The biggest name in digital MSK just built a curated in-person network on top of its virtual platform, and that's a strategic signal worth reading carefully.
Hinge Health built its name, and its public listing, on virtual-first musculoskeletal care. Its next major move was to invest in physical infrastructure, which tells you something important about where the category is actually heading.
A virtual-first company builds a physical network
Hinge Health, whose 2025 stock market debut was described as helping set the stage for a wider digital health IPO revival, launched HingeSelect, a curated national network of imaging centres and in-person physical therapy providers layered on top of its virtual MSK platform.
The company reports nearly 15,000 providers across 5,000 care sites signed or in contracting, with plans to extend in-person coverage to more than 100 major metros by 2026. That build-out is happening in a category with real competitive density: Sword Health and Omada Health, the first digital MSK provider to earn URAC telehealth accreditation, both compete for the same employer and health plan contracts, while smaller, more narrowly funded players like Vori Health ($53M Series B, founded by surgeons from Yale and Mayo Clinic) and IncludeHealth ($11M, partnered with Yale New Haven Health) occupy adjacent niches within the same broader MSK category.
MSK conditions remain a top-two spend category for most employers, with orthopedic appointment wait times averaging 20 days, the exact bottleneck a hybrid network is built to shorten.
Virtual-first and virtual-only are different strategies
The company that built its name on pure virtual MSK care is now investing meaningfully in physical infrastructure, a signal that "virtual-first" and "virtual-only" are not the same growth strategy, even though they're frequently pitched as interchangeable.
Hinge appears to be treating virtual care as the entry point into a relationship it then extends into physical care, rather than as a complete substitute for it, a materially different long-term positioning than competitors still selling a purely virtual product.
The balance sheet gap this creates
Watch whether smaller MSK-only startups without Hinge's balance sheet, Vori Health and IncludeHealth among them, can compete once hybrid networks become the category standard rather than a differentiator.
Building a curated national network of physical providers is a materially different capital commitment than building a virtual platform alone, and that gap could squeeze out startups that raised on a purely virtual thesis before this shift became clear.
