Salvo Health recently announced the closing of a $5 million Seed Prime round led by City Light Capital and Human Ventures to expand deployment of its wraparound GI care at providers including gastroenterology private practices, health systems, and ACOs.
The funding round included investment pro rata from all three of Salvo’s original seed investors: Threshold Ventures, Torch Capital, and Felicis Ventures, as well as angel investors like Anmol Madan (founder of Ginger Health and former Chief Data Scientist at Teladoc).
Salvo also revealed that Rachel Parlier of City Light and Emily Melton of Threshold will join the Board of Directors alongside Jeffrey Glueck, the Founder & CEO of Salvo. Parlier helped lead City Light investments in innovators like Bicycle Health and Spark Pediatrics. Melton, managing director and co-founder of Threshold, is a recent past Chair of the Board of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and has led investments in Livongo, Brightline, Imagen, Tia, and Viz.ai. Glueck, who launched Salvo in 2021, formerly served as Foursquare’s CEO, product leader, and chief marketing officer at Travelocity.
Salvo Health focuses on enabling local providers nationwide to provide wraparound care for chronic GI and metabolic liver conditions in a hybrid approach. And patients remain under the care of their trusted local physician, adding the best of Salvo telehealth and app-based daily support for follow-on care. Salvo helps solve staff shortages and clinician burnout by enabling insurance-covered and evidence-based, interdisciplinary care, including Salvo’s teams of licensed nurses, registered dietitians, and behavioral health specialists.
Salvo enables providers to bill RPM and CCM codes for Medicare and commercial patients where these codes are broadly covered, thereby improving patient outcomes and generating new ancillary service revenue for practices. And this positions large practices and systems on the path to value-based care arrangements, including shared savings and quality incentives. The model also frees busy providers to see more acute cases and more new patients by enabling patients to access daily support from their team at Salvo.
Unlike some startups in the GI space that focus on disintermediating or bypassing the local physicians while serving national payers or as an employer benefit, Salvo’s philosophy is to make the local physician the hub of an interdisciplinary, personalized care plan for each patient.
Salvo won deals with GI practices from Brooklyn to Pennsylvania to Virginia, and with a large health system in Baton Rouge, LA. And the funding will enable the company to fund staff-up to execute on these enterprise deployments, and expand sales and marketing to new customers.
In a separate two-arm study, this type of continuous care showed high potential for delivering better care at lower cost. And the treatment arm showed a 79% reduction in GI-related ER and urgent care utilization, compared to a control group. This type of proactive care heads off expensive and reactive care. And according to a leading actuary’s study of Total Medical Expense (TME) on over 9 million covered lives, Salvo has the potential to save payers $3 for every $1 spent on Salvo care. These savings were projected inside of a one-year measurement window, and applied also for ACO’s and other population health providers.
More recently, Salvo announced expansion into wraparound care for MASH and MASLD, based on requests from its GI and hepatology practices who are responsible for diagnosis of this liver condition. And metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) is one of the most common liver conditions worldwide, and the numbers continue to grow. Formerly named Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (or NAFLD), MASLD is estimated to affect nearly 30% of the U.S. population, rising in parallel to metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes. GI practices and departments generally lack enough clinical staff trained in behavioral health and nutrition, consumer-friendly technology and rich medical content, or the analytics and machine learning expertise to optimally guide patients through a structured weight loss program. And due to increased use of GLP-1 agonists in treating MASLD, Salvo physician partners seek to offer their patients medically-supervised, comprehensive programs to complement these medications, including guidance on resistance training to maintain muscle mass, cognitive behavioral skills, help building new nutrition habits, and ensuring adequate micronutrient intake. Salvo’s program was designed to address these specific needs.
Salvo Health as a technology company invested deeply in addressing the shortage of licensed care providers by using software and automation so that each care team member can support more patients effectively. And for Salvo patients today, two thirds of care minutes each month are delivered by software and app-based content, while one third of minutes provided by licensed personnel, letting care teams focus on the highest leverage uses of their time. This combination provides a “human touch” and builds a therapeutic alliance with each patient, and the average response time to patients of under two hours improves access, in an affordable and scalable way.
KEY QUOTES:
“I am delighted to lead this investment in Salvo Health and their innovative wraparound care for GI and metabolic chronic conditions. As an early-stage impact investor, we look for companies with the potential to not just transform industries, but also to improve lives. Salvo is enabling GI practices and health systems to fill in the gaps for underserved patient populations, especially for high-touch follow-on care between appointments and post-procedures.”
– Rachel Parlier of City Light Capital
“An estimated 70 million Americans are suffering from chronic gastrointestinal conditions that can cause serious disruptions to daily life. The growing need for GI care has surpassed the supply of specialists, and Salvo Health plays an important role in filling this gap. We’re thrilled to be backing such an experienced, data-driven, and product-focused team led by Jeff, that is poised to scale significant clinical outcomes.”
– Heather Hartnett, General Partner at Human Ventures
