Thrive Therapies lands $7.7M to put clinicians in schools

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Thrive Therapies, a Dallas pediatric healthcare company, has raised $7.7 million in a round led by LiveOak Ventures. Activate Venture Partners and the Charter School Growth Fund took part. The company will spend the money on entering new markets, growing its clinical teams and developing Thrive Clinical, its clinical intelligence platform.

Thrive supplies therapy, evaluations and behavioral health care to students with disabilities in more than 200 schools and districts across Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, under multi-year contracts. Its own clinicians work face to face with students, teachers and families inside the schools.

Speech-language pathologists, occupational and physical therapists, school psychologists and behavioral health clinicians are in short supply, which makes it hard for districts to serve more than 8 million children with disabilities. Districts must bill Medicaid to be reimbursed for these services, a process the company calls time-consuming and often insurmountable.

Session-level reporting

Thrive says most systems measure how well therapy works once a year. Thrive Clinical, which has documented more than 18,000 therapy sessions, reports at the session level instead. The same record supports a district's Medicaid claim, and clinicians spend fewer evenings on paperwork.

The company reports that more than 85 percent of students in its school systems met their annual IEP goals. It says 46 percent met their goals and no longer needed services, against a national average near 8 percent.

Founder and CEO Dr. Kristin McGraner ran a school system that paid for these services, researched whether they worked, and was a child whose disability was identified late. "The constant was that nobody could tell us precisely what a child needed, early enough to matter," she said.

Source: Business Wire