Announcing Quartet’s Next Stage of Growth

This past summer, early in my tenure as CEO of Quartet Health, I awoke to dozens of missed calls from someone important to me living with a serious mental illness. I began reaching out to others aware of the situation to learn what had transpired the night before. Knowing that a person so close to me once again faced a significant mental health setback was scary, and without any clear options, the only place where care was available was the local emergency department. These moments of crisis were, unfortunately, becoming the norm as opposed to the exception, with a struggle for years to find a clear diagnosis and appropriate clinical care.

After joining Quartet, I have found that my experience as a caregiver is not unique. In fact, I hear similar challenges in my conversations with Quartet employees, our customers, our partners, and our patients. To varying degrees, most have confronted some aspect of the mental health care system personally or with a loved one — be it getting a diagnosis, finding the right provider quickly, affording care, or trying to discern if treatment is helping.

In the seven years since Quartet’s founding, our work in helping more people get appropriate care has focused on addressing barriers to care, including the systemic separation of mental health from physical health. Thanks to several deep relationships with health plans, health systems, and physician groups, we’ve acted as the “front door” to mental health care for more than 300,000 patients across Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and commercial insurance. Eighty percent of all patients who come to Quartet are recommended through a primary care doctor.

In this journey, we’ve also learned that many more barriers remain intact that make it hard for patients to find the right care at the right time. As we look to the future, we are committed to systematically removing all barriers that block people — particularly those who confront the greatest challenges in accessing help and those with the greatest needs — from care.

The Path Forward for Quartet Health

Today, I am excited to announce the future path for Quartet Health, which will focus on supporting all patients getting high-quality mental health and substance use care, when and where they need it. We will continue to leverage and expand our partnerships with health plans, systems, and provider groups to improve the speed in which patients receive quality mental health and substance use care — regardless of condition, geography, or income. To achieve this speed to care, we will continue to empower existing and future in-network providers.

The more than $60 MM of capital we announced today, led by new and existing partners, will enable us to enhance, develop, and deliver on capabilities to better integrate mental and physical health in four specific areas:

1. Patient identification and engagement: Our proprietary algorithms leverage health insights and data to proactively identify patients who may have untreated mental health and substance use conditions. We will continue to invest in more personalized engagement across all channels of care — such as case managers, specialists, and direct patient sign-up — to become the one-stop, virtual front door to mental health care. Ultimately, our vision is to proactively identify and engage all patients in need of care and then support them in getting rapid access to personalized, high-quality care.
2. Optimized patient matching to robust supply of high-quality providers: To deliver on speed to quality care, Quartet will enhance its capabilities to evaluate and aggregate mental health providers across clinical needs and insurance types on its platform. Across all care options, Quartet will invest in our proprietary SmartMatch technology to quickly make the optimal patient-provider match. We will also provide white-glove services for patients who need additional support. Bedrock to all of this work is a special commitment to health equity and expanding our capabilities for those with serious mental illness.
3. Actionable insights to measure and reward quality: Quartet, in partnership with primary care physicians, will continue to leverage data to proactively identify patients with potential unaddressed conditions for formal screening. Once patients are receiving care, clinical assessments will be used to measure when patients with certain conditions are showing indications of improved health outcomes and which providers treated them. Over time, this will help strengthen the precision of Quartet’s matching algorithms and allow providers to be rewarded for high-quality care through value-based payment models.
4. Patient conditions and populations: Quartet will also enhance its capabilities to support additional conditions, such as substance use disorders and serious mental illnesses, and serve additional populations, such as pediatrics and transitional-age youth.

We know that by working as an integrated part of the mental health care industry and by supporting patients longitudinally across the care journey, patients will experience improved speed to mental health care, a more streamlined experience, better outcomes, and lower costs.

Everyone Deserves Mental Health

Before joining Quartet, I was hesitant to talk about my personal experiences navigating the mental health care system as a caregiver for a loved one. I thought I was alone in my experience. Coming from a minority, immigrant background, the stigma felt real.

Since joining the company, I have more conviction than ever that my experience has not been unique. In fact, sometimes when I talk with colleagues — or read that nearly half of those with a mental health condition never get treatment — my experience feels more like the norm.

All of us at Quartet share a conviction that there is a better path to improving mental health and substance use care. With the new capital, Quartet will be taking a significant step forward to building a new solution. We are excited to take this next step for the company and look forward to a day when every person in every community across the country can quickly and easily get quality care.