New York City-based Unite Us announced this morning the acquisition of Carrot Health, a consumer data and predictive analytics platform offering engagement insights to payer and provider customers.
With its new purchase, the social determinants of health software platform said it will be better positioned to help healthcare organizations identify patients with unmet social needs and connect them to community resources across all 50 states.
Unite Us did not disclose the terms of the deal, which has already closed. A representative told Fierce Healthcare that Unite Us will be integrating the Carrot Health team into its existing company structure.
"We intend to maintain current operations and bring Carrot Health team members into that mix to help us continue to offer tools and resources to connect communities," a representative of Unite Us said. "We’re excited that the founders of Carrot Health will be supporting this transition, as their leadership and expertise are invaluable."
Unite Us has garnered plenty of attention within the industry. As of March, the unicorn had raised a total of $195 million to date from health and tech investors including Optum, Transformation Capital, Salesforce and Town Hall Ventures.
Since launching in 2013, the startup has built out a tool that helps organizations screen individuals for needs around housing, food security and other issues. Those flagged can be electronically referred to community programs and other social service programs within its network while also providing the referring organization with tools for managing their care plan, delivering communications and monitoring broad-scale outcomes.
Unite Us counts a number of well-known healthcare organizations among its clients including Kaiser Permanente, Humana, CommonSpirit and CVS Aetna.
Carrot Health, launched in 2014, comes to the table with a consumer data set featuring 500 predictive models on health behaviors and outcomes across 250 million individuals—the largest such data set in the country, according to the companies.
The Unite Us representative said the company will initially be offering both product suites as "separate but complementary tools particularly for our predictive capabilities as well as for our research and evaluation services."
The company is planning to build a fully integrated product under the Unite Us Insights product line within a 12-month time frame, they said. Existing customers won't face any immediate changes to the platform, they said, but "will see the benefits of an increased data integration soon."
“This combination is the realization of the vision we had from day one to capitalize on the understanding of the need and translating that into meaningful action to improve people’s lives,” Kurt Waltenbaugh, CEO of Carrot Health, said in a statement. “Health leaders no longer need to string together multiple vendors, and now have access to one turnkey solution as the scaled industry standard.”
Social determinants have received a renewed spotlight within the industry as the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing health inequities. This has led to social determinants investments from major players like UnitedHealthcare as well as new deals surrounding these platforms such as Chicago-based NowPow’s recent deal with Marshfield Clinic Health System and WellSky’s acquisition of Healthify.