SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Berkshire Hathaway Homestate Companies (BHHC), Workers Compensation, a leader in workers’ compensation insurance, and Clarify Health, a leading healthcare analytics, and value-based payments platform company, are pleased to announce a new partnership to improve quality of care and outcomes for injured workers.
BHHC aims to direct injured workers toward the highest-performing orthopedic surgeons, reducing surgical complications and facilitating safe, timely returns to work. Clarify Health's platform processes anonymized healthcare and claims data for over 300 million people, using machine learning algorithms to map orthopedic patients’ outcomes to the treating surgeons. The partnership with Clarify Health and leveraging their extensive database and machine learning algorithm advances that mission.
“Clarify’s platform compares surgeons against their peers by providing crucial metrics on cost efficiency, readmission rates, and post-operative hospital stays,” said Clarify Health’s Founder and CEO Jean Drouin. “This information allows BHHC, Workers Compensation Division, to pick the appropriate healthcare providers for its workers, ensuring quality care and positive outcomes.”
Orthopedic injuries are the most common workplace injuries and complex cases often require surgical intervention. Unfavorable surgical outcomes can result in higher healthcare spending, increased disability, patient dissatisfaction, and poorer functional recovery. As part of BHHC's commitment to medical quality, the partnership with Clarify Health enables the company to make informed decisions about the best healthcare providers for their clients. A recent California market validation study by BHHC showed a strong correlation between Clarify Health's orthopedic data and favorable surgical outcomes for workers’ compensation patients. In a pilot program initiated in late 2021, BHHC leveraged Clarify Health's platform to direct injured workers to higher-performing orthopedic surgeons, resulting in patients being seen two weeks sooner on average and by surgeons with higher performance ratings.
“One of my goals as BHHC’s medical director is to identify approaches to reduce the occurrence of surgical complications, improve functional recovery and return to work for our insureds’ injured workers. This starts with leveraging big data,” said Krystal Lin, MD, MSPH, Medical Director and AVP of BHHC.
Following the success of the pilot program, BHHC expanded its efforts in 2022, doubling the team size and focusing on all complex orthopedic and spine injuries. The company is on track to help nearly 1,200 injured workers in California alone and plans to apply the same approach to other states where it operates sometime in the next two years.
“This partnership underscores BHHC's commitment to innovation and its dedication to providing the highest quality medical care for injured workers,” said Andy Linkhart, Senior Vice President, Chief Claims Officer, and Chief Financial Officer of BHHC. “By utilizing Clarify Health's data-driven approach, we continue to set the standard for workers compensation insurance, ensuring better outcomes for clients and helping them return to work safely and promptly.”
About Berkshire Hathaway Homestate Companies
The Berkshire Hathaway Homestate Companies (BHHC) are a group of six insurance carriers that are part of the Berkshire Hathaway insurance group. Headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, and with over 50 years in business, BHHC has evolved from a regional carrier to a national insurance group writing a diverse book of policies from coast to coast. The Berkshire Hathaway Homestate Companies include Berkshire Hathaway Homestate Insurance Company, BHHC Special Risks Insurance Company, Continental Divide Insurance Company, Cypress Insurance Company, Oak River Insurance Company, and Redwood Fire and Casualty Insurance Company.
Berkshire Hathaway Homestate Companies (BHHC) have earned an enviable record of success in the insurance industry. Supported by A.M. Best's highest financial strength rating of A++ (Superior) (as of February 1, 2023), our corporate size enables our organization to react swiftly and effectively to opportunities in the insurance marketplace. Our financial strength provides our employees, agency partners, and policyholders the security rarely available in today's marketplace.
About Clarify Health
Clarify Health is an enterprise analytics and value-based payments platform company that empowers payers, providers, and life sciences companies to deliver better care, therapies, and outcomes with actionable patient journey insights. Clarify’s cloud-based business applications are built on the Clarify Atlas Platform, which maps 300M+ patient journeys to deliver 18B+ AI-powered predictions and surface insights with speed and precision. Clarify’s products illuminate actionable opportunities to drive growth, optimize networks, improve care delivery, manage population health, maximize value-based care performance, and bring therapies to market. With Clarify, healthcare organizations can leapfrog from point-solution and manual analytics to self-service, rapid generation of enterprise insights that light the path to better care and outcomes.
