Cityblock Health is a new player in the healthcare arena — it spun out of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, a company working toward improving urban innovation, last October.
Based in New York City, it is working to help underserved communities by giving Medicaid and low-income Medicare beneficiaries access to health services. As CEO Iyah Romm, who previously held positions with Commonwealth Care Alliance and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health put it, the startup’s goal is uncovering “how to provide sustainable, cost-effective services to populations with greatest needs.”
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Though this mission is undoubtedly challenging, he emphasized why there’s a clear business care behind focusing on the non-medical aspects of a person’s health and how Cityblock Health is leveraging its own technology platform to accomplish this quest.
Romm will be delivering the closing keynote at MedCity INVEST in Chicago on May 2.
This exchange has been lightly edited.
MedCity: How did Cityblock Health come to be?
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Romm: Cityblock Health was initially incubated inside of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs on the basis of a simple idea: that cities should be healthy places to live. Sidewalk Labs imagines, designs, tests and builds urban innovations to help cities meet their biggest challenges. In the realm of U.S. healthcare, the challenges are especially immense for underserved communities that face complex health and social needs. Since its founding, Cityblock has spun out on its own and is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. Sidewalk Labs remains a close partner and investor.
MedCity: In simplest terms, how would you describe what Cityblock does and what differentiates it from other companies in the healthcare space?
Romm: Cityblock Health provides value-based care to low-income urban populations. We forge long-term relationships with our members and bring our services to meet them wherever they are — be it in our Neighborhood Hubs, at home, work, faith-based organizations or community centers or virtually. Community Health Partners, who are individuals hired from the communities we serve, anchor our care teams, driving engagement, non-judgmental support and trust-based relationships with members. Our clinical teams provide interdisciplinary team-based care delivery alongside healthcare providers and social services organizations already present in the communities in which we work.
Together we deliver primary care, mental health services, substance use disorder treatment, palliative care, management of complex chronic conditions, and services to directly address the social determinants of health, ranging from food access to transportation, social isolation and loneliness to housing insecurity.
Each member we serve is cared for by a care team that is tailored based on their unique profile. Commons, our custom-built digital platform, incorporates diverse data sources to enables providers to directly deliver personalized services and to seamlessly refer to clinical and non-clinical resources in the community. This all-in concierge model radically simplifies access to comprehensive services for our members, improving their experience of care and health outcomes.
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MedCity: How does your previous work with organizations like Commonwealth Care Alliance and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health inform what you do now?
Romm: My experiences in the public sector and non-profit health services organizations (both health plan and provider side) — and as a patient — informed our vision in founding Cityblock, and we continued to draw on them in our day-to-day work. At CCA, my cofounder of Cityblock and our chief health officer, Dr. Toyin Ajayi, and I helped to advance new initiatives that won national recognition for the ways in which we provided compassionate, comprehensive and effective care to Medicaid and Medicare patients across the state of Massachusetts.
In state government, I had the privilege of leading multiple, complex multi-agency initiatives, including building a statewide investment program that built dozens of programs focused on behavioral health integration, community paramedicine, and capability development to enable community providers to meaningfully move towards value-based payment arrangements.
And others on my team similarly bring a diverse array of experiences that inform our work. For example, my cofounder Melanie Bella was the founding head of the Medicare-Medicaid Coordination Office at CMS — a new shop created in the Obama administration to drive integrated care and financing for dually eligible populations nationwide.
MedCity: Why is there a business case for focusing on the social determinants of health?
Romm: The evidence is clear that non-medical factors have a dramatic impact on a person’s health. Particularly against the backdrop of innovation in population health and shifts towards value-based payment reform, the reality is that a fully integrated, person-centered approach to healthcare, which includes investments that directly address individuals’ social needs, produces tangible clinical and financial benefits when built, deployed and managed effectively. One of my favorite examples is the investment in food-as-medicine — a study recently published in Health Affairs highlighting our past work in Massachusetts speaks to this, with [a] specific focus on delivering food to nutritionally vulnerable patients.
MedCity: How will technology tools help drive change in the health of low-income populations?
Romm: The Cityblock product is better health and social service delivery. Technology is a key enabler and differentiator. Ultimately our care model relies on a wide range of tools and therapeutics, supported by a highly cross-functional integrated care team. Our digital platform is the glue that binds this all together, allowing us to deliver the right intervention at the right time, and coordinate the activities of many different players working together.
Fundamentally, the challenges we face in healthcare are a set of complicated logistics and communications problems. And to build the type of consumerism our patients really need, we have to be able to meet them seamlessly and quickly, whenever and wherever they want. We are building technology that codifies our approach to doing so, allowing us to productize, repeat and scale while retaining the utmost commitment to high quality, long-term relationships.
MedCity News: Cityblock Health is a fairly new company. What are its goals for the year ahead?
Romm: We are a new company and are excited to be getting off the ground. Our primary focus for this year is successfully launching our first Neighborhood Hubs in Brooklyn, powered by Commons, in close collaboration with EmblemHealth and other partnering community-based organizations and providers.
Photo: deberarr, Getty Images
