Health2047, a Silicon Valley business formation and commercialization enterprise launched by the American Medical Association (AMA) in 2016, has spun out its third company.
Co-founded by Health2047 along with Eric Whitaker, M.D., and Ken Alleyne, M.D., Zing Health will offer a Medicare Advantage plan and focus its initial efforts in the Midwest. The company said its overarching goal is to address the social determinants of health and decrease the burden on both patients and physicians.
Zing Health will be available to Cook County, Ill., residents starting Jan. 1, 2020. A news story in Chicago Business notes that Whitaker runs Chicago-based healthcare investment firm TWG Partners, and Alleyne is a West Hartford, Conn.-based orthopedic surgeon and founder of healthcare investment firm HartHaven Partners. “The pair are longtime friends and business partners,” the story says. “Alleyne previously served as chief medical officer of NextLevel Health, the Cook County Medicaid managed care plan led by Whitaker’s wife, Dr. Cheryl Whitaker. The men are also investors in VirtualHealth, a digital tool that aims to help insurers—including NextLevel—coordinate members’ care.”
Zing Health said it would connect necessary services directly with its customers by placing the patient-physician relationship at the core of its tech-enabled community care model. This approach stresses the importance of understanding social context, nuances of local healthcare systems and an individual's unique barriers to health and aims to create a health journey with less friction.
The company said it designed its plan to deliver a wide array of high-quality services with little to no cost for members, a robust over-the-counter formulary, decreasing physician pain points and ease of patient access—often at novel sites like federally qualified health centers. Each Zing customer will have access to a local field care team focused on understanding the community's unique needs. The Zing field team will also embed itself at partner hospitals to coordinate timely procedures and appropriate discharge practices.
As part of its collaborative, community-based approach, Zing Health said it would partner with, and support, local providers and physicians through transparent and more productive relationships that empower them around information and insights. These partnerships will allow Zing to gather data from health assessments and socioeconomic situations that impact health, and use this valuable information to lower health risks for its members and provide physicians with resources to improve population health management.
"We will co-locate care teams with community partners to collect real-time, on-the-ground data about our members and help them achieve their best health possible by ensuring they can access convenient, comprehensive care,” said Whitaker in a prepared statement.
Health2047 first spin-out, Akiri, is building a cloud-based, peer-to-peer network to enable trusted data exchange across the complex U.S. healthcare economy. Health2047's second spinout, First Mile Care, is a preventive chronic care company building a platform to help reverse prediabetes.
