This week, health data platform Arcadia made an acquisition that CEO Michael Meucci thinks will give the Boston-based company the data it needs to offer a more comprehensive suite of value-based care technology for its customers.
It bought Arlington, Virginia-based CareJourney, a health analytics firm designed to facilitate participation in value-based care contracts.
The acquisition comes six months after Arcadia sold its value-based care service division to Guidehealth. Through the two deals, Arcadia is sharpening its focus on providing the right data and technology to enable value-based care, instead of operating in both the technology and services sides of value-based care enablement, Meucci declared.
The new merger combines Arcadia’s data platform, analytics and workflow tools with CareJourney’s trove of data on cost, quality and benchmarks. CareJourney’s dataset is derived from claims data across Medicare, Medicaid, Medicare Advantage and commercial plans, representing more than 300 million beneficiaries and over 2 million providers nationwide.
“To oversimplify, [Arcadia] has a great data platform and a lot of good data engineers. When customers buy Arcadia, they’re buying us to take their data and put it into our platform. CareJourney has a bunch of really good data scientists — they don’t do much with customer-specific data, but they have access to CMS’ innovation data space, where they create really interesting insights, about things like individual geographies and markets or individual provider performance,” Meucci explained.
By blending these two companies, Arcadia will be able to offer a better suite of products around “the unified vision of using data to transform the way we deliver care,” he added.
He also said that the merger will help Arcadia differentiate itself from competitors like Datavant, Innovaccer and Health Catalyst.
“Analytics is typically where [Arcadia] is the strongest. Our analytics models are some of the best in the market, and CareJourney further enhances that. So we’re looking to build them more and more to strengthen that differentiation for customers,” Meucci remarked.
As a result of the acquisition, Arcadia now owns all of CareJourney’s products and customers, and the products have been renamed “CareJourney by Arcadia,” he explained. In the future, he said it is likely the two entities will combine their products, integrating together under one brand.
Currently, the two entities share about a dozen overlapping customers, including Providence and Rush University System for Health, Meucci added.
The deal also resulted in some leadership changes, with the most notable being that Aneesh Chopra — president and co-founder of CareJourney, who also served federal government’s first-ever chief technology officer — is now Arcadia’s chief strategy officer.
Photo: Natee Meepian, Getty Images
