Health IT

Rebranded healthcare AI company Prognos goes after payer market

As part of the relaunch, New York-based Prognos is making an aggressive push into the payer market to augment its predictive analytics work with life sciences and diagnostics clients.

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A healthcare analytics startup known for the last six years as Medivo has rebranded itself as an artificial intelligence company called Prognos. As part of the relaunch, New York-based Prognos is making an aggressive push into the payer market to augment its predictive analytics work with life sciences and diagnostics clients.

“We see a lot of opportunity for growth on the payer side,” Cofounder and CEO Sundeep Bhan said. As health plans move deeper into risk management and value-based payment, they will need access to the pharma data and test results Prognos has stockpiled over the years, according to Bhan.

Prognos has compiled 5 billion records on 100 million patients in 35 disease registries, the CEO said.

“Seventy to 80 percent of [medical] decisions are made based on test results, but test results are not used enough in population health,” Bhan said. Population health mostly relies on claims and prescription records, which is, by definition, retrospective. Predictive analytics changes that paradigm.

“If we can help patients get treated earlier, that can have a big impact on outcomes,” Bhan said.

Prognos actually launched its payer vertical last year and, as Medivo, has been working with laboratory, pharma and medical device companies since the early part of this decade. “We haven’t really promoted the company much,” Bhan said. That changed last week with the rebranding.

Cigna is among the company’s payer customers.

“Prognos’ analytics help us identify customers with chronic conditions such as diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and hepatitis C, so that we can engage them early and support them with health management options,” Brian Evanko, president of Cigna’s Individual and Family Plans segment, said in a Prognos press release. “This helps drive better health outcomes for our customers, resulting in improved health care quality and a better customer experience.”

Bhan said that there are three elements to success in healthcare AI.

“You need access to computational power,” he said. “It’s more and more becoming a commodity,” he said.

The second part is a collection of learning algorithms, which is at the heart of Prognos’ technology. The relaunched vendor has more than 500 such algorithms.

“And then you need large enough data sets to train these algorithms,” Bhan said. The collection of 5 billion records is pretty substantial.

Venture-backed Prognos has raised about $23 million over its history, according to Bhan. He said the company is profitable in life sciences and will reach break-even overall by the end of 2017.

Photo: Flickr user r2hox

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