For digital health startups, there is always a period of time before investors get seriously interested where company leaders have to prove their worth.
For Ben Forrest and the rest of his team at Olio Health – a post-acute care platform – that time has come and gone. And Forrest is happy to say hard work paid off.
“There’s that element of scale before the investor community really starts to say, ‘This is a thing,’ there’s product market fit, there is outcome data that’s impactful,’” Forrest told Home Health Care News. “We’ve been working hard to get to this moment in time. Not only will a capital investment have an impact on our business, but most importantly, take what we’ve done, scale it and drive outcomes for patients.”
That’s been Olio Health’s guiding light from day one, Forrest said. About five years post-launch, the Indianapolis-based Olio Health is now in half of the country. This week, it announced a $13 million Series A.
Olio’s software is designed to help valued-based care payers and providers work to improve population health measures by improving communication and workflow on its digital platform.
“Our company wants to be the glue for clinicians and social services teams in a post-acute infrastructure,” Forrest said.
Olio Health works with value-based care entities that have large post-acute footprints. Forrest and Olio have gone against the grain, in a way, from how startups traditionally work with these players.
“I think the playbook says, ‘Work with some, not all,’” Forrest said. “[Hypothetically, you’re supposed to] build a preferred network of home health, skilled nursing, hospice providers, etcetera. Our value proposition has always been that with software and with technology, it should be easy to work with everyone. That’s how we run our business.”
In fact, post-acute providers don’t even have to pay for Olio’s product. If a payer, health system or physician group wants to build a digital workflow ecosystem with their post-acute footprint, Olio allows that entity to invite whomever they would like onto that platform.
“That’s enabled us to get some pretty great user-base feedback and clients, relative to the big boys of the world in home health,” Forrest said.
With the new investment, Forrest said the company plans to broaden the geographical footprint to more areas and grow the company’s teams in new and existing areas.
“From a product perspective, we are getting really good at creating synergy around patients, and we want to continue to develop our roadmap there,” he said. “[Continue to focus on] more features that are centered around how to quickly and effectively give post-acute clinicians and health system teams the ability to work together.”
Capital will also be set aside for more integration, Forrest said, like electric monitoring systems for both home health and skilled nursing facilities.
One particular connection that Olio believes has a lot of value is looking at the relationship between acute and post-acute teams.
“We’ve collected some tremendous insights in our product and found that when acute users — whether that’s a health system or physician group — works with a post-acute team, we can see that when the engagement between those two entities is high, the potential for a readmission goes significantly down,” he said.
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