Overview
After decades of watching chronic illness patients cycle through emergency rooms, often at great cost and little long-term benefit, Dr. Brent Asplin decided enough was enough. What emerged from his frustration is Gather Health—a primary care startup that’s not only reimagining how older adults are cared for, but doing so with a business model that could reshape a notoriously difficult healthcare segment.
This isn’t just a health story—it’s a business case study in solving structural inefficiencies with scalable innovation.
An Urgent Problem, Met With a Human-Centered Model
The core insight driving Gather Health is brutally simple: it’s easier to admit someone to an ICU for $10,000 a night than to get them a $10/month blood pressure medication. But the downstream consequences—skyrocketing costs, ER congestion, and poor long-term health outcomes—are unsustainable.
Asplin’s response? Build a system that combines clinic-based care, at-home support, remote monitoring, and community programming—all tailored to higher-risk Medicare patients, especially those who are also Medicaid eligible. The company’s clinics aren’t just for check-ups. They host card games, dinners, and therapy sessions, creating spaces that fight loneliness while treating chronic conditions.
This focus on social and emotional wellness may sound “soft,” but the hard data tells another story: Gather Health has reported a 53% reduction in hospitalizations after just 12 months.
Traction, Tech, and the Business Opportunity
In just over a year, Gather Health has signed up 2,500+ patients and opened four locations around Boston. More impressive is its forecast: revenue is expected to grow 25x to $44 million in 2024, fueled by a $17 million raise from Khosla Ventures, Maverick Ventures, and HC9 Ventures. That’s an ambitious scale-up plan, especially considering the company only broke even at its first location this April.
What’s enabling this growth? A few key differentiators:
Tech-enabled care: From home-use blood pressure cuffs to glucose monitors, Gather collects real-time data to flag health concerns early.
Cost-efficient in-home care: Instead of nurse practitioners, who are expensive and hard to scale, Gather deploys EMTs and paramedics for home visits.
Transportation and access: Free rides to clinics remove one of the biggest friction points for older adults.
This combination of smart logistics, technology, and human-centered design isn’t just helping patients—it’s also appealing to investors and policymakers eager for viable alternatives to traditional fee-for-service care.
Why This Matters for Founders and Industry Veterans
For founders and operators who’ve spent years watching digital health swirl in cycles of overhype and burnout, Gather Health is worth paying attention to.
Yes, it’s a healthcare startup—but it’s also a lesson in how underserved markets can become high-growth opportunities when approached with the right blend of empathy, technology, and operational discipline. The company isn’t trying to reinvent medicine—it’s trying to reconnect it with the patients who need it most, in a way that’s both scalable and sustainable.
It’s no surprise that Khosla Ventures backed this. Their thesis has long revolved around non-obvious founders building non-obvious solutions in legacy sectors. For Alex Morgan, a Khosla partner with deep roots in biomedical informatics and personal experiences with poor healthcare access, this wasn’t just a business bet—it was a mission.
The Real Innovation? A Cultural Reset
Asplin frames it clearly: “You cannot solve chronic conditions with a 10-minute visit three times a year.”
The real breakthrough here isn’t the hardware or the funding—it’s the reframing of primary care from a transaction to a continuous relationship. Gather Health wants to be the always-on signal for health issues before they escalate, driven by AI, data, and good old-fashioned human connection.
This is what value-based care should look like. Not just buzzwords or billing codes, but a system that rewards better outcomes, not more procedures.
Are we solving for the system’s symptoms, or are we designing around its blind spots?
Gather Health is doing the latter. Are you?
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