A digital platform founded in Memphis will continue to expand its reach and capabilities to address transportation needs and services for healthcare providers and patients after receiving an investment from InvestTN.
While officials said it’s up to the company to disclose how much the investment was, InvestTN said the contribution came from their Growth Fund which makes investments between $250k to $3 million.
MedHaul is a scheduling platform that was founded in 2017 to connect organizations to transportation for patients with complex needs such as those in rural communities or who don’t have access to high quality public transport. The platform was founded by Erica Plybeah, with the idea stemming from her personal experience with medical transportation.
“I fell in love with medical transportation for two reasons,” Plybeah said. “The initial origin story is the experience with my grandmother who was a Type 2 diabetic, double-leg amputee, and just seeing my family deal with all of the transportation challenges with her and not really getting any insight from the health institutions on any better platforms or services they offered because they didn’t have any better options at the time.”
While the organization was founded in 2017, Plybeah said it was an idea she had had in her head for a while. She said the opportunity to put pen to paper arose from a collaboration between business development nonprofit Epicenter, and the Memphis Medical District.
The two organizations held an entrepreneurial contest looking for solutions to one of the top healthcare issues in the area — which was transportation. Given her existing ideas and passion for medical transportation, Plybeah decided to enter the opportunity challenge, which resulted in MedHaul’s first investment.
Plybeah added she was also working with a health system that provided “over 100,000” rides a year. However, they were using a spreadsheet to manage medical transportation, which she found to be inefficient given all the requirements needed to solidify a ride.
This method also only allowed one organization to access the spreadsheet, limiting the transportation company’s ability to see the information compiled. Plybeah said most of the time the agencies would capture the information over the phone, and leave room for manual error.
“That is when we learned that there was essentially no easy way to book medical transportation,” Plybeah said. “Especially for patients who have complex needs.”
The company formally launched in 2019 in the tri-state area of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Plybeah said it works like an Uber model, by building connections with medical transportation companies who in turn provide rides.
Since the company’s inception, Plybeah said they have been able to raise nearly $ 7 million and expand their services to about 15 states and growing.
“Back when we first started, we could only work with smaller foundations or one hospital at a time,” Plybeah said. “We weren’t big enough or mature enough to really bring on enterprise organizations. We do that today. Most of our customers are large enterprises like health insurance companies, large health systems, [and] large healthcare provider groups.”
Plybeah said they’ve been able to hit significant milestones with only a portion of the money that other organizations have raised — which she said has ranged from $10-40 million. Investments from companies such as InvestTN will allow MedHaul to expand its footprint and be the “category leading company in [their] space.”
Eller Kelliher, chief investment officer of LaunchTN, which powers the InvestTN fund, said MedHaul was an “attractive” investment opportunity because of their existing strategic investors.
“She had some recent growth and traction and signals in the market that things were leaning very positively,” Kelliher said. “If we could make a commitment to really fill out the round, it was going to help her get to those milestones faster.
While the federally-funded company is based in Nashville, Kelliher said they’re committed to “getting checks out” across the state. Kelliher hopes this will signal additional investment opportunities in the city.