WellSky Intent on Expanding Footprint, Presence Across Care Continuum

The post-acute technology company WellSky is spreading its wings over new geographies while growing its client base and expanding its product portfolio. Underlying the company’s strategy is a drive to develop solutions designed to support patient care as consumers navigate their way through the health care system.

WellSky is jointly owned by two private equity firms, TPG Capital and Leonard Green & Partners, per an agreement made in July 2020. WellSky counts as clients more than 1 in 3 of the home- and community-based health care providers in the United States.

This network of providers represents a knowledge base that informs WellSky’s decisions on where, how and when to grow.

“That gives us powerful insight into how care is being delivered in the home. I would argue there’s been more acuity being moved into the home, and I suspect that genie won’t go back in the bottle,” WellSky CEO Bill Miller told Hospice News. “So one of the ways you’ll see us evolve is looking at the ways we can help our providers care for sicker patients and still deliver great care.”

This means that WellSky will have to consider some key questions as they steer their business trajectory, according to Miller. Some of these include finding ways to make care delivery run more smoothly for providers serving patients who need help around clinical recovery or issues that arise at the end of life.

The company is also mulling how they can help providers address social determinants of health as recognition grows in the health space of how those factors impact patients, their specific health care needs, and the associated costs.

The insights WellSky has gleaned through the data they collect and the provider relationships they have built give the company a competitive advantage, according to Miller.

“Any way that we can continue to differentiate based on the knowledge and the analytics and the data that we have will give us more than a perceived head start,” Miller said. “I think you’re going to see us try to strengthen our hands around de novos and build more analytics.”

Data analytics systems are gaining rising levels of attention in health care. Hospice providers in particular are using analytics to identify patients in need of end-of-life or palliative care services further upstream.

Providers are also using these systems to track clinical outcomes and flag patients who are at high risk of hospitalizations. These types of data will also be important when hospices begin to negotiate rates with private payers through value-based programs like Medicare Advantage.

The next step for WellSky in terms of analytics is developing products designed to mitigate the most pressing challenge currently facing providers — the staffing shortage.

Miller told Hospice News that WellSky is developing an analytics solution that would help providers analyze employment, turnover and hiring trends and use that information to augment their staff retention efforts.

“Hanging onto great caregivers has been the number one issue and concern of all of our clients, bar none,” Miller said. “There is not anything close that measures up to the challenge that they’re seeing.”

In addition to expanding its capabilities, WellSky is focused on growing its footprint.

The Kansas-based company reports that it has quadrupled in size since 2017, now employing a staff of 2,200 worldwide. WellSky has laid the groundwork to hire another 1,000 to support its more than 20,000 clients.

The company also has completed 11 acquisitions during the past five years, with more likely on the way, according to Miller.

“We focused on depth [in acquisitions], and we’ve focused on tying it all together and creating a system that can truly answer the demands of the consumers, the demands of the payer, and the demands of the providers,” Miller told Hospice News. “I think acquisitions will always be a part of our strategy. We always have a pipeline of companies that we’re looking at speculatively, including some we are already in conversations with.”

Informing WellSky’s acquisition strategy was a recognition that as patients move through the health care system, they will have to transition multiple times to different providers in different care settings. In tandem, WellSky sought to develop a versatile platform that could follow the consumer’s course through the continuum, Miller explained.

A key example was the company’s 2020 purchase of CarePort Health from its parent company Allscripts (NASDAQ: MDRX) for the sum of $1.35 billion.

CarePort developed software platforms designed to better connect post-acute care providers with payers. WellSky saw the deal as an opportunity to enhance their ability to help providers facilitate patients’ transitions of care through hospital discharge process management, patient tracking across care settings, patient- and population-level analytics and electronic medical record-based protocols.

The transaction is the largest that WellSky has completed to date. It occurred during the height of the pandemic, shortly after WellSky’s recapitalization by its private equity backers.

“That was a gut-check decision. Now roll the tape forward 15 months, [CarePort] has been more critical to our growth and that our network and care coordination capabilities than anything else we’ve done, particularly over the last two years,” Miller said. “That has impacted our growth trajectory as much as anything.”

Spearheading many of these growth initiatives is WellSky’s recently appointed Chief Growth Officer Dale Zurbay.

Zurbay will be examining how the tech firm can best serve its clients in a post-acute market that is undergoing elevated levels of consolidation. He also has a background as a recruiter which Miller says will make him an asset in the company’s own talent acquisition efforts.

Going forward, WellSky will also be seeking opportunities to work with payers.

“You’ll also see us introduce additional opportunities to bring greater transparency to payers so they can better understand their members’ experiences,” Miller told Hospice News. “As we work to broaden our capabilities across the continuum of care, we will continue to be acquisitive, adding companies that act as a natural extension of our business.”