What You Should Know:
– Phreesia’s acquires Insignia Health, a mission-oriented company dedicated to improving health outcomes through patient activation.
– Insignia has an exclusive worldwide license for the Patient Activation Measure® (PAM®).
Phreesia, a customized patient intake software platform today announce it has acquired Insignia Health, LLC, a founder-led and mission-oriented company dedicated to improving health outcomes through patient activation. The acquisition is a natural extension of Phreesia’s commitment to enabling patients to become more active participants in their care.
Phreesia acquired Insignia from its co-founders, Chris Delaney and Craig Swanson, the University of Oregon and its other holders of membership interest. Insignia has an exclusive worldwide license for the Patient Activation Measure® (PAM®), which was created by a team of researchers at the University of Oregon led by Dr. Judith Hibbard, who has joined Phreesia in an advisory role.
Patient Activation Measures
PAM is widely viewed as the gold standard of patient activation measures, supported by more than 700 peer-reviewed studies published in leading healthcare journals over the past 17 years. The research validates that the brief PAM survey can accurately measure a patient’s level of “activation”—their knowledge, skills and confidence for self-management—and can lead to improved health outcomes, higher patient satisfaction and lower cost of care. PAM results are used to improve risk identification, guide patient support and evaluate impact as a patient-reported outcome measure (PROM).
PAM is the only measure of patient activation to receive an endorsement by the National Quality Forum (NQF), and the only one to be utilized by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and England’s National Health Service (NHS) beginning in 2019 and 2017, respectively. Insignia brings to Phreesia a proprietary and universally accepted model that will enable Phreesia and its provider clients to understand and engage patients in more personalized ways based on their level of activation.
“When we first created PAM, we wanted to provide clinicians with a tool to quickly and easily understand a patient’s ability to self-manage their healthcare, so they could individualize their approach and better engage their patients through tailored, incremental changes,” said Dr. Judith Hibbard, Professor Emerita and Faculty Fellow at the University of Oregon’s Health Policy Research Group. “The subsequent years of research have revealed the essential role that activation plays in determining outcomes for patients. Studies also showed us how the measure can be used to help clinical teams change the health and cost trajectory for patients. It is very exciting to have the opportunity to implement the measure and the related intervention approaches at a scale we had always hoped for.”
