Chicago-based digital health company Groove Health has raised $1.6 million for its predictive analytics platform, which focuses on personalized patient engagement to help health insurance companies, hospital systems and self-insured employers improve their medication adherence. The investors in the round were not disclosed.
 
The philosophy behind the Groove approach is that adherence is a behavioral issue, not a medical one.
 
"Medication adherence is a major challenge in healthcare today, with significant implications for medical outcomes," said Andrew Hourani, Groove Health's founder and CEO, in a statement. “At Groove Health, our interest lies at the intersection of data analysis and behavioral psychology. How can aggregated data help us identify the causative factors of non-adherence, and how can we influence patient behavior accordingly?"
 
From Groove’s perspective, the answer is a proprietary analytics platform combining existing healthcare data with patient-generated data from Groove's mobile app, along with other sources. This information is used to create a three-dimensional understanding of each patient’s unique adherence profile.
 
Groove then implements its patient engagement program, which uses a mobile app and other forms of outreach to influence health-positive behaviors in high-risk patients. The combined end-to-end platform integrates directly into the enterprise workflow, with an eye toward improving the efficiency of existing care teams. And organizations ostensibly have new methods of engaging patients.
 
"The complex nature of medication adherence demands solutions that are more innovative than simple medication reminders," said Hourani. "Health literacy, financial concerns, social issues, and other factors often influence non-adherent behavior. We are helping our enterprise customers identify and address these issues on an individualized basis."
 
Each year in the US, poor medication adherence causes 30 to 50 percent of treatment failures, 125,000 deaths, and more than $100 billion of avoidable healthcare spending.  A recent study in the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association found that 26 percent of hospital readmissions were potentially preventable and medication-related. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the National Committee for Quality Assurance incorporate medication adherence measures in their Star Ratings programs, which measure health plans' performance on important dimensions of care and service