Our investment in Medallion
We’re in a Cambrian moment in digital health. Every healthcare specialty is being reinvented by new digital products and services that put the patient experience first and flip existing business models on their heads. The COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated this, forcing the healthcare industry to reevaluate its practices and adopt a digital-first approach almost overnight to meet the needs of its patients.
Yet the underlying technology hasn’t kept up. While digital health companies are delivering new models for care, the healthcare industry still relies on decades-old systems — many powered by paper forms, fax, and phone calls — that were designed for in-person, low-tech care. This lack of technology creates bottlenecks for rapidly growing digital health companies and massive inefficiencies for legacy health players — costs that are then passed on to the patient.
Consider a telehealth app that wants to expand to offer primary care to patients in all 50 states. In order to do this, the company faces a key challenge: ensuring its clinicians are licensed and credentialed in each state. In order to start seeing patients, a clinician needs to be credentialed and verify specific information like medical licenses, NPI numbers, and other primary source data. If a clinician is seeing patients in states where they’re not licensed, they need to apply for a new medical license in that state. If they accept insurance, they need to be credentialed by every insurance payor the organization accepts (which on average is 30 payors!) in order to get reimbursed for their services. When factoring in each state and payor’s requirements, the complexity of managing an individual provider adds up quickly — not to mention managing several providers across an organization’s growing network.
Why isn’t it as easy to add a provider to your network as it is to hire an employee?
Enter Medallion. I’m thrilled to announce our Series A investment and join the board at Medallion, an enterprise-grade provider network management platform that helps healthcare organizations license, credential, and monitor the providers in their network. Medallion’s automated workflows and APIs allow for fast, secure, and accurate data exchange between providers, healthcare organizations, payors, and primary sources, drastically reducing errors, decreasing turnaround times, and improving the provider experience. In an industry where compliance is of the utmost importance, Medallion provides critical infrastructure for a healthcare organization’s most valuable asset — its skilled provider workforce.
When we first met the Medallion team, we were struck both by their speed of execution — building, launching, and scaling their product to a substantial customer base in less than a year — and the depth of CEO Derek Lo’s vision. As a second-time founder, Derek — who previously founded Py, a hiring platform for technical talent — balances uncanny speed with thoughtfulness. In a short amount of time, he’s built a stellar team (they’re 40 employees and hiring!) and earned the trust of best-in-class digital health companies like Cerebral, Eden Health, Ro, and more.
We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Derek and the entire Medallion team, and a notable group of co-investors, including Optum Ventures, Box Group, Susa Ventures, and individuals like Daniel Gross, Elad Gil, and the founders of Carbon Health, Nurx, One Medical, Ro, Segment, and more.