Dr Mostashari's Aledade Raises $30 Million to Advance Value-Based Care

Almost 1 year to the day from when Farzad Mostashari, MD, former National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, announced the launch of Aledade, the company’s work to partner with independent primary care physicians and create accountable care organizations (ACOs) is being validated.

Aledade announced on Monday that it had raised $30 million to support its mission and further fuel the company’s growth.

“This funding means that we are going to be able to put it to work and deliver world-class technology, data, and services, and make sure that we put the primary care docs back in control of healthcare,” Dr Mostashari said.

Currently, Aledade is present in 4 states—New York, Maryland, Delaware, and Arkansas—and it is looking to expand into 9 or 10 states for 2016, according to Dr Mostashari, co-founder and chief executive officer of Aledade.

The company has signed up enough practices now to triple the number of Medicare lives being managed from 25,000 people last year to more than 75,000 by the end of 2015.

In addition, the funding will be used to expand the services Aledade offers in its ACOs, such as more support, analytics, technology, and people, and expand beyond Medicare to commercial and private payers and Medicaid.

HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell’s announcement of the shift from volume to value, the goal of moving 50% of Medicare funds into value-based models by 2018, and the replacement of the sustainable growth rate with the Medicare and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 have all validated Aledade’s work, Dr Mostashari said.

“These are specific evidences of the larger underlying favorable trend of the business we’re in, which is help independent primary care practices band together, be supported and empowered, and seek accountability for the total cost and quality of care,” he said.

Coordinated care requires understanding the entire patient, and Aledade is working to better integrate all the information about the patient and create actionable intelligence from it. The funding raised will also help to pay the technology fees that inhibit many population health efforts because organizations can’t properly share data.

“With the funding we can pay the [fees], but my concern is not so much with us, but with all the other organizations and national efforts to move in this direction,” Dr Mostashari said.

He is working on other efforts to improve healthcare outside of Aledade. On June 5, Dr Mostashari announced the launch of a new campaign to break through another type of data blocking: patients being unable to access their own health data.

The campaign will first develop a how-to guide for patients so they can understand issues such as how to get their data, how to ask for it, what their rights are, and how to store their health information in a way that is both private and secure.

The second stage of the plan is to follow the experiences of volunteers who will ask for their data and the members of the campaign will document what happens when people ask and what are they told.

“[Patients] need to be able to ask for [their] records,” he said. “And organizations that have received billions of dollars of funding for meaningful use for the electronic health records need to be able to uphold their end of the bargain, which is if a patient asks, you got to make it easy for them to be able to get their records in electronic format.”