Artemis: Saving Healthcare Dollars for Self-Insured Employers
810 Bn dollars. A lot of money, and the estimated spend by self-insured employers on company healthcare benefits in 2012. Healthcare is now one of the top three costs for these companies (1).
Artemis is a start-up in NYC that has created a software product for self-insured employers that aggregates, analyzes, and visualizes their health claims data and identifies areas for savings. Data from all of the different vendors are aggregated in one location: medical claims, pharmaceutical claims, health risk assessments, etc. Artemis’s goal is for the tool to present each company’s population level data in an easy to understand dashboard, with real-time updates. The dashboard appears to be available on multiple devices, including tablets and mobile.
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With this data, employers can ensure that the benefit vendors that they use can offer the right types of services and programs their employees need (e.g. chronic disease maintenance programs). Artemis’s platform also provides suggestions for how the company can save money. The company asserts that using the tool can save self-insured employers ~10% of their healthcare costs.
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Artemis is planning to capture value by charging a $50-150k yearly subscription fee for access to their service. The fee ranges based on the size of the company and the number of employees they have. Artemis estimates that there are 65,000 self-insured employers in the US, and with only 2% of the market they expect to have revenues of $90 Mn. Artemis should have a relatively asset light operating model, with main costs likely including only data storage, engineering, sales and marketing, HR, and leadership overhead. The negative cash flow coming from the subscription pricing also makes the business model attractive.
Investors appear to see potential in Artemis’s product offering and strategy. Artemis was selected for the NYC healthcare technology accelerator, Blueprint Health in 2013, and the company has raised $1.2 Mn in seed and $795K in venture money according to CrunchBase (2). The company’s initial team also appears to have had previous successful start-up experience, and their advisers include leaders at Walgreens and New York Presbyterian Hospital.
While Artemis has accomplished a good deal since it was founded in 2013, I think there are also significant challenges ahead of the company.
- I have not found any official revenue numbers, and I’m curious how many subscriptions they have been able to sell so far. They were targeting 1.8 Mn in revenue in 2014, but I don’t know if they hit that target. B2B sales cycles can be long, and Artemis is one of many start-ups trying to get companies to add another software tool (the other tools may be in other spaces, e.g. controlling procurement spend).
- I’m also not impressed by the Top Savings Insights that the Artemis team showed the tool generating in their Blueprint Health Demo Day presentation, shown above. All of them seem fairly obvious, and the key is whether they can really make the suggestions very detailed, tailored, and actionable (e.g. go to these new insurers).
- Lastly, I think Artemis has to continue refining their segmentation of the target customer. Yes, there are 65,000 self-insured employers in the US, but I wonder if there is a small number that would disproportionately benefit from Artemis’s offering. Clarifying the target customer should reduce inefficiency and cost in sales and marketing.
(1) Artemis Blueprint Health Demo Day presentation, accessed through vimeo
(2) Does not include an original undisclosed seed round