Visana Health, a virtual women’s health clinic, has closed a $24 million series A funding round.
The round was led by Noro-Moseley Partners, with support from Cigna Group Ventures and Intermountain Ventures. Existing investors Flare Capital Partners and Frist Cressey Ventures also participated. Visana plans to use the funding to further expand its clinical offerings and beef up its tech infrastructure.
“Women can turn to us for any condition that they need,” Joe Connolly, co-founder and CEO of Visana, told Fierce Healthcare in an interview. “Women are often coming to us with signs and symptoms. They don’t necessarily have a diagnosed condition … oftentimes, it’s more than one issue.”
Visana aims to be a medical home for women, addressing all conditions from menstruation to midlife, including high-cost, complex conditions like menopause, endometriosis and PCOS. Today, Visana’s payer partnerships represent more than 35 million covered lives, and self-funded employer partnerships cover over 1 million lives. The company says it is on track to serve nearly 50,000 women this year.
“The market is really primed for women’s health right now,” Connolly noted, adding that employer demand has been particularly robust this year. Connolly cited a figure from Cigna that found 86% of employers are very or extremely interested in a comprehensive women’s health solution.
Visana focuses on complex patients from ages 18 to 65 and takes a comprehensive approach to women’s health. The average Visana patient has three to four chronic conditions. Addressing them simultaneously not only helps get at the root causes of diseases, Connolly explained, but also saves payers money.
“Their care is fragmented across all these different types of settings and then no one’s coordinating all those different care pieces,” Connolly said of the traditional healthcare system. “We end up with these patients that have poly pharmacy … and no one’s really connecting the dots on all of that.”
In particular, women over 45 years old cost 50% more on a per-member, per-month basis than the average, including men, according to Connolly. This is driven by the many health changes and heightened risk for certain conditions that women experience as they enter menopause. To have an impact, value-based care is a promising avenue.
To that end, many of Visana’s payer contracts have a VBC component, like a care coordination fee or a shared savings arrangement. Demand for VBC arrangements is beginning to rise from employers, Connolly noted, “because the cost of care trend continues to increase pretty astronomically for them.” Visana claims to reduce employer medical costs by 34%, cut unnecessary procedures by 78% and deliver more than $2,400 in annual savings per enrollee.
Between visits, Visana sends educational resources to patients. Patients can also chat with their providers via text or message the care coordination team. In the Visana app, patients can log their symptoms, which Visana clinicians monitor.
Visana providers begin with a 45-minute visit to screen for primary care, cardiometabolic and behavioral health issues. They then make a comprehensive care plan. Some patients need to be seen many times a year, while others don’t need to be seen as frequently.
For those who need to be seen in person, Visana coordinates referrals and care, such as for labs, imaging, mammograms, cervical cancer screenings and surgeries. Visana can manage mild to moderate anxiety and depression in-house but doesn’t prescribe controlled substances and refers out for more serious behavioral health issues.
A recent addition to Visana’s provider team was an endocrinologist for more complex cases. This was decided because Visana saw the access challenges its patients faced when it came to endocrinology: six to 12-month wait times. One 2024 study found the average wait time to see an endocrinologist was 72 days in the U.S.
Many of Visana members have diabetes or thyroid issues and are overweight or obese. Visana wants to address the root causes of these conditions without prescribing GLP-1s as the front-line approach, Connolly said. Typically, 60% to 80% of GLP-1 spend in the commercial market is for women, he added. “A lot of the employers and health plans that we work with appreciate that we take a more targeted approach to obesity to make sure that we can achieve weight loss goals,” he said.
This approach may include GLP-1s in a step-wise fashion, but also resistance training to mitigate muscle loss and low-carb diets. Alternatively, Visana may also prescribe metformin to eligible patients.
Part of the series A funding will be used to expand Visana’s artificial intelligence capabilities. Today, that includes an in-house tool that surfaces answers to provider questions about internal clinical protocols. Visana also uses an external AI scribe, which clinicians love, per Connolly.
Right now, Visana is unable to offer virtual abortion services. “Regulatory uncertainty always creates really big questions around the types of services that we’re able to offer,” Connolly said. “It’s difficult to launch a robust offering when things are changing so frequently.”