Valera Health, a behavioral health care management startup that developed an app to help clinicians remotely monitor patients with anxiety and depression, added Wisconsin health maintenance organization Group Health Cooperative of Eau Claire to its customer base in a multiyear contract. The payer also wants to use Valera’s program to support patients receiving treatment for opioid addiction, according to a company release.
In a phone interview, Valera Health CEO and cofounder Thomas Tsang said the Group Health deal is part of the company’s plan to make a greater push for payers to adopt its program this year.
Tsang also noted that his company closed a $3.4 million Series A round late last year with investment from Trinnovate Ventures — the venture arm of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona. Tsang said the company would use the funding to add staff in business development and bolster its team of software programmers.
Although the app is focused on care management for people with anxiety and depression, Valera Health is also interested in depression as a comorbidity, which can make some conditions more challenging to treat. With Montefiore Medical Center, Tsang said the provider had expanded the use cases for its app to OB-GYN clinics to treat perinatal and postpartum depression.
Valera Health currently works with five organizations that have more than 80,000 contracted lives. Part of the company’s goal, like other companies in this sector, is to contextualize behavioral health data with physical healthcare.
“Our outlook for 2018 is extremely positive,” Tsang said. “We are gaining traction among providers, but now we are also talking to payers.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Photo: Cecilie_Arcurs, Getty Images
