Stellar Health secures $10MM to champion value-based care

The shift to prioritize value-based care has been a struggle. Primary care practitioners are trapped in the hurried reality of their lives, flying through patient visits as quickly as possible. While they want to do right by their patients, our healthcare system still overly rewards providers based on the volume of services ordered, not the quality of care or prevention of illnesses. And even where it doesn’t, the shift to value has been hindered by entrenched behaviors from years of fee-for-service. Payors know this and — as the primary risk-bearers in the healthcare equation — need solutions that can drive real change in the behavior of doctors and their medical staff.

Founders Michael Meng, Ben Kraus, Octavian Costache, and Ari Brenner started Stellar Health motivated by that realization, and leveraged principles of behavioral economics and gamification to move the needle on clinician behavior. By surfacing the right information at the right time and adding the simple element of real financial incentives for the medical staff and doctor to do the right thing, Stellar creates genuine alignment on optimizing for the best medical outcomes. The Stellar team made the bet that payors and risk-bearing providers would pay for the performance they wanted to see. There’s a famous line in sales: “If you want to predict what’s going to happen in a quarter, read the sales team’s compensation plan.” People do what they are paid to do, and Stellar has shown that the old sales maxim applies to the medical field as well.

Stellar Health’s platform surfaces patient data that prompts a PCP and her practice staff with reminders on chronic or recent conditions that require follow-up, check-ins triggered by age or other factors, and the like. If someone walks into an appointment with bronchitis, the doctor will be prompted to also complete other tasks such as scheduling a mammogram, check on Rx adherence, or ask for an update about their diabetes care. But that’s only half the battle. Stellar uses a financial incentive system to actively reward the physician and her team for doing the right thing. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it works.

Michael, Ben, Octavian, and Ari are a unique, talented team with compelling experience from across the healthcare and tech landscape. Last year, in an early Stellar rollout in partnership with a large national payor, the platform prompted physicians to schedule a couple hundred mammograms that likely would have not happened. Those tests then detected several cases of early-stage breast cancer, positively changing the trajectory for those women. Lives altered for patients, costs removed from the healthcare system, and doctors satisfied that they were helped to do the right thing. That’s Stellar Health.

We are immensely proud to count Stellar Health as part of the Primary family, and look forward to seeing and supporting what’s next for the team on the heels of this Series A fundraising milestone led by Point72 Ventures.

At its core: A point-of-care, cloud-based platform that improves the delivery of value-based care.

Its mission: Shift the healthcare system to provide incentives to physician practices that finally drive towards realizing the original vision of value-based care.

How: By using the Stellar Health platform to surface data and prompt actions, Stellar Health pushes meaningful, actionable insights to providers and their practice staff and rewards them with real-time incentives.

Why now: Primary care physicians want to provide meaningful, proactive care to their patients, but they largely need to prioritize volume of visits over preventive care. With doctors more burdened than ever before, having a platform that makes their lives easier and patient visits more seamless is a big benefit.

The “it” factor: Based on its promising results to date, Stellar Health has developed a robust payor and provider network across 11 states in the U.S. and is rapidly increasing the number of patients on its platform. By the end of the year, 100,000 patient lives are expected to be managed on its platform.

— Brad Svrluga, Primary General Partner and Co-Founder

For more about the fundraise, check out TechCrunch, Crunchbase. and Built in NYC.

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