Atlanta-based digital health company Sharecare has acquired Visualize Health, a Tennessee-based company that improves healthcare outcomes by making it easier for payers and providers to close gaps in patient care. With the acquisition, Visualize Health becomes the 14th company to come into the Sharecare fold since Jeff Arnold founded the company in 2010. Financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed.
Visualize Health integrates with all major electronic medical records and practice management systems to quickly identify incomplete quality measures, gaps in care and deficiencies in documentation. Visualize Health also uses this information to provide recommendations for each patient, including preventative and prescribed care measures.
“Visualize Health’s capabilities complement our expertise in digital engagement and bring new innovation to our existing medical records management business,” Jen Martin Hall, Sharecare senior vice president of corporate communications, tells Hypepotamus. “With its cloud-based technology solution, it integrates streamlined, insights-based actions into the clinician’s workflow to eliminate care gaps in individual patient journeys.”
Visualize Health’s platform helps ensure the most comprehensive clinical care possible, while Sharecare’s tools, programs and resources help people to adhere to their treatment plans and meet individual health and wellness goals, says Hall. “Ultimately, these combined resources will support both providers and patients with technologies that enable them to achieve the best care outcomes possible.”
“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,” Sharecare founder, chairman and CEO Jeff Arnold 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.”
Sharecare also plans to partner with physicians using Visualize Health by offering the Sharecare app to their patients to help them better manage their health between office visits. At the same time, Sharecare will use insights from Visualize Health to enhance patient communication and engagement within the Sharecare app.
“We have spent the last five years at Visualize Health focused on not only improving the health of populations, reducing unsustainable healthcare spending and enhancing each individual’s healthcare experience, but also empowering providers with the tools they need to provide quality care,” Visualize Health CEO Dr. Kenneth Persaud said in a statement. “By joining Sharecare, we are poised to provide even more value to providers across the country, while exponentially expanding our reach and ability to innovate.”
Through previous acquisitions, such as Healthways, BioLucid, and Window Channel Network, Sharecare has integrated a range of capabilities and introduced new services to support providers’ workflow — including medical record management; quality, performance and risk-adjustment tools; and billing contract compliance. With Visualize Health, Sharecare wants to excite its customer base by innovating in the medical records management space.
“Visualize Health brings a new dimension to our existing capabilities for medical record management, which we also obtained through acquisition,” says Hall. “With Visualize Health, we enhance our ability to deliver insights-based actions that help providers follow through on care measures needed to ensure comprehensive, quality care.”
Visualize Health will remain based in Franklin and will operate from the Sharecare campus there, which the company acquired with its purchase of Healthways in 2016. In addition to the Visualize Health business, Sharecare’s Franklin office also serves as a regional hub for its Population Health unit, as well as its Health Data Services and Diabetes Solutions divisions — both of whom shared clients with Visualize Health.
“With Visualize Health already based in Franklin, it made fiduciary and strategic sense to have them join the larger Sharecare team already in place at our campus there, “ says Hall. “We are very excited about the continued deepening of our presence in the Nashville area, while we continue to grow as a company from our Atlanta headquarters.”
As healthcare shifts from a fee-based model to a model that ties physician reimbursements to patient outcomes, Sharecare finds itself uniquely positioned as an innovator able to give both physicians and patients what they need to thrive within this new system. “Being physician-accepted is a key factor in Sharecare’s continued growth and success,” said Arnold. “By combining forces with Visualize Health, our vision of health systems becoming Sharecare-enabled — and, ultimately, physicians ‘prescribing’ Sharecare to their patients — is within closer reach than ever before.”
