Knownwell, a Needham-based healthcare company, announced the closing of its acquisition of Alfie Health, an online medical and obesity management clinic.
The only employee joining Knownwell's team from Alfie is founder and CEO Alexander Singh, who will come on as the new head of analytics.
Alfie’s AI features will increase the diagnostic speed of Knownwell’s existing online systems, according to Knownwell founder and CEO Brooke Boyarsky Pratt. The integration is expected to be relatively easy, he said.
“What's amazing about AI is, you can introduce these new pieces of data, and as long as [doctors are] keeping an eye on it, it has a good sense of what to do with it,” she said.
The deal comes six months after Knownwell raised a $20 million Series A venture capital round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Bio + Health, with participation from Flare Capital Partners.
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Knownwell declined to provide financial terms of the acquisition.
Knownwell, which currently has 33 employees, provides primary care with a specific focus on metabolic health, such as obesity. The company works on a hybrid model, allowing patients to make appointments in person and online. Later this year, it plans to add locations in Minnesota and Texas.
Online health company Alfie uses artificial intelligence to generate recommendations for weight management through its ObesityRxTM platform. The platform ingests patient information through internally developed surveys to determine a patient's metabolic profile; once the assessment is complete, the software can determine which medicine or combination of medicines will be best for an individual patient.
Knownwell can provide readings like body composition, waist circumference, and basic metabolic rate to help Alfie improve its diagnostic accuracy.
The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases estimated that 42% of adults and 19% of kids and adolescents in the U.S. have obesity. Yet, there are only 8,300 physicians who've been certified by the American Board of Obesity Medicine, which is less than 1% of the national physician workforce.
Whereas Alfie can create a dedicated plan for a patient, Knownwell physicians ultimately have the final say. Whether or not physicians implement Alfie’s suggestions will help improve those recommendations in the future.
"When doctors either accept some of the recommendations or decline, we're going to be logging that data," Boyarsky Pratt said. "Over time, we'll actually be able to show how those patients did where we didn't follow the recommendation."
In addition to acquiring Alfie, Knownwell is expanding its C-Suite for the first time since its founding in 2022. James Chaukos will join Knownwell as the new chief operating officer; John Frager will join as the new chief growth officer. Chaukos was the former co-founder, chief operating officer and chief financial officer at Cricket Health, while Frager joins from Carbon Health.
