Originally published by Home Health Care News on March 15, 2023
Maribel Health — a company that helps health systems design and deliver advanced home-based care services — has completed a $25 million Series A. The funding round was led by General Catalyst.
The big idea behind Maribel Health is that patients want to receive care in their homes, but hospitals and health systems don’t always have the tools to make this happen, according to Dr. Adam Groff, co-founder of the company.
“Maribel Health is all about bringing subject matter experts, professional services and technology to help connect the hospitals, physicians, clinics, and home health care operators together,” he told Home Health Care News. “We can do this through a variety of ways, different kinds of clinical programs, but where we started is in the acute-care-at-home space.”
This includes services such as, hospital at home, community paramedicine, and other high-acute care models that extend past the capabilities of just hospital at home.
In order to accomplish this, Maribel Health has assembled a team of experienced health care clinicians, operators and technologists that understand the health care system from multiple angles.
Currently, the company has founding anchor partnerships with Mercy Health System and Bayada Home Health Care.
“With Mercy, we are building what will be an over 200-bed hospital-at-home program across several of their hospitals,” Groff said. “Bayada has a number of deep joint ventures with health systems, and we’re bringing additional advanced clinical capabilities into those deals, so that the home health and hospice operation can more completely serve the needs of their JV partners.”
Bayada CEO David Baiada calls the partnership a clear opportunity to think “actively and innovatively” about how to move more care into the home.
“Every hospital that we work with, whether it’s in a strategic relationship, or in a joint venture partnership, is wrestling with this challenge of moving higher-acuity care into the home for lots of different reasons,” he told HHCN. “We feel like part of our responsibility, as a good partner, is to bring next generation thinking to those relationships, and Maribel Health is a great example of this.”
As far as reimbursement, Maribel Health works with partners that have contracts with payers in place.
On its end, completing a $25 million funding round will allow Maribel Health to attract talent and grow out the company’s team. It will also allow further development of its technology platform.
“It allows us to bring in more really experienced and talented people who understand the intersection between health systems and home- and community-based operators, and we can enable advanced care in the home through our technology,” Groff said.
For the moment, Maribel Health’s main goal is to help its partners see success.
“The other partners that we’ll announce in the near future all share the vision that we do,” Groff said. “The vision that home- and community-based care of the future will have much more advanced clinical capabilities and technology.”
Looking further ahead, Maribel Health’s goal is to identify and develop relationships with those additional partners.
“Organizations, whether they’re hospitals, clinics, or home health care operators, are all facing some of the same constraints, which is lots of demand, but lack of capacity,” Groff said. “At the same time, you have huge advances with things like artificial intelligence and robotics. We see an inevitable push to give patients more tools and services that allow them to stay at home and in the community.”