Unite Us Connects Payments And Healthcare To Social Services

In some cases, the pandemic forced healthcare companies to develop brand-new solutions to deal with a digital-first economy. In others, it turned a spotlight — and often a flow of investment cash — to companies that were ideally situated to shine during the crisis.

The latter is the case for Unite Us, an 8-year-old company that uses technology to connect medical service providers with social services. While Unite Us has been growing steadily since its founding by a group of military veterans in 2013, it got a big shot in the arm (so to speak) earlier this month when it received $150 million in Series C funding round led by ICONIQ Growth.

As Unite Us Co-Founder and CEO Dan Brillman told PYMNTS, the company plans to take a trifold approach to expansion.

First, Unite Us will seek to expand its services so that they are available across the entire country. Fundamentally, these services allow healthcare providers to refer patients to the social services that will benefit them most. More importantly however, it allows all involved parties to track a patient’s progress through the entire system while maintaining the confidentiality mandated by state and local laws.

This end-to-end monitoring had been missing in the healthcare scene, said Brillman. While doctors could always refer patients to social services, it was rare that the doctor could then follow up to see how that patient had fared.

Secondly, Unite Us will look toward putting some of its newly earned cash into community investment.

“Our job is to bring government leaders, healthcare professionals and community representatives all together,” Brillman said. “There’s a lot of money out there to do it, and we also want to play in the game because we know that we want to catalyze the work. Care is local. So, it’s at the city level, it’s at the town level — even the ZIP code level sometimes. And we really want to participate in affecting a lot of lives because we’re so rooted in communities.”

Finally, Unite Us will continue to develop new products, including data analytics and its payment solutions, the second of which already stands out in the healthcare market, Brillman said.

Through the company’s current payment platform (Unite Us Payments), both medical and social service providers can electronically bill a patient’s insurance company securely, which helps keep the patient’s care inside a closed loop, right down to the financial aspect. Unite Us will continue to develop this platform, and it sees payments as a part of a bigger whole in terms of the healthcare economy and care landscape, Brillman said.

“We’ve seen people healthier off when they have homes, food and employment,” he said. “And so, shouldn’t those organizations be part of that payment game? Of course, the answer is yes. And so, the regulatory environment is moving in that direction where social services are starting to be elevated to the same priority level as a doctor. If you don’t have a house and you’re homeless, it’s very hard for you to be healthy overall. And so, you may go to the emergency room 10 times a month, and that’s a cost to someone. So, we work to bridge the medical and nonmedical industries into a delivery model where they’re economically incentivized and actually coordinating services that keep people healthier and focused on the outcome versus the fee.”

Brillman said an analogy to the adoption of social services into the wider healthcare landscape can be found by looking at psychiatric services 30 years ago. Back then, mental health services were often administered in someone’s house without the ability for insurance to help lessen the financial burden. Now though, it is widely accepted as a valid medical expense, even to the degree that it is paid for in Medicare.

Post Pandemic

Coming full circle, Brillman said part of the bridging his company does was accelerated during the pandemic, which helped hammer home just how critical social care is for overall health. He said governors took notice and realized that they have to take care of their constituents in effective and economical ways. Yet he said he still sees room for improvement.

“It takes multiple sectors for this all to work together really well,” he said. “And so, we need thought leaders in the medical community to actually take the lead in this. That happens at the state level with health and human service secretaries, and at the federal level through Medicaid and Medicare pushing these agendas forward. And I think that’s all happening really well. Obviously, I wish that would happen 10 times faster, but I wouldn’t say there are obstacles. It’s just more that the private sector is going to show how this works and provide the data and the insights to actually support the work. Then everyone’s got to obviously continue to believe in that and invest in it.”