Hope Lewis, CEO of MORE Health;
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China has the world’s largest number of cancer patients, but has limited resources to provide medical care to all of them, even as new treatments emerge. After the daughter of a client living in China was diagnosed with cancer, lawyer Hope Lewis founded the company to better serve China’s needs through international bridges.
MORE Health, based in San Mateo, California, where Lewis is CEO, is focused on providing advice in China and digitally connects more than 10,000 doctors around the world. The group of doctors includes Spain’s Dr. Felipe Calvo. “After the pandemic, medicine is no longer medicine,” said Calvo, co-chair of the radiation oncology department at the University of Navarra in Spain and scientific director of the university’s proton therapy unit. “Medicine is telemedicine, and we need to be really conscious of the best systems to connect with patients and colleagues,” Calvo said. Global networks and platforms that allow for the exchange of data and images are a cost-saving way for cancer patients to get second opinions, especially in underserved markets, he said.
“Cancer is a disease where every family wants a second or even third opinion,” Calvo says. “That information has to be obtained with great care. It’s not just a report. It’s not just an email. It’s images and analysis data. It’s a change that will last forever because it’s so useful.”
The market for digital health services has boomed since 2011, when Lewis founded MORE with her husband, Will Lewis, who was 28 years old at the time and is now the company’s general counsel. The global digital health market is expected to grow 21% annually from 2023 to 2033, from $241 billion to $1.6 trillion, according to Nova One Advisors.
MORE has raised more than $80 million to date from investors including Creadev, an investment firm linked to France’s Mulliez family, Longhill Investments and Unifortune Investment. Creadv picked MORE as a “great first addition” to its portfolio as a China-focused healthcare business, said managing partner Alexis Grolin. MORE is “already a bridge to expertise outside of China” and provides patients with “a good second opinion,” he said. “We’re always happy to invest in companies that are expanding access to healthcare.” The company currently employs more than 100 people.
Ted Bukowski, More’s chief revenue officer and now retired, joined the company because of Hope’s vision. “It was very compelling,” he says. “I loved the fact that this was her calling, and it wasn’t necessarily a business idea; she’d worked on attracting pediatric talent in Shanghai for one of our clients. She was a finance lawyer and she wanted to give people around the world equal access to cars. And so that little kid has become a vibrant 17-year-old girl.”
For Dr. Robert Warren, MORE’s chief medical consultant, focusing on China makes sense because the need is huge there. “The quality of care is excellent in the big academic medical centers in big cities,” Dr. Warren says. “But the number of patients who can get care at these hospitals is limited.”
MORE Health’s growth comes primarily from supporting physicians and patients, both through second opinions from MORE Health’s core of experts and the accelerating use of the MORE Health physician collaboration platform by academic medical centers such as Memorial Sloan Kettering and the University of Pennsylvania. MORE also fights cancer by expanding access to new treatments in clinical trials through its network. Dr. Bob Lee, a physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering, praised Lewis for being “visionary.”
A mergers expert, Hope seems to be on the lookout for future growth through acquisitions. “Yes, we are always looking for opportunities to add services,” Lewis said in an email. In the last year, MORE has added value-added services such as travel concierge, fertility surrogacy, patient acquisition and third-party matchmaking services. “MORE Health continues to look for opportunities when good resources and ‘access points’ present themselves.”
