Mercer Innovates the Employer Benefit Design Process to Drive Higher-Value Care With Clarify Health’s Provider Network Analytics

Clarify Health, a leading healthcare analytics and value-based payments platform company, announced that Mercer, a global HR consulting and asset management firm with a health and benefits business, is expanding their relationship to improve the employer benefit design process. In 2021, Mercer evaluated over 280 high-quality provider networks across 97 markets using Clarify Networks, a cloud analytics software that uses AI and machine learning to optimize network quality, efficiency, and referral patterns. As part of its mission to drive higher-quality care, Mercer is now adding Clarify’s commercial network intelligence analytics. This addition enables employers to maximize competitive coverage so that millions of individuals and families can benefit from higher quality care and a better patient experience.

“This is helping our clients reduce costs, improve quality, and enhance the patient experience. We’re expanding our relationship to continue modernizing benefit design and digitizing strategic decision-making via MercerBEACON, our client-facing software that is powered by Clarify’s insights and leverages value-based strategies in today’s healthcare marketplace.”

“Over the past year, we’ve experienced first-hand the ability of Clarify’s AI-driven software to improve network quality while bringing automation to the design process and saving our analyst team hundreds of hours,” said Nick Schram, Principal, Mercer. “This is helping our clients reduce costs, improve quality, and enhance the patient experience. We’re expanding our relationship to continue modernizing benefit design and digitizing strategic decision-making via MercerBEACON, our client-facing software that is powered by Clarify’s insights and leverages value-based strategies in today’s healthcare marketplace.”

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The Clarify Networks software delivers the industry’s most precise provider performance benchmarks that are case-mix adjusted based on real-world data, including claims, clinical indicators, and social determinants of health (SDoH) across 300 million patient lives. Mercer can compare providers in any of their clients’ markets, on-demand, to identify high-quality providers and develop best-in-class strategies to drive patients to those providers. The software predicts real-world network performance based on quality, efficiency, and referral patterns as real-time design changes are made, shaving months off the traditional design process. The software allows employers to identify and quantify savings opportunities from shifting care to better-performing providers.

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Todd Gottula, President, Clarify Health, commented: “The provider network design process has been in dire need of innovation. Traditionally, health plans and employers have relied on static data and cumbersome analytics to identify the best-performing and highest-quality providers to include in their network, resulting in a trial-and-error selection process that lasts 12-to-24-months. With its ability to precisely predict real-world network performance in software, Clarify Networks accelerates this timeline by over 8-fold.”

Based on their first-year success with Clarify Networks, Mercer will now begin leveraging Clarify’s competitive intelligence analytics. It will help enable competitive coverage for Mercer’s clients so that employees have greater access to care. This capability instantly identifies opportunities to increase competitive overlap by assessing the efficiency, quality, and referrals patterns of real-world competitor networks.

“The future of provider network optimization is on-demand cloud analytics that arms health plans and employers with the insights they need to drive higher-value care,” said Jean Drouin, MD, CEO, Clarify Health. “We’re thrilled to expand our relationship with Mercer as they continue to modernize the benefit and network design process to improve care for workforces across the globe.”

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