Parsley Health, a functional medicine provider, is now in-network with all major commercial insurers nationwide.
The company's in-network reach spans plans covering 150 million lives, including Aetna, Cigna, UnitedHealthcare, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Humana and Centene. Eligible services covered include provider visits, diagnostic testing and prescriptions. Parsley members must pay an annual non-covered program fee of $1,500 for wraparound support.
The announcement builds on Parsley’s phased expansion into insurance over the past two years, which began in New York and then California. Today’s nationwide expansion represents a tenfold increase in coverage, per the company. The company offers healthcare via telehealth nationwide or in-person in Los Angeles and New York City.
Parsley was founded a decade ago with the philosophy that functional medicine should be accessible to all. At the time, it was hard to find providers practicing functional medicine; it was very expensive; and there was little standardization around quality. Parsley set out to tackle all three.
“I saw that functional medicine, that figured out and addressed the root cause of disease instead of just managing symptoms, was the medicine that we all deserved to have,” Robin Berzin, M.D., founder and CEO of Parsley, told Fierce Healthcare.
Functional medicine aims to look at the whole person and get under the hood of symptoms to identify and address root causes of disease. Parsley takes a multidisciplinary approach, with members getting a care team of board-certified doctors, registered nurses, functional nutritionists, care coordinators, member experience advisors and access to the digital platform to track progress, access data and more. Members also get unlimited messaging with their care team.
Each clinician completes an internally built training known as a Parsley fellowship, plus advanced coursework through the Institute for Functional Medicine. The company has also built out a documented set of evidence-based functional medicine protocols that it says don’t exist elsewhere, and which are continuously reviewed and refined.
Three-quarters of American adults live with at least one chronic condition, and more than half have multiple chronic conditions to manage. This is reflective of Parsley’s patient population: at least 80% of members have one or more comorbidities. Most new members come with symptoms that have yet to be diagnosed.
Chronic disease, along with mental health conditions, accounts for the bulk of the country’s healthcare spend, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet the system doesn’t address the root causes of these conditions, Berzin argues. It’s why consumer interest in wellness and longevity is growing. Though data is widely available to consumers through wellness services like wearables and tests, how to act on that data is often unclear.
“People don’t have answers, and they can’t take action. And they don’t take action. And if you don’t take action, you don’t get healthier,” Berzin said. Parsley brings the missing piece—the doctor, with time to help patients understand their health. “We are closing the clinical loop in the functional medicine-longevity ecosystem,” Berzin noted. “We are putting the doctor back in the loop.”
Initial visits on Parsley are an hour long, with follow-up visits either 30 or 60 minutes long. The company does not offer 15-minute appointments. “Your health is too complex,” Berzin said. Provider panel sizes are also kept intentionally small. Members have multiple touchpoints with their care team throughout the month.
Nearly 90% of members report significant symptom improvement or complete resolution within their first year, according to Parsley, and the company reduces the number of specialists members need to see by 65% because of its holistic approach. Some patients stay with Parsley for years, while others might leave and come back, for instance, to have a baby.
Parsley has published what it says are validated outcomes data showing cost savings, which were key to its approach with payers. “We really had to prove ourselves to get that first contract with Aetna in New York,” Berzin said. She added that by that point, the company had already seen thousands of patients and had enough data to back its value proposition. The goal is to ultimately expand to Medicaid plans as well.
Having a true care partner “to work with you across all of these life stages and phases of your health, which is dynamic, has got to be the most powerful tool we have to drive better health outcomes,” Berzin said.