Leanne Sherred worked as a speech-language pathologist at outpatient centers and in homes for years before co-founding Expressable. She encountered plenty of access barriers present throughout healthcare, from lack of transportation to long waitlists.
But working with children presents an additional challenge when the parents or caregivers aren’t involved—when the speech therapy session sends, the learning often slows to a halt until the next visit.
That can make the process of ironing out the kinks in linguistic development lengthy and difficult, said Sherred, who also serves as Expressable’s president and chief clinical officer.
“In all of those spaces, I didn’t really see the caregiver involvement piece being executed on. It was leaving a ton of progress on the table for families and children,” Sherred told Fierce Healthcare in an interview.
Expressable builds on a body of research that reveals better communication outcomes for children when parents or caretakers incorporate speech therapy strategies within the home. The company’s virtual platform integrates teletherapy with personalized learning modules, home exercises and secure messaging with speech therapists available outside of the session.
Nicholas Barbara, Sherred’s husband and CEO of Expressable, co-founded the company in January 2020 with Sherred as the platform’s sole speech therapist.
Two years later, the company employs nearly 60 clinicians across 27 states, with the goal of expanding into all 50 states within the next six months, Barbara said.
Expressable announced a new infusion of capital on Wednesday to enable that growth. The company raised $15 million in a series A round, led by F-Prime Capital and including existing investors Lerer Hippeau, NextView Ventures and Amplifyher Ventures.
Barbara and Sherred said they plan to use the funding to add more members to the company’s team, as well as to scale its partnerships with providers and health plans. The startup has inked multiple partnerships with state and national health plans and intends to make more deals to increase patient access.
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Expressable’s caregiver-centric approach benefits its speech-language pathologists, too, Sherred said.
“Even in my experience in home health, which is the most apt to getting care in the natural environment, clinicians are constrained by the working model where providing home programs and exercises have to be done on the clinician’s own time and dime,” she said. “As soon as the session ends, clinicians aren’t being compensated for additional work. We are taking that work off the table.”
The company is working to capture as much data as possible to back up its model, including information on how many sessions a child may require to reach significant improvement.
“At the end of the day, the thing that matters to health insurance companies and to the parents is, how many sessions does it take to get a child to graduation? That’s the metric we care about the most,” Barbara said. “Our data to date has shown that our (caregiver-centric) theory is true, and it’s something we will continuously improve upon.”
Not all of Expressable’s patients are children—about 35% of its clients are adults. Around 5% to 10% of Americans have a communication disorder.
Insurance companies tend not to cover speech therapy sessions for adults, though, creating an additional challenge for patients and for the company.
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The platform’s digital approach aims to provide a convenient, accessible experience to all its patients. But the teletherapy component is just a vehicle for Expressable’s innovative care strategy, Barbara said.
“What we’re trying to evangelize to the market is the importance of this caregiver-led approach. We’re not married to virtual care for virtual care itself,” he said. “I think the winners in the digital health space will be the ones who focus on providing the highest quality care.”