Columbus CEO’s CEO of the Year 2023: Matt Scantland Aims to Improve Care Through AndHealth
The co-founder of CoverMyMeds tapped his personal experience as a patient for his latest venture, which aims to help individuals with chronic conditions and improve care for the underserved.
2023 CEO of the Year – Small For-Profit Winner
Matt Scantland has keen insight into the U.S. health care system on both a personal and professional level. Three years after founding pharmacy benefits company CoverMyMeds, his doctor asked him to take an active role in his well-being to resolve serious health issues including prediabetes.
As he worked to grow his company, he could see that millions of people like him were being treated in the system, but many weren’t receiving the outcomes or value they deserved. “Are any of those people happy with that? And that got me thinking about, ‘Why?’ ” he asks.
Then in 2020, some stark statistics emerged. U.S. life expectancy was 77.3 years, the lowest it had been since 2003. It had dropped by 1.5 years from 2019 to 2020, the largest one-year decline since World War II. While COVID-19 played an outsized role in the drop, chronic disease did, too. And that got Scantland thinking yet again.
Over the past 160 years, U.S. life expectancy has doubled, rising from 39.4 years to 78.9 years thanks to medical advancements and a health care system designed to tackle infectious diseases, emergency treatments and acute conditions. “Success in that system caused us to build a system that isn’t as well suited to solving chronic [conditions],” Scantland says. “What we’re doing at AndHealth is trying to be part of creating that same success that we created over the last 200 years for the next 100 years. We’re rebuilding our health care system to help people struggling with chronic diseases.”
AndHealth was founded in 2021 and backed by $57 million in investor financing. Scantland is working with the team that helped grow CoverMyMeds into Ohio’s first “unicorn”; it was acquired by McKesson in 2017 for $1.4 billion.
AndHealth and its partners—community health centers, health systems, employers and health plans—are building a community-based virtual and on-site health care delivery system to address the nationwide specialty care crisis while giving patients support so they can get their lives back from chronic disease. The company’s business model now focuses on Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis, migraines, psoriasis, and psoriatic and rheumatoid arthritis.
The community health center aspect is especially important to Scantland, who wants to increase access to care for people in underserved communities and those who need culturally competent care. Partner Lower Lights Christian Health Center, for example, serves the Franklinton area, which has the lowest life expectancy (60 years) in Ohio.
AndHealth’s entry into the market comes at a time of dire need. A new analysis by the Washington Post found that chronic diseases erase more than twice as many years of life among people younger than 65 as all overdoses, homicides, suicides and car accidents combined.
According to AndHealth, many uninsured or underinsured patients cite cost or lack of access to specialists as a barrier to care. “We think health is a human right, and every person should have access to incredible health care that helps them not only access the system but get great outcomes for chronic conditions,” Scantland says. “We’re not going to stop until every American has access to incredible care for these challenging and disruptive conditions.”
Doug Kridler, president and CEO of the Columbus Foundation, recently heard Scantland—who serves on the foundation’s governing committee—speak at a Columbus Partnership retreat. It reminded him of a speech Melvin Schottenstein delivered more than 30 years ago. Schottenstein, an attorney and co-founder of M/I Homes Inc., passionately told the audience to work together to make Columbus a place where their children want to help build the next great community.
“Matt’s is not the mindset of, ‘What do we have to do to compete against other markets?’ He understands the value of looking here first, building here first, giving here first,” Kridler says. “It’s incredibly strategic, visionary and respectful of the talent that’s around us and investing at home first. … Matt grew up here, stayed here and had all the options in the world after the success of CoverMyMeds. And yet, here he is doing it again, while also serving and being generous along the way.”
About Matt Scantland
Founder and CEO, AndHealth
In role since: 2021
Age: 44
Education: Bachelor’s degree in biological sciences, Ohio State University
Community involvement: Member of the executive committee of the Columbus Partnership and governing committee of the Columbus Foundation; board director for the Columbus Downtown Development Corp., InnovateOhio, the Wellington School and Twofold Ventures, his family’s investment company that backs growing businesses in health care, media and technology
Laura Newpoff is a freelance writer.
This story is from the CEO of the Year package in the Winter 2024 issue of Columbus CEO.