Myia Health and Mercy Virtual: Transforming Patient Care
By Simon MacGibbon, CEO and Co-Founder, Myia Health
We’re pleased to announce our groundbreaking partnership with Mercy Virtual, widely recognized as the world’s leading “hospital without beds.” With this partnership, Mercy and Myia will seek to finally unlock AI’s unmet potential in healthcare: preventative care and longitudinal population management. To enable this partnership, Mercy has led a $10 Million equity investment in Myia, alongside Myia’s existing investors including Zetta Venture Partners, BootstrapLabs, and The Boston Consulting Group.
The Ultimate Partner
Mercy has long been an ideal partner for Myia. As my Co-Founders and I started the company, David Katz’s profile of Mercy Virtual in AARP Magazine highly influenced our thinking. With an emerging machine intelligence platform, strong analytical research base, and hypothesis that predictive intelligence can enable better and more efficient patient management, we believed that our solution would be a great compliment to Mercy’s exemplary clinical resources, patient population, and passionate leadership team committed to realizing the promise of value-based care. This was only reinforced when we met the entire Mercy team led by Dr. Gavin Helton, President of Clinical Integration.
Since starting their virtual care center in 2015, Mercy’s focus on a home-based care model for patients has reduced readmissions and ER visits by more than 50%. What’s even more remarkable is that Mercy has achieved these results with traditional telemedicine delivery models and staffing.
With over half the U.S. population projected to have one or more chronic conditions by 2030, our partnership with Mercy Virtual seeks to bring to fruition the key benefits of population management at-scale.
Transforming Care Beyond the Clinical Setting
The current health care system is not set up to deliver the best possible care for patients beyond the hospital. This, coupled with inevitable forces necessitating a fundamental change in healthcare like increases in care costs, a retiring population who prefer to age in place, and clinician shortages necessitates effective and cost-efficient population management. By combining Myia’s focus on real world data collection and clinician workflow tools with Mercy’s clinical resources and virtual prowess, we will bring care directly to patients and meet them where they are.
Applying AI to Power Value Based Care
Through the integration of Myia’s real-world data collection and machine learning capabilities with Mercy’s proven clinical care model, the partnership seeks to improve patient outcomes by personalizing patient care. Longitudinally monitoring patients, orchestrating preventative care protocols, and staging rescue interventions in advance of symptoms, will enable Mercy to support patients across a broad risk spectrum and set a blueprint for value-based care. Moreover, the platform will give time back to clinicians, allowing them to do what they do best and to operate at the top of their license. This is the ultimate opportunity to use technology that works for clinicians — not against them.
Scaling to “Rising Risk” Patients
Ultimately, the most potential for improving long-term outcomes lies in the preventative management of patients who are at-risk of developing chronic conditions. Traditionally, the cost of virtual care or telemedicine was too much to justify servicing patients who were only merely “at risk.” By working together, Myia and Mercy can service patients who are most “at risk” of developing chronic conditions and work to prevent the negative cost and quality of life consequences for everyone.
