Rightway Healthcare, which provides patient-facing care navigation tools to employee populations, has raised $2 million in seed funding. The round was made up by individual investors.
The company works with both self-insured and fully-insured employers to help employees understand and utilize the health benefits available to them, through what CEO and Cofounder Jordan Feldman describes as an “Expedia-like experience”.
“We have, on the first screen of our iPhone, an app for social media, for eating, for finance,” he said. “But no one’s created that go-to portal to navigate … or be immersed in an active healthcare continuum, and that’s really what we’re trying to create.”
The company provides a mix of care navigation, with a human contact person, cost and quality transparency tools, health education content sourced from the Mayo Clinic, and patient-specific insights garnered from claims data.
“That’s our thesis here, that you need engagement, you need buy-in with your product otherwise it’s just going to be another call-in center within HR that no one uses,” Feldman said.
Feldman says that recent changes in the insurance market — namely higher deductible health plans — make it ripe for a benefits optimization offering that targets small and medium-sized employers.
“What we’ve seen over the last few years is these smaller employers have a growing cost in healthcare and not a lot of sophistication in their HR suite or their CFO and are kind of looking for help on a lot of dimensions,” he said. “We’re trying to be that comprehensive solution not only for the portal to be rolled out to employees to make better decisions, but also to help these smaller employers as a chief medical officer within their C-suite.”
Because the software is both high-touch and tailored to each customer, Rightway is rolling out slowly, starting mainly in Florida and New York, with a few additional customers in other states. The software has been live with customers for a few months.
“It’s going well,” Feldman said. “They’ve been using the patient navigator pretty extensively and that’s kind of just click of a button, call someone, hold your hand through the care continuum. We have an educational partnership with the Mayo Clinic, and our whole concept is really a roadmap. You get a diagnosis and we create the roadmap with educational content, with navigational services, and with advocacy to really empower you through the care continuum. With the idea being, [if] you have more economic skin in the game, you have more choice and you have more confusion.”
