Hearst Health Ventures has added a fifth company to its slowly growing digital health investments with Lightbeam Health Solutions, its first foray into population health. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Among Lightbeam’s services are an enterprise data warehouse that aggregates clinical and claims data from several different sources and a stratification tool, Searchlight, to flag up patients at risk of having a near-term, avoidable high cost event, according to its website.
Lightbeam follows other investments Hearst Health Ventures has made such as bundled payments software provider Aver and CareInSync, designed to help physicians coordinate care with patients. CareInSync was acquired by Zynx Health, a clinical decision support business that’s also part of Hearst Health’s network. Other investments include Welltok and Tonic Health.
Although population health technology is viewed as the infrastructure that will help hospitals shift from a fee-for-service to outcomes-based care model, healthcare facilities are still figuring out what works and doesn’t work. Still, the population health management market is projected to grow to $32 billion by 2020, with software accounting for one-third of it.
Photo: BigStock Photos
