Arcadia and CareJourney merge to take value-based care analytics to a new level

This week, healthcare data platform Arcadia made an acquisition that CEO Michael Meucci believes will give the Boston-based company the data it needs to offer its customers a more comprehensive package of value-based care technology.

It bought Arlington, Virginia-based CareJourney, a healthcare analytics company designed to facilitate participation in value-based care contracts.

The acquisition comes six months after Arcadia sold its value-based healthcare division to Guidehealth. Through the two deals, Arcadia is sharpening its focus on providing the right data and technology to enable value-based healthcare, rather than being on both the technology and services side of value-based healthcare, Meucci explained.

The new merger combines Arcadia’s data platform, analytics and workflow tools with CareJourney’s wealth of data on cost, quality and benchmarks. CareJourney’s dataset is based on claims data from Medicare, Medicaid, Medicare Advantage and commercial plans and represents more than 300 million beneficiaries and over 2 million providers nationwide.

“To put it very simply, (Arcadia) has a great data platform and a lot of good data engineers. When customers buy Arcadia, they’re buying us to feed their data into our platform. CareJourney has a lot of really good data scientists – they don’t do a lot of client-specific data, but they have access to the CMS innovation data room, where they get really interesting insights, like about individual regions and markets or how individual providers are performing,” Meucci explained.

By merging these two companies, Arcadia will be able to offer a better range of products around “the unified vision of using data to transform our healthcare,” he added.

He also said the merger will help Arcadia differentiate itself from competitors such as Datavant, Innovaccer and Health Catalyst.

“Analytics is traditionally Arcadia’s strength. Our analytics models are among the best in the market and CareJourney improves on that even further. So we’re trying to keep building on them to strengthen that differentiation for customers,” noted Meucci.

Through the acquisition, Arcadia now owns all of CareJourney’s products and customers, and the products have been renamed “CareJourney by Arcadia,” he explained. He said it is likely that the two companies will combine their products and consolidate them under one brand in the future.

Currently, the two companies’ customer bases overlap by about a dozen, including Providence and Rush University System for Health, Meucci added.

The deal also brought some leadership changes, the most notable of which is that Aneesh Chopra — CareJourney’s president and co-founder, who also served as the federal government’s first chief technology officer — is now Arcadia’s chief strategy officer.

Photo: Natee Meepian, Getty Images