Dive Brief:
- Royal Philips has announced the signing of a deal for its acquisition of Wellcentive, a major provider of population health management software solutions.
- The deal places Wellcentive and its employees within Philips' Population Health Management business group, slated to be headed by Wellcentive CEO Tom Zajac.
- Financial details for the transaction were not disclosed.
Dive Insight:
The move comes as financial incentives toward value-based care, along with strengthened health IT, have pushed population health to the forefront. Indeed, a late 2015 report by the Huron Consulting Group named population health management "the future of healthcare delivery."
Another report by PwC’s Health Research Institute in May added organizations that scale up their population health efforts and show evidence that it's working are more likely to be rewarded in risk-based deals with insurers.
Philips stated that it was already placed to provide solutions regarding enterprise telehealth, home monitoring, personal emergency response systems (PERS) and personal health services, and that Wellcentive complements its portfolio by bringing cloud-based IT solutions to import, aggregate and analyze data across health systems in order to help providers deliver coordinated care that will satisfy the latest quality requirements and payment models.
“With this strategic acquisition, we will strengthen our population health management business and its leadership, as health systems gradually shift from volume to value-based care, and provide more preventative and chronic care services outside of the hospital,” Jeroen Tas, Philips’ CEO Connected Care & Health Informatics, said in a prepared statement. "Wellcentive’s solutions will provide our customers with the ability to collect data from large populations, detect patterns, assess risks and then deploy care programs tailored to the needs of specific groups.”