To date, Zing Health has raised more than $300 million, says CEO Andrew Clifton.
Medicare Advantage plans, which many private insurers now offer, are an alternative to the government's basic and typically free Medicare plan. With MA plans, members pay to receive government-sponsored Medicare health coverage as well as additional benefits, like dental and vision care.
Zing Health differentiates itself from its MA competitors by focusing on patients in underserved areas managing complex chronic conditions, like diabetes, heart disease and end-stage renal disease. By targeting the root causes of health inequality and offering supplemental benefits and access to a broad network of providers, Zing Health is hoping it can stand out from competitors.
“Healthcare is really hard. Coordination of care is really hard,” Clifton says. “So, our job is to design the plans that are going to best serve folks with chronic conditions, and then have a member service and a care delivery that wraps around that to ensure we have the best outcomes for our members.”
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Zing Health, which employs 200 people and says it is one of the fastest-growing MA companies in the U.S., currently operates in Chicago, Indianapolis and Detroit, serving more than 14,000 members, 10,000 of whom are in Illinois. The majority are in Chronic Special Needs Plans, a category of MA plans designed to meet the needs of people with severe or disabling chronic conditions.
Zing Health declined to disclose the average plan monthly premium or last year’s revenue.
Private insurance companies have found tremendous financial success in offering MA plans to members by collecting steady payments from the federal government, but that is starting to change. Plan operators face rate cuts next year, as well as the rising costs of medical care and other policies aimed at constraining healthcare spending, all of which will make it harder to boost profits.
Clifton said Zing Health is managing through these challenges by relying on a value-based care model, which rewards doctors and other healthcare professionals for keeping patients healthy, instead of paying providers per visit or procedure.
In the long term, value-based care models are expected to cut down on healthcare costs while also making patients healthier.
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Before coming to Zing Health, Clifton was a healthcare consultant at KPMG and later an executive at St. Louis-based insurance company Centene. He became CEO in 2022, when Whitaker left the role to become executive chairman.
Whitaker founded the company alongside healthcare executive Garfield Collins in partnership with Health 2047. Before Zing Health, Whitaker held leadership positions at the University of Chicago Medical Center and the Illinois Department of Public Health.
Whitaker is also the founder of TWG Partners, which teamed up with Los Angeles-based Pipeline Health in 2018 to buy three safety-net hospitals in the Chicago area. However, the two drew the ire of public officials and residents shortly after when they announced the closure of Westlake Hospital in Melrose Park just two weeks after buying it.
Pipeline Health later sold the remaining two hospitals — West Suburban Medical Center and Weiss Memorial Hospital — to Chicago-based Resilience Healthcare in 2022.
This story first appeared in Crain's Chicago Business.
