Year in Review: 2023

To New Beginnings & Continued Success!

For those of you who popped Champagne and placed fresh oysters on ice to start your New Year’s celebration, your chances of opening one of the oysters to behold a magnificent pearl inside were about one in a million.

Many primary care providers (PCPs) may feel like they have similar odds in keeping their patients healthy while keeping their own heads above water. It may seem like an unattainable goal to predict which patients are most likely to be at risk and intervene successfully before symptoms emerge or acute events occur (while simultaneously keeping practices running and fending off burnout). But what if we could improve those odds?

At Pearl Health, it’s our mission to help PCPs transition from a system that requires them to simply care for the patients already in their waiting rooms to one that rewards them for providing more proactive, whole-patient care. We’re proud of our progress on this mission, including scaling our network more than 20x since 2022, forming a strategic partnership with Walgreens to help providers and health systems succeed in value, and further improving our systematic approach to reducing medical costs and improving patient outcomes by surfacing timely “clinical pearls” to providers.

Below are some pearls from 2023 that give us confidence we’ll continue to beat the odds as we ring in the new year. Cheers!

#1 $75M Series B to Fuel Growth & Accelerate Innovation

We had an auspicious start to 2023, announcing that we raised $75 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Growth Fund and Viking Global Investors, with follow-on funding from AlleyCorp, SV Angel’s Growth Fund, and other leading investors.

“This latest round of funding, combined with our previous investments, will allow us to expand our network and accelerate the development of innovative solutions that place providers at the center of healthcare delivery and cost management,” said Michael Kopko, Pearl Health Co-Founder and CEO.

Throughout 2023, this new round of funding positioned Pearl to expand our company’s reach within primary care, develop new partnerships, broaden the offerings available to our provider partners, and invest more in research and development.

“Pearl Health has done a great job of developing software to help providers achieve their goals around value-based care,” said Scott Kupor, Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who joined Pearl Health’s Board of Directors.

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#2 Strategic Partnership with Walgreens & Expanding Partnerships Ecosystem

Strategic Partnership with Walgreens

In 2023, Pearl launched a strategic partnership with Walgreens to expand access to value-based care in collaboration with community-based primary care physicians. This partnership is focused on delivering exceptional healthcare locally and will enable primary care providers to deliver more comprehensive, coordinated care to their patients, particularly those in the most vulnerable communities, where the ‘last mile’ is difficult to traverse.

“Walgreens is committed to being the partner of choice for providers and health systems looking to transition quickly and effectively to value-based care and improve outcomes in the communities they serve.” said John Driscoll, Executive Vice President and President, U.S. Healthcare, Walgreens Boots Alliance. “Our partnership with Pearl Health allows us to reach more communities faster and enable comprehensive, affordable care that improves long-term health outcomes and fosters healthier communities.”

Pearl Health’s technology, insights, and value-based care partnership models empower clinical teams to provide holistic, personalized treatment necessary for value-based, quality-focused care. Walgreens will provide complementary services, including hospital discharge management, prescription fulfillment, medication adherence, immunizations, post-acute interventions, care gap closure and diagnostic testing.

Expanding Partnerships Ecosystem

While Pearl Health focuses on supporting PCPs in their transition to value-based care, our team understands that many patients have specific, complex disease burdens that often go beyond the traditional responsibilities and scope of primary care. To address this, Pearl is building a growing network of specialist partnerships through which aligned specialty providers offer clinical support and wrap-around services that augment the care that PCPs provide for their patients.

In 2023, Pearl partnered with specialty providers such as Story Health to offer scalable specialty cardiac care and Vori Health to provide virtual-first musculoskeletal care. As we look forward, we’re excited to partner with more and more specialty partners to expand the care options available to primary care providers — and their patients.

#3 20x Network Growth Since 2022 & Expansion to 43 States

In 2023, approximately 1,800 primary care providers across the US partnered with Pearl Health, representing more than 20x growth in two years and expanding our network to 43 states.

Over the last year, we partnered with a wider array of primary care organizations than ever, including: health systems, clinically integrated networks (CINs), independent physician associations (IPAs), accountable care organizations (ACOs), large group practices, and small private practices.

The continued expansion of the Pearl Community and diversification of our network reflects the growing appetite for participation in innovative value-based care programs. We’re delighted to welcome these new partners to the Pearl Community and excited to collaborate with them to develop care models that put patient and provider experience first and allow them to focus on delivering the highest quality of care.

