PointClickCare, the market leader in the long-term post-acute care (LTPAC) space, recently announced the acquisition of Collective Medical, a platform that helps care teams collaborate to support vulnerable patients. The size of the deal was impressive (estimated by Blake Dodge at Business Insider to be $650M), that was not the important part of the story. The deal represents a serious push by PointClickCare into the acute care market.
I sat down with Dave Wessinger, President of PointClickCare and Chris Klomp, CEO of Collective Medical to discuss how this acquisition now gives PointClickCare its first meaningful offering for acute care organizations.
Complementary Solutions
“Our bread and butter has been long-term post-acute care,” stated Wessinger. “The gap is between us and the organizations served by Collective Medical. We [PointClickCare] had started into the acute care arena, but at the end of the day we didn’t have the channel, the relationships or the account activity to get there. Chris and his team at Collective Medical had all of that. It was a natural fit.”
Collective Medical’s platform tracks where patients are receiving care, why they are there and who they are seeing. With all this aggregated information, the platform can detect when “something is about to go south” explained Klomp. “With some clever technology we can find the right stakeholders to intervene and reach out to catch the patient before they fall.”
Klomp and his team have focused on socially vulnerable patient populations like those struggling with substance abuse. Increasingly Collective Medical’s customers were asking for help with a different category of vulnerable patients – seniors – which is where PointClickCare comes in.
Appealing to Acute Care
PointClickCare has over 70% of the Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs) and Senior Care providers in the US (according to the company). As such, they have deep knowledge of and access to data on seniors being cared for at these organizations.
When Collective Medical’s capability is combined with PointClickCare’s Harmony solution (which allows case managers to monitor the status of their patient in LTPAC facilities operating on PointClickCare’s platform – see this previous article), acute care providers would end up with a powerful tool to manage patients outside the walls of their facility.
Armed with PointClickCare, a hospital’s case manager would now be able to see in real-time how a patient they discharged to a SNF is progressing against their assessment. If they see something worrisome, they can proactively call the SNF or mobilize other parts of that patient’s care team to respond.
Similarly, if the patient needs to go from the SNF to another provider’s ED, the case manager will be alerted by PointClickCare and now they can better guide that patient to the most appropriate level of care after they are treated.
This capability will be critical as we move to Value-Based Care, especially for Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), payers and acute care providers – three types of organizations that have not traditionally been PointClickCare customers.
Wessinger confirmed that the acquisition of Collective Medical would be “our first meaningful foray into the acute care space.”
“The most common question that gets asked today [by ACOs, payers and acute care providers] is ‘where is my patient’,” said Wessinger. “That’s the last question we should be asking. Instead, we should be asking ‘how can I help’ and ‘what’s the right time I can help’ that’s when we can improve the care for patients. That’s ultimately where this [acquisition of Collective Medical] gets us.”
Looking Beyond
If we look ahead a year or two, it’s not hard to imagine PointClickCare moving further into the acute care space, potentially through an acquisition of a case management solution or a remote patient monitoring platform. Either (or both) would further solidify them as the system of record for patients outside of acute and primary care organizations.
That level of visibility and information consistency is a distant dream given the highly fragmented nature of LTPAC today. This acquisition by PointClickCare may prove to be the first step towards that dream.
Watch the full interview with Wessinger and Klomp to hear about:
- The gap Collective Medical was being asked by its customers to fill
- Why being a cloud-based platform was key to making this deal possible
- The insight that Klomp describes as “stupidly useful”
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