Value-based analytics company Clarify Health is acquiring Embedded Healthcare to help cross what it refers to as the “last mile” of creating durable shifts in care models: behavior change.
Although the terms of the transaction were not disclosed, the acquisition comes on the heels of Clarify’s $115M Series C funding round in March 2021, which gave it plenty of capital to invest in companies like Embedded that help make insights from data platforms more actionable.
- Clarify’s cloud-based applications are built on the Clarify Atlas Platform, which maps over 300M patient journeys to illuminate areas that can be optimized to improve value-based performance. The platform links clinical performance to financial impact to boost payer-provider collaboration.
- Embedded was spun out of the UPenn’s Healthcare Transformation Institute in 2019 to apply behavioral economics principles to provider behavior change, such as selecting higher-value care sites for elective procedures. Embedded reports that targeted incentives delivered to the point of care have proven to change 10% of physicians’ decisions in under nine months.
- Combining the Clarify Atlas Platform with Embedded’s incentive framework should help with targeting behavioral nudges at the moments when they’ll be most effective, such as giving early bonuses as soon as positive performance is identified.
Five Pillars of Value Based Care
In an interesting interview with Modern Healthcare, Clarify CEO Dr. Jean Drouin laid out what the company views as the five key pillars for value-based care technology:
- Trusted baseline to assess performance of care delivery
- Digital contracts to help automate progress tracking
- Contracts well-designed to align incentives
- Clinicians are aware of incentives before they make a decision
- Predictive analytics to reduce the lag between action and incentive
Clarify’s core analytics platform centers around the first pillar, while its acquisition of Apervita’s value-based care digitization business in summer 2021 took care of the second one. Now, Embedded’s behavior change technology directly addresses the third pillar, and it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to say that clinician communication (pillar 4) and predictive analytics (pillar 5) are now Clarify’s top priorities as it looks to round out its product portfolio.
