A California startup called Waymark has received $45 million in venture funding to work on improving healthcare access and outcomes among Medicaid beneficiaries.
Seeking to scale up value-based care in Medicaid, the San Francisco-based company received funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Lux Capital and leading angel investors also participated in the round.
Waymark said it would partner with payers and providers to train and employ community-based care teams and enable them with technology.
"Additional creativity and capital must be directed to Medicaid to avoid further entrenching disparities that are already so visible," said Waymark CEO and co-founder Rajaie Batniji, M.D., Ph.D., in a statement. "Waymark will increase the capacity of our healthcare delivery system and align the payment incentives to enable whole-person care."
Batniji previously co-founded Collective Health, a health tech company that developed infrastructure to better enable employees and their families to understand, navigate, and pay for healthcare.
Co-founders Batniji and Sanjay Basu, M.D., Ph.D., are both physicians who care for Medicaid patients, and who said they recognized the need to enable primary care providers to have better outreach and coordination opportunities in communities.
"Primary care providers are the backbone of any effective healthcare system, but are increasingly burned-out in the United States," said Basu, in a statement. He was previously director of research at the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care. "Waymark seeks to help primary care providers who care for Medicaid patients by providing them with a community-based care team to help address needs that extend beyond the clinic -- without costs to the provider or patient."
A Forbes article noted that Waymark is in the process of contracting with Medicaid managed care companies “with the hope of having tens of thousands of patients in each market to collect data and prove which interventions work and then replicate them throughout the country.”
The Forbes article also noted that Batniji and Basu have brought in executives from other healthcare companies, including Michael Ceballos who previously oversaw new markets at CityBlock Health, Afia Asamoah, the former head of legal at Google Health, and Christina Fellows, a former vice president of Medicaid finance at UnitedHealthcare.
