Redefining rural healthcare

When Orion Falvey graduated from the Lundquist College of Business in 2013, he left Eugene with one goal. Inspired by a prompt from his advisor and UO professor, Ron Severson, Falvey set out to solve inequalities in the rural healthcare system by developing a scalable model that would transform the industry.

A decade later, that model became Orchid Health, earning him the 2020 Rural Health Hero Award from the Oregon Office of Rural Health and making him the UO Alumni Association’s 2023 Outstanding Young Alumni Award recipient.

“The Alumni Association has been awarding an Outstanding Young Alumni Award going all the way back to 1984. This award is given to someone who is within 15 years of graduation and has done something really interesting with their path almost immediately upon leaving Oregon," UOAA Executive Director Raphe Beck says. "This year, it was kind of an easy decision because Orion has had such a spectacular professional career in just ten years since he graduated.”

Falvey said he was particularly excited to receive the award because of the opportunities the UO provided him and how his and the university's values intersect.

“It's especially meaningful to me to receive this award [because] I feel a strong connection to the values and opportunities that UO offered me, really a commitment to innovation, to social change work, and to kind of doing things a little bit differently and meeting people where they're at,” Falvey says.

Falvey’s road to transforming healthcare in the rural space was deeply personal. Growing up, he saw first-hand the inequalities of the healthcare system when his older sister Rigel was diagnosed with cancer during high school. It was a diagnosis that took months, and ultimately led to Falvey’s family relocating to Seattle for treatment, due to the barriers of accessing local care in their rural Alaskan hometown.

“Our whole hometown rallied around us. And there is this incredible sense of community and strength in smaller towns,” Falvey says.

Though his sister has fortunately been cancer-free since 2003, Falvey still wanted to give back to rural communities like the one that was there for his family in its darkest hours. He sold everything he owned and spent more than a year couch-surfing the Pacific Northwest, driving a rickety BMW to meet with industry leaders, research health care models, enter social business challenges, and find investors.

All that hard work paid off when, in 2014, he and cofounder Oliver Alexander, BS ’14 (business administration), opened their first Orchid Health clinic in Oak Ridge, Oregon—one of the most underserved communities at the time. The organization’s mission is aimed at creating a system that is based on relationships, joy, and working toward health equity. Its small, localized teams prioritize telemedicine options and community-focused care.

“[Our success] is based on the belief that our clinics are our company,” Falvey says. “If we're building trusting relationships with patients, that leads to community health outcomes. Our first pillar [is] employee well-being, then trusting relationships, community health, and our fourth pillar is financial sustainability. And that will come almost as a byproduct of doing those other things really well.”

Next year will be Orchid’s ten-year anniversary, and the company has grown to include five clinics in rural communities across Oregon. Falvey says he’s grateful for the journey it’s taken to get to this point, and eager to expand and open more clinics across the Pacific Northwest.

“We've established a very sustainable, successful model with our five clinics and I'm excited to get to continue to be on that journey and grow our people. The everyday work still is very energizing,” he says.

—By Sage Kiernan-Sherrow, MA ’21 (journalism), UOAA copywriter/editor; video by Luke Domenick, class of 2025 (advertising), UOAA student associate