Accolade, with 500 employees in Plymouth Meeting, seeks to boldly cut health costs for big companies
All three were trained as nurses but now are "personal health assistants" at the fast-growing Accolade in
It is part taskmaster, part minder, part friend in a health emergency, and part appointment manager. The Accolade phone number is included on health-care cards handed out to employees by companies such as Comcast and
Experts say the verdict is still out on whether Accolade can systematically reduce health-care costs. The firm also faces a raft of competitors, including West's
Still, Accolade has been on a hiring binge since a leadership change in 2015. It has a famously entrepreneurial CEO, a sharp focus on web technology, and backing from Comcast and some
Accolade also has 850 employees, with 500 in
"People bounce around the health-care system and they waste money as they bounce around," said
Barnes and others say
Barnes takes exception to calling Accolade a call center like those run by a credit card or cable company.
"This is not a call center," he said. "Most times Accolade employees have a college degree. They could be teachers or former managers with a high empathy quotient," he said. Callers spend an average of 14 minutes talking with their Accolade health-care assistant, an indication of the trust that people have in them, Barnes said.
Accolade says that health-care inflation can range between 5 and 7 percent a year for corporate health-care plans. But Accolade can contain those hikes to around 1 percent, the company claims. Accolade covers 700,000 members, and about 1.2 million people, including dependents, and it counts Comcast,
Barnes said that Accolade, which launched in 2007, takes a flat fee and a percentage of the cost savings at an organization as payment. He did not disclose terms.
And while he wasn't sure that Accolade could save companies money, the service will help employees return to work faster after illnesses. Accolade works to prevent hospital readmissions through its health therapists advocacy. He cautioned that services such as Accolade add "administrative costs" on a health-care system already burdened with massive bureaucracy.
With its base of teaching hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, the
"One of the insights [of Accolade] is that the patient calls you instead of you calling them," said
Emanuel said that 86 percent of the costs in the health-care system come from chronic diseases such as heart failure, diabetes, asthma, cancer, and emphysema. Accolade health assistants could help manage these diseases, reducing costs, he said.
"A lot of innovation is taking place [in health care] at this time and Accolade is one example," Emanuel said.
The idea for Accolade was to communicate and build relationships with people before they got sick, Spann said. Two years later, Accolade signed its first big client: Comcast. The
In 2015, Spann decided to step down at Accolade, believing that the company was ready for its next phase of growth -- to be more digital so that it could quickly scale up and reach millions of people.
He recruited
Other former top Concur executives also joined Accolade as Singh tapped into
Among the new venture capital backers that Singh helped bring to Accolade was the Andreessen Horowitz fund in
Over its existence, Accolade has raised
"The guy who built the business cannot always optimize it," Spann said. "I like to build things. And this had been built, and it needed to be transformed to be more scalable."
"You might be sick now. But you should establish this relationship," Rosa said that
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