Teal Health partners with Thatch to expand cervical cancer screening
Teal Health, a virtual women's health company, launched a partnership with Thatch Marketplace on Tuesday 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), which allow employers to provide tax-free funds to employees 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 clients can now offer Teal Health's at-home cervical cancer screening as an employee benefit through ICHRA. To obtain a screening kit, women can log into Thatch Marketplace and visit the Teal Health page. They can purchase the kit from their employer and complete a brief telehealth visit with a Teal provider, who will prescribe the screening.
Patients then receive a screening kit in the mail, collect a sample using the FDA-authorized Teal Wand (a self-collecting device for vaginal samples), and mail it to a laboratory for testing. Results are then shared through the Teal portal, and patients can connect virtually with a Teal provider if they need follow-up care.
“We chose to partner with Thatch to ensure more employees can receive life-saving screenings without the stress, time constraints or discomfort common with traditional care,” Teal Health CEO and co-founder Kara Egan said in an email. “This is one step closer to realizing our mission to make cervical cancer screening more accessible and affordable.”
Most cancer screenings occur in middle age, but cervical cancer screening often needs to be done earlier, often while at work. However, about one-third of women do not get timely cervical cancer screening due to a lack of cervical cancer screening opportunities, according to the announcement.
That's what Teal Health hopes to improve through its partnership with Thatch, Egan said.
“Our goal at Teal Health is to remove the barriers that prevent women from staying up to date on important preventive care, especially cervical cancer screening,” she said. “With our Teal Wand, we aim to make screening easier and more convenient by reaching women, whether at home or through their workplace benefits, and further our mission to eliminate cervical cancer as a public health problem in the United States.”
ICHRAs are also increasingly popular with employers looking to reduce costs and provide greater flexibility to their employees, although their growth has been relatively slow. There isn't much data showing how many people are actually enrolled in ICHRA, but Centene CEO Sarah London recently called it “the future of personal health insurance.”
Photo: BlackSalmon, Getty Images
