Accolades For Accolade: Now Comes The Hard Part

Usually, the only funding announcements a company touts are its own. But we were glad to see that Accolade raised a $71 million round last week.

Accolade is a healthcare concierge company. Large employers contract with them to provide their employees with access to phone-based guides who help navigate the complicated world of healthcare. Until now, Accolade has been a decidedly low-tech business, focusing on the power of human phone-based interactions to educate and advocate for employees. However, according to Accolade, the new funding represents a step in a new direction to build out a digital side to their business — or, in their words, “enhance our technology and analytics capabilities.”

We agree that there is power in pairing concierge service with consumer-grade technology that can adapt to an individual’s unique experience, and make it easier to navigate a range of healthcare resources. In fact, we agree so much that about a year ago, we entered into a strategic partnership with Quantum Health, a care coordination, and consumer navigation company, to create MyQHealth.

Unlike Accolade, our market-leading technology platform is already fully operational.

MyQHealth pairs Jiff’s enterprise health benefits platform with Quantum Health’s live experts for guided support to create the ultimate personalized experience. The goal is to reduce the unnecessary healthcare costs incurred when employees get lost in the healthcare journey. But unlike Accolade, our market-leading technology platform is already fully operational, and continues to improve every day based on the mountain of experience we’ve accumulated from more than three years of user feedback.

Because of that, Jiff customers that choose MyQHealth can reap these benefits today: a mobile-first platform offering personalized recommendations, a “home screen” for all of their health benefits, and deep synchronization between technology and on-demand healthcare warriors working on their employees’ behalf.

So, we congratulate Accolade in raising the funds necessary to craft the technology that we at Jiff have been focused on for the past three years. We’ll be the first to tell you: the technology is extremely complex to build. It will take substantial time and resources. We welcome the competition because, ultimately, the more we can bring smart technology to healthcare, the easier it will be to drive down costs and improve people's health.