DispatchHealth Brings In $200M, Aims To Build Largest System Of In-Home Medical Care

DispatchHealth, a provider of in-home medical care, secured a valuation of $1.7 billion following a round of $200 million in Series D funding.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

The new funding announcement comes less than a year after the Denver-based company banked $135.8 million in a Series C in June 2020.

“We’ve built one of the most comprehensive in-home care companies in the market,” Mark Prather, M.D., co-founder and CEO of DispatchHealth, told Crunchbase News. “This last year was a great growth year, and the possibilities of health care in the home were apparent due to the global pandemic. Everything was being delivered to the house, so why not health care? It was the right time to scale the model.”

Tiger Global led the Series D investment and was joined by existing investors Alta Partners, Echo Health Ventures, Humana, Oak HC/FT and Questa Capital to give DispatchHealth a total of $417 million in funding since the company was founded in 2013, according to Prather.

Andrew Adams, co-founder and managing partner of health care at Oak HC/FT, said via email that the firm had gotten to know Prather in the company’s early years and was drawn to DispatchHealth’s mission, which was aligned with Oak’s goal of partnering with companies that provide high-quality, lower-cost care and deliver on consumer experience.

“Last year we had the opportunity to participate in DispatchHealth’s first large financing and were eager to make a material commitment to support the further acceleration of scaling the care delivery model across the country,” Adams said.

“DispatchHealth is the ultimate win-win-win for all health care stakeholders as it can deliver all types of care — urgent to hospital — in the low-cost setting of the home and do so with the highest quality outcomes and patient NPS. Dispatch’s model is powerful and impactful at scale as it can serve patients of all payer types and in all markets across the country,” he added.

Prather describes the company’s delivery of in-home care as taking the skills found in emergency rooms and hospitals and bringing them into patients’ homes to substitute an avoidable emergency room visit. It offers 30-day episodes that substitute for a hospital stay and a marketplace to coordinate ancillary services.

The U.S. private health care market is massive: a $1.3 trillion market that is forecasted to reach $1.6 trillion by 2027. Prather estimates that if even 10 percent of the market was moved to in-home care, it would be a $130 billion market that was growing and underpenetrated.

In addition, research has shown the “hospital at home” method is known to reduce the mortality rate by 20 percent, according to the Medical Journal of Australia. In-home care is also less expensive than private models, with patients saving an average of $1,000 to $2,000 per month, Prather said. If DispatchHealth is able to scale over the next three years, he forecasts the company could save patients $2 billion in medical cost savings during that time.

DispatchHealth operates in 31 markets today and plans to use the new funding to expand into 100 markets, develop its technology and look for acquisitions that would add value to the platform in the way of better patient and partner experiences, he added.

“Our intent is to continue to grow sales and add a series of services to the platform,” Prather said. “We have an opportunity to layer in additional in-home services, such as physical therapy and radiology.”

Illustration: Dom Guzman