Portland-based Insignia Health LLC was acquired by Phreesia (NYSE: PHR), a public company that makes software to manage patient intake and engagement, for $35 million in cash.
Insignia will be a subsidiary of Phreesia, which also has a headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Ottawa, Canada, and has 1,500 employees scattered around North America, said Chris Delaney, Insignia’s co-founder and CEO. Insignia’s 26 employees will shift over to Phreesia, he said.
Phreesia’s tools enable patients to “take on tasks, from self-reporting data like social determinants of health to making payments to signing consent forms,” CEO Chaim Indig said in a written statement. “We’ve long admired Insignia’s expertise in understanding and activating patients, and we believe this acquisition will help us deliver on our mission to create a better, more engaging health care experience.”
Delaney said the sale will take Insignia to a new level of growth.
“We were looking for opportunities to scale what we built over the years, and they really stood out, given their reach,” Delaney said.
Phreesia acquired Insignia from Delaney and co-founder Craig Swanson, University of Oregon and other holders of membership interest. Insignia holds an exclusive worldwide license for the Patient Activation Measure, or PAM, which was created by a research team from UO.
The PAM has been the subject of hundreds of peer-reviewed studies in leading journals. It measures a patient’s level of activation to self-manage their care and can lead to improved outcomes, higher patient satisfaction and lower costs. PAM is used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Great Britain’s National Health Service.
The philosophy behind it is that the more activated patients are, the more they will take charge of their own health, not skip their medications and avoid the ER. The tool has been shown to save health plans up to $4,000 per patient per year at a cost of just $5 per patient.
