DispatchHealth Raises $33 Million To Bring More House Calls To Patients
DispatchHealth, which provides mobile and in-home health services, announced that it had raised $33 million in Series B funding on Tuesday. The latest round is led by prior backers Questa Capital and Alta Partners and adds Echo Health Ventures, which will have a seat on the company’s board.
DispatchHealth aims to reduce ER visits among the 100,000 patients it expects to serve this year and anticipates a savings of more than $100 million in direct medical spending in 2019. It accomplishes this by combining mobile tech with an old-school service: the house call. The company dispatches to its customers’ homes nurse practitioners and physician assistants with emergency medicine experience, armed with mobile blood-work labs, nebulizers, antibiotics and about 70% of the standard equipment found in emergency rooms, to diagnose and treat patients
“I started to think about the pricing of what we were doing in the ER and thought there was another way to leverage that skill set, in a much lower cost setting,” Dr. Mark Prather told Forbes. “It’s really an older care model, a house call with higher acuity services than you would typically find in a doctor with a stethoscope and a black bag.”
Prather worked as an emergency room doctor for more than 20 years before cofounding DispatchHealth in 2013. During that time, observations of aging family members and his own read of the research suggested that geriatric populations may benefit more from care in the home setting rather than in a hospital for certain conditions inspired him to found the company.
According to the CDC, three in four Americans age 65 and older are living with multiple chronic conditions. Prather says his company’s platform, which primarily serves Medicare and Medicare Advantage patients, complements rather than substitutes for traditional care and is aimed at older patients and those that struggle with access to healthcare. DispatchHealth visits will cost patients without insurance on average $200-$300, patients with insurance typically spend $50 or less, a savings over the average spend of $1,917 on an emergency room visit in 2018, according to the Healthcare Cost Institute.
DispatchHealth’s latest round of funding will be used to scale the company’s operations and expand its 11 market footprint across eight states to 25 markets over the next few years. The money will also help the company prepare patients for multiple-day treatments in their own homes so they can avoid a lengthy hospital visit.
“Typically we’ve focused on an intervention in the home that’s a single episode, designed to reduce unnecessary ER utilization,” Prather said. “In the future, there are instances where it may be beneficial to extend that care for a few days.”
Prather anticipates that burgeoning in-home ecosystem of care will function alongside other providers and grow even more personal.
“Geriatric acute care has become more personal over the years, increasingly we’ll see a lot more care delivered in the home,” said Prather. “Our growing senior population is a group that often faces mobility limitations and can benefit from the safe, effective and convenient care that in-home treatment provides.”