Company leader
Ben Forrest
Co-Founder and CEO
Olio
Ben Forrest is co-founder and chief executive of Olio, a care-coordination software company in Indianapolis, Indiana. He spent 14 years in the medical device industry, including work with Stryker's spinal products, before starting Olio in 2018.
Working With Doctors in Joint Replacement Bundles
Before Olio, Forrest sold spinal products for Stryker, the medical equipment maker. He became interested in care collaboration while working with physicians in Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement, a Medicare bundled-payment program that paid hospitals one price for a joint replacement and had them split it with post-acute providers.
He heard frustrations from the doctors that patients' post-acute care plans were often outside their hands. "These guys didn't even know where their patients were, let alone how they were doing," he told Skilled Nursing News in 2019. "You now have this game of episodic care," he said. "So you've got most times 90 days, and there's a lot of clinicians that touch that patient across their journey. Unfortunately, all those clinicians are siloed in different environments."
He started a consulting firm focused on care collaboration and left Stryker in 2018 to build Olio full time.
Launching Olio With Two Hospital Partners
Forrest and Eddie Keever co-founded Olio in February 2018. Keever was vice president of product integration when Olio announced its Series B in 2025. Forrest told the Indianapolis Business Journal in 2020 that he decided to start a health care software company after years of talking with hospitals and nursing homes about how they communicated. "The lay person just assumes that nursing homes and hospitals work together in harmony," he said. "The reality is, this has not been the case."
The first version went into 15 nursing homes through the physician group Central Indiana Orthopedics. Olio launched with its first two hospital partners, both in the Indianapolis area, in January 2019. As of 2019, hospitals paid for Olio's software, with rates that varied by the scope of tracking and the size of the hospital footprint, and skilled nursing facilities used it free.
In 2019, nursing home staff completed surveys of about 15 seconds on how a resident was doing, and the whole care team, including the hospital physicians, saw the answers in one place. Forrest compared Olio to Slack, the workplace messaging tool. By 2020 Olio's app also had an escalate button: if a nursing home resident spiked a fever, a nurse could press it to reach the hospital's doctors.
Scaling Through the Pandemic
By May 2020, more than 300 nursing homes across Indiana were using Olio with hospitals, including Indiana University Health, Community Health Network, Hancock Regional Health, Union Health in Terre Haute, Indiana, and Deaconess Health in Evansville, Indiana.
IU Health had started with a pilot at three hospitals and, after the coronavirus pandemic began, extended Olio to all 16 of its hospitals in a week or less, an IU Health executive told the Indianapolis Business Journal.
Funding and Company Size
Olio raised $2.5 million in March 2019, mostly from angel investors along with Innovative Ventures. Forrest put the company's revenue at $1 million in May 2020. In May 2025 the Indianapolis Business Journal reported an $11 million Series B round led by Fulcrum Equity Partners with Mutual Capital Partners taking part, following a $13 million Series A round led by Fulcrum in 2022. Olio told the Indianapolis Business Journal then that it had fewer than 50 employees.
Forrest on Workflow and Transitions of Care
On the HLTH podcast in December 2025, Forrest discussed coordinating care across more than 100 care sites. In an August 2026 Skilled Nursing News interview sponsored by Olio, Forrest said "the biggest shift is that technology has to fit into existing workflows instead of creating new ones." He added that "transitions of care" is "still not part of the everyday language many skilled nursing operators use," a takeaway from a summit he organized with skilled nursing leaders.