Farzad Mostashari, M.D., the former National Coordinator for Health IT, is starting up a company that aims to help primary care physicians form and connect with accountable care organizations (ACOs).
The startup, called Aledade, launches with $4.5 million in seed funding from New York City-based venture capital firm, Venrock. Mostashari announced the company's formation in a blog post.
In the blog post, Mostashari says the new company will aim to help "independent primary care doctors re-design their practices , and re-imagine their future." This means bringing them together in ACOs, where he says they bring in better care coordination and will be rewarded for value.
On its website, Aledade (which is a device that was used to sight a distant object and use the line of site to perform a task) says it will make it easy for primary care physicians to form ACOs. It will offer resources, services, and technology that are needed to establish an ACO with no upfront costs. It will also offer to manage the bureaucracy of an ACO, to understand and comply with regulations; assist with EHR optimization and workflow redesign; help with quality reporting; benchmarking; patient outreach; and a number of other ACO-related tasks.
With him in the start-up will be Mat Kendall, who worked with the regional extension center program at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), and Edwin Miller, who has worked at athenahealth, CareCloud, and digiChart.
According to an interview in Modern Healthcare, Mostashari's firm has initial partners in four states-Arkansas, Delaware, Maryland and New York. Once those partnerships are developed, he says the firm will adapt and expand.
After departing ONC as National Coordinator in October, Mostashari joined the Brookings Institution as a visiting fellow. Mostashari joined the government in 2009 as Principal Deputy National Coordinator and took over as the National Coordinator in 2011.
