In 2009, Ben Evans and Dr. Jeff Wells founded OurHealth with a simple mission: Help employers give their employees access to better healthcare.
“We felt like the most powerful thing you can give patients is an independent primary care doctor,” Evans said in a recent phone interview.
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The Indianapolis, Indiana-based company’s approach looks like this: It brings onsite and near-site clinics to employers.
The onsite model works well for organizations with 750 employees or more, while the near-site version is more applicable to smaller companies that can’t do an onsite clinic on their own. The near-site clinics are usually shared by various employers rather than being built for one specific company. OurHealth also offers a custom model that encompasses the best of the onsite and near-site models.
A clinic typically has a full-time physician, a full-time nurse practitioner, a full-time health coach and a support team of a few nurses. All the clinics are staffed by OurHealth.
Each location offers a variety of services. In Evans’ words, one can go to an OurHealth clinic for anything they might go to their primary care physician for. Additionally, the centers offer pediatric urgent care, wellness services and lab tests. OurHealth’s clinics also carry 90 generic medications, Evans said.
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All the services are free to the employees. However, the healthcare offerings at the clinics don’t replace insurance.
OurHealth has clients in Indiana, Chicago, Philadelphia, Nashville and North Carolina. They range from publicly traded software companies to law firms, Fortune 50 companies to schools. The city of Indianapolis, for example, is one of its customers.
“If there’s one thing employers are challenged with, it’s how they help their employees get healthy,” Evans said.
The Indianapolis company’s revenue model is fairly simple: Employers pay it a per employee, per month fee for access to clinics.
Last year, OurHealth raised $37 million in a round led by White Oak, a San Francisco-based equity firm. The company said it plans to use the money to expand into new markets, hire 480 new employees and invest in marketing, sales, technology and data security, among other goals.
The fundraise will help propel OurHealth toward its next big goal: save employers $1 billion in healthcare costs by 2025. Evans said the company is about 10 percent of the way toward reaching that objective.
“If you save employers money, that means their employees are getting healthier,” he said. “If they’re getting healthier, it means you’ve done a good job of getting them better access to care.”
Photo: CherriesJD, Getty Images
