One Medical (ONEM), a membership-based primary care provider, soared during its public debut, opening at $18 per share after pricing shares at $14 on Thursday evening. The stock surged throughout Friday’s trading session — as much as 62% — on a day markets have been steeply selling off amid heightened fears over the coronavirus and its potential impact on the global economy.
The San Francisco-based company — which offers same-day appointments that it says actually start on time — priced the stock on the lower end of its original range ($14 to $16), which raises the question whether shares were fairly priced.
When asked about the stock’s performance, CEO Amir Dan Rubin said, “We’re really in this for the long run. Our mission is to try to transform health care. And we combine modernized video visits and virtual care with lovely convenient offices. And we believe we have an opportunity to grow and perform at scale.”
One Medical, which melds telemedicine with in-person visits, currently has 397,000 members across 77 physical offices in major U.S. cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. The company lost $33.1 million on revenue of $198.9 million in the first nine months of 2019. Revenue increased 29% over the same period of 2018, according to its filing with the SEC.
Google (GOOG, GOOGL) is the largest of One Medical’s 6,000 employer clients, accounting for 10% of the company’s net revenue. Eighty six percent of members are covered by their employer-sponsored insurance, but all individuals are required to pay a $199 annual fee out of pocket.
Preventative, proactive care
The space has certainly been ripe for innovation, with most millennials eschewing regular checkups. Forty-five percent of 18- to 29-year-olds don’t have a primary care physician, according to a 2018 Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Along with One Medical, startups like Forward, Cityblock and Oak Street are also trying to make health care less miserable — and more millennial.
According to Rubin, primary care only makes up 6% of all health care spend, but regular check-ups and longer visits can cut down emergency room visits by 30%.
“We touch each member seven times a year, five of which are virtually, about two on average are in office. And people contact us 24/7 for their questions, issues, needs ... They can email us, they can text us, they can video us, they can call us ... And also if they need to come in, we can do bloodwork, we can have a physical exam, and so we’re really a combination of being human-centered as well as technology-powered,” he told Yahoo Finance in an interview Friday.
Rubin hopes that services like One Medical could help mitigate potential illnesses — perhaps even rapidly spreading diseases like the coronavirus, which has over 9,900 confirmed cases worldwide.
“We have close to 47% of our members engaged on our technology every month, and we reach out to them ... We have a lot of inbound questions now about the flu and cold. And we can triage people from their home. We could ask about travel, we could ask about upper or lower respiratory issues, we could ask about fever... so we’re able to do a lot of triaging, answer a lot of questions, and manage people in the right settings without having people unnecessarily using emergency departments or other high cost resources,” he said.
Rubin says One Medical has yet to diagnose any of its patients with coronavirus, but “every day, every hour people are contacting [them] — whether it’s routine questions or questions about their children.”
Melody Hahm is Yahoo Finance’s west coast correspondent, covering entrepreneurship, technology and culture. Follow her on Twitter @melodyhahm.
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