Why We Invested in Unite Us
By: Victoria Cheng, Partner at PruVen Capital, Adi Sivaraman, Investor at PruVen Capital & Hannah McQuaid, Investor at PruVen Capital
As the US faces a potential economic downturn, we wanted to highlight a company making strides to improve the health and wellness of our community’s most vulnerable people. When we made the investment into Unite Us, we chose to support Co-Founders Dan Brillman and Taylor Justice as they build the leading care coordination technology platform for Social Determinants of Health (SDoH). Unite Us is on a mission to advance health equity by delivering an outcomes-focused, end-to-end platform that connects healthcare providers with community-based organizations (CBOs) across the nation for the benefit of patients.
We recently published our thesis of Innovating outside the clinic, highlighting the critical need to address factors that affect patient health outside of the clinical setting. As the healthcare system evolves to take a more comprehensive and holistic approach towards managing health outcomes, Unite Us is at the leading edge of integrating social care with healthcare in America. To that end, below are a few highlights on why we invested in Dan and Taylor’s vision.
The Unite Us coordination platform and the SDoH opportunity
Unite Us has developed the leading care coordination technology platform that connects healthcare providers with social care providers to standardize communication and track outcomes. Through their platform, organizations (health and CBOs alike) can securely send and receive referrals between community services and providers, share information, communicate bidirectionally, track patient outcomes and support the entire patient journey. Unite Us brings together all the components of social care, including food, housing, transportation and employment into a single platform, allowing all of these services to seamlessly work together. The company aligns all stakeholders in healthcare, the community, and the government around a shared mission to improve health and establish a true continuum of care for people who need it most.
Before Unite Us, there were limited channels through which a healthcare provider might easily communicate or interact with a social care provider, which are CBOs that many people depend on for housing, jobs, mental health, wellness and financial aid assistance. In 2013, Dan and Taylor recognized a massive gap in the healthcare system after their experience navigating community and social services as veterans. Since then, they have been laying the foundation across the country for what we know as the first coordinated care network for social care services. Unite Us securely brings all SDoH data together with the goal of raising social care to the same priority level as medical care. The reason this resonated with us is because up to 80% of health outcomes, including the length and quality of life, can be impacted by SDoH factors and can have detrimental implications on patient health and society if left ignored. Further, failure to address SDoH factors can cost health providers, payers and patients billions of dollars annually. As one example, food insecurity costs the U.S. health system $155 billion a year. Health systems, payers, and governments alike all have strong financial incentives to drive down care costs by incorporating social care programs into their care model.
Advancing health equity through SDoH data infrastructure
Unite Us has built a vast network that establishes a closed loop system, enabling alignment between health and social care providers into a single secure platform. As the healthcare industry continues to advance from a volume-based fee care model to a value-based one, we believe Unite Us is at the forefront of innovating in the SDoH space, an area that is increasingly critical to tackle. With this closed loop data ecosystem, Unite Us helps providers, payers, and governments better understand and quantify the effectiveness of social interventions along with being able to highlight the most successful programs. The more people that participate in the Unite Us network and ecosystem, the more data that is provided to improve the effectiveness of collaboration between social and health care. At the same time, Unite Us adheres to the highest security standards, ensuring that individuals’ privacy is protected across the ecosystem. The ultimate result is a better informed system for providing integrated health and social care.
2nd Founding Moment: A full suite platform and powerful network effects
Unite Us continues to be a market leader in SDoH with its robust network of social and health providers demonstrated through its 1) outcomes, 2) product, 3) technology innovation and 4) technology integrations. The company is experiencing what we at PruVen call its 2nd Founding Moment. Having built this complex and highly valuable network, Unite Us is demonstrating the ability to transition into being a broader platform that provides additional value-added services of analytics for population health and payment interoperability to their clients. Unite Us now serves as the operations system (OS) for social care by combining a closed-loop system with deep network buildouts that reach multiple stakeholders across the nation. In addition to building the actual infrastructure for social care, Unite Us has created an end-to-end solution that can identify and predict social care needs in communities, manage enrollment, and leverage data and analytics to drive investments into communities. This infrastructure enables social care funding at scale through funds distribution, invoice management and reimbursement for social services.
Unite Us continues to expand across the nation and we are thrilled to be a part of their journey to bridge the gap between health and social care as they continue to add new products and grow the network to serve those most in need. We hope this helps highlight why PruVen chose to back Dan Brillman and Taylor Justice on their mission to accelerate the industry’s transition to a value-based care system driven by social care.
