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Tag: Included Health

Owen Tripp, Included Health

Owen Tripp is CEO of Included Health. It started way back in the 2010s as a second opinion service but now has added telehealth, continuous primary care, behavioral health and guidance for its populations. He’s taken to calling what they do all in one personalized healthcare. Underlying all this is a data integration and analytics platform that’s now being used by some of the biggest employers including Walmart, Comcast, CALPers and more. Essentially Included Health is building the new multi-specialty medical group. Owen & I really got into the details and had a great conversation about how we develop a “3rd way” between the payers and providers–Matthew Holt

This One Weird Trick Can Fix U.S. Healthcare

By OWEN TRIPP

Creating a healthcare experience that builds trust and delivers value to people and purchasers isn’t a quick fix, but it’s the only way to reverse the downward spiral of high costs and poor outcomes

Entrepreneurs like to say the U.S. healthcare system is “broken,” usually right before they explain how they intend to fix it. I have a slightly different diagnosis.

The U.S. healthcare system is the gold standard. Our institutions and enterprises, ranging from 200-year-old academic medical centers to digital health startups, are the clear world leaders in clinical expertise, research, innovation, and technology. Capabilities-wise, the system is far from broken.

What’s broken is trust in the system, because of the glaring gap between what the system is capable of and what it actually delivers. Every day across the country, people drive past world-class hospitals, but then have to wait months for a primary care appointment. They deduct hundreds for healthcare from each paycheck, only to be told at the pharmacy that their prescription isn’t covered. While waiting for a state-of-the-art scan, they’re handed a clipboard and asked to recap their medical history.

This whipsaw experience isn’t due to incompetence or poor infrastructure. It’s the product of the dysfunction between the two biggest players in healthcare: providers and insurers, two entities that have optimized the hell out of their respective businesses, in opposition to one another, and inadvertently at the expense of people.

Historically, hospitals and health systems — including those 200-year-old AMCs — have dedicated themselves fully to improving and saving lives. I’m not saying they’ve lost sight of this, but until recently, margin took a back seat to mission. With industry consolidation and the persistence of the fee-for-service model, however, providers’ hands have been forced to maximize volume of care at the highest possible unit cost, which in turn has become a main driver of the out-of-control cost trend at large.

This push from providers has prompted an equal-and-opposite reaction from insurers. Though the industry has been villainized (rightly, in some cases) for a heavy-handed approach to utilization management and prior authorization, insurers are merely doing what their primary customers — private employers — have hired them to do: manage cost. Insurers have gotten very good at it, not just by limiting care, but also through product innovation that has created more tiers and cost-sharing options for plan sponsors.

Meanwhile, healthcare consumers (people!) have been sidelined amid this tug-of-war. Doctors and hospitals say they’re patient-centered, and insurers say they’re member-centric — but the jargon is a dead giveaway. Each side is focused on their half of the pie, and neither is accountable for the whole person: the person receiving care and paying for care, not to mention navigating everything in between.

It should come as no surprise that trust is falling. Only 56% of Americans trust their health insurer to act in their best interest. Even trust in doctors — the good guys — has plummeted. In a startling reversal from just four years ago, a whopping 76% of people believe hospitals care more about revenue than patient care.

Loss of Trust in Healthcare Providers

Hospitals in the U.S.
are mostly focused on…
⏺  Caring for patients⏺  Making money


Source: Jarrard/Chartis (2025)

This trust deficit is the root cause of so many healthcare problems. It’s the reason people disengage, delay and skip care, and end up in the ER or OR for preventable issues. When a good chunk of the population falls into this cycle, as they have, you end up with the status quo: unrelenting costs and deteriorating outcomes that is dragging down households, businesses, and the industry itself.

There’s no quick fix. Despite what my fellow entrepreneurs might say, no one point solution or technology (no, not even AI) can rebuild trust. The only way to reverse the downward spiral is by serving up a modern experience that is genuinely designed around people’s needs.

