Matter Health — a primary care services provider with a focus on affordable housing communities — has secured $35 million in a Series A financing round. The funding was led by the Jordan Park Group, an investment management company.
“The primary purpose of the funding is just to allow us to expand our reach to serve more patients,” Mason Mercy, co-founder and CEO of Matter Health, told Home Health Care News.
Matter Health is a preventive primary care provider that caters to low-income seniors. As an organization, Matter Health forms partnerships with affordable housing developments that serve residents who are 62 and older. The company then builds miniature primary care clinics on site for those residents to utilize, allowing them to age in place more seamlessly.
“We focus on this population because they face a lot of different challenges around access to proper preventive care, and education around preventive care,” Mercy said. “Our goal is to really bring a total health care solution directly where they actually live.”
Matter Health has earmarked the $35 million to build anywhere from 70 to 100 additional clinics embedded within various affordable housing developments. The funds will also allow the company to build out all the critical infrastructure to support those clinics.
Throughout his career, Mercy has been dedicated to improving health care in different capacities. First, he was focused on improving access to care services by building hospitals in rural communities. Next, his focus was on building health care technology and case management platforms for acute care hospitals.
“One of the things that was always a trend, essentially, was that low-income older adults kept coming back to the hospital, whether it be for ER visits, [general] utilization or actual acute events and admissions,” Mercy said. “These low-income older adults utilize the hospital so much more, and often for preventive reasons.”
In many ways, seeing this gap in care services that needed to be addressed was the beginning of Matter Health.
Compared to its industry peers, Matter Health is unique in a number of ways, Mercy said.
“As opposed to freestanding clinics … we’re building these clinics on site where people actually live,” Mercy said. “We really kind of traverse that final mile to actually embed ourselves in the community, so you never even have to leave your home to receive care.”
Mercy noted that another big differentiator is Matter Health’s care model.
The company’s providers have small patient panels which allow them to focus on getting to know the patient and offering holistic preventative primary care. Clinicians see patients often, but at a minimum once per month.
The company’s revenue model involves partnering with different Medicare Advantage (MA) and dual special needs plans and entering into value-based payment arrangements with these organizations.
Currently, Matter Health operates in Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee. By the end of 2022, the company will be operating Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Atlanta, Georgia. The company also has plans to eventually enter the Detroit market.
As far as near term growth goals, Matter Health is under different phases of development with 27 different clinics, all set to open this year, according to Mercy.
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