Centivo, a self-funded health plan supported by a digital platform, has brought in $34 million in a Series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures, the company announced today. Other backers include F-Prime Capital Partners, Maverick Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Ingleside Investors, Rand Capital, Grand Central Tech Ventures, Oxeon Investments, and individual investors including Jim Foreman, Ken Goulet, and Kevin Hill.
“While the healthcare system is broken, excellent providers — physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and more — improve lives and provide high-value care every day in every community in America,” Centivo CEO and cofounder Ashok Subramanian said in a statement. “Using analytics and emerging technology, Centivo identifies, partners with, and amplifies the work of the best providers and engages them as true partners to deliver great, cost-effective care to patients.”
Centivo’s outcome-focused model focuses on better connecting patients with primary care providers. Offered through employer customers, the health plan also aims to incentivize members to seek appropriate, cost-effective care and maintain adherence to their personal care plans.
The backbone of this approach will be the company’s technology platform, which includes a patient engagement app as well as other tools to help providers and Centivo ensure high-quality care, Alan Cohen, head of product strategy at Centivo, told MobiHealthNews.
“We’re building assets on three sides,” he explained. “We’re building unique digital assets on the member side, to really engage members and make sure they understand their health, understand the directions their physicians are giving them, and they can be connected to their physicians right there on the app [by] pressing a button. … We’re building digital assets on the provider side to help providers make decisions about where they should send their patients, and then track everything and get all the information back from these entities. And then we’re also building assets for the health plan side, for us, so we can watch all this; we can make sure that the highest quality, most cost-efficient care is being delivered. Kind of think of it like a dashboard that we can look at.”
Cohen went on to say that while the digital health capabilities built for the platform by Centivo itself will be limited, the system has been designed to easily accommodate the offerings of other digital product developers.
“What we’re going to try to develop is very unique assets, and build a platform that allows for the integration of these next-generation healthcare technologies,” he said. “I’ll give an example: There’s a lot of really interesting health coaching, digital disease management programs out there, and we’re not going to recreate that. We’re not trying to come up with the best digital diabetes management program when there’s a slew of excellent providers out there. What we’re going to do is build a platform that we can integrate all of those, and then bring in the clients cost efficiently.”
The first full version of Centivo’s platform will be completed this fall, when the health plan will be going live with its first batch of customers, Cohen said. According to a statement, the company’s full product will become available to employers with employees in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and other select markets.
“We’re thrilled to lead this investment at a time when we know the market is ready to accept bold changes in healthcare,” Yumin Choi, managing director at Bain Capital Ventures, and who will be joining Centivo’s board, said in a statement. “Through a robust technology platform, analytics, and partnerships with key players in each market, Centivo can deliver high-value care that’s far more efficient and cost-effective than current solutions. We’re excited to help Centivo gain momentum with employers as it looks to rapidly scale.”
