This is a piece written for clinical readers — practice owners, physicians, therapists, and clinicians considering whether 76 Health is a partnership worth exploring. The voice here is more direct than our patient-facing writing, because the audience is making different decisions.
If you're a patient, the rest of our articles probably make more sense as a starting point. If you're a clinical reader, this is the brief on why we're building, what we believe, and what kind of partnership we're trying to make work.
Where we started
76 Health came out of a long conversation about a structural problem in chronic and lifestyle-driven care.
Most of the conditions that drive the highest costs and worst patient outcomes in the system — chronic pain, post-surgical recovery, accident injuries, recurring migraines — aren't conditions that resolve in a single visit. They require coordinated, sustained care over weeks or months, with multiple providers involved, multiple data streams to track, and multiple decision points along the way.
The system isn't built for that.
Reimbursement is visit-based. Records don't travel. Coordination work doesn't have a billing code. The patient ends up as the de facto project manager of their own care. The providers do the best work they can in the visits they have, but the layer between visits — where most of these conditions are actually managed — has no clear owner.
This isn't a critique of clinicians. It's a critique of the structure most clinicians work inside.
We started 76 Health to build the missing layer.
What we believe
A few principles guide what we're trying to build.
Coordination is a clinical function, not a back-office function. The work of holding the patient's plan, watching the data between visits, surfacing the right questions, and adjusting course when patterns shift is clinical work. It needs clinical infrastructure, not call center scripting.
Therapy-first care has the evidence behind it. For the conditions we focus on, the strongest evidence supports starting with movement-based therapy, behavioral support, and conservative care — escalating to imaging, injections, or surgery only when the data warrants. We aren't reinventing this principle. We're building the operational layer that makes it routine.
Physician oversight is essential. Every care plan we coordinate is reviewed and signed by a physician. Escalation decisions go through a physician. The clinical relationship between patient and physician is the foundation — and the coordination layer exists to support it, not replace it.
Continuity is structural. The care coordinator who handles a patient's intake stays with them through the episode. The clinical team holding the plan is the team holding the data. Continuity is the design choice, not the marketing claim.
Outcomes are what we sell. We don't lead with technology or with our internal infrastructure. We lead with the conditions we treat, the outcomes we're tracking, and the published evidence behind the model. The internal infrastructure is in service of the outcomes — not the headline.
What we're building
A few specific things that distinguish what we're doing from what most MSOs and care coordination companies do.
We're building a coordination layer that integrates with existing practices rather than replacing them. The practices we partner with keep their clinical identity, their patient relationships, their record systems, and their decision-making. We add the operational and coordination infrastructure that's been missing — at whatever depth the partnership needs.
We're building infrastructure that watches the gap between visits. Weekly check-ins. Validated outcome measures captured continuously. Patterns surfaced to the clinical team in time to act on them. The clinical layer isn't waiting for the next visit to learn how the patient is doing.
We're building three engagement models, not one. Practices that want clean patient flow can engage as Care Coordination Partners. Practices that want operational support can engage under a Management Services Agreement. Practices considering succession can structure that conversation around what they want the next chapter to be. The engagement model fits the partner — not the reverse.
We're building this with design partners, not for them. The first practices we work with are shaping the operating model. Their feedback changes how we build. Their patients are the population we're learning from. We're not arriving with a finished model and asking practices to fit into it.
Where we are right now
We're early. Pre-seed. Working with our first design partner practices. The infrastructure is partially built. Some of what we think we know about how this should work will turn out to be wrong.
We're being intentionally selective about partnership. We're not trying to scale to dozens of practices in our first year. We're trying to get the model right with a small number of partners before scaling — because the model has to actually work before scale becomes the next problem.
If you're a clinician considering partnership, the right framing for an initial conversation isn't whether we can sign anyone with a license. It's whether we're a fit. Whether the principles above resonate. Whether the patient population we focus on overlaps with yours. Whether the engagement model fits how you want to work.
We say no to partnerships that aren't a fit. We expect you to do the same.
What this isn't
We're not a marketplace. We don't try to maximize the number of practices in our network.
We're not a typical MSO. We don't lead with billing automation and back-office centralization. We lead with clinical coordination.
We're not a PE rollup. The succession conversations we do have are structured around continuity for the patients and the practice — not flipping the asset in three years.
We don't lead with technology. The technology is in service of the clinical work. Not the other way around.
What we're looking for in partnership
A few things matter.
- Practices that believe in evidence-based care, and that use validated outcome measures or are open to doing so
- Practices that are established and stable — typically two-plus years in operation, with a clinical team in place
- Practices that are in-network with major payers (or willing to be) for the lines of business they serve
- Practices that are open to coordination — willing to deliver care against a shared plan, willing to communicate progress through a shared record, willing to flex how they work in service of better outcomes
If you fit those criteria and the model we've described resonates, we'd like to talk.
If you don't fit them — or if the model doesn't resonate — we'd rather know early. We'd rather lose a conversation at the front door than fail to serve a partner well.
What comes next
If you're reading this and curious about the model, the next step is a conversation. Not a pitch. Not a sales call. A peer-to-peer conversation about how you work today, what's on your plate that you'd like off it, and whether what we're building fits.
That's where these things start. The rest follows.
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