Apr. 30, 2024, Repost from Fierce Healthcare and Endpoints News -- LunaJoy Health, a women-focused mental health provider, has raised $4.2 million in funding and announced the launch of its integrated care program, LunaCare. Drawing on financial and strategic support from Y Combinator, FoundersX Ventures, Goodwater Capital and others, LunaJoy plans to roll out its new program in current markets, to be expanded later this year, and to staff up.
"LunaJoy Health’s mission to bring a new standard to maternal health care for Medicaid mothers aligns perfectly with our goal of supporting scalable solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. We're proud to back such a vital initiative that promises significant impact,” Surbhi Sarna, Partner at Y Combinator, said in a press release.
LunaCare is a new integrated behavioral health program supporting doctors at outpatient offices, health systems and through payer networks in addressing mental health with tech-enabled care management. It leverages a proprietary AI-driven scoring system to predict a patient’s risk and navigate them to the right care pathway, executives said. The goal is to offer in-network care to patients within their existing ecosystem of healthcare.
“They’re already seeing their doctors, they're already working with their payers, if they have insurance,” LunaJoy CEO Sipra Laddha told Fierce Healthcare. “It’s just part of the workflow, it’s part of how the information gets transmitted in medicine.”
About a third of mental health screenings are coming back positive from LunaJoy partners, according to Laddha. Last year, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists updated its guidelines on screenings to recommend them more frequently, which “has created this wealth of screening data, but not necessarily connection or conduit for treatment.”
The new integrated offering aligns with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' ongoing Transforming Maternal Health Model, which is designed to help organizations expand infrastructure to better serve women on Medicaid. In March, LunaJoy announced a partnership with CareSource to care for high-risk moms on Medicaid in Georgia.
LunaJoy also offers telemental health services and is in more than a dozen states. It is in-network with most commercial payers, including Cigna, Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield and some regional plans, per Laddha. It also works with several Medicaid and Medicare plans. There are plans to expand to eight additional states in four to six months, Laddha said.
“When we really focus on making sure we’re meeting the needs of a core population we tend to do a better job,” Laddha said.
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St. Petersburg, Florida-based LunaJoy raised $4.2 million from investors including Y Combinator, FoundersX Ventures, Goodwater Capital and Magic Fund. Launched in 2021, the startup previously raised a seed round of $2.4 million. Co-founders Shama Rathi and Sipra Laddha told Endpoints News that LunaJoy had already hit the revenue metrics it needed for a Series A and decided to skip raising a formal round.
“Instead of having to spend six months raising, this came together within two to three weeks, and we were just quickly able to go back to building and being able to capitalize on the growth,” said Rathi, who is also a child and adolescent psychiatrist.
The plan is to use it to build out the company’s tech platform LunaCare to connect different providers and insurers that can help patients get care easier during pregnancy and postpartum.
“We’re able to use a combination of analytics and integration, in collaboration with the health system, in order to make sure that those women are delivered timely care that is specifically for this timeframe that they’re going through,” Laddha, LunaJoy’s CEO and a reproductive psychiatrist.
In total, LunaJoy has raised $6.6 million and currently offers virtual care in about a dozen states. Its goal has been to prioritize having insurance coverage, especially for those on Medicaid, Rathi said.
“We really decided to hunker down in this mix and go deeper rather than trying to do everything for everyone,” Rathi said. “We have extensive insurance coverage, and we’ve had that since we opened our doors.”
Learn more about LunaJoy