One of Middle Tennessee’s newest health care companies, launched earlier this year by Nashville-based Rubicon Founders, is expanding its Music City footprint.
Evergreen Nephrology has formed a partnership with Nephrology Associates, Nashville’s largest kidney care practice, in a deal aimed at increasing value-based care, Rubicon Founders CEO Adam Boehler said.
Launched in August, Evergreen partners with nephrologists to provide the financial backing to take on increased cost of care risks associated with value-based care, which offers financial incentives to physicians, health systems and other providers based on quality of care. Evergreen and Nephrology Associates will share that risk, Boehler said.
Evergreen also provides resources to nephrologists to invest in expanded home-based dialysis and a tech platform to manage value-based care.
Boehler, who is also Evergreen’s chairman, said about 10% of U.S. patients receive dialysis in the home, compared to countries like Guatemala where 50% receive kidney care in the home. He said Evergreen’s goal is to have 40% to 50% of its patients recieving in-home dialysis.
“Today, the United States health care system pays for services, not for outcomes. Our goal is, ‘How do we change the system to one that pays for outcomes?' ” Boehler said. “We believe that if we empower the physicians that take care of these kidney patients, if we can invest home-based programs, if we can invest in clinical resources we can drive much better outcomes. That’s the goal of Evergreen, creating a new paradigm for kidney patients.”
Boehler gained a birds-eye view of the nation’s health care system when he joined the Trump administration in 2019 to lead U.S. health care innovation as senior advisor to the secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and director of the innovation center at CMS. He was then tapped by President Trump and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be the first CEO of U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, the federal government's $60 billion international investment arm.
Prior to going the Trump White House, Boehler founded and was CEO of Landmark Health, which provides care to chronically ill patients in their homes.
He launched health care investment firm Rubicon Partners, which is backed by billion-dollar investment firms Oak HC/Ft and Welsh, Carson, Anderson and Stowe, in April.
Nephrology Associates President Dr. Ashish Soni said his firm was attracted to the Evergreen partnership because it will allow physicians to focus on the “disease process” while enabling more patients to receive care in the home. Nephrology Associates has 33 physicians and covers nearly every facility and dialysis center in Middle Tennessee, outside of Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
“We have always been on the cutting edge of delivering kidney care to the Middle Tennessee area,” Soni said. “Our practice has gone through many revisions in the sense of looking to see what ways we can best deliver the care our patients need. What we found with Evergreen technology was an excellent opportunity to forgo any financial concerns that a practice may have to deal with … and really be focused on quality, metrics that deliver the high-level of quality our patients need and empower our clinical providers so that they’re enabled to look at nothing but outcomes.”
Evergreen employs about 40 people inside its Metro Center office. Boehler declined to say how many partnerships Evergreen has formed with nephrology practices since its founding. He said the company is less concerned with the number of partnerships it forms than finding the right practices to partner with.
“At the end of the day, Evergreen is about partnerships with phenomenal [nephrology] groups and about delivering unbelievable patient care,” Boehler said. “If we’re successful in that, it will be because we have transformed kidney care — and that’s our goal.”
