What You Should Know
- The Funding: Garner Health has raised $118M in Series D funding led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Redpoint Ventures, Maverick Ventures, and Kaiser Permanente Ventures., bringing its total capital to approximately $200M.
- The Mechanism: Unlike passive transparency tools, Garner acts as a financial overlay on existing health plans. If an employee visits a “Top Provider” identified by Garner’s data, the employer covers their out-of-pocket costs (deductibles/copays).
- The ROI: By steering patients toward doctors with 75% lower complication rates, employees pay 80% less out-of-pocket, while employers see an average 12% reduction in total healthcare spend in the first year.
Attacking Fundamental Market Failure
In the U.S. healthcare market, price rarely correlates with quality. A higher bill often just means a more expensive building, not a better outcome. Garner Health is betting $118 million that better data—and a smart bribe—can fix this broken equation. Garner is attacking what CEO Nick Reber calls a “fundamental market failure”: the lack of transparent data on physician quality. Using a dataset of 320 million patient records, Garner identifies the doctors who follow the latest research and avoid unnecessary procedures.
“Our data shows that the top-performing doctors have 75% lower rates of complications and mortality than their peers,” said Reber.
The “Double Win” Incentive
Garner’s secret sauce isn’t just the data; it’s the financial engineering. Traditional “doctor finder” tools fail because they rely on patients to care about quality metrics they don’t understand.
Garner changes the behavior by changing the cost. The platform layers on top of a company’s existing health plan. When an employee uses Garner to find a “Top Provider,” the employer steps in to cover all or most of the out-of-pocket costs.
- Employee Benefit: They get to see a top-tier doctor and pay 80% less (often zero deductible/copay).
- Employer Benefit: Despite paying the deductible, they save money in the long run because the patient avoids complications, revisions, and unnecessary surgeries. Garner claims this results in a 12% reduction in total healthcare spend in year one.
The model is resonating in a market desperate for cost containment. Garner’s revenue is up over 130% year-over-year, and the platform now serves 2.5 million people.
