Included Health, a navigation and virtual care company, is growing its services to include a new specialty care clinic, which will provide virtual support for costly conditions like cancer, the company announced Wednesday.
San Francisco-based Included Health serves employers and health plans and offers online primary and behavioral healthcare support. It also provides tailored services for LGTBQ+ patients and Black patients.
The new specialty care clinic, which will become available in 2025, is starting by offering three centers: the Cancer Center, the Center for Women’s Health and the Center for Metabolic Health. For women’s health, the company will begin with a program for menopause. For metabolic health, it will start with a program for healthy weight. Patients will receive a care team and gain access to medical specialists and experts for second opinions, as well as navigation and advocacy support. They’ll also receive personalized care plans, in-home support for prescriptions, diagnostics and help with administrative tasks. The specialty care clinic will be integrated with the company’s primary and behavioral health services.
Included Health plans to expand its specialty care clinic to more health conditions in the future. It started with cancer, women’s health and metabolic health because its clients were asking for support in these areas, said Ami Parekh, Included Health’s chief health officer.
“Patients fall through the cracks all the time,” Parekh said in an interview. “And unfortunately, the more complex your disease, the more likely you are to fall through the cracks or have to repeat your story between multiple doctors or get repeated imaging or get a bill that you don’t understand. All of that complexity increases as your burden of illness increases. … It was clear from a member’s perspective that they had needs that we thought we could help fill.”
To track the success of the specialty care clinic, Included Health will follow patient engagement and member satisfaction. It will also track the Healthy Days metric, which “estimates the number of recent days when a person’s physical and mental health was good (or better) and is calculated by subtracting the number of unhealthy days from 30 days,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The launch of the specialty care clinic ties in with a larger trend of patients seeking more integration when it comes to their healthcare, Parekh stated.
“One of the key things we believe is that specialty care needs to be integrated within the larger health needs of a patient, which often include primary care, behavioral health and accessing the larger ecosystem through navigation,” she said. “So as we continue to build towards truly all-included care, specialty was the natural evolution in our journey.”
Other companies that offer access to virtual specialty care include Teladoc Health and Transcarent.
Photo: Feodora Chiosea, Getty Images
