Dive Brief:
- Outcome Health raised $500 million in venture financing during its "first-ever" round of funding, bringing the Chicago digital startup’s valuation to $5 billion. It makes touch screens and tablets for doctors' waiting rooms, offices and treatment centers to enhance patient education.
- Investors include Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, Alphabet’s growth equity investment fund CapitalG, Leerink Transformation Partners and Pritzker Group Venture Capital, among others.
- Outcome said the investment’s size and the quality of investors position the company for growth across a number of opportunities, including clinical trials, payers, pharmacies and international markets.
Dive Insight:
The large investment in Outcome highlights the continued interest in using patient-centric solutions to improve how patients engage with their providers. The company believes a better patient-provider relationship can lead to improved health outcomes. It "serves actionable health intelligence at the moment of care to improve patient outcome" through partnerships with providers to "achieve the transition toward value-based care."
Outcome, founded in 2006, plans to increase the number of its partnerships from 20% (or 231,000) of U.S. providers to 70% by 2020 with its new financing. Its current number of partnerships impacts 500 million patient visits annually, according to the announcement.
Clinicians with access to actionable insights on patients can customize care plans accordingly. More and more clinicians are using Big Data for these purposes during the shift away from the fee-for-service model.
Patient-centric technology is also being used outside of providers' walls for population health management.
Dr. Rasu Shrestha, UPMC chief innovation officer and executive vice president of UPMC Enterprises, recently spoke to Healthcare Dive about the several reasons why hospitals are leveraging data for risk stratifying patient populations. A "person-centered approach to care is really critical because we believe that’s the best way to drive costs down and improve the quality overall of care,” Shrestha said.
Though the adoption of technology solutions for patient engagement and population health management remains relatively low, it is expected to intensify significantly over the next few years as the federal government continues to tie clinicians' payments to the quality of care provided.