Scaling Access to Top Quality Doctors: Our Investment in Garner Health
By Elliot Geidt and Jacob Effron
We’re excited to announce that Redpoint is leading Garner Health’s $45M Series B. Garner’s platform improves patient outcomes and lowers system costs by helping patients find top-quality doctors.
For any patient, getting to the right doctor has a dramatic impact on outcomes. Numerous studies have shown that certain doctors are >2x more likely to follow evidence-based medicine that improves patient results than other doctors. This is true even for doctors that practice at top hospitals. Top-quality doctors also tend to avoid over-ordering unnecessary tests and procedures which often lead to further complications for patients and >$100B in wasted care across our health system.
Sending patients to top-quality doctors is a win-win for patients and the employers, insurers and risk-bearing providers that pay for their care. So why is it still so hard to find top-quality doctors today?
- Patients and providers have been hamstrung by a lack of data. Analyzing individual doctor performance requires large datasets and methodologies accounting for the difference in patients doctors see. Without reliable transparent tools to analyze doctor performance at scale, patients and referring providers often rely on qualitative signals such as recommendations from friends / peers or recognizable brand names.
- Past companies who tried to suggest providers failed to engage employees. They lacked a clear reason to use their tools as they offered no predictable cost savings. This led to subpar results for employers and insurers. Other care navigation companies have successfully engaged employees but at high cost due to their people-intensive model.
Enter Garner
Garner identifies top doctors and helps ensure patients are routed to them. They have assembled a unique dataset of >45 billion claims and developed a transparent bottoms-up methodology to assess doctor quality. Garner surfaces these quality recommendations via an employee-facing app with financial incentives to employers and via API to referring providers so that patients can see the best doctors.
Garner has a unique ability to help both patients and their employers. Employers face cost increases >5% annually but lack good options to control these costs. They can switch to a narrow network product, but find cutting out large health systems unpopular with employees. Many are turning to the only other option they see: implementing high deductible health plans. These plans with high patient out-of-pocket cost (often $5,000) have grown by 43% over the past five years. Over half of employed workers are now enrolled in one. But with >60% of Americans unable to afford an unexpected expense of $1,000, these higher-cost out-of-pocket plans are a huge problem for employees.
Garner solves this problem because getting employees to go to top-quality doctors saves money. They partner with employers to offer a Smart Health Reimbursement Account that actually covers patients’ costs when they see a Garner-recommended doctor. Employees simply open the Garner app/website or call, choose a doctor themselves or with the help of a concierge and have their bills reimbursed.
We’ve seen many employer-facing digital health solutions but most require weighty, expensive implementations that make them only work for large employers or a limited set of payers. Garner is easy to implement and works on top of any payer for employers of any size. This includes smaller fully insured employers often underserved by digital health innovation.
Garner has done an impressive early job of engaging employees at a low price-point driven by software that enables impressive ROI. We see this lower-cost, software-driven approach as the next evolution of care navigation.
Identifying top quality doctors is also hugely helpful for provider groups, particularly as they take on more risk. We think risk-bearing providers will increasingly focus on downstream specialty costs in the following years and Garner is ideally suited to help them.
Part of what drew us to Garner is the team’s unique combination of data science and healthcare expertise. Founder and CEO Nick Reber helped lead Bridgewater’s Research Analytics team before joining the leadership team at Oscar where he saw the quality and cost impact from patients seeing top doctors firsthand. He has assembled a top-notch team of healthcare and tech industry veterans to tackle the ambitious vision of helping Americans access better care.
Our Partnership
At Redpoint, we’ve been fortunate to partner with cutting-edge data companies including Snowflake, Looker, Monte Carlo, Dremio, Timescale and Materialize. We’re big believers that cutting-edge data science on novel data can improve healthcare. We’ve seen similar value from analytics, when combined with new care models, in our investments in Cityblock, Bright Health and Strive Health. Analytics is just one part of the puzzle. Impact requires a well thought-out go-to-market that effectively engages and helps patients while creating clear value for the employers and insurers who pay for it. Garner has a special ability to improve patient experience and outcomes while lowering costs. It actually works.
We’re thrilled to be partnering with Nick and the Garner team on their important mission to scale access to top-quality doctors. We’re also excited to join Founders Fund, Optum Ventures, Sequoia, Thrive, Maverick Ventures, BoxGroup and CoFound Partners on this journey.
If you’re equally excited about helping more patients find the best doctors, take a look at open roles on the Garner team here.
