Catheters, glucose monitors, and ostomy bags, delivered in two days with a real human who has been there. Insurance handled. No fax machine required.
It is an ordinary Tuesday and somebody, somewhere, has just run low on ostomy barriers. In the old world that meant a phone tree, a fax, a hold tone, and a week of quiet worry. At Better Health, it means a text message and a box on the doorstep by Thursday.
Better Health is a modern medical supplier. That is the plain description, and the company seems almost stubbornly proud of how plain it is. It ships the unglamorous things that keep millions of Americans living independently at home: continuous glucose monitors, intermittent catheters, ostomy pouches, incontinence products, wound care. The twist is what rides along with the box - a peer coach, expert content, and insurance billing the customer never has to think about. Across 48 states, the company has turned a category famous for paperwork into something closer to a relationship.
The supplies are commodities. The experience around them, it turns out, is not.
“Peer support, medical supplies, and expert content so you'll never feel lost or alone.”
- Better Health, company taglineThe medical supplies business is enormous, essential, and almost universally disliked by the people who depend on it. That is a strange combination, and it is exactly the gap Better Health walked into.
For someone managing a chronic condition, getting supplies has traditionally meant navigating a maze: a doctor's order here, an insurance approval there, a supplier who treats you like a claim number rather than a person. Choice was an illusion. You received whatever the supplier stocked, whenever it arrived, and you were expected to be grateful. The result was predictable - missed reorders, abandoned regimens, avoidable complications, and a lot of people feeling alone with conditions that are hard enough on their own.
The cruelty was the quietness of it. Nobody set out to make catheter ordering miserable. The system simply optimized for billing codes instead of human beings, and over four decades the misery compounded. Better Health's founders looked at that and saw not a broken niche but a national one.
“Customers deserve Better.”
- The company's founding belief, condensed to two wordsNaama Stauber Breckler had already spent a career in the places most people never see: defense systems in the Israeli military, network security engineering, then a string of healthcare startups.
Before Better Health, she founded three healthcare companies - CompactCath, MocaCare, and Avails Medical - and earned an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business along the way. CompactCath, an innovative urinary catheter, was the seed of the whole idea. Building it meant talking to thousands of people who used medical supplies every day, and those conversations kept circling back to the same complaint: the product was rarely the problem. Getting it, understanding it, and not feeling abandoned while using it - that was the problem.
So in 2019 she co-founded Better Health with Adam Breckler, a serial product builder whose resume includes Prism Labs (Y Combinator S17) and Visual.ly. Her bet was specific and a little contrarian: that the way to fix medical supplies was not a better catalog but a better relationship - bundling the supply with a human who understood it, and letting insurance fade into the background. Plenty of investors have learned the hard way that healthcare punishes optimists. Better Health bet that this time the optimism was operational, not naive.
“She is focused on creating human-centric solutions that support underserved populations and those living with chronic conditions.”
- On CEO Naama Stauber Breckler, Authority MagazineBetter Health bundles five things people usually have to assemble themselves: the right product, the insurance approval, the clinical guidance, the peer support, and the delivery. One experience, not five errands.
Order by text. Talk to a care team that picks up the phone between 8:30am and 8:30pm Eastern. Get free two-day shipping. And, when you need it, get matched with a peer coach who often lives with the same condition. It is a deceptively simple stack, and it spans the conditions that are hardest to manage alone.
Continuous glucose monitors and diabetes supplies from leading brands, insurance coordinated.
Barriers, pouches, skin prep, and leakage control, curated and delivered discreetly.
Intermittent and external catheters for chronic retention and bladder management.
Specialized incontinence products shipped to the door, no waiting room required.
Wound care supplies paired with expert guidance for healing at home.
Human coaches and expert content layered on top of every shipment.
PICTURED ABOVE, IN SPIRIT: the five aisles of the drugstore nobody enjoys visiting, reassembled into one polite conversation.
Naama Stauber Breckler and Adam Breckler launch Better Health in San Francisco to digitize the medical supplies industry.
Backed by Caffeinated Capital and General Catalyst to reinvent medical supply shopping through e-commerce.
Caffeinated Capital and General Catalyst lead, with Bill Ackman's Table Management, 8VC, and others, to scale the bundled supply-and-care model.
Healthworx (CareFirst), University of Miami Health System, Mosaic General Partnership, and Samsung Next join to reach more patients, payers, and providers.
Serving members of Medicare, Medicaid, Cigna, Humana, Florida Blue, and Oscar - with a 90% retention rate.
Anyone can promise a friendlier experience. The interesting question is whether friendliness changes outcomes. Better Health's reported member data suggests it does.
CHART NOTE: 64% avoiding an unnecessary visit is the kind of statistic that makes a health plan's CFO sit up straight.
“64% of members avoided an unnecessary healthcare visit, and 47% reported improved psychological distress.”
- Better Health member outcomesThe proof is not only in surveys. It is in who showed up to invest. The 2024 round paired venture money with strategic backers who have skin in the outcome - Healthworx, the venture arm of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, and the University of Miami Health System. When the payers and the health systems start writing checks, it usually means the model is doing something to the cost curve they like.
Strip away the funding and the logistics and Better Health is arguing for something almost old-fashioned: that a person managing a chronic condition is a customer who deserves choice, not a patient who gets whatever ships.
The company's stated mission is to modernize the antiquated medical supplies industry by digitizing it and bringing transparency and choice to the home. That means working alongside manufacturers to put the right products in front of the right people, and treating insurance management, education, and delivery as one job rather than the customer's problem. The vision behind it is plainer still - that nobody should feel lost or alone while doing the daily work of staying healthy.
It is a mission with a built-in conscience. Many of the people answering the phones and coaching members live with the conditions themselves, which keeps the company honest in a way a mission statement on a wall never could.
“Better Health strives to enable consumer choice and transparency at each step in accessing medical products.”
- From the company's About pageMore people are living longer with chronic conditions at home than at any point in history. Every one of them needs supplies, support, and a system that does not make them feel like a burden.
That is the tailwind Better Health is built for. As care keeps moving out of hospitals and into living rooms, whoever owns the home-supply relationship owns a piece of the future of healthcare. Better Health is wiring that relationship for engagement and adherence - the exact things payers will pay for, because the alternative is far more expensive emergencies down the line.
Back to that ordinary Tuesday. The person who ran low on supplies sent a text and barely thought about it again. No fax. No hold tone. No week of worry. A box arrived, and so did a note from someone who understood. The medical supplies industry spent forty years making that moment stressful. Better Health is spending its existence making it forgettable - and in this corner of healthcare, forgettable is the highest praise there is.
“97% of members would recommend Better Health. In medical supplies, that number is practically science fiction.”
- The proof, restated