After seeing the Hispanic population disproportionately affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, tech industry veteran Bismarck Lepe co-founded a startup tailored specifically to the community, called MiSalud Health.
The company offers Spanish-speaking people living in the US telehealth visits with health coaches in Mexico who offer a range of primary care and behavioral health services.
MiSalud has raised nearly $19 million through venture capital funding from investors including Ulu Ventures, Pivotal Ventures, and Magnify Ventures, according to Lepe. It employs 50 clinicians in Mexico, 23 clinicians in the US, and operates across 16 states.
Healthcare Brew spoke to Lepe about MiSalud’s business model, how the company is incorporating technology into care, and his hopes for the startup’s future.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What prompted you to start MiSalud?
We saw that the Hispanic population was more likely to pass away from Covid, more likely to be hospitalized, and more likely to get it. We dug into that issue and we realized that it was an access issue. Many Hispanics live in healthcare deserts. We thought, “Maybe we can tap into physicians in Mexico, and through technology, be able to give people in the US access to those physicians.”
We got the company started in 2021, and it’s scaled very nicely. We’re approaching 100,000 members on the platform. We primarily sell directly to employers who have a high concentration of Spanish speakers, but about 30% of our consults are done in English.
What is MiSalud’s mission?
Our mission is to make healthcare more accessible and affordable for everybody. We are starting with the Hispanic population because they’re more receptive to speaking to a health coach that may be based in Mexico, and there’s an immediate need in terms of language gaps and cultural gaps. We think this near-shore model in healthcare can work for everybody.
How do patients get set up with MiSalud, and what services do you offer?
When we start with an employer, we’ll go [to their worksite] and do biometrics tests, blood draws, get people’s weight, get their BMI, and then put them in specific programs. If their goal is to lower their diabetes or if they have hypertension, they’re put into specific programs, then they meet with their health coach on a regular basis.
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We have about 90% participation. If we go to a factory that has 1,000 employees, 900 will participate in the initial wellness fair. Of those, about 50% use the platform on a recurring basis.
MiSalud covers many different services, and in some cases it does step in as an alternative to a primary care provider (PCP). Sometimes we have to refer people out to go get labs done, to go get imaging, to potentially go see their PCP. We will also do some care navigation, especially if someone doesn’t understand what their insurance covers.
How is MiSalud using AI?
We’ve created our own healthcare copilots that sit alongside our health coaches and our physicians. They’re taking notes and summarizing what’s been said so it’s much faster to figure out what the person may need.
As the visits are happening, our copilots are making recommendations to the health coaches or the physicians, and when they disagree, they’ll very quickly say so, providing reinforcement learning to our AI. The goal is eventually to be able to release some of this functionality to our end users. One of the first versions of this that we’re going to be releasing is a nutrition app that’s been trained through the many thousands of nutrition consults and visits we’ve had across our platform, and that’s going to be released sometime in the near future.
What are your future goals for the company?
We want to continue to add more specialties. We’re adding women’s health and pediatrics. The key is going to be really personalizing the experience for everybody who logs in. If you have a universe of potential services that you can offer, you want to make sure that the services are being catered to the individual. We want to continue to invest in our AI agents so eventually we have a MiSalud agent that’s really monitoring and managing your health and brings in the specialist whenever they’re required.
Eventually we think there may be an opportunity for us to have clinical laboratories in places where we already have a high concentration of members, or maybe even start with our own hospitals and clinics on the other side of the border and start to build more of a holistic health system under the MiSalud brand.