Having car issues? Just find the nearest mechanic. Toilet isn’t working? A plumber will be out shortly. Think you have strep throat? A doctor might be available to see you that day. Need to set up a mental health appointment? Be prepared to wait.
Anay Patel, the head of strategy and corporate development at Quartet Health, has noticed that as customers, we rarely wait for services in most industries. But waiting is the norm in mental healthcare.
“Today, it takes weeks and months to be seen by a mental health provider in many parts of the country,” Patel said. “For patients with serious mental illness (SMI) the wait times can be even longer. It’s unacceptable and nowhere near good enough.”
Quartet Health is trying to fix that. The healthtech company, whose mission is to improve speed to quality mental healthcare for all, recently acquired InnovaTel, a telepsychiatry service provider made of psychiatrists, nurse practitioners and licensed clinical social workers. Today, Quartet supports patients in more than 30 states through a combination of its data-driven matching capabilities, technology infrastructure, and white-glove care navigation services. The acquisition of InnovaTel will accelerate Quartet’s vision to provide care on a national scale, with providers licensed in all 50 states.
“Our goal is to offer patients of all clinical needs and acuity levels clinically excellent mental health care in hours and days, not weeks and months,” Patel said. “By complementing our ecosystem of mental health providers with our own virtual care providers, we’ll be able to meet all patients where they are.”
Built In NYC sat down with Patel to learn more about what this acquisition means for the future of Quartet Health.
How is the coming together of these two companies delivering on Quartet’s vision to improve speed to quality mental healthcare?
In spending time getting to know InnovaTel, we realized early on that we both shared the same vision for how mental healthcare should be delivered. And as we started to chart out the combination of what we could achieve together, we learned that the two businesses had complementary strengths, bringing together Quartet’s sophisticated technology platform and analytic capabilities with InnovaTel’s deep clinical experience.
Quartet has spent the last several years building a set of pathways, in partnership with our platform partners, for providers to refer patients seeking mental healthcare. During this time, we’ve seen firsthand that for patients, especially for those who have a serious mental illness (SMI) diagnosis, care options can be limited, and finding a clinician who is in-network and is available to see patients in hours and days, instead of weeks and months, is prohibitive. Not only is provider supply and patient demand incongruous, but the lack of technology as a means to deliver care can also be a point of friction.
You can start to see where the problem and solution come together to create better clinical outcomes for patients.’’
The longer a patient waits for care, the higher the probability for an unfavorable clinical outcome grows significantly, as does the cost of care. Through working with InnovaTel, we found that of the hundreds of thousands of patients they treat virtually annually, over half have an SMI diagnosis, which means their clinical team has deep expertise on how to treat toward an optimal set of outcomes. You can start to see where the problem and solution come together to create better clinical outcomes for patients.
What tech investments is Quartet making to achieve its new strategic direction?
We’re actively investing across several core technology areas. As we bring the best of InnovaTel’s clinical expertise together with Quartet’s existing technology and care navigation capabilities, we’re actively building toward the future. This includes engaging with technology partners that offer a suite of care delivery enablement tools, including an electronic health record and clinical practice management software. We are also focused on tools that will continue to support our work to measure quality, including how effective our clinical interventions are. In support of care intervention measurement, we are going deeper on analytics that help validate care models that generate the right outcomes.
On the platform side, Quartet has built a set of proprietary intelligence algorithms that match patients to the right provider based on a set of objective criteria, as well as a set of clinical assessment tools that our care navigators leverage in support of patients we engage with.
As a patient, imagine engaging with your care provider, and that care provider having all of the necessary clinical and non-clinical information needed to get you the care you need at their fingertips, and doing so in hours and days, not weeks and months. We’ll continue to invest in refining these capabilities, fortifying them with even more clinical-rich intelligence and automation, while wrapping an empathic care navigation specialist around the technology, to support every step of the way.
QUARTET CULTURE
What growth opportunities will this acquisition create for members of the Quartet and InnovaTel teams?
We’ve seen a tremendous reaction from both teams, with expressed interest in wanting to work collaboratively on various initiatives related to the launch of our joint ability to deliver care virtually in 2022. For our technology, product, and data science teams, they now have access to world-class clinical teams to help build a platform in support of high-quality care. And for InnovaTel clinicians, their vision of measurement-based clinical interventions can now be scaled, supported by a team of talented engineers and data scientists with technical proficiency.
With respect to hiring, we are actively welcoming new talent and additional skill sets to join our team. We see added demand for clinical talent, and as such, we’ve expanded the clinical recruiting team and supporting people functions. Within operations, we’re looking for care navigators to support patient interactions and client managers to deliver value to our customers. On the technical side, we have open roles across data science, engineering, analytics, product, and application security.
What’s next for the company?
In a single word, execution. In 2021, we achieved significant milestones. We set a new corporate strategy, raised growth capital from collaborative strategic partners, acquired InnovaTel, and supported more patients receiving the care they need than any year in our history. We also laid the foundation to execute against our strategic plan in 2022, which will be about making our shared vision of speed to quality care a reality for all.
What excites you most about working at Quartet?
It’s rare to work in an industry on a problem that’s receiving the attention it justly deserves. When you look at mental health in general, we’re finally seeing policy, reimbursement, innovation, and talent come to a part of the industry that has been neglected for far too long. Quartet, in many ways, has been a trailblazer for many of the exciting technology companies focusing on mental health.
With our new strategy, investment in InnovaTel, and the commitment to the talented team we’re growing, I am excited by Quartet’s unique position to deliver value to each of the constituents we serve: patients, payers, and clinical providers.
It’s rare to work in an industry on a problem that’s receiving the attention it justly deserves.’’
In some areas of healthcare, you can book an appointment to see a provider the same day. Quartet is building a model for mental healthcare where same-day access to care with a high-quality provider is the standard.
