When it comes to continuity of care, Sprinter Health wants to be a bridge.
“We take that fragmentation out of the system, which is a big challenge, and we also provide easy access to us and deliver everything that people need,” Dr. Melissa Welch, chief medical officer of Sprinter Health, said on the latest episode of Home Health Care News’ Disrupt podcast.
San Francisco-based Sprinter Health is an on-demand mobile health startup that has generated significant investor interest. The company offers virtual care from nurse practitioners and specialists coupled with in-home visits from staff who are trained as medical assistants, community health workers and phlebotomists. In May, Sprinter raised $55 million in a series B round led by General Catalyst.
Welch says her role as the company’s CMO has allowed her to continue to pursue her passion for serving underserved communities. Sprinter Health does this by taking a patient-focused approach.
During the conversation, Welch goes into more detail about how Sprinter Health serves these communities by leveraging technology and her long-term vision for the company.
Below are highlights from the conversation, edited for length and clarity.
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HHCN: For the listeners that aren’t familiar, can you give an overview of Sprinter Health and its business model?
Welch: Sprinter has really distinguished ourselves, I would say, in creating a system that pairs virtual and in-home care. We provide care in the home, virtually, and we can do a hybrid model of care. (We are) focusing on really targeting people who have gaps in their care, meaning they may need a preventative care service, they may need diagnostic services, or they may have other needs. We go into the home and curate a special set of assessments to find the person’s specific needs. Our model includes a different type of workforce than, I think, goes into most homes. Many people may just send phlebotomists in (the home) to do isolated services. Others may send nurse practitioners into the home, or in some cases, doctors may go into the home.
Our model is one that leverages licensed phlebotomists, who we train with medical assistant skills and skills in community health work, outreach worker engagement strategies. As you can imagine, when people come into your home, you want people who might be familiar with your community, familiar with who you are. That community health outreach worker strategy is one that we think is very important. We pair those “sprinters,” as we call them, with a virtual team of nurse practitioners and other specialists, who can be there in case the patient may need more advanced services where a licensed technician is required. It’s a virtual in-home and hybrid care model using a very different model to go into the home and provide preventative care services, wellness services and any other specific services that are prevention-focused that people might need.
You started Sprinter Health after a 40-year career in the healthcare industry. Can you talk about this and what attracted you to the home-based care space?
I started my career in the public sector, in public health. It was an early calling for me. I grew up in impoverished areas in Southern California, and we weren’t a wealthy family, so we relied on public health services when I was a child. I remember vividly going to community-based clinics that were located in the parks and getting my immunization. As you can imagine, that can leave an imprint on you as a child, and it did for me. I knew I wanted to be a doctor early as a child, at nine years old. Public health and serving the community, based on that experience as a child, was something that I always wanted to do.
I finished my undergraduate career in California, went to Harvard for medical school, came back to California at (University of California, San Francisco), where I did my residency. I got my Master of Public Health at Berkeley, and went right into community-based care from there. That’s always been the core of my background. I was a primary care internist for about 15 years of my career, and during that time, I did home-based care visits, worked with public health nurses, and worked with … community health outreach workers. It’s kind of a full-circle moment. My whole career has really been focused on addressing the needs of underserved populations, whether that’s Medicaid, Medicare, or vulnerable children and mothers.
I had the opportunity, probably about 15 years into my career, to go on to the plan side of care delivery. It’s interesting, I made that pivot in my career mostly because the business that came looking for me, Aetna recruited me. They recruited me primarily because they wanted somebody who had experience in the public sector and experience with diverse populations to help them shape programs to serve those same types of populations. Throughout my career, that has been a regular theme. I went to other companies, Blue Shield of California, helped do some of the same things, drive care programs for vulnerable populations, and market and brand for those populations.
At the pinnacle of my career, I ended up working for some (Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly) (PACE) programs … serving vulnerable senior populations. In that context, home care became very prevalent. As you can imagine, seniors have greater challenges, with falls, with dementia, with transportation, with food, all of those services are provided by PACE. You go into the home and develop a very unique relationship with that population, and so I spent a lot of time with that program. More recently, I became a caregiver for illness in my family, both my husband and my dad passed recently, and I had to do a lot of home care.
When the Sprinter opportunity came along, it was pretty obvious to me that this was a way to both give back to the community and to serve the population that I was very interested in serving, vulnerable people who might not have access to care. I could do that in a setting that could be very personalized.
We’re in a system of care now where access to care is really a challenge for many communities. It’s really been a full circle opportunity for me. I’m looking forward to spending a lot more time here structuring new programs for vulnerable populations.
I know that increasing access to quality care and serving underrepresented communities is something that you’re passionate about. How is Sprinter Health doing this?
Over the year and a half that I have been here now, I’ve seen our target partner populations increasingly be more underrepresented communities, particularly in the Medicaid space. We serve all ages and all types of partners and partner insurance types, so Medicaid, Medicare, the exchange population, as well as some of the more complex models, like D-SNPs, which are different types of Medicare managed care models.
