment of patients—at least those who could get access to the testing, as she believes all patients should, she says. 

“It became very clear to me that the whole field of oncology was going to change ... but we were not trained at all for it in medical school,” says Carter, getting back to the impetus for starting N-of-One. Even if patients had plenty of education and access to major centers of excellence for next-generation sequencing, their doctor didn’t necessarily know what to make of the complex genetic data or all the relevant clinical trials being conducted.  

Just prior to launching Medzown, Carter served as managing director at Blue Venture Fund, the venture capital arm of the Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) system, where getting patients the highest quality care versus the cost dilemma surrounding specialty drugs and cell and gene therapies was an area of her research. How do we get patients the best care but in a way that is financially sustainable? The cost-of-care problem has only escalated with the expansion of these therapies to non-oncological conditions, including rare, neurodegenerative, and autoimmune diseases. 

Making these “amazing precision drugs” available to patients who need them requires that the financial burden be manageable for payers, providers, and patients alike, she says. The economic outcomes generated by Medzown's model directly support that mission. 

Unique Business Model  

For health plans and self-insured employers, the goal is not only better outcomes at a lower cost but a better member experience, says Carter. For pharma and any organization engaged in drug development, Medzown creates awareness and access to clinical trials among a largely untapped pool of patients to speed up referrals and enrollment and thereby reduce the high cost of daily operational overhead and missed timelines.  

Medzown operates on a unique and unbiased business model, Carter says, adding that the company does not talk publicly about how it generates revenue. But the savings potential, for those at risk for the cost of care, comes in part from the shift in financial responsibility to pharma companies when patients are treated in a clinical trial. In the context of cancer that amounts to greater than $80,000 in savings per enrolled patient. 

Current partners that have been publicly disclosed are BCBS of Massachusetts and the financial service and insurance company, Sun Life. Identified members are engaged by Medzown using co-branded materials with their health plan partners, says Carter. Members can also reach out to Medzown directly or be referred to the service by their provider.  

“We work closely with providers and provider networks and support them in their work,” she says, noting that doctors are seeing patients continuously with little breathing room between appointments all day long. Under the best of circumstances, they rarely have the ability and time to know the detail of every open trial for every patient in their panel.  

The company has “very high expectations” of its rapidly growing team of navigators and precision medicine scientists, says Carter, as the work is sophisticated and requires specialized knowledge as well as a high dose of compassion. “We’ve got thousands of patients in the queue that are in different stages of going through our program.” 

The service is national in scale, but Medzown has some clients from outside the country as well, Carter reports. People of all ages and socioeconomic circumstances are served. Feedback from members to date has been “unsolicited excitement” and gratitude for helping them better understand their disease and the breadth of treatment opportunities.  

Medzown has no direct competition, although for decades companies have been trying to get people into clinical trials using modalities ranging from digital matching to decentralized trials, she adds. In this regard, the novelty of the Medzown approach is that it is tackling recruitment through the lens of health plans and self-insured employers as a covered member benefit rather than acting as a vendor for a study sponsor or contract research organization (CRO). 

Carter encourages payers, as well as sponsors and CROs, to join in her mission to make better, faster access to cutting-edge treatments and clinical trials a reality for patients with complex, high-cost conditions. “We are all aligned in wanting it to be successful, she says. “After all, we all want this for the people we love.”