Kidney Care Provider Somatus Acquires Lumiata
Somatus, a value-based kidney care company, has acquired strategic assets from Lumiata, a healthcare-specific AI platform. Somatus said it would leverage Lumiata’s ability to accurately predict high-cost claimants and likelihood of disease progression, advancing its capability to reduce costs for providers and health plans.
McLean, Va.-based Somatus recently announced a Series E financing round of more than $325 million.
Leveraging Lumiata’s AI and predictive capabilities, Somatus said it would be able to surface opportunities to reduce costs, and enable better care by providing reliable predictions for patient outcomes while also helping to identify and eliminate healthcare disparities. Lumiata is able to make predictions down to the individual member level while protecting members' privacy, a key factor in Somatus’ acquisition decision.
“We built our RenalIQ technology platform to help providers, health plans, and our community-based care teams reach patients most in need of personalized, whole-person care,” said Satish Cheema, chief product and strategy officer at Somatus, in a statement. “With the addition of Lumiata’s predictive analytics tools, and the talent behind it, we can deliver enhanced care and improved outcomes for patients sooner.”
Lumiata had raised $14 million in 2021, according to a story in Venture Beat. According to its website, the company uses AI to predict the onset and progression of more than 130 acute and chronic illnesses over the next 12 months. “These predictions enable providers to intervene sooner and achieve better outcomes for their patients,” the company said.
As an example of the work it does, Somatus has entered into a long-term, multi-year partnership with Anthem Inc. to change how kidney care is experienced and delivered for members of Anthem’s affiliated Medicare Advantage plans. The Anthem deal expands the company’s geographic footprint to 34 states and increases its kidney care lives under management to more than 150,000.
In a recent interview with Healthcare Innovation, Cheema said Somatus starts by collaborating with the health plan and focusing on the outreach to members. “The more we engage, the more successful we are in delaying disease progression, reducing unnecessary hospitalizations, and ensuring that they're on the right medications,” he said. “We also work with providers, creating different types of models of partnership with them, incentivizing them financially and other ways to hit certain care quality metrics, and to see patients,” Cheema added. “The tragic part is a lot of the CKD three, four and five patients don't even see a nephrologist on a regular basis. We start getting them to the nephrologists in a timely manner. Once they do that, we are then able to prevent or delay the disease progression of these patients. The partnerships with the providers oftentimes happen in collaboration with the health plan, or we directly to the nephrologists and primary care physicians and create these very interesting contracts and financial models that incentivize them to better manage the panel of patients, get them new referrals, and also delay disease progression for those patients.”
The RenalIQ platform helps health plans as well as Somatus’ leadership see how the network is doing, and which providers are performing better than others in terms of quality metrics, hospitalization metrics, utilization and other cost metrics.
