InquisitHealth Expands Peer Mentoring Programs with New Funding

RIVER EDGE, N.J., Aug. 16, 2018 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- InquisitHealth, a population health management company powered by peer-to-peer mentoring, announced today the closing of a seed financing round led by Hudson River Capital Partners and Dreamit. New funding will be applied to expand InquisitHealth's existing diabetes, asthma, and pre-diabetes programs and to establish new programs for hypertension, sickle cell disease, and COPD.

This new investment brings InquisitHealth's funding up to a total of $4.2M, inclusive of non-dilutive funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

"With these new investments and incredible partners, we're excited to expand our peer mentoring solutions," says Ashwin Patel, MD PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer at InquisitHealth. "We are seeing great results across the spectrum, but especially in the Medicaid population, where there is a higher prevalence of social, behavioral, and health literacy challenges."

InquisitHealth's therapeutic peer-to-peer approach leverages high degrees of shared empathy between peer and peer mentor to drive clinical outcomes. These relationships are cultivated through InquisitHealth's rigorous peer mentor training, robust peer matching algorithms, and an ethnically-, linguistically-, and experientially- diverse team of peer mentors.

Through goal-focused conversations with their matched patients, peer mentors fill knowledge gaps, inspire behavior change, and help address the underlying social and behavioral determinants of health (SBDoH) ? which are especially common amongst high-risk, high-cost patients.

InquisitHealth's value-add approach builds upon what is achievable through traditional care models, resulting in better clinical outcomes that are more sustainable. Recent analysis of InquisitHealth's diabetes peer mentoring program across all commercial, Medicare and Medicaid populations demonstrated an average 1.5-point reduction in HbA1c, sustained 24+ months.

"InquisitHealth has opened a new channel in the treatment of chronic diseases," says James Foy, partner at Hudson River Capital Partners and InquisitHealth's Board Director. "It has replicated academic research in real-world situations to assist health care providers achieve dramatically better, and sustainable, outcomes in a range of diverse communities. It has also demonstrated success in partnering with a wide array of entities including medical centers, unions, and large pharmaceutical firms. This investment round will facilitate a significant scaling of this exciting new approach to peer mentoring."

InquisitHealth's recent participation in the Dreamit accelerator provided the company access to a diverse network of payers and providers, many of whom struggle to engage and help all segments of their patient populations equitably. Since its participation in Dreamit in 2016, InquisitHealth has come to serve over a dozen such enterprise clients.

Karen Griffith Gryga, Managing Director at Dreamit says, "Through our national network of health systems, we have seen strong evidence that personalized peer mentoring is highly effective in driving behavior change for patients with chronic diseases."

As health systems transition to value-based care delivery, there is broad awareness of the need to holistically support each patient in between physician visits. Peer mentorship is a clinically proven approach to engage patients and help address their needs. InquisitHealth's mentoring-as-a-service (MaaS) model is a turnkey solution for health systems and health plans to activate successful patients to help those struggling. The result: population-driven, population health improvement.

"InquisitHealth is bringing value to the entire healthcare ecosystem ? patients, providers, health plans, hospitals, patient foundations, and pharmaceutical companies," says investor Brad Farber, Founder of Atika Capital Management. "They are tapping into the power of peers to drive medication adherence, healthy lifestyle changes, and through that, delivering significant improvements in health outcomes."

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About InquisitHealth:

InquisitHealth is a population health management company powered by peer-to-peer mentoring that delivers improvements in patient outcomes by inspiring healthy lifestyle changes and addressing the underlying social and behavioral determinants of health (SBDoH).

Through Peer Mentor Universitytm (PMU), peer mentors of all ages, cultures, languages, chronic conditions, and economic backgrounds are empowered with disease-specific knowledge and coaching skills to motivate their peers to make healthy lifestyle choices. These trained peer mentors use InquisitHealth's HIPAA-compliant technology platforms to deploy scalable, evidence-based peer mentoring programs to help health insurers, health systems, patient foundations and pharmaceutical companies make better health contagious.

SOURCE InquisitHealth