Farzad Mostashari’s Aledade, a company that helps create and operate physician-led ACOs (accountable care organizations), has raised another $10 million in funding, according to a report in the Washington Business Journal.
The latest funding came Durham, N.C.--based Mosaic Health Solutions and Seattle-based Echo Health Ventures LLC, and will aim to help independent practices in North Carolina, Dr. Mostashari, the co-founder and CEO of the Maryland-based Aledade, said in a recent statement.
The new funding comes as an addition to close out last year’s round, according to Aledade, including $23 million at the end of 2017 and another $23 million in October 2018. The company filed an amended Form D Jan. 18 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Washington Business Journal report noted. Aledade has now raised $136 million to date.
Aledade was named an up-and-coming health IT vendor in 2018 by Healthcare Informatics, and in that June piece, Mostashari—the former National Coordinator for Health IT—discussed the company’s growth. “Within a few short years we have grown to manage $2.5 billion of medical expenditure and we are going to grow that by $1 billion this year,” he said at the time. “If you think about it in terms of lives under risk contracts, we are going to be adding probably 100,000 Medicare lives in risk contracts.”
In that piece, Mostashari also noted why Aledade strongly believes in working with physicians rather than ACOs that are hospital-centric. “There are ACO models where if you keep people healthy and out of the hospital you get to keep some of the savings,” he said, “but it is really complicated to do that as part of a hospital system, where doing so will reduce your revenue directly. It is much simpler to do it with independent physicians. So that is our focus. I have always had a real soft spot for the smaller physician practices.”
Just recently, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina (Blue Cross NC), one of the state’s largest insurers, and five of the state’s major health systems in North Carolina announced that launch of a new value-based care program that encompasses hundreds of thousands of healthcare customers throughout the state.
Only a month prior to that, Blue Cross NC announced a partnership with Aledade, to launch a value-based care initiative to support primary care physicians across the state. Through the initiative, the two companies will support physician-led ACOs tailored specifically for primary care physicians and the communities they serve.
Through these ACO arrangements, Blue Cross NC will collaborate with Aledade to provide physicians with technology and data analytics tools to better manage patient care and costs. After joining these ACOs, practices gain a more comprehensive view of their patients’ total cost of care, gaps in quality of care, and experiences throughout the entire health care system, the companies said.
