Phreesia Acquires Insignia Health to Improve Patient Experience

Phreesia has announced the acquisition of Insignia Health to enhance the patient experience, improve health outcomes, and lower the cost of care through patient activation.

The acquisition is a part of Phreesia’s efforts to enable patients to become active participants in their care.

The patient intake software company will absorb Insignia Health’s patient activation measure (PAM) to enhance patient experience, improve health outcomes, and lower cost of care. 

Insignia Health is a founder-led company committed to improving health outcomes through patient activation.

“Phreesia’s core strength is putting tools in the hands of patients to take on tasks—from self-reporting data like social determinants of health to making payments to signing consent forms—that they can do better than anyone else, and that align with the convenient digital experience they want,” Phreesia’s CEO Chaim Indig said in the announcement.

Insignia Health has a worldwide license for the patient activation measure (PAM), created by a researcher team at the University of Oregon to define patient activation. The team was led by Dr. Judith Hibbard, who has since joined Phreesia in an advisory role.

Phreesia recognizes PAM as the gold standard for patient activation measures. 

“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,” Judith Hibbard, professor emerita and faculty fellow at the University of Oregon’s Health Policy Research Group, said in the announcement.

PAM is backed by over 700 peer-review studies published in healthcare journals over the last 17 years. In addition, research shows that a brief PAM survey can measure a patient’s activation level.

Researchers state that patients’ knowledge, skills, and confidence for self-management can result in improved health outcomes, better patient satisfaction, and lower care cost.

Additionally, PAM results have been used to improve risk identification, guide patient support, and evaluate impact as a patient-reported outcome measure (PROM).

“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 could be used to help clinical teams change the health and cost trajectory for patients,” Hibbard said.

According to the announcement, PAM is the only measure of patient activation used by CMS and England’s National Health Service (NHS) beginning in 2019 and 2017.