Health benefits navigation platform Accolade announced on Friday the filing of its S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, making it the next digital health company in line to join the public markets.

Accolade has set a $100 million maximum aggregate offering price to calculate its registration fee, but has not yet locked down the price and volume of its share offering.

The Seattle-based company will be listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market, and has tapped Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and BofA Securities as its lead book-running managers.

Accolade’s platform seeks to increase health plan and employer benefits engagement while helping members understand their care options. The company also has a population health offering that includes personalized clinical team support and insights generation.

“Our approach results in real, measurable, actuarially validated savings for our customers, starting with average savings of approximately 4% of total employer healthcare spend during a customer's first year and often increasing to more than 10% per year for our more tenured customers, amounts significantly higher than the fee we charge our employer customers,” the company wrote in its S-1.

WHY IT MATTERS

In addition to signaling Accolade’s upcoming offering, this filing also offers a look at the benefits navigation business’ recent performance.

The benefits navigation platform counted $94.8 million in revenue for the year ending in February 2019, representing 23% year-over-year growth. However, net losses during these same two fiscal years were $61.3 million (ending in 2018) and $56.5 million (ending in 2019).

For the nine-month period between March and November 2019, the company brought in $88.1 million. Net loss during that time was $49.2 million. As of the end of November, its accumulated deficit was $318.7 million.

Looking a bit more broadly, Accolade wrote in the S-1 that it foresees “the total addressable market for our current solutions to be approximately 24 billion.” A push into fully insured employers could add another $1.7 billion in opportunity, the company continued, while government-sponsored programs opens up another $10.7 billion.

THE LARGER TREND

After something of a digital health IPO lull 2019 saw Livongo, Phreesia and others make their bids to public investors. 2020 seems to be maintaining the momentum with offerings from One Medical and, now, Accolade.

Prior to this, the company had seen plenty of activity from private investors. Its roughly 13-year equity haul placed the company at a total raise of just under $240 million, with recent investments comprised of a $20 million injection from Humana in October, a $50 million Series F in early 2018 and a $70 million Series E in the summer of 2016.

In mid-January an error in the Walgreens app led to the leak of customers' secure messages. Specifically, the error allowed customers to see each other's information including personal data such as names and prescription drug information. 

The company announced the breach late last week, assuring customers that following the breach it disabled the message viewing feature in the app “to prevent further disclosure until a permanent correction was implemented.” 

“Our investigation determined that an internal application error allowed certain personal messages from Walgreens that are stored in a database to be viewable by other customers using the Walgreens mobile app,” Rina Shah, VP of pharmacy operations at Walgreens,  wrote in a letter to customers who were impacted. “Once we learned of the incident, Walgreens promptly took steps to temporarily disable message viewing to prevent further disclosure and then implemented a technical correction that resolved the issue.”

Individuals' financial information, bank information and social security numbers were not compromised. In the letter, Shah urged customers to monitor their prescription and medical records to make sure that an outside party has not made changes. 

WHY IT MATTERS 

App-based texting is now a mainstream way of connecting with healthcare providers and pharmacies. In the wake of this announcement security professionals have been vocal about steps appmakers must take to avoid this kind of situation in the future.

“While the language suggests that this was due to a system error rather than an attack against the application’s authorization, it highlights the importance of rigorously testing software,” Jack Mannino, CEO at nVisium, a Herndon, Virginia-based application security provider, said in a statement sent to MobiHealthNews. “Mobile applications and APIs have a lot of interfaces, where we need to understand how our systems behave when they fail, whether it’s through intentional attacks or inadvertent errors with unintended consequences.”

However, other stakeholders have a different take — praising the retail pharmacy’s response. 

"I commend Walgreens for detecting the vulnerability in their mobile app and closing the gap in relative short order,” Fausto Oliveira, principal security architect at Acceptto, wrote in a statement to MobiHealthNews. “It appears that they have invested well in detective capabilities. Incidents will happen and how a company detects and responds to an incident along with the level of transparency that is used can go a long way in repairing lost customer trust."

THE LARGER TREND 

HIPAA permits “readily producible” private health information to be transferred to a patient through their preferred medium, as long as the provider can do so in a way that wouldn’t present an “unacceptable level of security risk” to personal health information.

However, there are still a lot of questions about ensuring the safety of that information. In 2018 Xcertia, a standards and guidelines body for mobile apps, announced the draft release of its updated Privacy and Security Guidelines, which provide practical and descriptive advice for health app designers.