The chronic disease-reversal telehealth startup by CoverMyMeds co-founder Matt Scantland is extending its reach to lower-income populations and brick-and-mortar settings in northern Ohio – a partnership model expected to spread.
AndHealth will offer specialty care for certain chronic conditions at eight of the 11 clinic sites of Third Street Family Health Services, a federally qualified community health center based in Mansfield. That adds to the startup's original client base of large self-insured employers and more recently small and mid-size businesses through the Ohio Chamber of Commerce.
"This is about living our health equity value and making what we think is going to be transformative world-class care ... available to everyone," Scantland told Columbus Inno. "We can actually use the right tool for the job, and we can extend the reach of Third Street."
Columbus-based AndHealth cares for migraine and chronic autoimmune conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, gastrointestinal and skin conditions. Its specialists and health coaches via telehealth will coordinate with primary care clinicians at eight of Third Street's 11 sites for lab tests and other in-person care, including in Mansfield, Shelby, Bucyrus and Ashland.
"So many times in healthcare, we've thought about channels – as in, are you in virtual care or on-premise care – and I think that's a false choice," Scantland said.
More than 60% of Third Street's patients are covered by Medicaid, and another 10% qualify for its income-based sliding fee scale. Last year the center served 20,000 individuals, averaging about four visits per year, CEO Peggy Anderson said.
About 800 of those patients have migraine or autoimmune conditions, not enough to support a full-time staff rheumatologist or neurologist. Until now Third Street could only refer them to specialists, who are scarce.
"Folks don't follow up, they can't get in, they may not be taken if they have Medicaid or no insurance, or not good insurance," Anderson said. "Maybe they just don't follow up because they know they can't afford that co-pay."
Nationally, half of specialty referrals from community health centers never get completed, Scantland said.
"We don't have the internal expertise to be able to provide those services," Anderson said. "We want them to not be the patients that fall through the cracks just because we couldn't wrap around them."
Yet untreated, those conditions lead to an outsized portion of overall medical claims costs, such as ER visits for an acute migraine attack.
"It's going downhill faster, they're in more pain or more discomfort or not able to work – so it affects their whole state of being," Anderson said.
Under the agreement, AndHealth becomes a credentialed medical provider to Third Street, adopting its sliding fee scale. Third Street bills Medicaid or other insurers for telehealth visits and other services, and reimburses AndHealth a market rate.
AndHealth puts patients through comprehensive testing to find root causes, such as egg allergy or teeth-grinding. Through frequent telehealth visits, specialists and health coaches guide the patient to change behavior to eliminate those causes. For patients who need dietary changes, AndHealth delivers full meals prepared under doctors' orders.
Nationwide community health centers serve 30 million patients, the "cornerstone" of primary care, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The centers integrate medical, dental, behavioral and other services.
"This is just the next logical progression, we think, for community health centers is to be able to offer more in-house specialty care," Scantland said. "It's an opportunity to essentially triage scarce resources into the population that is suffering the most, and is costing our healthcare system the most.
"We're now talking with health systems, especially in rural areas that have the same type of challenges. Everyone wants to solve this referral gap."
Third Street staff are going through implementation training, and the center will measure results of adopting the program.
How AndHealth has grown its first year
Since launching in February 2022, AndHealth is available to hundreds of employers. Revenue is not disclosed, but the number of covered members has increased by 30-fold this year and keeps growing, Scantland said.
Headquartered at Two Miranova Place downtown, the company has about 70 employees and will end the year at about 100.
Its $57 million in private equity seed funding gives the revenue-generating business "years" of cash, Scantland said. The business is incorporated as And Health LLC.
In April, AndHealth spread to small and mid-sized businesses as an offering in the Ohio Chamber Health Benefit Program, a state-regulated multi-member structure in which companies have independent health plans but access the economies of scale of a much larger group.
"One of the things we've really noticed in our model is you can help patients do things that weren't possible before when you can see them more," Scantland said. "Just like we can do more Zoom meetings in a day, ... you can take small steps to address social drivers of health with the patient when you have this blended hybrid model. That just wouldn't be possible if you had to tell the patient: Hey, take a day off work, drive an hour and a half into a major city and have this visit."
