UnitedHealth's Optum has acquired Vivify Health to tackle hospital readmission rates

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UnitedHealth subsidiary Optum acquired Texas-based remote patient monitoring (RPM) startup Vivify Health for an undisclosed amount, according to CNBC.

Vivify equips payers and providers with a comprehensive RPM platform, complete with a suite of connected medical devices and mobile health apps. The company reports that its platform has contributed to 76% fewer patient readmissions at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), and patients using Vivify report a 97% satisfaction rate.

Through this acquisition, Optum has an opportunity to significantly reduce costs from hospital readmission rates and better manage care for patients with chronic diseases. Hospital readmissions are a major, avoidable expense in healthcare: As many as 35% of patients who've had congestive heart failure end up back in the hospital within 30 days, leading to higher claims costs for payers, for example.

But RPM systems are capable of intervening by reminding patients to keep up with their post-treatment care routines and keeping doctors abreast of patients' progress via smart device-generated data, like Vivify's blood pressure cuffs or consumer wearables such as Fitbit. Hence, RPM enables doctors to spot when a patient's health is in decline earlier so that less cost-intensive measures can be taken - such as scheduling an outpatient visit from a nurse practitioner.

This form of preventative care can be especially effective at cutting costs for chronic disease patients, as they account for 90% of US healthcare spend: For instance, if doctors can spot when a diabetes patient is experiencing unhealthy blood glucose levels, it's possible to intervene before more serious health issues develop. And Vivify isn't the only startup working in this space: Diabetes management company One Drop uses data from nearly 2 million users to deliver 8-hour glucose predictions and personalized health suggestions, which have been shown to decrease users' average blood glucose levels in as little as one month's time.

Optum can leverage its tech expertise to circumvent a serious concern that providers have with RPM: how to analyze the mountains of patient-generated health data. Following initial research into the effectiveness of Apple's electrocardiogram (EKG) feature for Apple Watch, the response from providers was mixed: On the one hand, hundreds of thousands of people could engage more personally with their own health, but on the other hand is the potential for providers to be flooded with benign EKG data from healthy people.

But Optum is well-versed in data aggregation and analysis - the company has even gone so far as to take over all nonclinical operations at San Francisco-based health system John Muir Health, which demonstrates the company's willingness to be an intermediary between providers and big data.

So, it makes much more sense for Optum to manage information generated from RPM initiatives than it would for an individual health system to do so. And in addition to the cost savings that could be generated from its Vivify acquisition, Optum could also leverage the data it collects from users to fuel additional insights on chronic disease management for use across UnitedHealth.

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