Spora Health just launched a primary care network specifically with Black people and people of color in mind.
Often times the number of disparities in healthcare that exist for Black people in America can go unaddressed due to a lack of understanding and education among medical professionals. Spora Health just launched for patients in Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Tennessee.
“An equitable healthcare system has never existed in America, especially for Black folks and that is the goal,” said Spora Health CEO and founder, Dan Miller, in an interview with TechCrunch.
According to TechCrunch, Spora Health recently closed on a $1.2 million seed round and is one of the primary care providers for Black people and people of color.
Although Spora Health is currently taking a telemedicine approach, they will eventually open physical locations. Patients of the platform can get access to its care delivery platform and care team which consists of nutritionists, doctors, nurse practitioners, plus more.
Through its machine learning-driven technology, Spora Health can look for chronic conditions like pre-diabetes, emphysema, hypertension, and more, along with predicting risk profiles for patients.
Currently, Spora Health costs $9.99 per month and on the first visits, patients will pay their normal co-pay. No insurance? No problem. For those without insurance, there’s a one-time $99 fee for the first visit.
“Being a young startup, we can compete on price,” said Miller. “For us, we can make the offering more affordable because we have less overhead as well as tech that allows us to be more thoughtful.”
Although the goal may be to better serve Black people and people of color, not all of Spora Health’s providers fall into those same demographics.
“We want to over-index on providers of color but supply and demand doesn’t match up,” said Miller. “There’s a shortage of providers of color becoming physicians. So we need to invest in the reeducation of providers.”
Becoming a provider on Spora Health isn’t an easy feat. In order to become a provider, medical professionals must participate in the Spora Institute along with going through an interview process. The Spora Institute serves to help professionals understand their implicit biases and serves to reeducate providers.
“Within med school, there is a curriculum around health equity but that only happens in the first year of the program,” Miller said. “What tends to happen by the end of the residency is that a lot of these implicit biases tend to surface again because the training curriculum and environment does not incorporate equity and doesn’t think about disparities in certain populations.”
For more on Spora Health, visit their site here.
