Clarify Health is launching a new platform that harnesses behavioral science to nudge providers toward value-based care.
Called Clarify Advance, the new digital tool can influence decision-making by offering "timely and salient monetary incentives" for clinicians who select higher-value sites of service. The platform has boosted providers' use of high-value care by 15%.
The platform unites Clarify's abilities with those of Embedded Health, which it acquired earlier this year. Embedded, which was co-founded by healthcare expert Ezekiel Emanuel, M.D., is a behavior change platform. Emanuel told Fierce Healthcare that uniting with Clarify allowed it to bring its capabilities to scale in the form of Clarify Advance.
"This was a marriage that really optimized both of our strengths," Emanuel, who serves as a strategic adviser to Clarify, said. "They understood that this could be really heavily synergistic."
Clarify Advance offers payers a tool that can enable them to participate in an upside-only model, allowing them to be rewarded for behaviors that would put them at risk without the need to take on risk, according to the announcement. Incentives are micro-targeted, allowing for workable incentives that don't require contracts to be renegotiated.
The platform makes decision-making easier by offering access to a preferred provider network and tailored recommendations based on their own patterns, value opportunities, credentialing and distance. Doctors are also rewarded early and directly, without substantial interruptions to workflow and without hitting the practice's bottom line, the company said.
Jean Drouin, M.D., co-founder and CEO of Clarify, told Fierce Healthcare that building scale can be a significant challenge for new healthcare companies and that the Clarify team is excited by the potential Advance has to scale that hurdle.
"This one feels like it really has the potential to take off," he said. "The building blocks have finally come together."
For now, the company is rolling out Advance to a broader audience and is looking to build on its pilot results as it expands. Drouin expects further data to back up the efficacy of Advance soon.
Emanuel said that, ultimately, healthcare costs remain one of the largest challenges facing the industry, and platforms like Advance have the chance to truly make a dent in this far-reaching barrier.
"What's going to sink the American health system is cost," he said. "Everybody is groaning under the cost in the commercial space."