Continue reading…

Ami Parekh, Included Health

Ami Parekh is the Chief Health Officer of Included Health. It provides navigation services & expert medical opinions (the original Grand Rounds) and virtual care (the old Doctors on Demand) and it then bought a smaller company called Included Health. Ami explains why navigation exists (clue: health plans have been terrible at it) and how it works, and what money it saves on trend (about 2%). They’re also reaching out asking about people’s “Healthy days” and are tracking that metric, and giving people more healthy days–Matthew Holt

Matthew’s health care tidbits: My retina & what it tells us about primary care

Each time I send out the THCB Reader, our newsletter that summarizes the best of THCB (Sign up here!) I include a brief tidbits section. Then I had the brainwave to add them to the blog. They’re short and usually not too sweet! –Matthew Holt

I had a little scare the other night. I was driving home from a weekend in the mountains and I asked my wife if she saw that flashing light. No it wasn’t the cops, and no she hadn’t seen it. Turns out that I had a bright flash if I moved my eye a certain way. Oh, well I assumed I was tired and a good night’s sleep would fix it.

Next morning the flash was still there when I looked quickly to the left and a few weird floaters had appeared. I headed to the Mayo Clinic website and it looked to me like I had a detaching retina. I got on the urgent visit video with One Medical. The NP who answered said it sounded like I might have retina problems and I should get it checked by my ophthalmologist. But my eyesight has always been great (other than me needing reading glasses in my old age) and I haven’t got one. So who, I asked, do you recommend?

Here we fall into the crux of the problem. One Medical is an excellent primary care service. So good that Amazon bought it for $3bn. But it’s not a multi-specialty group nor is it a system like Kaiser. The answer was, “we don’t really recommend anyone–that’s not how it works.” The NP ended up looking up ophthalmologists near me & sent me a name as a referral in their app. But that’s not a link to anything and it wasn’t one chosen through some analytical process of seeking quality excellence.

I looked up MarinHealth (my local hospital)’s website and searched ophthalmology. That referred name was on it. I called. The doctor was out this week. They gave me another name. That doctor’s office gave me another name and that third office could see me that same day. I felt some pressure to see them right away as in the case of a detached retina Mayo says “ Contacting an eye specialist (ophthalmologist) right away can help save your vision”. The good news is having spent a couple of hours at the ophthalmologist’s my retina needs watchful waiting not surgery.

But the bad news is that for me, like 90% of Americans, there’s no easy way to get referred into a trustworthy system for specialty care. This can be even worse. My friend Sarah McDonald explains in her book The Cancer Channel how, after being diagnosed with a rare incurable cancer by a head & neck surgeon, the all encompassing support she received was to be given the number of a specialist at UCSF who couldn’t even talk to her for 3 weeks.

Mike Magee talks about the role of the health care system being to reduce patients’ “fear and worry”. Our lack of a specialty care referral system, especially when potentially serious and urgent care is on the line, is a big reason why there is so much fear and worry. I wish I had a concierge advocacy system like Included Health or Transcarent which could get me to the right place and work with me through the experience. But like most Americans at the time I need reassurance the most I’m calling a list of phone numbers hoping someone can see me.

We have primary care, we have specialty care. But we don’t have a system that cares.

WTF Health: Included Health’s CEO Owen Tripp on Grand Rounds, Doctor-on-Demand Merger & New Name

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF Health

A sign of effective ‘merging-and-acquiring’ among innovative healthcare companies? How about a new brand-name? The company known as “Grand Rounds Health and Doctor on Demand,” which merged in March 2021 and quickly acquired LGBTQ+ virtual care company, Included Health, announced that the company would be moving forward as Included Health from here on out. We get into the strategy behind that name-change – and, more importantly, how the integration of the three companies is going – from CEO Owen Tripp.

This quick update covers how the navigation-plus-virtual-care co is prioritizing integration at-scale for millions of members – unlike other growing healthcare companies who Owen says have, “acquired companies, but haven’t put them together.” From member experience, clinician experience, and the business model backing all of this, we get a state-of-play on Included Health, including Owen’s take on the rising popularity of at-risk models among competitors Accolade Health and Transcarent, the legacy relationship the company has with Walmart, and how small/mid-sized employers are increasing area of focus for growth.

#Healthin2Point00, Episode 214 | One Medical acquires Iora, plus funding for HumanFirst & many more

Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess pokes fun at me because my primary care provider has acquired a Medicare provider – One Medical buys Iora Health for $2.1 billion in stock. This deal is curious because these are two very different organizations. Next, HumanFirst (formerly Elektra Labs) raises $12 million in a Series A, bringing their total to $15 million, working on distributed clinical trials. Medallion raises $20 million in a Series A to address barriers for digital health providers around state licensing rules, and Aunt Bertha raises $27 million working on the social determinants of health and getting social care resources to patients. Finally, Grand Rounds and Doctor on Demand acquire Included Health, an LGBTQ+ focused care navigation platform. —Matthew Holt