Cityblock, a population health startup that offers physical and behavioral health services, has announced plans to reduce its workforce by 155 employees – about 12% of the company’s total workforce.
The company’s CEO, Dr. Toyin Ajayi, said the layoffs are part of Cityblock’s maturation as it becomes more “agile” and “nimble” in delivering care.
“Some of the critical changes we’ve made to enable key processes through technology, standardize our care teams, and reduce layers for stronger accountability, unfortunately, require parting ways with a number of our incredible colleagues,” Ajayi said in a blog post, describing the job cuts as part of an overall organizational restructuring.
The tech-enabled unicorn is a value-based care provider for Medicaid and lower-income Medicare beneficiaries. It connects patients with community-based groups and health plans to help provide physical and behavioral health care and social services.
The company integrates behavioral health in a number of different ways, including via standardized screenings for behavioral health concerns in all clinical intakes. Cityblock additionally offers evidence-based treatment programs for severe mental illness (SMI), substance use disorder (SUD) and longitudinal behavioral care.
Broadly, that all fits into its collaborative care model (CoCM).
“Cityblock chose the CoCM model because it utilizes an integrated team and clinical data to help improve quality of life and reduce behavioral health symptoms,” the company explained in a post about its integrated approach. “Additionally, using our population health focus, we can identify which members would benefit from a program such as CoCM and our value-based care model allows us to be flexible in how we provide CoCM interventions.”
Founded in 2017 as a spin-off of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, Cityblock quickly gained investor attention. The startup has raised just shy of $900 million in total.
Cityblock Health has been one of the leaders in integrated primary and behavioral health care through a population model.
“I think there is a desire to bring behavioral health [into population health], but because our system is historically so fragmented – medical is different from behavioral, behavior is often different from substance use disorder – it’s very hard to get them all together,” Dr. Michael Tang, head of behavioral health at Cityblock, previously told Behavioral Health Business. “At Cityblock, we have combined medical, behavioral and substance use contracts. So we have all of it together from a finance perspective, so that we can think about the individual as a whole person.”
Despite the staff reductions, the company plans to prepare itself for future expansions.
“There’s a profound opportunity to create lasting social value through transforming the healthcare experience for populations that the system has historically left behind,” Ajayi said. “To achieve this, we must continue to strive both for excellence in the quality of care we provide, as well as for efficiency and sustainability.”
Cityblock is the latest in a long list of health care startups that have reduced their workforce. Headspace, Foresight Mental Health, SonderMind, Eleanor, Workit, Talkspace, Cerebral and others have all reduced their workforce in the last year. This comes as the startup industry faces economic headwinds and a slowdown in investor financing.
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