WellSky Acquires Healthify, Setting a Wider Definition of Healthcare and Becoming One of the Country’s Largest Social Services Networks
Social issues like homelessness, addiction, and food insecurity cost the American healthcare system billions of dollars. This sale recognizes Healthify’s role in addressing those issues and accelerates its next phases of impact.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that individual healthcare outcomes are inextricably tied to our wider communities and social contexts.
Even pre-covid, progressive leaders in our healthcare system had come to appreciate the importance of the social determinants of health (SDOH) — how housing instability, food insecurity, addiction, and other issues not traditionally thought of in the realm of healthcare play an enormous role in driving overall higher costs and worse outcomes in our systems. The academic data has been increasingly incontrovertible — reducing SDOH challenges could be one of the most efficient ways to take costs out of the healthcare system. But despite being armed with that insight, payers, and providers lacked a smart, systematic way to track SDOH interventions and connect patients to services beyond the traditional provider system. Enter Healthify.
Founded by a team of friends who first came together while students at Johns Hopkins, Healthify was one of the earliest players bringing commercial focus to SDOH. Cofounder and CEO Manik Bhat developed the vision for Healthify while working as a community health worker in East Baltimore, where he saw firsthand the opportunity that addressing social needs represented for the broader healthcare system. From the beginning, we loved the business. It’s a mission-driven, “doing well by doing good” model that Healthify brought to market with a genuinely inspiring vision for driving costs down for payers while improving the health of our most vulnerable citizens. Since our seed investment in 2016, we’ve been passionate supporters of Manik and his leading role in the movement to deploy pragmatic, high ROI solutions to attack SDOH via the nation’s leading payers and providers..
This week we are so proud to watch Healthify move onto the next phase of its journey and thrilled to know that the Healthify mission — to build a world where no one’s health is hindered by their need, will continue and expand in its impact by becoming a part of global health and community care technology company WellSky. This deal represents that most special and rare sort of venture outcomes — it’s a great return for shareholders, a life-changing moment for founders, and a deal that will accelerate positive change in our society. While Healthify’s performance as a standalone company certainly justified continuing to build an independent business, we all believed, and Manik particularly championed, that achieving Healthify’s ultimate mission could be accelerated by a partnership with a platform like WellSky. When they approached us we were excited to listen. The combination, now realized, is poised to unlock large scale, near term impact across the US. That opportunity for accelerating achievement of its mission was one that this team couldn’t pass up. As Manik said:
“In WellSky, I saw a similar dedication to use technology to improve health outcomes and the opportunity to scale our mission. WellSky and Healthify coming together enables the formation of one of the largest social services networks in the country, creates a market-defining solution set that fully brings healthcare and community services together, lays the groundwork for robust ROI analysis with additional clinical data, and allows us to scale social service reimbursement across the nation in a critical time as we address long-term recovery from the pandemic.”
Congratulations, Manik and Team Healthify. We have been inspired by your mission and dedication from day one, impressed by your success in building a highly scalable and successful business, and are now excited to watch you shift into hyper scaling mode via this new partnership. It’s been a special honor to be a part of this ride. Thanks for having us!
