In November, MedArrive had a significant jumping-off point established. It was worth $25 million, raised through a Series A and led by the venture capital fund Section 32.
Its goal was to make “tens of thousands” of at-home visits in the next year, CEO Dan Trigub told Home Health Care News at the time.
It has found multiple ways to do just that. But like many other home-based care companies, it has also used COVID-19 as a catalyst. For instance, a recent partnership with the health plan Health Net has allowed it to vaccinate more individuals from the virus in their homes.
That allows MedArrive to vaccinate vulnerable individuals, for starters. But it also sets the company up to eventually send more workers into more homes to provide more care.
“We quickly pivoted and leveraged our platform to deliver on this really good use case that can deliver a lot of value to a plan,” Trigub told HHCN. “We really see this as a launching pad, though, proving that we can execute, deliver really good results and high NPS scores and show that our infrastructure works well. And then from here, it’s about what more we can do. How do we move on to higher, more clinical services that we can execute on?”
The New York-based MedArrive is an at-home care provider and coordinator. It works with health systems and health plans to enable at-home care, leveraging non-traditional workers on the way, such as emergency medical services (EMS) professionals.
That staffing model is unique. A few providers in the field have used it, however, to shield themselves from the ongoing staffing crisis.
Medically Home – the high-acuity-care-at-home enabler – also works with Global Medical Response to utilize EMS workers.
MedArrive already has nationwide capabilities, but its “Tier 1” markets are currently Florida, Texas, California and North Carolina.
The company’s goal is to build on use cases, like its vaccination program with Health Net, and also on its active partnerships. That includes the one it has with the data-science company Spect to bring retinal screening solutions into the home.
“We’ve made a ton of progress since [November],” Trigub said. “We’ve announced our relationship with Molina Healthcare and a few others. We’ve grown our team significantly. We’ve brought on some just amazing folks all across different backgrounds, primarily from large health care organizations like Epic and Optum. Now, it’s about continuing expansion – growing our geographic footprint and continuing to execute on partnerships.”
The goal is to be in 12 to 18 markets by the end of the year, Trigub said.
“But again, we can launch anywhere. It’s really about finding good opportunities, because we’re not going direct to consumer and spending money on marketing or customer acquisition,” he said. “It’s really about finding good partners who we can build with and run these programs for. That’s kind of how we think about it is finding good, marquee partners like large health plans and health systems, and then going from there.”
MedArrive also is happy with the subtle swing back to in-person care as the pandemic somewhat wanes.
As a company founded in the midst of the pandemic – December of 2020 – it is not as honed in on telehealth as other companies launched around the same time may be.
It recognizes the vital importance of telehealth, and how it can maximize efficiency, but really wants to deliver on care that is being conducted in person.
“Telehealth 1.0 was just a true telehealth visit, and what 2.0 is, is really what MedArrive is about,” Trigub said. “It’s leveraging telemedicine, still incorporating that into the workflow of a patient visit, but then us being that physical bridge – being the eyes and ears of that telehealth provider – because, you know, there’s so much more that we can execute on and deliver with our providers in the home paired with telemedicine. … It’s here to stay, and it’s going to be here for the foreseeable future, but there needs to be more to it.”
Moving forward, MedArrive wants to be involved in all sorts of partnerships.
But one area in particular is behavioral health, which many other at-home care providers have begun experimenting with over the last couple of years.
“Behavioral health is going to continue to be important in the future,” Trigub said. “But we don’t want to recreate the wheel where there’s no reason to, we want to layer [partners abilities’] into what we do.”
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