Wildflower Health, a San Francisco-based mobile health software company, has acquired the Circle Women's Health Platform, a mobile health technology incubated by Seattle-based Providence St. Joseph Health (PSJH).
As part of the transaction, PSJH has signed an enterprise-wide commercial agreement with Wildflower. Providence Ventures will also participate in Wildflower's recently announced Series C financing led by Health Enterprise Partners, with participation by existing investors Hatteras Venture Partners and Echo Health Ventures.
“We are committed to growing healthy families and creating long-term value for our payor, provider and employer clients,” Leah Sparks, founder and CEO of Wildflower, said in a statement. “The addition of Circle's innovative technology platform and its talented team greatly enhances our ability to simplify healthcare, every day, by making intelligent connections between consumers and the resources they need, when they need them.”
Circle is the second business to emerge from Providence’s startup incubator, following the spin-out of health system enterprise software company Xealth. The app appears to be a natural fit for Wildflower Health, whose mobile enterprise software aims to give patients the ability to manage their entire family’s health on one platform.
In an interview with Healthcare Informatics earlier this month, Aaron Martin, EVP, chief digital/innovation officer at PSJH and managing general partner, Providence Ventures, described Circle by Providence as a personalized platform delivering content, products, and services for women to help them manage their health and the health of their families. The Circle app is targeted to the female head of household, who Martin refers to as the “chief medical officer of the home.” “She controls about 90 percent of the healthcare spend, not only for her family but also extended family,” Martin said in the interview.
The key to this platform is personalization, he notes. Personalization is driven either through a connection to the patient’s electronic medical record (EMR) or by the woman providing information about herself and her family, he said.
Circle was created by PSJH clinicians who wanted to ensure their patients regularly receive curated, provider-approved family and children's health resources. The app serves as a single source of information for parents, providing resources on everything from breastfeeding to teenager interactions. Circle provides content, tools and trackers, and is integrated into the health system's EMR.
“We are continually seeking new ways to engage more consumers in their health between episodes of care, with the goal of ultimately making our communities healthier through continuous digital engagement,” Martin said in a statement. “The combination of Wildflower Health and Circle will result in a comprehensive, personalized solution for family health and will allow PSJH to accelerate our vision of digitally engaging every family we serve.”
Wildflower's client contracts represent more than 45 million health-plan lives under management, as well as a growing number of hospitals. Circle is currently available in nearly 30 hospitals across the PSJH network, as well as within parts of other health systems such as OSF Healthcare and Sutter Health.
