Healthcare technology and AI company Innovaccer has acquired Story Health, a digital specialty care platform with health system inroads.
Financial terms of the deal, announced Tuesday, were not disclosed. Innovaccer said the deal adds to its scalable Healthcare Intelligence Cloud offering, which in recent months was bolstered by the company’s other strategic acquisitions.
“Healthcare doesn’t change through dashboards alone,” Abhinav Shashank, co-founder and CEO of Innovaccer, said in the announcement. “It changes when data and AI power completely new clinical models. Story Health has proven that in specialty care; and we’re excited to bring this technology and clinical expertise to our health system customers nationwide.”
Cupertino, California-based Story Health, a Fierce 15 2024 honoree, launched in late 2020 and has raised about $27 million in funding from backers such as Northpond Ventures, B Capital Group, LRVHealth, Define Ventures and General Catalyst. Its approach combines virtual coaching, biometric monitoring and care team alerts to support patients with chronic conditions between clinical visits.
Story Health and its partners—Intermountain Health, Saint Luke’s, ChristianaCare and other health systems, as well as Medicare Advantage insurer Zing Health and value-based care company Guidehealth—have logged stronger outcomes through that approach. One pilot of 35 patients at Intermountain saw about $210,000 of cost savings, below-average hospital readmission rates and 10 hours per month of freed-up clinic appointments per 20 enrolled patients.
More broadly, the company says provider partners on the platform have seen a 6.9% 30-day heart failure all-cause readmission rate (as opposed to the 18.1% national average), hospital rate reductions of more than 60% and other gains in engagement and medication adherence.
“When we built Story Health, we believed specialty care needed more than software, it needed an operating model,” co-founder and CEO Tom Stanis said in the announcement. “Most platforms stop at insights. Story Health goes all the way to action. Joining forces allows us to scale nationally and turn continuous, AI-assisted specialty care into the new normal.”
Story Health’s current customers won’t see interruptions in service due to the acquisition, and the company still plans to launch into other clinical specialties such as diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
With Innovaccer, the companies said existing customers will gain access to the parent company’s broader AI capabilities. The purchaser plans to embed Story Health’s platform into providers’ electronic health record and existing workflows as well as to add agentic AI alongside Story Health’s live coaches.
Innovaccer said the strategy will help further scale Story Health’s care model to more providers and plans across the country.
“By extending care beyond the walls of our clinics and into the daily lives of our patients, we’ve seen improvements in medication adherence, fewer hospitalizations, and stronger engagement between visits," said Kirk Garratt, M.D., medical director of the Center for Heart and Vascular Health and chair of cardiology at ChristianaCare, one of Story Health’s partners.
"The integration with Innovaccer will allow us to scale this model further, empowering our teams to provide continuous, personalized care without adding to clinician burden. This is a critical step forward in making advanced, AI-enabled specialty care accessible to more patients in our community,” Garratt said.
San Francisco-based Innovaccer, which closed a $275 million series F funding round at the top of this year, hasn’t been shy about its plans to build new capabilities through acquisitions. A January purchase of Humbi AI, an actuarial software, services and analytics company, was preceded by the 2024 purchases of Cured, a digital marketing and CRM platform for healthcare, and Pharmacy Quality Solutions, a pharmacy-payer performance technology.