Alumni Spotlight: Kim Quigley (C’96), Founder and CEO of Onrise Care
Interview by Marissa Dai (B’26)
Kimberly “Kim” Quigley, MD graduated from Georgetown’s School of Languages and Linguistics (now College of Arts & Sciences) in 1996. Combining her 20+ years of experience in mental health care and athletics, as well as drawing inspiration from the Jesuit tradition she gained from Georgetown, Kim decided to found her own company called Onrise Care.
Please introduce yourself.
My name is Kimberly Quigley, MD. I'm a psychiatrist by training. I graduated from Georgetown in 1996, and I was a German major and a Pre-Med minor. Back then, I was in the School of Languages and Linguistics which is now FLL in the College. I have been doing mental health for about 20 years now, mostly focusing on different ways of delivering mental health care – I've been interested in it ever since my time at Georgetown. After various jobs in different sectors, I started a telehealth company in 2018, and we have focused in the last year on athlete mental health.
Was there a specific aspect or time in your Georgetown experience that influenced you to pursue entrepreneurship?
Yes, but they're not the ones that you would expect. So number one, I actually had some hard times: I had a failed walk-on attempt to the volleyball team. I went and very quickly got hurt. I knew I wasn't going to be playing a lot, so I decided to quit. At the time, I didn't really have any support to turn to, not necessarily because of Georgetown, but more so because I wasn't willing to talk to anybody about it. During that time, I was in my Problem of God class with my favorite professor at Georgetown who ended up passing away. His name was Father John Ciani, and he was a very formative professor for me. He was diagnosed with cancer in the middle of my Problem of God class but was still extremely effective at teaching us the Jesuit mission of helping other people. It taught me a ton of things about taking time to really understand what you're doing before you do it. I think that's the one piece of the Jesuit tradition that really resonated with me – to take a long time to study before entering into the world to help other people. The loss of Father Ciani was very heartbreaking for me. I had never had a class like that before, as most people haven't before they came to Georgetown. I'm 48, and I still remember it.
Another class I took was in the School of Languages and Linguistics called the Foundations of American Education. It focused on how poorly systems could be designed for the people they were serving, and that was a fascinating class. Even though they're not traditional entrepreneurship classes, it really made me think about how we design systems of care for people, regardless of their backgrounds, and how we're typically not very good at it.
What inspired you to create Onrise Care?
One of my best friends at Georgetown, who was also an athlete and pre-med, died by suicide while I was at Georgetown. We had stayed for our spring break and studied for the MCAT together in Lauinger. He died at the end of that week. It was a huge deal for our community, and it was an incredibly difficult time for everybody. I was the one who spent the most time with him that week and had no idea what he was dealing with in his life at the moment. That was when I decided to focus on mental health. At that point, I was already pre-med, but I was pretty stuck on athlete mental health from that point on.
I don't think it was specifically Georgetown, but no one really knew how to deal with that at the time. We were all pre-med, and some of us were athletes, and there was just so much pressure. No one really understood how to deal with it. And I don't think the school really did either. I mean, I don't think many schools did at that point. It's interesting, because Georgetown now has one of the most preeminent athlete mental health programs in the country, and they've pivoted beautifully in a way a lot of colleges haven't. That's really cool to see, but at the time and still in a lot of other places now, that's not the case.
How does Onrise Care play into this mission of athlete mental health?
I've always treated athletes throughout my career. The reason that I often get contacted is that I don’t sit within their university or their team, and they are concerned about absolute privacy.These are usually collegiate athletes and above who are scared to go to people who have vested interest in their future, whether it was monetary, for contracts or playing time, or any reasons like that. They just didn't want to go through their coaches, through their athletic departments, or through their teams. Somehow, people would find out about me, and then I would get to take care of these guys. And then I thought, there's gotta be a way to get to people before they're really, really sick. And what does that look like? During COVID, I had some extra time to go digging into models of how mental health care, specifically for athletes, were done all over the world. I had been in positions working for larger organizations where my whole job was designing mental health delivery, but mental health for athletes was still really far behind.
I really started to think, “Okay, we have a shortage of providers. But we also have an engagement problem. Athletes don't feel comfortable coming forward, so who could be that glue to get them into treatment or into a safe place?” At that point, I started to think through the process of using retired athletes as that glue. With athletes, one of the most crucial things is shared experience, and all retired athletes have been through almost everything that current athletes are going through. Peer-to-peer counseling is being done all across different parts of mental health from addiction to chronic kidney disease and diabetes, but not in athletics. So, you can take an athlete that’s 35 or 40 who is now transitioning into a job with a family, and they can be there to listen to current athletes. On top of that, I already had the clinicians in place to have a system of peer-to-peer counseling and licensed mental health care. Putting that all together is really what Onrise is. The things that make Onrise so valuable to organizations currently is that we're a third party. We sit outside of the organization, so we walk alongside you to keep people healthy, but we also don't have to deal with the fear that this is going to get back to their athletic departments or team staff.
