DispatchHealth Raises $330M To Alleviate Hospital Crowding

DispatchHealth announced on Tuesday it raised $330 million, according to Home Health Care News.

The round was led by health care-focused Optum Ventures, with additional funding from funds like Echo Health Ventures, Blue Shield of California and Humana.

The Denver-based company provides at-home nursing services for patients who require more care or a higher degree of observation and intervention. DispatchHealth partners with health systems, insurance companies and employers to offer families a long-term at-home care resource without jettisoning patients, especially those who are fragile or have limited mobility, in and out of hospitals and doctors offices.

The company is building a tech-enabled care platform helmed by former chief product officer at Uber, Daniel Graf. The platform, called the Last Mile Care Technology Platform, will track care patterns to help determine how resources should be utilized, how much of certain equipment is needed, and triaging patient care with other parts of the health care system.

Keeping patients out of the hospital

It might not seem like it at first glance, but the goal of pretty much all health care startups is to keep people out of emergency service systems like the ER. Hospitals, saddled with patients and overworked clinicians and nurses, operate on thin margins with very little ability to innovate or invest without disrupting the ecosystem.

That’s where companies like DispatchHealth come in. Startups in the on-demand health care space received $1.3 billion in funding so far this year, per Crunchbase data, a spike from pre-pandemic funding in 2019 and an indication that the pandemic fueled long-term need for options in the health care system that didn’t overflow hospitals or urgent cares with struggling patients.

DispatchHealth and companies like it are likely to see more popularity as time goes on. Baby boomers are expected to be the biggest elderly population in recent history, and will live far longer than generations before them. Most of them will prefer to age in place, at home, rather than going into a long-term care facility. Taking care of them will require a complete overhaul of the health care system, and removing hospitals as the go-to for urgent, chronic or long-term care.

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