The news: Deloitte is doling out $750 million to expand its ConvergeHealth healthcare business into consumer and financial services sectors, and build on ConvergeHealth’s suite of digital health solutions.

• Specifically, the multi-million dollar investment will help it build out more digital consumer-focused healthcare payments tech, and increase its footprint in the clinical trials space.

What is ConvergeHealth? It offers digital health and data analytics solutions to pharma, medical device, and healthcare companies.

• In 2019, it launched ConvergeHealth Connect—a suite of four digital health products targeting patient engagement, public health, and personalized care, all powered by Salesforce Health Cloud.
• In 2020, Deloitte launched MyPath for Hospital in Home solution via ConvergeHealth’s platform. It delivers personalized patient care via remote patient monitoring (RPM), virtual visits, and underlying analytics.
• MyPath can be deployed after a care team assesses and enrolls a patient into the MyPath for Hospital in Home program, after which the patient’s home environment is set up with necessary sensors and devices, and the virtual care system is then activated.

The bigger picture: Connected care platforms and integrated digital health solutions like ConvergeHealth’s breed value for multiple stakeholders involved in the healthcare delivery pipeline.

Patients can receive personalized care from the comfort of their homes. ConvergeHealth’s platform gives patients access to 24/7 virtual care, uses AI bots to educate and support the patient if they face challenges and concerns about their health, supports medication adherence via an AI-driven Rx manager, and optimizes health outcomes using analytics.

Doctors and patients can interact via multiple channels, including virtual video visits and chat, and it helps providers prioritize tasks. For example, insights from RPM data can be leveraged to inform the best course of clinical action—which minimizes superfluous workloads, and can help ease physician burnout.

Health systems benefit from the platform’s ability to optimize health outcomes while streamlining healthcare via digital delivery. Once patients are enrolled in a connected care program, a personalized care plan is created, set up with RPM devices at home, and then their care shifts to digital delivery. This allows hospitals to shorten the timeframe of an inpatient stay and save costs that come with in-person care. Plus, more tailored care should translate into better patient outcomes.

Pharma companies can improve clinical trial matching, speed up digital clinical trials, and recruit a diverse pool of participants. ConvergeHealth’s MyPath for Clinical product focuses on using analytics to better connect patients, researchers, and clinical trial sponsors, for instance.