New York City-based Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) spun out a new startup on Tuesday that will offer patients virtual triage services and nonsurgical physical therapy.
The company, named RightMove Powered by HSS, also announced a $21 million Series A funding round led by Flare Capital and HSS. The startup’s headquarters are also in New York City.
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HSS created the independent company to address the massive financial burden caused by musculoskeletal care, said Amy Fahrenkopf in an interview. She is HSS’ senior vice president said and interim CEO of RightMove while the startup conducts an executive search. Yearly expenditures for musculoskeletal care in the U.S. total more than $380 billion, and musculoskeletal conditions are the number one high cost condition for the country’s commercially insured population, according to Fahrenkopf. It was only during the pandemic that cancer overtook MSK as the most expensive condition to cover for large employers.
“There’s just an enormous amount of waste in the musculoskeletal care space,” she said. “And a lot of that comes from patients not knowing where to go or having unnecessary tests, injections and surgeries.”
To remedy this problem, HSS felt it had “an enormous amount of expertise” that it could share to help ramp up virtual musculoskeletal care across the country, Fahrenkopf said.
RightMove has two primary services. The first is a triaging service in which patients receive a 45-minute assessment from a HSS-trained physical therapist. These triage appointments are conducted virtually and can be scheduled throughout the country on-demand within 24 hours.
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“The point is really to get patients to the right level of care when they need it,” Fahrenkopf said. “It has been proven over and over again that a tremendous amount of the waste happens when patients bounce around the healthcare system and have unnecessary treatments like imaging injections and surgery visits.”
The second service is physical therapy delivered via telehealth. There are more than 95 musculoskeletal conditions that can be treated without seeing a physician first, including lower back pain and carpal tunnel syndrome, Fahrenkopf pointed out. She said RightMove wants to focus its virtual physical therapy offering on those common conditions.
RightMove hopes to go live with its services before the end of 2023, Fahrenkopf shared.
The startup will sell its platform to health plans and employers. RightMove is aiming to form value-based partnerships with these companies because it believes these risk-sharing models will be the best way to serve members and employees, according to Fahrenkopf.
The newly-formed company is certainly not the only virtual platform for physical therapy — other companies offer these services, such as Hinge Health and IncludeHealth. But Fahrenkopf contends that RightMove will be able to stand out.
“There’s a lot of companies that use the word virtual, but it means different things to different people. A lot of the virtual offerings out there are very much focused on animated or video physical therapy, and they require patients to use sensors and be very self-motivated,” she said. “Ours is truly telehealth — ours is using very highly trained physical therapists. HSS has some of the highest trained physical therapists in the country, and they will be training the physical therapists that we hire.”
Fahrenkopf added that RightMove’s virtual visits will be based entirely on HSS guidelines and workflows. She said this differentiates the startup from its competitors because these pathways have not been licensed to outsiders, meaning “anyone else out there doesn’t really have access to the same clinical expertise that we have.”
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