Wellness brand Hims & Hers moving deeper into healthcare with Privia Health partnership

Hims launched in 2017 as a men’s health company, selling just a few products designed to help men suffering from erectile dysfunction or hair loss. Now the company has expanded greatly, adding a women’s health business called Hers, focused on birth control, sexual health, and skin and hair care. But even then, the company’s ambitions seemed to be growing: In 2019, Hims hired its first chief medical officer, Pat Carroll, MD, and the company began to put itself on the map as a healthcare delivery company.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, Hims & Hers accelerated the development of its healthcare platform to cover primary care and mental health care, which now provides access to medical care and treatment for more than a dozen conditions. It conducted more than 2 million telehealth consultations in 2020 and now has about 260,000 subscriptions.

Now, Hims & Hers is collaborating with Privia Health to provide Hims & Hers patients with direct access to providers for in-person visits and virtual primary care in the District of Columbia, Georgia, Maryland, Texas, and Virginia.

Privia Health is a national physician organization that has more than 2,600 providers with a strong focus on primary care.

Carroll told Fierce Healthcare that Hims & Hers is “building the front door to healthcare and wants to partner with established provider organizations to ensure customers have access to a ‘broad spectrum of high-quality care.’”

“If you look at what we’re doing at Hims & Hers, it’s the next iteration of consumer-facing care, and we are committed to doing it right and becoming part of the health ecosystem,” Carroll said.

The Privia Health collaboration builds on the company’s partnerships with health systems Ochsner Health and Mount Sinai Health System to help patients manage chronic conditions and other health conditions not addressed by Hims & Hers providers.

The partnership with Privia, Ochsner, and Mount Sinai represents a strategic business initiative for the company as it moves deeper into the multi-billion-dollar U.S. healthcare market. It also expands on Hims & Hers’ referral capacity.

“We will be referring our patients from our platform into Privia in a frictionless way, and their providers will have the opportunity to refer their patients to the Hims & Hers platform for certain conditions,” Carroll said. Dermatology, behavioral health, and sexual dysfunction are areas in which Hims & Hers has expertise. Treatments for those conditions aren’t always available, even in multi-specialty medical groups, Carroll noted.

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