While Bill Gianoukos and Carl Nehme were heading up their last startup, a photo messaging platform called TrumpIt, Gianoukos mother was diagnosed with stage IV cancer.
The outlook was grim: Her doctor estimated she would only live another eight weeks. But Gianoukos' wife, a doctor herself specializing in pain management, had another idea. If they made some adjustments to Gianoukos' mother's care, she might be able to live longer and with a higher quality of life.
"We changed the course of action, and she lived another 26 months," Gianoukos said.
The experience was an eye-opener for Gianoukos and his repeat co-founder Nehme. That was the first time they realized that technology might be leveraged to support health care providers. Specifically, they imagined using a holistic approach to support patients with chronic illnesses—irritable bowel syndrome, back pain, insomnia and more.
"The U.S. health care system is amazing when it comes to people who need critical care," Gianoukos said. "But the current health care system is not tailored to people dealing with chronic conditions [whose care is] not geared toward life expectancy but rather toward quality of life."
On Thursday, Gianoukos and Nehme, along with co-founder Dr. Akl Fahed, unveiled Goodpath. It's a telehealth startup that aims to enable health care providers to support the chronic care needs of their patients. They had initially planned to announce Goodpath's debut later in the year, but COVID-19's effect on the health care system drove him to push up the launch. Hospital systems are already in danger of being overwhelmed, making telehealth a critical solution to keep patients out of the clinic as much as possible.
Originally envisioned as an e-commerce marketplace for wellness products, Goodpath has since pivoted to more fully embrace telehealth.
Goodpath works by first assessing individual patients online to determine whether they might be a good candidate to receive care via the platform. Then, depending on the patient's needs, Goodpath might set up virtual meetings with a dietitian, a physical therapist, a behavioral health specialist or even a yoga teacher.
The approach is based on the model of integrative medicine, which takes account of the whole patient, including all aspects of their lifestyle.
"It's the best way to solve these problems," Gianoukos said. "We built a team of technologists and medical professionals and built what would typically be done at an integrative health clinic and do that online."
Currently, Goodpath's team includes 15 full-time staffers, plus a medical advisory board of 15 clinicians led by Fahed as chief medical advisor.
To use the platform, patients pay a monthly fee, which ranges from $48 to $125 based on the services they receive. Goodpath has discounted its health care programs by 30 percent to help patients access care amid the pandemic. Gianoukos said that the online services are not currently covered by health insurance, but that's something he would like to offer in the future. So far, more than 30,000 people have completed Goodpath's online assessment, Gianoukos said.
In tandem with the launch, Goodpath also announced that it has raised a $4 million seed round led by GFC. Additional seed investors include Indicators Ventures, Switch Ventures and Blindspot Ventures.
Gianoukos and his team also unveiled Goodpath’s new Coronavirus Advice page, a regularly updated resource page filled with medically reviewed information about COVID-19, what the effects of social distancing and stress can do to the body, how to get access to care while social distancing and more.
It's worth noting that this is not Gianoukos' first rodeo. He has built and sold two other startups: HeyWire, whose B2B SaaS platform was acquired by SalesForce in 2014 and now powers SalesForce LiveMessage, and the photo messaging platform TrumpIt, which he and Nehme sold to Wayfair in 2016. Gianoukos went on to work as a senior director of product management at Wayfair for nearly two years before turning his attention to Goodpath.
Next, Gianoukos hopes Goodpath can partner with primary care groups to help physicians treat their patients with chronic conditions. Providers can reach out here.
"[Primary care physicians] have a backlog of patients that have these conditions," Gianoukos said. "They're almost at a dead end with them. Their tools are to prescribe something or send them to a specialist. Most people don't get the outcomes they need from those two solutions."