Within all of those models, one of the things that we’ve noticed is that we have a knack for being able to actually access underserved communities. A lot of plan partners will come to us and say, ‘We’ve heard that you guys really are able to go into these communities and be very successful with very high booking rates and engagement rates and excellent satisfaction scores. How are you able to do that?’ I think one of the things that makes it really easy for us is that we look for people who come from the communities to work for us. The community knows what to expect when they see our Sprinters. They’re uniform, they’re professional. They take pride in the fact that people are letting us into their homes, and we respect that. We train our sprinters to keep that as a forefront. We’re very patient-focused. It’s a passion and value for our company, and I think it’s reflected in our net promoter scores, which have been consistently over 90.
Underrepresented communities will be a huge value prop for us going forward. It’s something I think that really differentiates us, and clearly it’s something that I’m passionate about as well.
What are some key clinical challenges that you feel Sprinter Health is best equipped to solve due to the company’s care delivery model?
As a physician, going into the home, you can see a lot of different needs. I think when we go into the home as sprinters, and the virtual care team that is available to patients, we’re looking at how we meet all of that individual patient’s needs. Many companies will go in, they’ll just do blood draws, or they’ll just do a blood pressure check. We go in and ask, ‘What are all of the care gaps that this particular individual needs? Is it diagnostic services? Is it learning how to collect a stool sample for colon cancer screening? Is it mammography scheduling that they need help and follow-up on, or is it just that they need us to help point them to how to get food resources they may be lacking, or how to prevent falls in the home?’ We look at all of those things. We have ways where we leverage technology to look at prior utilization, patterns of the patient, prior needs that the patient may have, and of course, gaps in care that we can close when we go into the home. When we get there, our care teams, our sprinters, our virtual nurse practitioners, our MDs, if we need them, can provide that particular patient with everything they need, one and done in that visit, and people don’t have to go back.
We make it very clear that we’re not trying to replace their primary care providers. As you can imagine, people develop very personalized relationships with their primary care provider. Having been one, I can tell you that is very true. We make it very clear that we’re a bridge. We’re there to make sure they get everything they need, but also to provide them with that continuity. That knitting back to their health care provider, and back to the health plan. All of those people, the patient, the health plan, the provider, get the information that we provide in the visit back to them. I think that this is a key thing that medicine doesn’t do now, the health care system doesn’t do now. It’s very fragmented. We take that fragmentation out of the system, which is a big challenge, and we also provide easy access to us and deliver everything that people need.
In May, we covered the news that your company raised $55 million in a Series B funding round. What’s the plan for this current round of funding and what does it allow you to do that wasn’t possible before?
We’re really grateful for the funding and for our investors who’ve been with us from the beginning. It’s really allowing us to grow the company. We are attractive, as we said, to many plan partners because of the populations we’re able to reach and care for. A lot of that investment is going to go towards scaling our staff of sprinters and nurse practitioners, and also to optimizing and perfecting some of the technology we’re using, leveraging some of the AI efficiencies that are out there now to retool our navigation strategies, our own workflows and our own efficiencies. Technology build, optimization and staff growth to allow us to continue to scale the company, is primarily where most of those funds will be focused.
What are your short-term goals for Sprinter Health, and what are some of your long-term goals for the organization?
It’s easy to start to see ourselves continue to get bigger and bigger, as we’re doing. We were excited that we’ve booked over 1,000 appointments today, so it’s a big celebration within the company. I’m sure by another week or so, we’re going to (surpass) that.
I think perfecting our current delivery model is certainly within the scope of our short-term goals, optimizing some of our technology and tools. We have a very sophisticated way of sending our sprinters out into the home. Our chief technology officer calls it trickle. How we basically send sprinters out, make sure they have the resources, make sure they’re in the right place at the right time with the right patient. It takes a lot of sophisticated trickling, as we call it. We control that, and we retool that every day. I think a lot of our short-term goals are going to be concentrating on perfecting our care delivery, and our technology capabilities and models.
Long-term, we’ll be thinking about other ways that we can contribute to the home care space. Home care is going to pervasively be a huge part of the health care delivery system now and into the future. I think that there is no question about that. The elderly population alone, in 2027, will be the predominant population. We still have mothers, babies and vulnerable populations who are not going to be able to access traditional brick-and-mortar health care due to some of the known barriers we’ve already talked about. We will be looking for ways in the long term to continue to serve all of those populations, to do things that help us reduce the cost of care. (We will be) looking at ways to move people faster and keep them out of institutionalized care, which would include bringing them out of the hospital faster after an admission, and getting them out of the nursing home faster. (We’ll be looking at) different ways, perhaps to monitor people, using AI for some of the chronic care conditions that might allow us to do that. I think all of those are things that may be on our longer-term horizon.
