Solv Health raises $27 million as health care providers move online

Solv Health, a startup that sells health care providers digital tools to manage patients, has raised $27 million in new funding led by Acrew Capital, with MultiCare Health System, Light Street Capital, Benchmark and Greylock Partners also participating.

Why it matters: Overnight, the ongoing pandemic significantly altered how people interact with the health care system, creating a need to reduce unnecessary in-person contact that has sped up the digital transformation of medical practice.

Details: Solv’s primary business and source of revenue is selling software to health care providers — mainly urgent care clinics — that helps them manage patient appointments and related interactions.

• It’s essentially an “OpenTable for health care providers."
• “The ROI we’re delivering them is patient engagement and acquisition,” co-founder and CEO Heather Fernandez tells Axios.

On the patient side, Solv has an app that enables users to find providers nearby that accept their insurance (if they have it), book appointments, and track their deductible spending.

• Solv has also added services like virtual doctor visits, appointments for COVID-19 tests, and the ability to pay for care via the mobile app.
• Since March, patients have booked more than 700,000 virtual appointments through Solv, up from only 9,000 in all of 2019.
• According to the company, 80 million Americans currently live within a 5-mile radius of a same-day appointment they can book via Solv.
• The service is available to patients in 43 states for in-person visits, and 38 for virtual visits.

The pandemic has also created a new opportunity for the company as urgent care clinics quickly became primary providers for COVID-19 tests.

• In recent months, the company has also partnered with the city of Seattle and the state of Michigan to provide underlying patient-booking software for their testing programs.
• To date, Solv patients have booked 2.1 million tests, according to the company.

The bottom line: Urgent care is increasingly becoming the first, if not the only, interaction patients have with health care providers, making it even more imperative for both clinics and patients to interact more efficiently.