PJC interview: Eden Health
PJC Interview with Matt McCambridge, CEO & Co-Founder of Eden Health
“The whole idea of Eden was around eliminating the daily hassle of healthcare for individuals as well as for employers who provide healthcare for 160 million people. So we provide a comprehensive offering that is primary care, mental healthcare, physical therapy, and navigation.”
- Matt McCambridge, CEO & Co-Founder of Eden Health
About Eden Health: Eden Health is a primary care and insurance navigation company for employers designed to elevate the health and wellbeing of employees everywhere. The company helps employees navigate today’s complicated healthcare landscape across insurance, primary care and mental healthcare, through virtual and in-person care, so they can make smart, well-informed and cost-conscious decisions. Learn more at https://www.edenhealth.com/
About Matt: Matt and his co-founder, Scott Sansovich, met during their freshman year of college at Harvard. After going their separate directions after undergrad -- Matt to Insight Venture Partners and Scott to Cue Ball then AppNexus -- they reconnected in April of 2017 to launch Eden Health, with a particular focus on “integrating technology solutions with the actual delivery of care.” In Matt’s words: “The whole idea of Eden was around eliminating the daily hassle of healthcare for individuals as well as for employers who provide healthcare for 160 million people. So we provide a comprehensive offering that is primary care, mental healthcare, physical therapy, and navigation.”
What motivated him to start Eden Health: When Matt’s sister was 14, she was rushed to the hospital with an unexplained, life threatening health issue. It wasn’t until years -- and countless specialist appointments later -- that his sister found a primary care doctor who was able to connect the pieces and get her the diagnosis and treatment she needed to fully recover. With Eden Health, Matt wants to combat the dysfunction that he saw first hand with his sister’s care -- nobody coordinating care, nobody paying attention to making sure the “same tests weren’t being done a hundred different times” -- and help people get access to that coordinated primary care that was so valuable in her recovery.
On his experience with PJC: “PJC first backed us in our seed round. They’ve been extremely friendly to founders as a firm….and I think that they’ve focused on the right items to care about: hiring, new sales, and making introductions to support that. This is a very long term game and they’ve been eager to participate in each round….Healthcare is not a year-long investment, nor is any real startup, so getting a long-term partner is awesome.”
Top takeaways from our interview:
Fragmentation in the healthcare industry is causing real issues. To Matt, fragmentation is the biggest issue facing healthcare today. And patients are suffering because of it: The average wait time to see a physician is 24 days; 20% of employees had problems paying their medical bills within a 12 month period; 57% of adults with mental illness don’t get any care during the year; 40% say making health insurance decisions is very stressful. The list goes on. With Eden Health, Matt and Scott are addressing this fragmentation -- and these pain points -- head on by making it easier to access coordinated primary and mental health care.
For Eden Health, patients always come first. In fact, this is Eden Health’s guiding value as a company -- and it looks like it’s paying off. Matt shared with us a number of quotes from patients whose lives have been dramatically impacted -- for the better -- by the company. One of the quotes that stood out the most: “I’m so relieved. Finding a practice that covers my primary care, mental health, basic women’s health and care management all in one place makes my life so much easier. It’s crazy that it’s such a rarity to walk away from a doctors appointment and feel listened to. It’s so nice to feel that way after my appointment today. [I’m] So relieved to find such a convenient, comprehensive, and high quality one stop shop for my care.”
Don’t be afraid to ask for help. No founder or founding team has all the answers. It’s important to talk with other startup founders and dive into your VC network to find that domain and functional expertise that you may be lacking -- or to avoid those pitfalls that every entrepreneur is in danger of falling into. In Matt’s words: “The thing that is most helpful for me is people who have domain and/or functional expertise in the things I’m having issues with or want to brainstorm about.”
Relationship-building is key to the future of Eden Health. When we asked Matt about his five-year plan, he said Eden Health is just at the beginning. There’s a lot more relationship building and connections to deeper and deeper specialists to be made. “Where we’re positioned right now as the front door to healthcare for all of our users, there is an opportunity for us to do a lot more for them. Whether that’s in-house or connecting them to relevant external groups….How do we continue to deepen our relationship in new and unique ways?”