Lifespark has agreed to acquire Livio Health, a wholly owned subsidiary of the parent company of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota (Blue Cross).
What’s more, the parent company of Blue Cross has landed a minority owner stake in Lifespark through a cash investment made in addition to the valuation of Livio Health.
“It’s really kind of a three piece partnership,” Lifespark CEO Joe Theisen told Home Health Care News. “There’s the Livio acquisition but in addition to that, Blue Cross Blue Shield is making a financial capital investment in Lifespark as a minority owner. In addition to that, we’re aligning around new populations and new lives that are really important on a go-forward basis. All three of those things really culminate in the kind of partnership that Lifespark wants.”
Earlier this year, it was reported that Lifespark was seeking $50 million in funding.
Plus, Lifespark has always had its eye on Livio Health, Theisen said.
“When Blue Cross built and stood up the Livio model, we were watching it from afar,” he said. “Obviously, there was a lot of synergy and a lot of mission alignment around what the plan was looking to do, which was building a complex medical service for seniors from their payer-provider perspective. Recently, when it became an opportunity to make the acquisition, there was just a lot of goodwill.”
Lifespark is a Minneapolis-based senior care provider with both home health and senior living operations. The company’s other services lines include home care, hospice and primary care.
Meanwhile, Livio Health delivers specialty care and primary care to patients with chronic and serious illness through its care teams. The company has dubbed its in-home care services as the “modern house call.”
As part of the acquisition agreement, Livio Health employees will join Lifespark, and all operational components of the former will be integrated into the latter.
The transition is slated to take place over the course of the next several months. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In addition to being aligned with Livio Health on culture and the mission, the Blue Cross connection also made the company an appealing acquisition target for Lifespark.
“Having that full commitment to really changing experience for seniors and having the risk be attributed to [Blue Cross] was probably the third leg of the stool that was very attractive to Lifespark acquiring Livio Health,” Theisen said.
On its end, Livio Health sees the acquisition as an opportunity to offer the seniors they serve even more access to care.
“It allows our members to have access to Lifespark services, and I think that’s important,” Dr. Mark Steffen, chief medical officer and SVP of medical management at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, told HHCN. “The model of care they’re delivering every day is important. We want to focus on the people that we get to serve first, and we think that we can drive better health outcomes through the services that we’ll be able to deliver.”
Overall, Lifespark’s purchase of Livio Health is another big step towards its ultimate goal of moving towards a more holistic, risk-based and value-based care system.
“We want to restore health and not just palliate health for a lot of these seniors,” Theisen said. “It’s a combination of both restorative and palliative services that are all baked in proactive health. This gives us strong capabilities with our collective assets to really make it happen. To get on the other side and use technology and analytics to be proactive, and not just proactive but predictive.”
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