Dive Brief:
- Heal, a startup that delivers on-demand doctor house calls to patients, recently secured $26.9 million in Series A funding.
- Heal provides on-demand access to physicians to patients through partnerships with insurers including Blue Shield of California, Cigna, Aetna, and United Healthcare. Services are also available for a $99 fee to patients not covered by these plans.
- Since 2015, Heal has secured a total of $40 million in funding and has provided on-demand physician services to more than 10,000 patients.
Dive Insight:
Technology is making more services available to consumers when and where they want them than ever before. Want food delivered from your favorite restaurant? Try Grubhub. Can’t wait until tomorrow for that Amazon order? Check out Amazon Prime Now. Need a doctor today, but can’t get to the doctor’s office? There’s an app for that. Companies such as Heal, Pager and Doctor on Demand are exploring opportunities in healthcare as health services inchies toward marrying the idea of patient-centric care with technology.
However, some criticize these types of services. Gorkim Sevinc, managing director of Johns Hopkins Medicine Technology Innovation Center, told Healthcare Dive earlier this year he doesn’t want to see healthcare “commoditized like a cab ride.”
There's been a recent tussle in the digital health space. Different reports from StartUp Health and Rock Health find different levels of funding entering the space and some wonder if digital health funding is leveling off or about to hit another record year. In addition, a recent study found less companies are entering the space. However, digital health is weird beast of a market because "digital health" is thought of differently as "healthcare" so opportunites are varied.
That said, that won't stop companies trying to enter the space or venture capitalists trying to make an ROI on what they see as a profitable market.
So while it's somewhat a cop out to say "time will tell" to see what shakes out, there are still a couple of months left for more digital health funding and see where we are at the end of the year.