How does Georgetown continue to provide you support as an alumni?
For two years, I did not raise any money as an entrepreneur. I went through as a traditional doctor and said, I'm going to make the money and pay for it as I go along. And at some point, I realized that if I don't have an infusion of capital, I'm not going to be able to grow to meet the demand that we're seeing. But I was very worried about going out to traditional fundraising sources, because of lots of things: them wanting you to grow unreasonably fast, which could compromise care, or maybe compromise your mission. That's when I reached out to the Alumni Association. I reached out to Peter Mellen, who is an Entrepreneur in Residence on Hoya Gateway. He actually accepted a meeting with me, to my surprise. I just sat down with him one day, and I said, “I'm a doctor, I'm not an entrepreneur.”
He laughed, and he was like, “Yeah, you are an entrepreneur. You've built a business that's doing really well. And that's incredible.” He encouraged me to get involved with the entrepreneurship group. Now, this was 25 years after I graduated. I had never been involved with the entrepreneurship group at Georgetown. I was pre-med when I was there, and there wasn't a lot of crossover then, so I was never involved in any business classes or anything. It's been a really awesome experience that I truly value. I went in front of the Georgetown Angel Investor Network as well to get funding. I made the finals but was not selected to pitch to the whole group. I left with invaluable advice though. I went on to implementing it immediately. Then, the second time Onrise presented we were funded, and we just closed on the largest round that GAIN has ever done in December. They're our main investors, and I hope to keep it that way.
What does the day-to-day in your life look like?
I'm up early. I have two college students and a high schooler, so I’m balancing that too. I have a junior in college, and I have a college freshman soccer player, so there's another athlete in my life, and then a sophomore in high school. So I'm up early, trying to do all my reading. A lot of my day is keeping ahead of where our industry is going and really making sure that we're positioning ourselves not only for success, but also to give the best care to everybody. Athletics changes so rapidly that it's important for me to keep up with that. I have about an hour of reading every morning. Then, I spend a good amount of each morning with our team, both our executive team and our player care team, performing oversight of the athletes that are giving peer-to-peer counseling, then oversight of every contract we have. We're a B2B business, so for example, we contract with the teams, clubs, leagues, and players associations. Then we have data review, investor meetings, and then doing a ton of troubleshooting, problem tech, all those things. It’s a little bit of everything right now, but I would say strategy and trying to stay ahead of where everything's going is my main job at this point.
What is the hardest part of your job?
I think keeping everybody's morale up. Everybody is scared– I am scared, especially in a startup environment. Everyone asks, “Am I doing the right thing? Am I taking care of people well enough, will there be enough money?” Trying to keep everybody positive and reminding them that we're in a very new space, and we're doing incredibly good work. The people that we see are people that would otherwise not engage in mental health at all because our model allows us to make people comfortable that are not comfortable with traditional mental health care. So trying to do that each day is a wonderful part of my job. It is spending a lot of time with different people, and really trying to figure out how to take that culture that I have right now with a small team and allow that to kind of disseminate down through our organization–which is something that I've had to do in medicine for many years, but it's different in business, for sure. One of our investors and the co-founder of GAIN, Devon George, is helping me think through that process. I love business, and I didn't know that I would. I think if I had been exposed to entrepreneurship at an earlier age, I would’ve pivoted sooner. So I love that there's a community that I can still be involved with, even at an older age with Georgetown. I also love the initiatives that Jeff Reid and the Georgetown Entrepreneurship program have for undergraduates in all schools, even those who are pre-med or in FLL like I was.
And the best part?
I still get to do medicine, which is fun. I still get to treat the athletes, which is what I've always loved to do, so that's tremendously fulfilling. The other thing is having athletes, the retired athletes, doing peer-to-peer counseling with current athletes and seeing how healing it is for them, to be able to join our treatment teams and say, “Wow, I did not realize what I was going through at the time like that.” It's hard; I went through the same thing. It's almost bi-directionally healing for both retired athletes and for current athletes. Just knowing that we are putting together a model for good business and that gives back is very rewarding.
Is there anything you wish more people knew about your industry?
Athletes are people first, and athletes second. About 90% of what we talk about with our athletes has nothing to do with athletics. It has to do with their lives as people. And that's just beautiful, right? We forget that, and that's really easy to forget.
Finally, what is one piece of advice you would give to any student who might be interested in health care entrepreneurship?
Don't rule out any ideas. Your ideas are as important as anybody else's ideas. Health care is full of companies, but it's not full of ideas. Innovative ways to give care are still left to be had. Georgetown has an incredibly strong School of Health, led by Dean Christopher King. And I think I would look into some of the opportunities that are there to both get involved in the entrepreneurship community and to get involved in the School of Health because that's something that I did not have. It was just kind of a straight pre-med track or straight nursing, but it didn't really deal with the delivery of care, and I think those are really, really awesome resources at Georgetown today to make a difference and love what you do.
Learn more about Onrise Care here: https://onrise.care/