Outcome Health is serious about outcomes. While that may sound redundant considering the digital technology and marketing company’s name, its mission is becoming more immediate and significant as the pharma and healthcare industries embrace a similar evidence-based results philosophy.
At Cannes Lions Health, Outcome’s president and co-founder Shradha Agarwal, along with senior VP Katherine Calvert, made the rounds—hosting a panel, doing meet-and-greets and interviews—to talk up its goal of leveraging point-of-care communications as a conduit not only for business outcomes, but clinical outcomes, too.
For pharma companies, that alignment is becoming more important, Agarwal said, as they face greater pressure to think beyond mass marketing. These days, that means focusing on patient outcomes—and proving their products deliver.
Outcome's pitch? Use it to distribute information, education and marketing materials in physicians’ offices and hospitals—on tablet computers and larger custom digital screens—to boost product and disease awareness while improving patient care. Outcome works with pharma companies, medical device makers, payers, pharmacies and even consumer packaged goods companies that want to deliver messages to patients and doctors at point of care.
In the process, and through data-sharing deals with partners, it collects a lot of data that could be analyzed and fed back up the chain to show payers and drugmakers how well various clinical approaches are working.
Founded in 2006, the company just this year changed its name from ContextMedia to Outcome Health after considering more than 600 different suggestions. The one that stuck, Outcome, was suggested internally.
“The name Outcome came from our own teams who had already been talking to healthcare partners about clinical outcomes, health outcomes and business outcomes,” said Agarwal. “So the idea of aligning a fragmented industry around a shared vision of improved outcomes and participating in a new model became so organic for us.”
Outcome—which acquired one of its leading competitors, AccentHealth, in November and just recently raised $500 million in venture capital funding—seems poised for just that kind of move. It now has relationships with 231,000 healthcare providers, and has added capabilities such as a clinical trial recruitment platform, to boost its service offerings, as well as its reach.
To deliver on its name, Outcome has partnered up with QuintilesIMS, ZS Associates and Crossix to be able to measure outcomes directly attributable to its services, along with its own data and assessments.
“We see the opportunity to partner with each of the stakeholders in healthcare, which is an extremely fragmented industry, to think through how we can better align business outcomes with better health outcomes," Agarwal said. "We’re doing that through ways such as measuring prescription data, measuring claims data, and measuring physician level data partnered with healthcare systems."