Dealflow | May 9, 2019

Dispatch Health raises $33 million for home health calls

Jessica Pothering
ImpactAlpha Editor

Jessica Pothering

ImpactAlpha, May 9 – Dispatch Health is upgrading the old practice of in-home doctors’ visits as a way to cut back on unnecessary emergency room visits and costs. The company has raised $33 million in Series B funding from Echo Health Ventures, Alta Partners and Questa Capital.

Dispatch founder and former emergency care physician Mark Prather launched Dispatch 2013 with a focus on helping elderly patients who often face mobility issues when seeking care. 

Patients needing non-life threatening medical attention can call or book an appointment online with Dispatch, and urgent care specialists will arrive for a home visit within two hours. The teams are equipped with 70 percent of the tools and equipment used in a typical emergency room, according to the company.

Dispatch partners with major insurance companies and health care systems and specifically focuses on both elderly and low-income patients who disproportionately rely on emergency rooms and emergency transit services to access care. It partners with both Medicare and Medicaid.  

“I started to think about the pricing of what we were doing in the ER and thought there was another way to leverage that skill set, in a much lower cost setting,” Dispatch founder Mark Prather told Forbes.

Dispatch sees several hundred patients per day in 10 cities in eight states. Its Series B funding will help the company expand geographically. 

Dispatch Health is the second Denver startup this week to raise funding for an alternative urgent care model. The other was CirrusMD, which raised $15 million for its tele-health urgent care model and announced plans to roll out its services in several Veterans Affairs facilities.