Fresh off a 2020 fundraise and fueled in part by the Covid-19 pandemic, a Kenwood-based health care/femtech startup is once again expanding its footprint in the U.S.
Ms.Medicine, which specializes in concierge primary care for women, is expanding into the St. Louis market this fall — its sixth location overall. Several more offices are in the works as the company navigates its hyper growth phase.
The news comes roughly 18 months after Ms.Medicine announced a multimillion dollar Series A in early 2020. The exact amount was not disclosed. Since then, the company has tripled in size — it had just two live practices at the time — and doubled its employee count to 10.
Besides St. Louis — Amy Roberts M.D. & Associates will open in October — two more offices, in Denver, Colo., and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., will open by February 2022, said Cameron McGregor, Ms.Medicine chief operating officer. Contracts are pending in four additional unnamed cities in Florida, Pennsylvania and Colorado.
Ms.Medicine had planned to grow its footprint with the investment, but the most recent push has been accelerated heavily by the Covid-19 pandemic. McGregor said Ms.Medicine practices have experienced a huge uptick, a phenomenon the team has labeled, “the never again patient.”
The concept of concierge care, she added, could just as easily gone by the wayside, given the pandemic’s impact on discretionary spending, particularly discretionary health care spending. Ms.Medicine’s average membership fee is $2,750 a year. But people, McGregor said, were “clamoring for care.”
“Through no fault of their own, health systems stopped elective surgeries and people couldn’t see their doctors in person, but patients were still getting sick,” she said. “They still needed medical care, but they couldn’t get it in a way that they had become accustomed to, so they really started looking at our model. It was driving patients toward us, and as it was driving patients toward us, it started driving providers toward us as well.”
Ms.Medicine, launched in 2018 by Cincinnati’s Dr. Lisa Larkin, specializes in concierge primary care, meaning patients receive access to their provider 24/7 and pay a retainer or membership fee for the service, versus billing against insurance or Medicare.
That allows providers to spend more time with patients, McGregor said, around 30 minutes, or up to an hour for new visits.
The model is built for women, although the clinics do offer care to men.
“I have seen really endless potential with where to go with Ms.Medicine,” Larkin said last year.
With each new location, Ms.Medicine works to find the right provider fit first. The company makes the initial investment to get the clinic off the ground, offering operations and management support. Ms.Medicine doesn’t take equity in the practice, McGregor said, but providers pay a portion of membership fees collected each year.
Besides Cincinnati and Miamisburg locally, Ms.Medicine providers are also based in Holland, Mich.; Naples, Fla.; and Fairfax, Va., which marked the first extension of the Ms.Medicine brand in 2019.
The 2020 capital raise has helped the company round out its operations, marketing and recruitment teams, McGregor said.
Once a contract is signed, for example, a recruiter helps the physician build a patient base. In St. Louis, for example, more than a dozen patients have already committed to joining the practice, which is still a few weeks away from its debut.
“I think that shows how hungry patients are for this kind of care,” she said.
