Marissa Plescia
World Class Health, a global concierge health benefit, has raised $8 million in seed funding, the company announced Wednesday. The financing will help the company continue to build out its global centers of excellence.
The New York City-based startup serves self-funded employers and provides access to a global network of the top 1% of providers. The network spans North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India and Asia. It includes access to specialties like musculoskeletal, cancer, fertility and others. The network’s prices are usually at Medicare level or lower.
World Class Health also supports patients’ travel and accommodations for treatment within its network and provides care navigation services from diagnosis to recovery. For the seven days following treatment, patients receive support from a dedicated nurse at the hotel next to the hospital.
The $8 million in seed funding was led by AlleyCorp and included participation from LifeX; Joyance; Cooley & Co; City Light; Vivek Garipalli, founder of Clover Health; and Munjal Shah, co-founder and CEO of HippocraticAI.com.
“World Class Health has the potential to help millions of people worldwide access better and more affordable healthcare,” said Dr. Omar Njie, M.D., principal at AlleyCorp, in a statement. “By scaling high-quality, cross-border healthcare solutions, and making them more readily available for global organizations, World Class Health is able to better address the complex needs of patients and employers alike.”
With the financing, the company is further building its global centers of excellence network by identifying the top 1% of hospitals and physicians. This is no easy task, according to Dr. Kumar Dharmarajan, co-founder and chief medical officer of World Class Health. The company looks for hospitals that are accredited by the Joint Commission International, as well as hospitals with a good reputation (such as those in Newsweek’s top global hospitals list).
On the physician side, the company is independently credentialing.
“We’re looking at their licensure and their board certification, all malpractice history, things that we as patients would rarely be able to do on our own. … These are also doctors that have a ton of experience, so they’re not the doctors who are fresh out of school,” Dharmarajan said. “These are doctors who’ve done the relevant procedures hundreds of thousands of times, so you can feel confident that there’s really nothing that they haven’t seen before.”
There are two kinds of employers that could benefit from World Class Health’s services: large businesses with employees all over the world and companies in regions without access to quality care, according to Sid Nambiar, founder and CEO of the company.
“These large companies are saying, ‘I have employees who are from all over the world,’” he said. “Because they’re global talent, they might be from Europe, and they work in the U.S. They might be from the U.S., and they work in Latin America. They need a single global platform that lets them choose where they get complex care. The second use case is, you’re a company in an industrial region of the U.S., the Rust Belt. In Pittsburgh, you operate a manufacturing plant. In this manufacturing plant, you have access to a few hospitals around your area, but those hospitals may not be five-star hospitals, so you don’t have access to quality.”
Employers currently face significant challenges with healthcare costs, quality, and access. U.S. employers spend $800 billion annually, with hospital prices nearly three times Medicare rates. Additionally, medical errors cause over 250,000 deaths yearly, and a shortage of healthcare workers and monopolistic hospital practices limit access to care, both in the U.S. and globally.
Nambiar added that there are two types of competitors in the market. One is the typical commercial insurance carrier, but these networks are often “narrow and aren’t based on quality.” In addition, many large employers are starting to build their own centers of excellence network. For example, Walmart has a Centers of Excellence program.
Looking ahead, World Class Health hopes to get to a point where millions of lives have access to its global network, Nambiar said.
Picture: Feodora Chiosea, Getty Images