Morgan Health, a business unit of JPMorgan Chase, has co-led an $80 million raise for Cortica, a provider for autistic and neurodivergent children.
The strategic round follows Cortica’s series D and was co-led with Nexus NeuroTech Ventures, with additional backing from Autism Impact Fund. The investment will be used to grow Cortica's number of value-based contracts and to integrate guarantees focused on faster evaluation, diagnosis and treatment, as well as clinical outcomes. The capital will also be used to extend Cortica’s footprint, which currently covers eight states.
Cortica aims to offer whole-child care through an interdisciplinary team including neurologists, behavior analysts, speech pathologists and occupational therapists. The company, founded in 2017, offers medical care, developmental therapies, ABA therapy and family wellness counseling.
“What you want is one consistent medical home for the patient and that’s what Cortica is providing,” Morgan Health CEO Dan Mendelson told Fierce Healthcare.
The company claims its model of care has been shown to improve outcomes across conditions often co-occurring with autism, like sleep disorders, seizures, psychiatric comorbidities and more. At the same time, it uses 50% of standard ABA therapy volumes, limiting the use of antipsychotic and stimulant medications and reducing emergency department and inpatient admissions. It also claims to offer 34% in annual savings per patient.
Rates of autism are on the rise, though that may be because diagnoses are simply getting better. Meanwhile, demand far exceeds supply when it comes to care options. And while effective care requires a range of services, it is rare to find an integrated solution in benefit design, according to Mendelson. Caregiving can be a serious burden on working parents who must navigate a fragmented system to find support, which can take them away from their work.
“We hear from our employees on this. This is a very serious area of need for them,” Mendelson said. “These services are siloed in the typical benefit plan and parents then are caught trying to coordinate between all of these benefits.”
This marks the seventh investment for Morgan Health, which launched in 2021. By the end of this year, it will have made nine investments totaling $215 million. The idea for the business unit was to take the learnings of JPMorgan Chase, itself a large employer, and accelerate innovation in the employer-sponsored healthcare market. The unit has been focused on deploying up to $250 million into solutions for its employees, dependents and the broader ecosystem.
Cortica works with 35 payers in a mix of value-based and fee-for-service relationships. One of its major appeals to Morgan Health is that it does not shy away from taking on risk in contracting, Mendelson noted. “One of the core theses that we are advancing at Morgan Health is that we want to be working with organizations that will take responsibility for quality and cost,” he said.
Cortica, which will serve more than 24,000 patients and their families in 2024, is currently available to JPMorgan employees in legacy fee-for-service arrangements “that do not keep pace with the growing prevalence and cost burden of autism and neurodevelopmental disorders,” Cortica CEO Neil Hattangadi, M.D., told Fierce Healthcare in a statement. “These legacy arrangements are also inadequate to meet the holistic needs of each child and family.” Morgan Health will work to evolve these contracts into value-based arrangements with metrics around access, outcomes and cost across medical and behavioral care.