Reach Capital’s First Healthcare Impact Report

With contributions from Caoimhe MacRunnels and Jennifer Wu

The healthcare system is at a breaking point. Rising costs and staffing shortages are straining its capacity to deliver high-quality, timely care, and exhausting providers. Meanwhile, patients demand better experiences, on par with what they expect from consumer services and conveniences. Growing volumes of data from hospitals and personal devices offer unprecedented opportunities to improve care, yet much of it remains siloed and unused.

These mounting pressures are catalysts for change. At Reach, we’ve been backing and working alongside founders building tools that improve access to quality healthcare at scale, and enable people to live their best lives.

Our first Health Impact Report showcases the work of these companies and the macro trends that shape our healthcare investments. It distills the principles that guide our impact measurements — quality, access, and scale — and how we apply them to see where our companies are on their impact journey.

Impact, of course, is more than a score. It shows up in lives changed by our companies: Students with no medical background trained and filling vacant hospital roles. A boy who couldn’t sit still to write now eager and ready for school. Families once buried under medical bills now able to access financial relief. Cancer research accelerating at an unprecedented rate.

Below is a summary of the macro-trends behind our current healthcare investments, and further opportunities for impact in healthcare where we seek solutions. The full report, which you can download here, provides more details about the impact journey for seven of our healthcare companies.

Healthcare Trends and Our Investment Response

1. Healthcare’s Chronic Labor Shortage

Healthcare Job Openings vs. Hires (2000–2025)

The gap between healthcare job openings and hires is growing, seemingly unabated. Today, over half of workers say they are looking to leave their jobs. At the current rate, there will be a global shortage of at least 10 million healthcare workers by 2030.

Closing this gap could avert 189 million years of life lost to early death and disability, and boost the global economy by $1.1 trillion.

From the Reach portfolio:

• Aprende Health: Online training to prepare Spanish-speaking hospital workers for patient-facing roles
• Sketchy: Visual learning tools to help learners prepare for clinical practice
• Stepful: Online training to prepare people with a high school degree for careers in healthcare

2. Ballooning and Unaffordable Costs

Total Annual Health Expenditures per Capita in U.S. dollars (2000–2023)

Despite lackluster outcomes, healthcare costs represent a large and growing part of expenditures. The U.S. spends nearly twice as much on healthcare per person as peer nations, despite lower utilization of services.

Out-of-pocket spending reached $1,514 per person in 2023, up 15% from a decade prior. Over 1 in 3 adults have skipped or postponed getting the health care they needed because of cost.

From the Reach portfolio:

• Cartwheel: Virtual mental health services from licensed clinicians are delivered through schools, and covered by private insurance or Medicaid
• Goodbill: Billing audits provide transparency and automatically check for eligible discounts

3. Declining Patient Experience

% of Americans who rated quality as ‘Excellent’ or ‘Good’ (2010 – 2024)

Perceptions about the quality of healthcare have declined precipitously since 2010. Among the frustrations: the difficulty in simply getting seen by a doctor. The delay is especially pronounced for specialized care, where the average appointment wait time in 2024 has grown to 31 days — 50% longer than in 2004. 

With nearly half of consumers encountering scheduling snafus, long wait times, and poor communication, many wonder: Why can’t booking an appointment be as simple as making an online dinner reservation?

From the Reach portfolio:

• Coral Care: Pediatric specialty services by licensed therapists in families’ homes, averaging 7 days from booking to care
• Cartwheel: Virtual mental health care from licensed therapists delivered via schools, with first appointments typically within 7 days

4. Consumers Expect Digital Health Conveniences

Younger Consumers Drive Demand for Digital Convenience (% Usage by Generation)

Consumers want healthcare experiences to mirror the ease of other industries, in terms of access, convenience, and personalized information and offerings.

Today, more than 90% say convenience is the most important factor when selecting a physician, driving demand for at-home, virtual, and asynchronous care. Consumers are also increasingly turning to social media, online reviews, and AI platforms when seeking health information and researching care providers.

From the Reach portfolio:

• FoodHealth Company: Evidence-backed Food Health Scores displayed where people shop, whether in-store or online

5. Vast Healthcare Data Is Growing But Unused

Estimated Growth of Global Healthcare Data (2013–2025)

Despite generating enormous volumes of information every year, 97% of data produced by hospitals goes unused. Healthcare leaders say health data is often underutilized when making clinical and business decisions.

As a result, critical insights remain trapped in silos, blunting decision-making and delaying interventions, leading to higher costs and inefficient care.

From the Reach portfolio:

• Manifold: AI-driven data platform that accelerates research in life sciences by breaking down data silos and enabling scientists to quickly get insights and evidence
• Goodbill: Digitizing and structuring discount eligibility data for thousands of hospitals to uncover opportunities to reduce medical bills for patients.

Read the full report to learn more about each company’s impact journey.

Further Opportunities for Impact

We invite founders to partner with us to build a better system — one that lowers costs and raises the standard of care, delivering better experiences for patients and caregivers alike.

Here are tangible opportunities we see to have meaningful impact at scale. For more specific examples of solutions we’re looking for, and inspiring examples of tools in the market, check out our full report.

• Reducing Financial Burden for Patients: Improving affordability not only unlocks access to better care and outcomes, but also helps providers deliver services more sustainably, ultimately strengthening the healthcare system.
  
• Streamlined QA Compliance for Healthcare Systems: As AI becomes integrated into healthcare and more processes become automated, there’s an urgent need for better systems that ensure clinical quality and compliance at scale.
  
• Smarter Diagnostics for Precise Insights: We need new diagnostics and monitoring tools that can unlock hidden insights into challenges experienced by patients, make it easier to pinpoint root causes, reduce guesswork, and accelerate the right interventions.
  
• Supercharging Specialty Care Delivery: We see opportunity in tools that augment, rather than replace, specialists by automating routine workflows, providing evidence-based decision support, and improving care coordination across different teams.
  
• High-Touch, Personalized Care at Scale: There is immense potential for AI agents to integrate clinical, claims, and personal health data in ways that surface relevant insights and recommendations for clinical providers, while reducing administrative busywork.
  
• A Unified Platform for Personal Health Data: Today, many patients juggle a confusing patchwork of apps, web portals, and medical records that fails to deliver a complete view of their health. It’s time to unify these disparate sources of data into a single, actionable operating system for consumers.
  
• Holistic Primary Care: Consumers want integrated care that addresses physical, mental, emotional, and social well-being, rather than treating them in isolation. There is a compelling opportunity in connecting these services to enable holistic care delivery, and building the evidence needed to make integrated care models broadly reimbursable.

Let’s build together!