Patient Engagement, Payers, Pharma, Startups

Clarify Health nabs $57M for care guidance tech and clinical trial expansion

San Francisco-based Clarify Health's new funding round led by private equity firm KKR will help the company build out data science expertise, buy data assets and enter the life sciences sector.

San Francisco-based Clarify Health has raised $57 million in a Series B financing round to expand development of its care guidance platform and enter the life sciences sector.

The funding is being led by private equity firm KKR through its Healthcare Strategic Growth Fund, which is focused on helping high-growth healthcare startups to scale. All told, Clarify Health, which was founded in 2015, raised roughly $63 million from investors.

This year, the company has picked up customers including the Texas Hospital Association, North Carolina Healthcare Association and the Orthopedic Centers of Colorado, according to a press release.

In an interview Monday, Jean Drouin, CEO and co-founder of Clarify Health, said he sees the company’s mission and data capabilities as feeding directly into the shift toward value-based care.

Prior to starting the company, Drouin spent more than a decade at consulting firm McKinsey working on operational improvements with large health systems and improving patient experience. It was that experience that highlighted the dearth of tools to help keep track and monitor the progress of patients, compared to consumer industries like financial services or e-commerce.

“It’s hard to get insights to clinicians about how to improve the delivery of care from a workflow optimization point of view,” Drouin said. “If you think about care as a journey, it’s not just about getting the right diagnosis, it’s coursing you through that journey in an effective and efficient way.”

Clarify provides predictive analytics models and engagement tools that allow clinicians to assign specific care plans and monitor patient behavior and risk in real-time, as well as analyze performance in value-based payment models.

The company pitches its solution as a way to use patients’ smart devices to increase transparency and decrease confusion in their healthcare journey. Lack of prior preparation or sufficient follow up creates waste, inefficiency and increased costs in the healthcare system.

“The care team is now able in real time to monitor actions taken by the individual patients and correct them if they go off course,” Todd Gottula, Clarify’s president and CTO, in a phone interview.

The healthcare predictive analytics space has gotten increasingly crowded in recent years with recent entrants like Clarify, Georgia-based Jvion, Texas’ VitreosHealth as well as more established players like UnitedHealth Group’s Optum.

Money raised this round will be use to hire more people in business development, sales and data science, as well as buy new data assets. Resources will also be directed to support Clarify’s expansion into the life sciences sector, particularly within the clinical trial space to better identify participants, structure trials, and automate the collection of real world data.

To date, the company’s business focus has largely been on the payer and provider space, helping health systems and physician groups better coordinate care and insurers more efficiently administer value-based programs.

Currently Clarify is at 60 employees and hopes to double or triple that number by the end of 2019. Along with the funding round, the company’s board is being expanded with the addition of KKR’s Ali Satvat and Johnny Kim.

Using the company’s technology a clinician can build out personalized care plans and alert both providers and patients when a follow-up action is necessary. Responses and usage is then fed back into the platform to improve the operating algorithm.

Earlier this year, the company was named a Qualified Entry by CMS, which gave them access to Medicare Part A and B claims data and the Part D prescription drug event data, adding to their already robust data set of more than 2 billion healthcare records on more than 100 million lives.

“The moonshot of this company is to create the world’s first real time care guidance platform, just like when you get in your car you type in where you want to go and you’re rerouted if there’s traffic,” Drouin said. “Why in healthcare are you not given an end-to-end care plan that can be dynamically updated?”

Photo: Getty Images, pixelliebe

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