Mount Sinai teams up with telehealth DTC disruptor Wisp on HIV prevention

In recent years, direct-to-consumer (DTC) healthcare startups have disrupted the status quo by allowing patients to pay for same-day prescriptions in cash rather than going through insurance.

Now, some are teaming up with traditional healthcare providers.

On June 9, New York-based health system Mount Sinai and digital women’s and sexual health company Wisp announced a joint program, covered by most private insurances, that aims to prescribe HIV prevention drug PrEP fully via telehealth.

This is Wisp’s first large-scale partnership with a health system and the first time it will offer a program that’s covered by insurance, Wisp CEO Monica Cepak told Healthcare Brew. But the DTC company hopes to do more of both in the future, she added, because Wisp customers have told the company they’d prefer an “ecosystem of care with a single sign-on experience.”

Plus, when it comes to preventing HIV, the traditional healthcare system isn’t reaching everyone, Antonio Urbina, medical director of the Institute for Advanced Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told us. The CDC has paused PrEP coverage estimates to retool its methodology, but the agency’s preliminary estimate suggests just 36% of people who could have benefited from PrEP had been prescribed it in 2022. That same year saw 31,800 estimated new HIV infection cases reported in the US, primarily among people of color.

“We’re adding a front door for people who never walked through the old one anyway,” Urbina said.

The deets. Wisp’s telePrEP program will be $0 for 99% of insured patients after discounts from the 340B drug pricing program, Cepak said. The collaboration comes after at least 18 states have added restrictions or otherwise pulled back HIV drug discount programs in 2026.

Another major challenge of PrEP is that patients taking it must undergo quarterly testing to ensure they haven’t contracted HIV, Urbina said.

Mount Sinai started offering a hybrid program in 2022 that enabled clinicians to give PrEP prescriptions via telehealth, but patients still had to get their HIV tests in person.

For this partnership, Wisp will mail patients at-home tests, allowing Mount Sinai’s program to go entirely digital. The hope is that fully remote care will be more accessible for patients who struggle to make it into the office for tests every three months or feel uncomfortable talking to their provider in person, Urbina said. “There’s a lot of people that have internal stigma about HIV and HIV acquisition that may not feel comfortable going to a doctor,” he said.

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Other healthcare disruptors have pivoted their models or partnered with traditional healthcare providers in the past, too, for various reasons.

Online therapy provider BetterHelp, for instance, started taking insurance with the hopes of attracting more customers. Major pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk also abandoned a lawsuit against Hims & Hers and later partnered with the DTC platform to provide Novo’s GLP-1s, Ozempic and Wegovy, via a subscription service.

Cepak predicts “more and more” DTC companies will pursue partnerships with traditional healthcare systems in the future. Wisp acquired sexual health platform TBD Health in January 2026 for its remote STI testing, HIV prevention, and telePrEP care capabilities in order to make partnerships like this one possible, Cepak added.

“It’s ultimately addressing a patient pain point, which is significant fragmentation in the healthcare space,” she said.

For potential diagnoses as sensitive as HIV, it’s important to be connected to a larger health system, as opposed to other DTC telemedicine companies that solely offer prescriptions and no follow-up care, Urbina said.

“What if the test comes back and you are HIV positive?” he said. “With this collaboration, if any of those issues surface, we have a strong connection to care.”