NeuroFlow, a behavioral health tech company, is acquiring Alluceo, an Intermountain Health behavioral health platform.
Alluceo is a team-based care platform designed to integrate mental and behavioral health into primary care. Launched in 2018, it enables team communication, risk and complexity assessments and the delivery of connected care. Now, NeuroFlow will integrate the model into its analytics suite to enhance its risk identification capabilities for patients.
The move builds on the organizations’ commercial partnership, announced last summer, to bring behavioral health screening and analytics to primary care patients in Colorado. Intermountain’s goal is to improve outcomes by proactively identifying health needs, which it says can be difficult at scale. The Alluceo integration will initially inform NeuroFlow’s screening and assessments of Intermountain patients. The companies will continue testing and refining the model, with the goal of eventually making it available to customers nationally.
Developed over many years, Intermountain’s risk model approach combines behavioral and medical health assessment data with clinical information to offer a precise picture of patient health risks. The model uses data from multiple sources including patient self-reporting, disease registries, EHRs and claims.
“Intermountain has been involved in this kind of learning with big data for quite some time, but we really need an organization like NeuroFlow with their technological capabilities to really incorporate that [in a user-friendly way],” Tammer Attallah, behavioral health clinical program executive director at Intermountain, told Fierce Healthcare. In his role, Attallah is focused on improving clinical outcomes. Key to that strategy is getting the right diagnosis, directing patients to the right care pathway and, importantly, measuring whether they are improving.
Intermountain, an integrated health system, has the unique advantage of having access to data on the care delivery and payer sides, Attallah explained. It can look at data across both to better predict how likely a patient is to engage with a particular treatment. Understanding needs well enough to make those connections is no easy feat. That’s where a partner like NeuroFlow comes in.
Having too many screeners and assessments can be a burden to everyone involved, Attallah explained. “Healthcare is frankly way too cumbersome for both providers as well as patients,” he said. NeuroFlow integrates its analytics within Intermountain’s EHR. Having streamlined tools to track and predict risk lightens the burdens on providers facing disparate data points and the task of drawing insights from them.
"These sophisticated data models represent a significant step forward in our ability to help healthcare organizations more precisely and accurately identify and stratify behavioral health risks," Jeremy Kreyling, senior vice president of healthcare informatics at NeuroFlow, said in a press release. "Incorporating the clinical data from Intermountain's robust model into our platform will provide the context health systems and plans need to make better care decisions.”