The news: Quest Diagnostics is acquiring patient engagement company Pack Health in an all-cash deal.

More on Pack Health: Pack Health provides comprehensive digital health coaching for 30 chronic conditions by addressing a range of health influencers like mental health, lifestyle behavior, and social determinants of health.

• The company focuses on helping users develop self-management skills to improve their health.
• Users are matched with certified health coaches, who they work with on a weekly basis to meet their health goals. This is personalized via wearables data and patient-reported data.

What does Quest Health have to gain? Quest will be adding Pack Health’s platform to its Extended Care services—its suite of health tech solutions that enhance diagnostics.

This builds on Quest’s previous acquisition of MedXM (now Quest HealthConnect), which provides remote patient monitoring, health risk assessments, and care management services that support in-person clinical care.

Why it makes sense: Quest serves healthcare provider clients—most of which are using virtual visits for treating chronic conditions more than any other healthcare area.

• 66% of healthcare providers are using virtual care for chronic condition management, per Amwell and HIMSS Analytics’ 2021 survey.
• Plus, chronic disease management is a top area that patients are using virtual care for: 21% of US adults said their primary purpose in using telehealth was for managing their chronic condition, per an August 2021 Bipartisan Policy Center survey.
• And in fall 2020, when in-person visits were the lowest, 41% of chronic condition management visits were virtual—compared with just 6% that were virtual pre-pandemic, according to Deloitte’s February 2021 Virtual Health Accelerated report.
• Plus, Pack Health has clinical research demonstrating that its solution can actually engage patients and improve health outcomes—which means doctors would be more likely to recommend it to their patients.

What’s next? Quest could package up its Extended Care services (including Pack Health’s solution) and offer a plug-and-play option to provider customers down the road.

Quest is already a top provider for diagnostics services in the US:

• It services 1 in 3 US adults and is used by half of physicians and hospitals in the US. This means it could easily upsell a comprehensive virtual care solution.
• For example, home health agencies (which are facing a shortage of home care workers) could leverage a virtual care solution to fill in gaps in care.
• In other cases, patients with multiple chronic conditions can use Quest’s comprehensive virtual care solutions to have consistent check-ins with their health status and work on improving it instead of potentially missing appointments and having avoidable health concerns.