Medalogix Merges with Muse Healthcare, Gets Backing from Vistria and LHC Group

Medalogix was already one of the market leaders in home health predictive analytics. It has now gotten what appears to be another boost.

That boost comes in the form of three new developments: a merger, a private equity investment and an investment from yet another publicly traded home health care giant.

On Wednesday, the Chicago-based investment firm The Vistria Group announced a recapitalization and a growth investment in Medalogix and Muse Healthcare. As a result of that move, Muse Healthcare — a data science and technology company focused on hospice, home health and palliative care — will join forces with Medalogix.

The two companies will operate under the Medalogix brand going forward.

“There were multiple potential partners that we were having conversations with, … but there was a collective decision at the board level that we loved what Vistria was representing and what they saw in the business,” Elliot Wood, the president and CEO of Medalogix, told Home Health Care News. “The easiest way to develop a very successful partnership is to understand that you are aligned on mission from the outset. That was the case with Vistria.”

In addition to Vistria’s backing, LHC Group (Nasdaq: LHCG) has become a minority investor in the newly consolidated company. LHC Group joins Amedisys (Nasdaq: AMED) and Encompass Health (NYSE: EHC) as minority investors in the Medalogix brand.

Those three companies account for three of the largest five home health providers in all of the U.S., according to LexisNexis Risk Solutions data. Lafayette, Louisiana-based LHC Group, in particular, delivers home health, hospice and home- and community-based services (HCBS) through its network of 537 home health locations,120 hospice locations and 124 HCBS locations.

“We feel very honored [that those companies are investors],” Wood said. “The relationships that we’ve had with Amedisys and Encompass have provided tremendous value to us as an organization, both in the utilization of our products and the feedback on those products, as well as really kind of working with us to help think through what types of products we should develop next.”

Overall, Medalogix’s goal is to transform health care through its data-based solutions and machine learning capabilities. The new company’s reach — with Muse integrated — will engage more than a third of all Medicare home health and hospice recipients, according to a press release.

LHC Group’s relationship with Nashville, Tennessee-based Medalogix began in 2019, when many providers turned to predictive analytics solutions to prepare for the Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM).

Medalogix’s main four tools include: Care, which is used for episode planning; Touch, which is used for hospitalization prevention; Bridge, which is used for end-of-life planning; and Nurture, which is used for post-discharge care.

On its end, Shoreview, Minnesota-based Muse Healthcare was founded in 2019, primarily as a hospice predictive model. Integrating its technology with Medalogix allows them to cover the entire care continuum, Tom Maxwell, the chairman and co-founder of Muse Healthcare, said in the press release.

“[It will enable us] to give our customers the insights and care guidance to obtain the most appropriate outcomes,” Maxwell said. “Together, we will accelerate the growth of our customers, ensuring they are using data to support every care decision, and appropriately increase the days of care provided in the place where the patient deserves to be: their home.”

Bryan Mosher, the CEO and co-founder of Muse, was actually a co-worker of Wood’s when Medalogix had just a handful of employees early on. The two have maintained a relationship over the years, and they’ll now be back working together again under the Medalogix brand.

“Muse has built incredible technology and an incredible product,” Wood said. “Not only is it filling in that entire home continuum, but there are also capabilities that each platform has that we believe we can leverage together.”

LHC Group previously used Medalogix Bridge and Nurture. It now will be utilizing all of the four tools in addition to its own proprietary clinical care model. The Medalogix toolset “complements other components of LHC Group’s value-based care strategy,” an LHC Group spokesperson noted.

LHC Group will also become a user of Muse’s tools for the first time. It believes that Muse will aid its “accelerated M&A pipeline” in hospice, the spokesperson explained.

As for Medalogix, the mission remains the same, despite the moving parts.

“There’s this tailwind behind the idea that patients can get better at home,” Wood said. “When people leave the hospital, they want to go home sooner. And so we always believed that the value in us — and a big part of what we were doing — was providing home health agencies products and tools that allowed them to do that.”

As for Vistria, it adds to its health care portfolio that includes the San Diego, California-based Mission Healthcare and Chicago-based Help at Home, which are both focused in home-based care.