“We are excited to work with Pearl Health to enhance our capabilities in value-based care for our Medicare patients. Pearl Health’s technology platform and services will enable us to better identify and manage the needs of our high-risk and rising-risk patients, improve our quality performance, and optimize PCPs’ revenue potential,” said Dr. Michael Synn, Chief Medical Officer at Santé Physicians IPA. “We look forward to collaborating with Pearl Health to achieve our goals of improving patient satisfaction, health outcomes, and cost efficiency.”

Through our collaboration with this growing network of primary care providers and organizations across the country, we have also developed a more nuanced understanding of the many challenges faced by PCPs across the US today.

Many of these learnings culminated in Pearl Health’s 2023 Primary Care Pulse Survey & Report, which identifies key challenges, impediments, and frustrations that PCPs are confronted with today, as well as opportunities to achieve deeper satisfaction in their work, greater financial reward, and better outcomes for patients and the healthcare system.

#4 Surfacing “Clinical Pearls” & Driving Performance in Value

In 2022, we launched the Pearl Platform, a lightweight, easy-to-use technology platform designed to help PCPs and clinical staff proactively manage patient panels. The platform is powered by the Signal-Action Framework, which leverages data science and clinical expertise to 1) identify the right opportunities to improve patient outcomes and drive savings, and 2) surface those opportunities to providers through an intuitive user experience that helps them focus on the right patients and actions. In its first year, the Pearl Platform included detailed patient information with data across providers and facilities and core functionality to help providers take actions that drive success in value-based care, such as chronic care check-ins, annual wellness visits (AWVs), and admit, discharge, and transfer (ADT) alerts.

In 2023, as we increased the volume of data in our platform, we also incorporated more sophisticated approaches to driving value, including the introduction of 10 new clinical signals to help providers deliver better, more proactive care. These include alerts to predict and prevent emergency department visits, reduce unplanned admissions, identify opportunities for transitional care management (TCM), and help patients with advance care planning (ACP). In keeping with our design principles of simplicity and ease-of-use, all of these patient insights are incorporated into a single, increasingly advanced Signal-Action Framework that powers the insights surfaced through our intuitive technology platform.

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At the close of 2023, we’re proud to report that PCPs and clinical staff have taken approximately 50,000 actions through the Pearl Platform.

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The downstream impacts of these actions are meaningful, leading to more proactive patient outreach and increased performance in value-based care programs. In 2023, in aggregate, providers in the Pearl Community have scheduled approximately 1,000 post-discharge follow-up visits, increased the percentage of their patient panel with scheduled annual wellness visits (AWVs) by more than 10%, and reduced the percentage of high-urgency patients in their patient panels by 30%.

As we look forward, we continue to take a principled approach to evolving the Pearl Platform, making improvements that surface actionable information in low-friction, easily-consumable ways. In 2024, we’re excited to invest in systems that facilitate practice prioritization decisions, increase visibility into how well providers are doing against performance objectives, incorporate new data sources, increase EHR integration capabilities, and pilot new service offerings to remove less critical work and reduce administrative burden.

We are setting bold goals for ourselves and our clients in 2024. As we double the number of patients in our platform, we aim to more than double the number of high-value actions taken in support of their care across our growing inventory of proactive, patient-centric signals. We invite our practices and our clinical partners to join us in this challenge!

#5 100 Employees & Talent Model Built for Scale

As we have partnered with more primary care organizations across the country, we have invested in our team to ensure the Pearl of tomorrow can deliver on our lofty goals. We started 2023 with around 60 employees and we’re heading into the new year just breaking 100, including several new members of our leadership team.

Dr. Cameron Berg, MD, FACEP, FAAEM
Executive Vice President, Clinical Strategy

Patrick Mauro
Executive Vice President, Clinical Strategy

Ciara Walsh
Chief of Staff

April Greene
Senior Vice President, Medicare Advantage

Ryan Donahue
Vice President, Software Engineering

Chris Chambers
Senior Director, Growth Solutions

Garrett Colgan
Senior Director, Finance and Strategy

Pearl is led by provider-enablement, risk-bearing, and technology experts who are thoughtfully building a mission-driven team to accelerate healthcare’s transition to value-based care.

We’re still rapidly expanding across functions, including data science, engineering, product, network development, and customer success.

Interested in joining our team in 2024? Check out opportunities on our Careers Page.