Innovaccer Consumer Health & CRM GM Gary Druckenmiller, Jr.

Patient Engagement

Innovaccer Acquires Marketing and CRM Platform Cured

Innovaccer shook things up last week by making its first-ever acquisition, a move that positions healthcare marketing and CRM platform Cured as a cornerstone of its patient experience roadmap.

Although Cured’s platform might initially seem like an odd fit for Innovaccer’s portfolio of data analytics and population health solutions, the acquisition quickly starts to make sense in the context of Innovaccer’s three-pronged forward strategy:

• Value – transitioning from fee-for-service to value-based care (the Health Cloud and Data Activation Platform)
• Productivity – shifting from burnout to AI-driven productivity (the recently debuted Sara AI suite)
• Experience – moving from encounter-based care to experience-driven care (where Cured comes in)

Cured leverages data and AI to help healthcare organizations boost their patient experience campaigns, not unlike the data-first approach that Innovaccer takes to the provider space.

• Cured’s marketing and CRM platform engages patients throughout their care journey to build relationships, improve outcomes, and generate revenue – three areas where billing-focused EHR systems and bolt-on CRM platforms notoriously fall short.

• It maintains a library of 80+ healthcare-specific engagement journeys and propensity models, which are poised to gain plenty more horsepower when combined with Innovaccer’s unified patient data platform and contact center.

As a cherry on top, Cured is adding over 20 health system and digital health clients – including Sutter Health, UCHealth, and VCU Health – to Innovaccer’s current roster of ~95 customers.

• Cured’s three co-founders will also assume leadership roles within Innovaccer to help drive a CRM strategy that now revolves around delivering a Healthcare Experience Platform (HXP) as much as a customer relationship management solution.

• While time will tell how different an HXP looks from a CRM, marrying Innovaccer’s 360 degree view of clinical, claims, and patient behavior data with Cured’s marketing and engagement prowess sounds like a solid way to unlock some powerful capabilities.

The Takeaway

Healthcare organizations have long struggled with either CRMs layered on top of EHRs built for other purposes, or industry-agnostic CRMs that need to be customized to fit their specific needs. By joining forces with Cured, Innovaccer is looking to combine its data intelligence and contact center capabilities with a marketing and engagement force that’s strong enough to overcome that struggle through a new type of Health Experience Platform.

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The Wire

• Nuance DAX Copilot for Epic: Nuance and Epic announced the general availability of DAX Copilot for Epic, which fully integrates the ambient documentation solution into Epic’s EHR. DAX Copilot for Epic drafts clinical notes directly in Haiku – Epic’s mobile app – for immediate physician review, marking the first integration of its kind to stem from the larger AI partnership between Microsoft and Epic. Although DAX Copilot is already used by thousands of providers, the Epic partnership will greatly expand its reach, starting with the 150+ provider orgs already lined up to deploy the new integration.

• CMS Finalizes Prior Auth Rule: CMS finalized its new rule to streamline the prior authorization process and improve the electronic exchange of health information. Starting mostly in 2026, certain Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and Qualified Health Plans will be required to include a specific reason when denying requests, publicly report their prior auth metrics, and send decisions within 72 hours for urgent requests and 7 days for standard requests. Impacted payors will also be required to implement new APIs to support electronic prior authorization and data exchange.

• “Striking” Impact of Hospital Diagnostic Errors: A study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that nearly a quarter of hospitalized patients who died or were transferred to the ICU experienced a diagnostic error. After examining data from 2,428 patients across 29 academic medical centers, researchers identified 550 who had a diagnostic error (23%), with 436 experiencing harm as a result (18%). The underlying problems with the greatest association to diagnostic errors (and probably good starting points for safety improvement efforts), were errors in testing and clinical assessment.

• 98point6 Acquires Bright.md Assets: 98point6 is acquiring asynchronous telehealth startup Bright.md’s remaining 16 customers and core business development teams just a few months after its technology was scooped up by Evernorth. The acquisition follows 98point6’s recent pivot away from care delivery to focus on licensing its virtual care software to providers, and Bright.md will help expand that software menu to asynchronous care while helping lean in on commercialization.

• Biofourmis Expands to In-Home Care: Biofourmis expanded its connect care platform to enable its users to order, schedule, and track a wide range of in-home services such as nursing, phlebotomy, and imaging. The new in-home capabilities are meant to help providers and biopharma quickly scale care-at-home and digital clinical trial programs through both Biofourmis’ own solutions as well as its partner ecosystem, which includes national home health company BrightStar Care.

• Family Physicians See Fewer ED Visits: A study in JAMA Network Open suggests that having a family physician that knows you well is a key driver of better outcomes. Among 5.2M Ontario residents, patients who had a virtual visit with an outside physician were 66% more likely to visit the ED within 7 days than those who had a virtual visit with their own physician. Patients who had a virtual visit with an outside physician had a 3.3% chance of ending up in the ED within a week (vs. 2% who saw a family physician), corresponding to one additional trip to the ED for every 77 visits.

• Forta Raises $55M: Forta Health raised $55M in Series A funding to help train parents of children with autism to be caregivers and expand its platform to other chronic conditions. Forta’s platform helps family caregivers navigate bureaucratic healthcare processes and uses AI to determine which care pathways might be worth pursuing. While the initial focus is on autism and improving access to parent-led ABA therapy, Forta also sees the potential to scale its platform to conditions such as Alzheimer’s.

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• Closing the Women’s Health Gap: Women are expected to spend 25% more of their lives in worse health than men – an average of nine years – according to a joint report from the World Economic Forum and McKinsey. The report estimates that about 5% of the women’s health gap relates to reproductive health, while other major contributors include clinical trials that focus disproportionately on men and the fact that women have a harder time accessing treatment. That gender gap comes with a heavy cost, which if closed could increase global GDP by $1 trillion by 2040.

• BrightSpring Eyes March IPO: Community-based health services provider BrightSpring Health is looking to raise up to $1.4B in an upcoming IPO, according to a recent filing reported by Bloomberg. BrightSpring was originally looking to go public in late 2022 but abandoned that plan to outwait the market rut. The IPO should be a great bellwether for investor appetite if it takes place as planned this March, since BrightSpring owns a wide range of home health and hospice businesses that manage complex populations.

• Will AI Replace Pathologists? A bombshell opinion piece titled “AI’s Threat to the Medical Profession” was just dropped in JAMA by a trio of pathologists making the case that AI could soon replace human pathologists for interpreting tissue specimens. They see AI reducing pathology work to an “input/output” function in which knowledge of disease development is forgotten and lost, although they also see the Biden Administration’s recent AI executive order as a potential way for physicians to regain control.

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