Digital Health M&A From a Founder

Since announcing the merger of PeerWell with Bardavon a couple of weeks ago, I’ve had the opportunity to think about what it really means—both personally and for the digital health space. I’ve also had the chance to speak with many of our customers, partners, new colleagues, former employees, and advisors.?

The acquisition of PeerWell certainly comes with a mixture of emotions. For me, PeerWell has been at the center of my life for the last 8 years. In this time, I’ve learned A LOT about healthcare, how challenging it is, but moreover, why this work is so important. In understanding both the difficulty and the importance, I feel even more confident that combining forces with the Bardavon team is the? best way to keep pushing our mission forward.

As we begin the journey as a combined company, I’m also feeling intense curiosity. In unraveling the many layers that go along with the acquisition of a startup, my own curiosity was presenting much more strongly than I anticipated.

Missed the acquisition announcement? Check it out here.

Since the merger, here’s what I’ve been most curious about

The “compounding effect”

PeerWell has always been a small (but mighty) team. We built some of the most incredible technologies that were not possible just a couple years ago. We’ve been at the forefront of change in healthcare and it’s something that I’m really proud of. However, healthcare is a massive field that needs a lot of help. The entire Bardavon team is a group of people that believes in the same vision and has complementary skills.?

I am curious about what we can do together with our combined experiences. While we both share the belief that healthcare needs to change, we got there through different paths. Leveraging each other's strengths, and more importantly leveraging each other's healed wounds from different battles fought, offers a major edge. I look forward to the compounding effect and moving faster than either of us could alone.

Additionally, being able to marshal the expertise and goodwill of a larger team is exciting. Simply put, we can affect a lot more change than before.?

By the way, we’re hiring!

Working at scale?

For PeerWell, we focused our efforts on building best-in-the-world patient experiences. We sweat the details on how to make healthcare technology accessible to anyone, anywhere. This is why we built our sensor-free, clinically validated SMART Motion platform to measure range of motion and other body mechanics using everyday smartphones.?

For Bardavon, they’ve focused as much on the provider and payer experience as we have on patients. Providers are a principal agent in healthcare delivery, there is no healthcare without them. The Bardavon team has now built one of the largest provider networks in the country that delivers the highest quality in-person care.

Combining these two core capabilities gives us the opportunity to provide the best healthcare, with the best providers, to patients across all treatment modalities: in clinic, at home, and digital.??

In my opinion, I don’t think this has ever been done at scale. With our combined areas of expertise and reach, I am curious to see how far we can go. Our core clinical focus is on musculoskeletal disorders and alleviating the burdens placed on patients, family members, and providers when trying to recover from these conditions. PeerWell began with a focus on delivering digital and virtual patient care but we could not ignore the need of our patients to have a provider evaluate them - with their expert hands. The best care cannot be delivered virtually 100% of the time, it is wrong or naive to think so. We had imagined building an in-person network to deliver enhanced care. Now we don’t have to imagine it, we can do it, today, nationwide.

The future of healthcare?

Patients and providers are the two principal agents that matter most when it comes to keeping people healthy. Over the last 50+ years we’ve turned our backs on this truth. Most healthcare systems have more back office admins than they do frontline healthcare providers. Healthcare delivery has drifted too far in the wrong direction—away from the principal agents. With increasing prior authorization burdens and more systematic red tape, providers are less enabled to offer patients the best care. This is not the fault of the employer or the benefits administrator, but this is true today.

I’m curious what the world will look like when we create a platform that uplifts our principal agents—the patient and the providers. I want to see how much better outcomes can be when we put the patient first and give the provider a running start on delivering the best care. I want to see how greatly costs can be lowered. More than anything, I want my kids to experience a healthcare system that takes care of sick people. Or better yet, a system that looks after us so we don’t get sick in the first place.?

Read what Matt Condon, CEO of Bardavon, has to say about modernizing MSK healthcare and the work we will do together.

At Bardavon, combining clinical physical therapy with virtual care is the driver of change we’ve been working toward.

The more I reflect on the merger of PeerWell and Bardavon, the better I feel about continuing on in the race to affect real change in healthcare. Together, we can deliver on a more personalized, scalable, hybrid care model that myself, and colleagues like Chrissy Farr, believe strongly is the future of healthcare. I think it’s our best shot at bringing patients and providers to the forefront.

I am curious to watch it all play out.

Together, Bardavon and PeerWell are already doing BIG things to put the patients and providers first. Check out the SMART Motion Coach, our brand new built-in tech acts like a real coach—guiding patients through better, safer movement from home.