A Delaware County healthcare start-up is expanding its virtual primary care offering for hourly workers nationally

Vitable LLC, a healthcare start-up from Delaware County, is expanding its virtual primary care service for hourly workers nationally, the company announced Wednesday.

Founded by Joseph Kitonga in 2019 while he was studying computer engineering at Penn State, Vitable has also started offering its own basic health plans for employers in relatively low-wage industries.

“We’ve gone slow to get the model right. Now we want to bring the service to all small businesses across the country,” Kitonga, 28, said.

The business was inspired by the healthcare travails he observed among employees at the home health business his parents founded in 2012, not long after the family emigrated to the United States from Kenya, Kitonga said in a 2021 Inquirer interview.

Vitable started in the Philadelphia area with a focus on companies in childcare, senior care, restaurants, and small-scale manufacturing. It has since expanded to Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois, and Washington, D.C. More than 400 employers use Vitable’s services, paying the company from $30 to $50 a month for more than 100,000 employees, Kitonga said.

Venture capital firms have invested $25 million in Vitable to help it grow. The company employs 60 and has offices in Woodlyn, Delaware County; Center City; and San Francisco. Its clinicians work on contracts. Kitonga declined to share the company’s revenue.

The company’s original offering was a primary care plan focused on preventive care. It was “specifically designed to help small businesses with everyday hourly workers who typically make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but too little to afford the Cadillac health plans,” Kitonga said.

In Philadelphia, the plan included pop-up physician visits to workplaces and home visits, but that service will only be available in certain markets as Vitable signs up businesses across the country, Kitonga said.

Vitable started offering basic health plans after employers said Vitable’s primary care plan covered more than the basic plans employers were buying to comply with requirements of the Affordable Care Act for what is called minimal essential coverage.

“It did really well. It grew quickly,” Kitonga said.

This month, Vitable added yet another line of business. It acquired Liferaft, which provides services that enable employers to reimburse employees for health insurance premiums for plans bought on ACA exchanges.

These so-called individual contribution health reimbursement arrangements were launched during the first Trump administration. They echo the shift to 401(k)’s with their defined contributions from traditional pensions.

“The promise that it holds is that employers can set a budget, employees can go and select a plan, then the plan is portable with the employee,” Kitonga said.