Signify Health, a leading provider of technology-enabled healthcare solutions designed to keep people healthy and happy at home, has acquired PatientBlox, a technology company with deep expertise in applying distributed ledger technology in healthcare. The acquisition accelerates Signify's prospective provider payment capabilities for episodes of care, supporting the company's commitment to advance value-based care through novel payment and risk arrangements.

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“We are excited to enhance our leading value-based payment platform with this first-of-its-kind prospective capability and the greater predictability and accountability that come with it,” said Signify CEO Kyle Armbrester. “We are already powering the nation's most innovative payment programs, and this capability opens up significant opportunities to create and support new programs and market entrants.”

As part of the acquisition, Signify will integrate the PatientBlox technology into its already robust and scalable value-based care platform, which supports $6B in health care spend annually associated with the federal government's bundled payment program, BPCI-A, and episodes of care payment programs by health plans and employers, says a press release.

“We combined our team's healthcare, fintech, and supply chain experience with machine-learning and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to build the PatientBlox platform for administration and management of prospective bundles,” said PatientBlox Co-Founder and CEO Rahul Sharma. “Our DLT based platform enables collaboration between Healthcare Payers and Providers and provides real time data synchronization across entities thus enabling rapid scaling of prospective bundled payment programs.  We are excited to work with Kyle and the Signify team and are proud to have the novel technology developed by the PatientBlox team be part of Signify's leading platform, which is already driving real change in the healthcare industry.”

The addition of blockchain technology enables a further shift away from traditional fee-for-service models. By making payments to providers at the start of the episode, providers are incentivized to drive care redesign because there is shared measurement and accountability at every step of the process, which results in improved care coordination, outcomes and cost savings.

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An episode of care is a health care event -- a condition or a treatment -- that is marked by a sequence of interactions between a patient and providers. The blockchain can capture each of those interactions and the patient's care milestones that trigger payments. The PatientBlox platform is designed to manage these transactions without relying on fee-for-service claims.