According to Kris Engskov, America’s healthcare system is ill-equipped to deal with an aging population and the mental health challenges that come with it.
That’s why I started Ripple Care.
As CEO and co-founder, Engskov combines highly specialized care, technology, and home services to address mental health in older adults, helping them stay at home and free from long-term care. You are leading a fledgling company aiming to become Facility.
Rippl Care came out of stealth mode last week, $32 million in seed funding. The round was led by two venture capital firms, Chicago-based ARCH Venture Partners and Cambridge, Massachusetts-based General Catalyst. Engskov and his fellow founders had hinted at releasing more information about the company in his week leading up to the investment announcement.
BHB first reported Venture Enskoff in March He sought to build the company’s leadership team. He co-founded Rippl with Inca Dieterich, an associate at ARCH Venture Partners since 2020. She is Vice President and Partner in Strategy and Innovation.
Engskov, a former Clinton White House administrator and former Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX) executive, will step down as president of Bellevue, Wash.-based senior living company Aegis Living in September 2021, at the time Launched an unknown startup.
The following Q&A has been edited for length, clarity, and style.
BHB: What is Ripple Care? What does Ripple Care do?
Enguskov: This is a network of technology-enabled, highly specialized people who help keep people with dementia and other mental health conditions at home and out of the ER.
what is it for? I try to answer this in the context of what we think the differentiators are. what we are trying to provide. The main reason it doesn’t exist is because paid healthcare doesn’t pay for it. That’s why we try to approach it in a value-based way.
We may not start out based on values, but that’s the ambition. Because we are paid for results and we believe we can do it cheaper.
First, we want to provide patients and families with 24/7 crisis behavioral support.
Second, we want to provide navigation and coordination of care. This is a big one not paid for by paid Medicare. How do you help people through their journey? because it is long.
Also, professional medical management. Most of these people have multiple chronic diseases. And often they are not seen in their entirety.
Finally, we want to make psychotherapy available to both capable patients and their families. This is because we know that the tipping point in long-term care is usually the caregiver not being the patient.
In the long term, we plan to add remote patient monitoring.
Sounds like your team was very successful in raising funds. You call this a seed round, right?
Yes, it’s a seed round. I admit it’s a big seed round.
We started our company within Arch Ventures.
We understand that the first condition you’re trying to address is dementia and other cognitive needs, but why classify Rippl Care as a behavioral health company?
I think we say mental health more consistently because it’s a broader category and more broadly represents what we’re trying to do.
We are starting with dementia and neurodementia, but I fully expect you to want to help people with depression and anxiety. We experience health conditions very differently than most other groups.
We anticipate wide-ranging effects on mental health conditions in this category.
Aren’t the services you offer limited to just people with dementia or other neurocognitive problems? Let’s say there is Would RippleCare help the patient even if they didn’t have dementia?
absolutely. For us, dementia is only a starting point, as we consider it an urgent need. We expect the psychological services we provide to be applicable to a wide range of conditions. That’s why we have a dedicated team that we’re building.
Does Rippl Care still have providers serving homes?
No, we haven’t started the service yet. The service is expected to start later this fall. But we are building teams and hiring clinicians. Primarily advanced nurses, licensed social workers, and community health workers.
It plans to serve its first patients later this year.
Does your team have an early hiring round goal for telecommuters?
Learning how the model works best takes time, so I’m hesitant to speculate. We are inspired by the many collaborative care models out there, and several that CMMI has tried over the past few years have shown very impressive results.
However, the model differs in terms of how technology is used, how people are deployed (both virtual and on the ground), and so on.
Broadly speaking, what technology does Rippl Care use?
we are very early I can’t give you many details.
But all I can say is that we fully expect you to build your own unique platform to do the work we set out to do. If I had to explain it in a way, it would be:
A big part of that is designing technology platforms that make time with patients valuable and impactful and allow them to work within their license.
We’re just getting started, but that’s the ambition of technology.
Just piercing the darkness here leaves room for telemedicine services?
We expect a significant amount of our services to be delivered virtually. It’s one of the big opportunities for us.
We believe that having a strong ground game is important over time, but we know that much of this care can be delivered very effectively virtually. This can be very key for people in rural areas who have no access to access.
What’s your top short-term goal? What’s your top long-term goal?
Our short-term goal is to get the first network up and running and refine this model. The care model we are pioneering is new and has never been done before. There are many moving parts that need testing. That’s the most important thing we do.
Of all the topics created and funded in the last three years, there has been a strong focus on the pediatric space and young adults. I have never seen anything specifically focused on this kind of specialized mental health care for older adults.
There are approximately 20 million people classified as elderly with some form of cognitive impairment. Half of those people have dementia and the majority have Alzheimer’s disease.
Right now, our system isn’t ready yet, and we haven’t reached the first 85-year-old baby boomer. He also has a 1 in 3 chance of developing dementia at age 85.
You will learn a lot in the coming months about how to provide this highly specialized care. And I think we can really influence primary care providers and other potential partners to help them fill gaps in care.
That’s the long term goal.
