Community Health Workers (CHWs) are frontline public health workers who typically share ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status, and life experiences with the community members they serve. CHWs have been identified as a valuable resource that can deliver services around the healthcare journey in a culturally sensitive way, thus leading to positive health outcomes. While the market for care navigation and care coordination is crowded, there is tremendous potential to leverage CHWs as a resource on a larger scale to drive improved health outcomes for underserved communities. The US Department of Health and Human Services’ recently announced of the availability of $226.5M in American Rescue Plan Funding to launch a Community Health Worker Training Program, and there have been (and are expected to be more) shifts in Medicaid funding for the development of community health centers and reimbursement for services provided by CHWs that were not previously reimbursed, therefore creating new opportunities for innovative CHW models.
Solution
Pear Suite aims to be a trusted care navigator to guide otherwise underserved populations through their health journey. Pear Suite empowers CHWs to support older adults and individuals in underserved communities by providing culturally sensitive, empathetic care navigation. CHWs are lay members of the community who typically work in association with the local health care system in both urban and rural environments. CHWs typically share ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status and life experiences with the communities they serve (NIH). Pear Suite leverages CHWs to connect people to resources (vaccination resources, food access, transportation, housing support, economic support) and also helps them to get onboarded to digital health programs or telehealth to support their health journey.
Pear Suite’s platform allows the CHW user to build custom care journeys to automate patient support and facilitate person-centered interactions; achieve higher activation rates through personalized recommendations and goal tracking; engage patients using omni-channel communication tools; and track real-time metrics to evaluate impact and drive actionable solutions. Pear Suite has both SaaS and tech-enabled services lines of business: the SaaS product is used by Pear Suite’s clients for their CHWs and the services product provides outsourced CHWs employed by Pear Suite to supplement the clients’ teams.
Why We Invested
Pear Suite transforms social determinants of health data into actionable solutions and empowers community health workers to provide culturally sensitive care navigation. Without actionable data, healthcare organizations struggle to address the social drivers of health at scale. Researchers estimate that a lack of data and inaction prevents 20M adults from living at home and costs billions annually. Pear Suite's cloud-based platform enables anyone to leverage data to better assess and address the social drivers of health in a scalable, cost-effective, and person-centered way. Pear Suite’s Cofounder and CEO, Colby Takeda, is mission driven and has a strong impact orientation to maximize the CHW as a valuable community resource to drive improved health outcomes by addressing often overlooked sociocultural factors that have a strong impact on health.
Pear Suite has traction with several different customer types. While sales to date have focused on government agencies, Pear Suite is expanding to focus its sales on healthcare organizations and startups as well as payor clients. Pear Suite has developed both a strong SaaS platform as well as a services business to address the multiple facets related to operating in the CHW market. We believe that Pear Suite is differentiated via its focus on CHWs as a key stakeholder in the patient journey with ability to drive impact both in terms of improved outcomes for patients and improved socioeconomic opportunities for the CHWs themselves.
Impact
Pear Suite was founded to address the lack of focus on social factors within healthcare. More specifically, there are many solutions in the healthcare space that aggregate healthcare data, but few are focused on translating social determinants of health (SDoH) data into actions to help individuals address their needs. Existing solutions do not lead to an action on behalf of the member, as solutions typically focus on what the data means to payors or providers. Therefore, Pear Suite seeks to leverage data to assess what actions can support long term outcomes for patients.
Community health workers are uniquely positioned to drive impact as frontline public health workers who typically share ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status, and life experiences with the community members they serve. As a result, they understand the sociocultural needs of that community and can effectively drive better health outcomes. The platform provides resources such as better understanding local food resources, support in accessing SNAP benefits, understanding affordable senior housing options, enrolling in virtual physical activity classes, connecting users to technology classes so that they can better leverage tech to manage their health and so on.
In addition to the impact in terms of improving health outcomes for the patients that Pear Suite will reach, the company can also create better economic outcomes for CHWs. The CHW role provides a potential path for upward mobility for individuals within a community. CHWs often move on to work as clinicians, nurse practitioners or in government agencies. Therefore, this role provides a meaningful starting point from which to kickstart workers’ careers.