Sempre Health, a San Francisco-based company that uses monetary incentives and pricing to encourage healthy behaviors, announced today that it has obtained $8 million in Series A financing. Rethink Impact was the lead investor, and was joined by Social Capital and other unnamed backers.
“We are incredibly excited to invest in Sempre Health as it uses its core technology to tackle the nearly $300 billion in hospitalizations and excess healthcare spend stemming from medication nonadherence” said Jenny Abramson, founder and managing partner of Rethink Impact, said in a statement.
To encourage care adherence, Sempre works with a range of stakeholders including payers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and pharmacy benefit managers. Its platform can inform patients about discounts on their prescriptions, and change those discounts to incentivize more healthy behaviors. Examples of these changes are diminishing discounts if a patient waits too long to fill their prescription, and patient rewards for consistent refills.
Health plans can choose which specific medications can be subject to these price changes, allowing each discount program to be consistent with formulary design and, ideally, reduce the costs resulting from nonadherence. And with these new funds, the company said it will be working to flesh out its network of partners.
“We aim to build a world where healthcare benefits are individualized and responsive. Everyone should be able to share in the savings they generate for the healthcare system," Anurati Mathur, CEO Sempre Health, said in a statement. “Our goal is to provide improved adherence, increased engagement and an easy and effective intervention, fundamentally changing medication affordability and access.”
Although its was founded in 2015, Sempre’s platform didn’t see an official launch until July 2017. In the time since, the adherence company inked a high-profile collaboration with Novo Nordisk on a pilot program that’s aiming to offer diabetes medications to 10,000 patients. Sempre said in today’s announcement that it will have partnerships with more than 15 payers and pharmaceutical manufacturers by the fourth quarter of this year.
“We're excited to continue to support Sempre in their mission to make essential medicine more affordable,” Ashley Carroll, partner at Social Capital, said in a statement. “It’s been amazing to watch this team evolve from two founders with a big idea to a fast-growing company with a product that’s already improving the lives of thousands of patients.”
