Eden Health, a New York-based employee benefits and telehealth platform paired with primary care services, has announced $4 million in seed funding led by Greycroft Partners. In addition to the funding, the company also announced that it is looking to expand its services to more employer customers in the New York City and New Jersey markets.
“Eden is a personal health platform that works exclusively with employers,” Eden Health CEO and cofounder Matt McCambridge told MobiHealthNews. “We become the first point of access for all employees when encountering the healthcare system, and really keep each piece of the healthcare system together so employees have one place to go and all of the information they need at their fingertips.”
McCambridge described Eden’s platform as having three major components. The first is its digital health focus, spearheaded by an app that serves as an employee's primary point of entry when engaging with their care. Along with the capacity to connect users with care providers through text chat within five minutes or facilitate a telemedicine encounter, the app helps users organize visits or other areas of care.
“We find that 70 percent of our clinical encounters are through that application, so that’s really the majority of the traffic right now, and that’s the huge focus of development for us,” he said. “From the employee’s perspective, they have a lot more access to all of their data right through the phone, and can find out things like how much money it’s going to cost for an MRI even before they go, or just have more access to services.”
Cost exploration and insurance navigation constitute the second component of the platform, McCambridge continued. This is an issue in particular for many employees who may have dozens of potential benefits, but are unaware of what is available or what service might be best for them at the time, he said. Alongside the third portion of the product, brick-and-mortar primary care clinics offering same-day appointments and referrals to specialty care, McCambridge said that his company has enjoyed employee engagement rates in excess of 60 percent and reduce the total cost of care by up to 10 percent.
“We think the pairing is hugely important because, as far as employees are concerned, every encounter with the healthcare system is extraordinarily complicated and they don’t know what to use for what specific task,” he said. “By bringing these together — by being the primary care provider, by providing the insurance navigation as well as doing telemedicine remotely — all that integration means that employees only have one place to enter first, and then we can facilitate them to get access to the rest of the system. That’s why we see really, really high engagement rates for the employees and significant usage, because we really become home for them when accessing their benefits.
In addition to expansion efforts, Eden’s newly announced seed funding will go toward further development of the platform’s digital app and better connection to external healthcare services, McCambridge said. Other participants in the round alongside Greycroft Partners included Piper Jaffray Companies, Max Ventures, and 645 Ventures.
“The healthcare market today is ripe for innovation. Specifically, there’s an untapped opportunity to work across silos - insurance, primary care and telehealth - to deliver a truly unique experience that impacts the overall quality and cost of care,” Ellie Wheeler, partner at Greycroft Partners, said in a statement. “We believe that Eden Health is taking a differentiated approach to fix a broken system. Their vision will allow them to build a more empathetic healthcare delivery platform that meets the needs of employers and employees alike.”
