Quartet Health, a tech-enabled mental health care company, is expanding its capabilities with the acquisition of InnovaTel, a clinically led mental health-as-a-service platform with expertise in treating complex conditions.
The InnovaTel acquisition follows New York-based Quartet’s announcement last week of a strategic partnership with Independence Health Group, the Philadelphia-based parent company of Independence Blue Cross, to achieve speed to quality mental health care for all patients across conditions, acuity levels, and insurance type. As a part of the new collaboration, Quartet raised more than $60 million for its next stage of growth, led by Independence with participation from existing investors GV and Oak HC/FT.
Both Quartet and Erie, Pa.-based InnovaTel were founded in 2014. To date more than 300,000 people — across Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and commercial insurance — have used Quartet’s services. InnovaTel has 130 clinicians on staff, 51 percent of whom are prescribers and 27 percent of whom are clinicians of color. The company's model of working with community mental health centers to get patients in-network mental health care has improved the capacity to treat patients with mental health needs by anywhere from 5x to 10x, Quartet said. More than 50 percent of patients who InnovaTel serves have a serious mental illness.
With the InnovaTel acquisition, Quartet said it would develop care delivery capabilities to complement its existing ecosystem of clinicians who practice in-network on behalf of health insurance plans. InnovaTel will also expand its reach to serve members of health plans and systems nationwide through this partnership. Over time, the two companies will expand their virtual care delivery capabilities, with an initial focus on providing timely and high-quality access to care for those with a serious mental illness.
“As a longtime clinician and provider of care, I know first-hand the systemic challenges that people face every day across our country when they need to quickly access mental health care,” said Jonathan Evans, clinical psychologist and InnovaTel's president and CEO, in a statement. “We are thrilled to come together with Quartet Health to build a comprehensive, nationwide solution to help all people — across insurance types and clinical needs — obtain timely access to high-quality care. Quartet's sophisticated data and analytics and technology infrastructure will provide the framework for InnovaTel to scale quickly to communities nationwide, with a continued focus on those with the most complex needs.”
This new partnership with Independence builds on a whole-person health initiative that Independence and Quartet announced in February 2021 to better integrate mental and physical health care. In the first eight months of Independence and Quartet working together, more than 1,100 mental health and primary care clinicians in Southeastern Pennsylvania have signed-up to use the Quartet platform, and more than 2,500 members have been connected to the Quartet platform for care.
Puneet Singh, CEO of Quartet Health, described the partnership with Independence and the funding infusion as enabling Quartet to enhance, develop, and deliver on capabilities to better integrate mental and physical health in four specific areas:
• Patient identification and engagement: The company’s proprietary algorithms leverage health insights and data to proactively identify patients who may have untreated mental health and substance use conditions. Quartet said it would continue to invest in more personalized engagement across all channels of care — such as case managers, specialists, and direct patient sign-up — to become the one-stop, virtual front door to mental health care.
• Optimized patient matching to robust supply of high-quality providers: To deliver on speed to quality care, Quartet will enhance its capabilities to evaluate and aggregate mental health providers across clinical needs and insurance types on its platform. Across all care options, Quartet will invest in its proprietary SmartMatch technology to quickly make the optimal patient-provider match. It will also provide “white-glove services” for patients who need additional support. Bedrock to all of this work, the company said, is a special commitment to health equity and expanding our capabilities for those with serious mental illness.
• Actionable insights to measure and reward quality: Quartet, in partnership with primary care physicians, will continue to leverage data to proactively identify patients with potential unaddressed conditions for formal screening. Once patients are receiving care, clinical assessments will be used to measure when patients with certain conditions are showing indications of improved health outcomes and which providers treated them. Over time, this will help strengthen the precision of Quartet’s matching algorithms and allow providers to be rewarded for high-quality care through value-based payment models.
• Patient conditions and populations: Quartet will also enhance its capabilities to support additional conditions, such as substance use disorders and serious mental illnesses, and serve additional populations, such as pediatrics and transitional-age youth.
"As a caregiver to one of the millions of people with complex mental health needs, I know first-hand how important it is that all people get an accurate diagnosis, find the right provider quickly, access affordable in-network care, and know that treatment is helping,” Singh said in a statement. “I am excited to work with Independence to build an equitable mental health care system, in turn connecting countless Americans to timely access to the high-quality care they want and deserve."
