Teal Health, a virtual women’s health company, launched a partnership with Thatch Marketplace on Tuesday that aims to improve access to at-home cervical cancer screening.
Thatch Marketplace is a benefits platform that helps employers offer Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements (ICHRAs), in which employers can provide their employees tax-free money so they can purchase their own individual health insurance plans. Some of its clients include ADP, Jersey Mikes and Smoothie King.
Through the new partnership, Thatch’s employer customers can now offer Teal Health’s at-home cervical cancer screening as an employee benefit through an ICHRA. To receive the screening kit, women can log in to Thatch Marketplace and visit the Teal Health page. They can purchase the kit from their employer and complete a short telehealth visit with a Teal provider, who prescribes the screening.
Patients then receive the screening kit in the mail, collect their sample with the FDA-authorized Teal Wand (a vaginal sample self-collection device) and mail it to the lab for testing. Results are then shared through the Teal portal, and patients can connect with a Teal provider virtually if they need follow up care.
“We chose to partner with Thatch to ensure that more employees can access life-saving screenings without the stress, time constraints, or discomfort often associated with traditional care,” said Kara Egan, CEO and co-founder of Teal Health, in an email. “It’s one step closer to achieving our mission of making cervical cancer screenings more widely accessible and affordable.”
Most cancer screenings occur midlife, though cervical cancer screenings are often needed much earlier, typically during working years. However, because of a lack of access to cervical cancer screenings, about one in three women are not up-to-date on their screenings, according to the announcement.
This is what Teal Health hopes to improve in this partnership with Thatch, Egan said.
“Our goal at Teal Health is to remove the barriers that prevent women from staying up to date on critical preventive care, specifically cervical cancer screening,” she stated. “With our Teal Wand, we aim to make screening more accessible and convenient by meeting women where they are, whether at home or through their workplace benefits, and further our mission to eliminate cervical cancer as a public health concern in the U.S.”
ICHRAs are also becoming more popular for employers as they look to decrease costs and offer their employees more flexibility, though they’re growing at a relatively slow pace. There isn’t much data out there that shows how many people are actually enrolled in ICHRAs, but Centene CEO Sarah London recently called it the “future of individual health insurance.”
Photo: BlackSalmon, Getty Images
