Digital health engagement platform Sharecare announced this morning that it is acquiring Visualize Health, a population health and quality measurement platform that helps providers catch any gaps in patient care. 

Visualize Health’s program is focused on the value-based care model. Its platform helps to identify any quality measure gaps and deficiencies in documentation. When the program catches one of these gaps it will give the provider the action needed to address this. Currently the program can integrate with “all major” EHRs, according to the company. 

WHY IT MATTERS

Sharecare said that the acquisition will allow it to roll out new tools including medical record management and billing contract compliance, in turn growing its revenue streams. 

“As reimbursement models shift to value-based care, provider groups are facing new and growing pressures to deliver the best possible quality while also adapting to various performance measures, and reporting and documentation standards — all of which greatly  increases provider workload, particularly when they lack the technology to gain visibility in each patient’s full care plan,” Jeff Arnold, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Sharecare, said in a statement. “By acquiring Visualize Health, we are poised to help our partners effect meaningful change across their populations by improving care coordination, quality measurement and the relationship between clinicians and their patients.”

THE LARGER TREND

Cofounded by TV personality Dr. Mehmet Oz in 2010, Sharecare has a long history of buying fellow startups. In fact, the Visualize Health acquisition marks its fourteenth such deal. Its other purchases include virtual reality company BioLucid and Healthway’s population health business. 

Over the last decade the company has been actively seeking deals as well. In 2019 the state of Georgia tapped Sharecare and Walmart in a new initiative to improve the health of the employees on its State Health Benefit Plan (SHBP).

Just last month Sharecare’s platform was opened to every person in Arizona regardless of their insurance carrier or status, thanks to a partnership between the company and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona. State residents can download the platform to access a handful of personal health tracking tools, while those who are BCBSAZ members will be able to access additional services.

Last week tech-enabled health assessment company Q Bio emerged out of stealth mode and announced a $40 million in Series B funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round with participation from Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures. 

Following their investments, Andreessen Horowitz’s Vijay Pande and Khosla will be joining the board. 

WHAT THEY DO 

The company conducts a full workup of patients based on biomarkers it deems relevant to determine patients' risk factors. The patient’s data will go through a data analytics platform and surface the most relevant information surrounding health risks and undetected conditions.  

“In about an hour, we take blood, saliva, urine, vitals, and do a non-invasive whole body MRI. We also aggregate your entire medical history and do a genetic analysis,” Jeff Kaditz, CEO and cofounder of Q Bio, wrote to MobiHealthNews in an email. “The resulting product itself is like an analytics dashboard for your body. The bioinformatics platform behind the Q Dashboard is the first to be able to automatically surface the most relevant clinical chemical and anatomical changes in a person’s body broken down by the major subsystems, weighted by their genetic, medical history and lifestyle risks.”

The idea is that the system can learn each individual patient’s norms in order to pinpoint specific risks or previously undetected conditions, instead of comparing the patient to population data. 

At the moment the company is offering an annual membership, which comes at $3,495 for an individual. The membership includes the full body workup, access to the dashboard which analyzes the results and tracks changes in the user’s body, and a 30-minute dashboard review, during which the member’s doctor can join. 

Historically, Kaditz said that health information has been overwhelming collected on sick patients.

“I think we need to embrace the fact that human health is a long-tail distribution, so the best way to determine if someone has an issue or is developing an issue is to compare themselves to their previous selves and then account for [things] like lifestyle changes, trauma, symptoms to try and help explain those quantitative changes,” he wrote. 

There is no set frequency that a person needs to accessed, according to Kaditz. Instead that would depend on their health, history and risks. 

WHAT IT’S FOR 

The company plans on investing the new funds into improving its tech and making it more affordable for a broader population. 

“We have barely scratched the surface of what we have planned and what is possible, I’m very excited to be able to start demoing more of our technology,” Kaditz wrote. “This is going to get much faster and cheaper. I think then it will be really clear how this scales. This is a very complicated problem we are trying to solve for and what we currently offer is just a small piece of the overall puzzle.”

MARKET SNAPSHOT 

While the bulk of medical research focuses on so called “sick-care,” there are several companies and studies taking a look at what normal means. In 2017 Verily launched the Project Baseline Study with Stanford Medicine and Duke University School of Medicine with the goal of collecting broad phenotypic health data. The initiative’s aim is to collect data from 10,000 participants over the course of four years in order to gain insights about health and progression into disease. 

ON THE RECORD 

“Q Bio makes true preventive medicine possible today,” Pande, from Andreessen Horowitz, said in a statement. “By measuring everything from blood to imaging and more in a longitudinal way, patients can have personalized baselines and physicians the data and power to understand, interpret and utilize this data to personalize care.”