Glen Tullman led a blockbuster IPO when Livongo raised $335 million as it went public in 2019. He also was involved in one of the largest deals in digital health when Teladoc bought Livongo a year later for $18.5 billion.
But Tullman feels there's more work to do in healthcare. With his latest venture, he's aiming to overhaul the employer-sponsored benefits space.
"People joke that I don't know when to quit," Tullman told Fierce Healthcare.
Tullman launched the new company, Transcarent, with General Catalyst Managing Partner Hemant Taneja. General Catalyst also was a big investor in Livongo, a diabetes management company.
Under Tullman's leadership, Livongo developed a data-science-driven chronic disease management solution and scaled up remote patient monitoring services. While Livongo successfully took a tech-enabled approach to diabetes management, employers also are looking for similar solutions to tackle other healthcare issues, Tullman said.
"With all the payers, pharmacy benefit managers, health systems, and innovative siloed players, for many people, healthcare is more confusing, more complex, and more costly than ever before," said Tullman, who serves as CEO and executive chairman of the company.
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“We believe Transcarent will be another game-changer,” said Taneja in a statement. “At Transcarent, we’re forming true partnerships with self-insured employers by introducing an innovative business model and offering their employees a transformative experience across their most common and most important care needs. It’s an authentic collaboration between the healthcare and technology sectors to usher in consumer-directed innovations in an industry that historically has been slow to evolve.”
Transcarent uses a combination of software, technology and data science to provide members with health navigation, virtual care and bundled providers in one consumer-directed health and care platform, according to the company.
Self-insured employers, who pay for almost half of the healthcare expenditures in the U.S., have seen costs escalate year after year without corresponding improvements in the quality of care. While employers attempt to offer their employees access to best-in-class healthcare services, the result for employees and their families is often fragmented solutions that are confusing to use, complex to understand and costly to pay for, company officials said.
Transcarent is taking a different approach as it will strike risk-sharing agreements with employers, Tullman said.
"We're changing the business model to align with self-insured employers and their members. We're not asking employers to pay anything upfront. If we don’t provide higher quality and lower cost, you don’t have to pay anything. Nobody else has been willing to go at risk," he said.
The company will provide members with a personalized, 24/7 experience and connect them via chat, phone or video to a personal health guide or a physician, expert second opinions, medication review and management, virtual physical therapy or full surgery management, officials said.
Employees will also have access to the leading centers of excellence and appropriate site-of-care offerings as well as a range of care provided at home rather than in the hospital.
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"For employers, Transcarent provides a risk-based model that fully aligns incentives. And their employees can trust that Transcarent will focus on quality first, provide clear and unbiased information, a full range of choices, and share the rewards that their better health decisions generate," company officials said in a press release.
Transcarent recently merged with BridgeHealth, a company that connects workers with centers of excellence and other appropriate sites of care.
BridgeHealth serves 1 million members with more than 160 centers of excellence and ambulatory surgery centers and more than 300 pre-negotiated surgical bundles across eight surgical categories, and it provides documented improvements in quality of care, resulting in 80% lower complications, according to Transcaent.
The startup got a major cash infusion with a $40 million series A round in October 2020, led by Taneja and Lee Shapiro, managing partner of 7wireVentures, of which Tullman is a founder and remains a managing partner.
Alta Partners and Jove Equity Partners also invested in the funding round.
The acceleration of digital health during the COVID-19 pandemic and the increased investor interest in the healthcare space provide an opportunity to "define the experience of health and care," Tullman said.
"The next 18 months will determine the next five years and the future of healthcare, not just digital health. We have this unique opportunity now to really revisit how we’ve been providing healthcare in this country," he said.
"Anybody who thought we couldn’t quickly scale was proven wrong. And anybody who thought we couldn’t empower consumers was proven wrong. The only question is, do we have the leadership to actually reinvent the healthcare system in a way that is focused on and driven by consumers? Or do we have to wait for Amazon or Walmart to do it?"
Tullman added, "We’re going to do it at Transcarent."
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The startup has recruited a team of healthcare and technology leaders, including Krishnan Sridharan, formerly with Aetna, Cigna and UnitedHealthcare, who will serve as president of Transcarent. Jeff Dobro, M.D., joined as chief innovation officer after stints at Mercer, One Medical and Willis Towers Watson. Jamie Hall joined as chief commercial officer after working at BridgeHealth and the BlueCross BlueShield Association.
A former Remedy Partners and Signify Health executive, Bipin Mistry, M.D., has joined as chief medical officer, and Caitlin Fleming, who worked at Haven and Optum, is serving as chief of staff.
Tullman, along with former Livongo President Jennifer Schneider, M.D., also is backing a new blank check healthcare technology that's preparing an initial public offering of up to $500 million, according to documents filed in October with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The blank check company, Health Assurance Acquisition Corp., aims to identify companies that are involved in what it calls "health assurance," have high growth potential and expanding total addressable markets and are led by mission-driven CEOs committed to responsible innovation, according to SEC documents.