Closing Behavioral Health Access Gaps in Medicaid: Leading Brave Health’s Series C
By Anna Fagin, Hui Cheng, and Gary Wang
Our country faces an unprecedented mental health crisis. Whether attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing inflation concerns, rampant social media usage, or others, the fact remains; 50M+ Americans experience some form of mental illness. Over half of those adults do not receive treatment.
These numbers rapidly climb for the 1 out of every 4 Americans receiving healthcare coverage under Medicaid, America’s largest payer. Nearly 20% of Medicaid members have a moderate or serious mental illness, double the rate of their privately insured counterparts.
Unfortunately, outsized demand for Medicaid membership is also met with dwindling supply. Only 35% of psychiatrists currently accept Medicaid. Delays in necessary behavioral health often result in an increased risk for acute incidents, which are ultimately addressed through emergency room admissions and long inpatient stays. These visits are nothing more than band-aids — they provide immediate coverage but drive up the total cost of care, ultimately failing to close underlying care gaps.
Brave Health, our latest investment in behavioral health, is the category-defining solution to this challenge. Brave serves high-needs Medicaid members through virtual community mental health centers that offer a full-suite of outpatient services, including individual therapy, psychiatry, and peer support. We’re thrilled to partner with Anna Lindow to lead their $30M Series C, with participation from Union Square Ventures, City Light Capital, and others.
Key to Success: Whole Person Care & Patient Engagement
Brave has many of the qualities we believe to be critical for a successful value-based behavioral health business. First and foremost is strong clinical outcomes. We have seen time and again that it is not enough to provide access to care — for a care model to be effective, especially in Medicaid, it must build trust with those it serves, meet their whole person needs, and tailor the approach to the unique contours of each person’s life. Too often we see healthcare companies neglecting these key principles. Brave, in contrast, is anchored by a tech-enabled member engagement engine purpose-built for individuals with multiple comorbidities and complex social needs. This has enabled Brave to have best-in-class member engagement rates, leading to strong care program completion and clinical outcomes.
The strength of Brave’s product has not gone unnoticed by their managed Medicaid plan partners. We heard clear enthusiasm from trusted plan leaders in our network — and most importantly, their teams — about partnering with Brave for their most at-risk patients:
“Our care managers love Brave. Their ability to get members seen and seen quickly, feed data back to us, and ensure no patient falls between the cracks — Brave is our favorite out of all the partners we’ve worked with.”
“Brave takes populations that others are afraid of. Their willingness to serve Medicaid members, ability to engage those members in care, and their deliberate strategy to do so…helps them stand out from similar models.”
A World-Class Team
The strongest Medicaid providers maintain a deep understanding of the intricacies of the population they serve. The team at Brave epitomizes this point. Beyond the impact on patients, Brave is first and foremost a clinician-centric organization. Anna’s prior leadership at General Assembly has helped her design a thoughtful, intentional approach to clinical recruitment & retention. Brave’s ability to attract, win, and keep high quality clinical talent is a key differentiator in today’s supply-constrained environment.
Large Opportunity to Serve
Since launching with health plans in Florida in 2019, Brave Health has rapidly grown and now serves over 65M covered lives across 200+ health plan contracts. Earlier this month, the company announced its first value-based contract with Molina of Texas, and has signed two additional value-based contracts with Sunshine Health (Centene) and Simply Healthcare Plans. This brings the total number of potential Medicaid members under Brave Health’s care in a value-based arrangement to 1M+. As we look to the future, we are excited to deploy our deep industry relationships to help Brave continue to partner with innovative payers and health systems and execute on policy & payment model reform that will differentially impact the trajectory of their growth.
We could not be prouder to be working with Anna and the rest of the Brave Health team as they bring much-needed behavioral health access to millions of vulnerable Medicaid members
