In recent years, GI practices have been facing growing financial and clinical challenges at what feel to some like an exponential rate — especially for those who remain independent.
This rings particularly true when it comes to the management of chronic GI conditions, including irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn’s disease, which may involve more ancillary services, like nutritional counseling and gastroenterology-focused therapy sessions.
That’s where New York City-based Salvo Health comes in. Salvo Health is a virtual extension of brick-and-mortar GI practices that work under GIs themselves to connect patients with nutritionists, nurses, dieticians and other clinicians who can continue patient care between diagnosis and procedures such as colonoscopies and endoscopies.
“At ASCs in particular, including private equity-sponsored rollups that have spread, there is a lot of pressure to do gold standard colonoscopies and endoscopies because those are essential services to the local community,” Jeff Glueck, CEO of Salvo Health, told Becker’s. “At a typical independent GI practice, there are not enough resources for follow-on care, nor are they set up to do so. It’s not logical to expect a surgeon to sit down weekly with a patient and discuss their low FODMAP-elimination diet, their food as medicine approach, their movement, microbiome diversity, and lots of other interventions that are key to the guidelines that [the American Gastroenterological Association] puts out.”
Salvo Health works through insurance to build out these services for GIs and maintain them. This enables GIs to see more new patients and more acute patients at a time when staffing challenges and reimbursement have created immense pressure for independent practices.
The organization also recently added $4 million to scale up its operation and inked partnerships with 700 GI physician practices, encompassing 14% of all independent GIs in the U.S. Since Salvo Health’s launch in 2022, the platform helped reduce GI-related ER visits by 79% according to one two-arm study cited by Mr. Glueck.
Through Salvo Health’s strategy of augmenting physician practices — as opposed to operating as a virtual clinic — the company aims to provide relief to the patient, practice and physician sides of challenges in the GI industry.
“What has happened historically is that patients don’t feel heard because there just isn’t enough time for a board-certified GI to spend a lot of time with a patient,” Mr. Glueck said. “That care is fragmented. You don’t have [an interdisciplinary] team working together that includes [support for] mental health, social determinance of health, food as medicine, nutrition, exercise, stress and environmental [factors]. We bring all of that into a team that we put behind every patient with chronic disease, and we do so really affordably because of the tech investment.”
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