Katie Adams
Providers across the nation are continuing their work to make value-based care at scale a reality. One of the most recent examples of this comes from Emory Healthcare in Atlanta — on Monday, the health system announced a partnership with Dallas-based startup Guidehealth designed to help value-based primary care reach more than 350,000 patients across Georgia.
Guidehealth, founded in 2023, is a value-based care enablement company. It was founded by two healthcare veterans — one being Sanjay Doddamani, the former CEO of value-based care startup Upstream, and the other being Michael Gleeson, Arcadia’s former chief strategy and innovation officer.
The co-founders launched Guidehealth last year as a response to the need for technology that helps health systems succeed in value-based care arrangements while still maintaining financial stability, Doddamani said. The startup helps health systems scale value-based care by providing staff, technology and expertise to augment their existing systems, he explained.
For the new partnership, Guidehealth is working with Emory’s “population health collaborative,” which is the health system’s term for a new subsidiary that includes both employed and affiliated primary care physicians participating in value-based care models.
Guidehealth will provide Emory’s population health collaborative with analytics, profiling and unified care plans for patients, Doddamani noted. He also pointed out that the startup will provide staff members, called health guides, who can improve quality, clinical documentation and care management.
In his view, this partnership represents a new model for how to support clinically integrated networks in value-based care.
“This model centers around a remotely embedded health guide that works within the practice and their EHR. The health guide uses a suite of AI tools to support the practice as well as a broader term of clinical and administrative experts to ensure value-based care performance for that practice,” Doddamani stated.
He said the main goals of the partnership are to help Emory demonstrate how health systems can lead in value-based care, to support the transformation to profitable primary care, improve the patient experience and grow Emory’s presence in the Georgia market.
Patrick Hammond — CEO of the Emory Healthcare Population Health Collaborative and CEO of the Emory Healthcare Network, the health system’s clinically integrated network — noted that Guidehealth “checked off a number of boxes” during Emory’s search for a value-based care enablement partner.
One of these boxes was Guidehealth’s ability to accelerate Emory’s performance in value-based agreements while lowering the health system’s operational execution risk costs, Hammond remarked. He also pointed out that the startup works with all payers classes and can help advance Emory’s ability to take on two-sided risk, especially in Medicare.
“Guidehealth brings not only an industry-leading population management and analytics platform, it also has been developed to support workflows in clinical practices. Guidehealth better enables different primary care offices working with different electronic medical records to be successful in population management without significant changes to their standard workflows today,” Hammond declared.
He believes the startup’s platform can help Emory improve primary care across Georgia. In his view, the main focuses of the collaboration are improving patient engagement and increasing the frequency and effectiveness of preventive visits and screenings — all while reducing the administrative and operational burden on clinicians.
“This allows our providers to focus more on what they do best: helping our patients and serving our communities,” Hammond said.
Emory plans for more than 500 of its employed and affiliate primary care providers to offer patient care, education, research and community engagement at their practice locations. They will have a goal of seeing patients at least once a year.
Guidehealth has similar partnerships with other provider organizations, including AMITA Healthcare Network, Sinai Health System Chicago and PA Clinical Network.
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