Mayo Clinic Chief Clinical Officer of Advanced Care at Home Dr. Michael Maniaci

Value-Based Care

NeuroFlow Acquires Quartet as Behavioral Health Consolidation Heats Up

It turns out that Quartet offloading its psychiatry business last week was only half of the story, and NeuroFlow will be writing the next chapter after acquiring the rest of the value-based behavioral care enabler.

Quartet works with health plans, health systems, and community centers to connect patients with behavioral care needs directly to high-quality providers, including its own medical group.

• Just last week, it sent 165 of those providers to Iris Telehealth through the acquisition of its innovaTel psychiatry division, which specializes in difficult to manage conditions.

• It wasn’t exactly clear why Quartet felt it was the right time for an exit, or why it split up the business, but it’s apparently been looking for mission-aligned partners to help expand its impact.

NeuroFlow checks all the boxes. The NeuroFlow platform centers around integrating behavioral health into physical health workflows, eliminating a major blindspot for physicians looking to improve overall outcomes – not to mention quality and risk management programs.

• Since launching in 2016, NeuroFlow’s raised $58M of total funding (versus a hefty $266M for Quartet), and it hasn’t shied away from adding new capabilities through M&A.

• It picked up measurement-based care company Owl in 2024, and it’s fresh off the acquisition of Intermountain’s behavioral health risk analytics model earlier this month.

It’s hard for healthcare organizations to manage the quality, outcomes, and cost of their patients’ care without managing behavioral health. NeuroFlow makes that happen at scale.

• It handles everything from the identification, triage, and measurement of that care, while also equipping patients with self-guided programs that allow providers to track their progress and update their risk levels.

• Quartet’s expansive provider network and referral management expertise will bolster NeuroFlow’s offerings for its existing customers, and bring along new ones like PA-based Independence Blue Cross, which was specifically called out in the release.

The Takeaway

There’s unfortunately no shortage of demand for behavioral health services, and many expect a new wave of consolidation to be driven by companies pooling resources to build platforms that can keep up. That wave could already be here, with NeuroFlow’s acquisition of Quartet adding to back-to-back busy weeks in the segment.

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The Wire

• Suki and Zoom Deepen Partnership: Suki announced that it landed an undisclosed investment from Zoom after bringing its ambient AI documentation capabilities to the telehealth platform late last year. The latest funding builds on Suki’s $70M Series D raise that we detailed in October, which arrived on the heels of signing over a dozen new health systems over the prior few months.

• Healthcare Bankruptcies Decline: New data from Gibbins Advisors showed that healthcare bankruptcies declined in 2024, but still hit their second-highest level in the past six years. The analysis of Chapter 11 bankruptcies showed that filings decreased by 28% from the peak in 2023, with Senior Care and Pharmaceutical subsectors accounting for nearly half of the total. There were five Hospital sector filings, down from 12 in 2023, although that included the largest bankruptcy in the last 30 years with Steward’s 31-hospitals.

• Hone Series A: Direct-to-consumer telehealth company Hone Health, best known for its testosterone replacement therapy services, closed $33M in Series A funding to drive its expansion into “proactive & preventative longevity care.” Hone’s longevity-focused approach includes lab testing and medication for $129/month, and it announced that it already used its new funding to acquire ivee to bring more of its offerings directly into patient homes.

• Hospital-at-Home Needs An Uber: Mayo Clinic’s hospital-at-home program has expanded to 35 patients per day over the last year, but its chief clinical officer Dr. Michael Maniaci told Becker’s that it needs an Uber app to scale further. HaH programs require “tubing coming from someplace, prescription medication coming from another place, the nurse coming from one place… and they all have to show up at the same time.” That’s all currently handled separately, and Dr. Maniaci says the market needs “the administration of the ecosystem” with a unified app.

• ACA Plan Denials: ACA marketplace plans denied an average of 1 in 5 claims during 2023, and KFF’s analysis showed that multiple plans denied far more than that. Of the 425M claims marketplace plans received in 2023, 92% were for in-network services (19% were denied), but plans denied 37% of the remaining claims that were out-of-network (for a 20% overall denial rate). BCBS of Alabama had the highest denial rate at 35%.

• HealthBus Acquires BetterHealthcare: HealthBus is rounding out its MSK offerings through the acquisition of BetterHealthcare, which specializes in improving access to physical therapy and rehabilitation services through its interoperable scheduling platform. Integrating the BetterAccess platform will reportedly help HealthBus scale its appointment booking and provider matching capabilities to more diverse health systems, small practices, and large enterprises.

• Bicycle Raises $16.5M: Virtual opioid addiction clinic Bicycle Health raised $16.5M in unlabeled funding after announcing that it reached positive operating margins in Q4 of last year. Bicycle’s virtual OUD treatment platform has already been used by 40k patients across 49 states, and it now plans to grow its reach even further by partnering with more payors and health systems, hiring more addiction medicine specialists, and expanding its offerings for high-risk populations like adults in custody.

• Penn IT Investment Breakdown: The Penn Medicine Information Services Benefits Realization Report detailed the impact of the academic system’s IT investments during 2022 and 2023. A total of 48 completed projects generated $163M in benefits from initiatives that included consolidating reporting platforms and establishing dual data centers. The integration of more data to improve clinical workflows was a major trend throughout, and Penn Medicine’s LiveAware platform was one of the biggest stars of the report.

• KODE Expansion: KODE rounded out this week’s investment-heavy news cycle with $27M in Series B funding to “transform management of evolving staffing needs” through its newly launched AI KODE Management Platform. The funding will enable KODE to expand its network of 5,500+ certified coding professionals, dubbed “Koders,” which leverage its AI platform to help health systems accelerate collections and reduce staffing costs.

• ChatGPT Eases Radiology Reporting: Two new studies show how ChatGPT can assist radiologists in preparing reports. In a paper in Radiology, researchers used GPT-4 to detect errors in 10.3k head CT reports, finding the generative AI algorithm had 84% sensitivity for interpretive errors and 89% for factual mistakes. In a separate paper in AJR, researchers used GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to automatically extract recommendations for additional imaging from text reports, finding good accuracy for modality, body part, and rationale (although GPT-4 had better performance).

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The Resource Wire

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The Industry Wire

1. HCA 2024 breakdown and 2025 outlook.
2. Cleveland Clinic rejects RFK Jr.’s AI nurse claim.
3. What’s driving PA’s hospital consolidation wave?
4. FDA Modernization Act 3.0 looks to reduce animal testing.
5. Illinois hospital investigated after patient found on roof dies.
6. What it’s like to make yourself sick on purpose for a clinical trial.
7. Georgia HCP arrested for twerking over a disabled patient.
8. Public trust in health agencies and vaccines decline.
9. Providence restructures its executive team – again.
10. Trinity Healthcare gives docs go-private ultimatum.