Startups

Employee clinic company Crossover Health snaps up telemedicine startup Sherpaa

CEO Scott Shreeve said the company’s push into virtual care was led by customer demands about serving employees who were remote and therefore unable to access the company’s physical clinics.

Employer clinic company Crossover Health is broadening its pitch to customers through the acquisition of Sherpaa, the New York startup which was formed as an online-only primary care provider.

San Clemente, California-based Crossover Health develops on-site and near-site employee health clinics to a client base including Microsoft, Visa and Comcast. The company, which was founded in 2010, currently operates a total of 20 clinics across six states, serving a total workforce of nearly 200,000 people.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

CEO Scott Shreeve said the company’s push into virtual care was led by customer demands about serving employees who were remote and therefore unable to access the company’s physical clinics.

“This deal provides our customers more access and more capacity,” Shreeve said in a phone interview. “For many of our in-person clinics, there’s simply no more room at the inn for our clients.”

After taking a survey of the space, Shreeve decided that Sherpaa was a good acquisition target based on the sophistication of the company’s technology platform, its capabilities in care management and its focus in helping to develop longer term relationships between patients and providers (a rarity in the telemedicine space).

“With Sherpaa it’s not just a one-time relationship, it’s this ongoing communication that allows the provider to be much more efficient,” Shreeve said.

Sherpaa started in 2012 and has raised around $8 million from investors to develop a completely virtual chat-based telemedicine service that relied on asynchronous communication with a licensed physician. The company’s thesis was that 70 percent of conditions could be diagnosed and treated online.

As part of the deal Sherpaa co-founder Jay Parkinson is joining Crossover Health to help lead the development of the combined company’s virtual primary care offerings.

“So much of primary care is communication, which is built on a foundation of trust,” Parkinson said in a statement. “The ability to leverage the trust achieved by Crossover Health in its physical health center model, and seamlessly to extend that trust through the digital practice capabilities of Sherpaa, creates a singular care delivery vehicle able to offer primary care anywhere.”

Shreeve said the new partnership will allow Sherpaa to scale and deploy its technology platform to more customers and create a full end-to-end offering with in-person capabilities. He also touted Sherpaa’s structured data set for a range of more than 300 conditions which has been fine tuned to recommend the best clinical actions and follow-up care plans which provides a robust layer on which to build software algorithms.

Because of the near-ubiquity of mobile technology, Shreeve said Crossover said it was important to give patients “optionality” in how they access care.

One intriguing analog Shreeve mentioned was the retail industry, particularly the example of glasses company Warby Parker.

“When they launched they were 100 percent online, but what they found was that customers needed a physical place to go as well,” Shreeve said. “What we’re trying to do is create one simple place to go that blends both the in-person and the online experiences.”

The company has developed care teams made up of clinicians providing digital only care for Crossover’s remote patients. Interestingly, Crossover is housing these so-called virtualists together to take advantage of the benefits that come from collaboration.

“AI and this shift to virtual care will change the nature of work,” Shreeve said. “We want to be on the front end of that because that’s where the world is moving.”

Looking to the future, Shreeve said he sees Crossover continuing to add capabilities through potential partnerships, as well as acquisitions. He positioned digital health as being in a period of consolidation where platforms are broadening with more offerings to better meet changing customer needs.

Photo: designer491, Getty Images

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