Xerox Adds to its Rubik’s Cube for Healthcare Solutions

With its latest acquisition, Xerox adds to its capabilities for what it calls “Consumer Health Integration”—the intersection of population health, care management, and consumer engagement. Xerox announced the acquisition of RSA Medical, a U.S.-based provider of health assessment and risk management designed to increase wellness, close gaps in care, and effectively utilize medical insurance coverage.

RSA Medical helps health and life insurance companies by providing clinical staff that reaches out to payers’ members, doing wellness assessments, helping them understand what programs are available and how to enroll in them, manage their care and answer questions that direct them to utilizing their insurance resources, and provide on-going “tips and tricks” to staying healthy. There is also a toolset—MedGine—designed to help in the early identification of medical conditions and risk factors. It is a recent update and reconfiguration of what RSA Medical originally used to assess risk for underwriting.

There is a rising tide of activity at healthcare organizations and service providers looking for ways to effectively engage consumers—members and patients—in actively managing their own health, wellness, and financial responsibility. It behooves healthcare insurance plans to have a healthier population, and also to identify “at risk” people as early as possible, and help them address their gaps in care using the “right resources at the right time.” The same is true for healthcare providers (see HfS 2015 Population Health and Care Management Blueprint). There is a convergence in the market around payer and provider needs in this area.

Xerox maps this acquisition into its commercial payer practice, which is a practical place for it to go, given its heritage in the payer operations space. However, the capability is relevant as well to the Government agencies Xerox serves, as well as healthcare providers. They all need to address these same business outcomes. Along similar lines, Xerox intends to integrate MedGine with its other analytic solutions, like Midas+ Juvo Care Performance, which is in the healthcare provider business and is used primarily by hospitals. And, another recent acquisition, HCI, brings in socio-economic data, modeling tools, and evidence-based programs to also complement Juvo.

There is an intersection here between the solutions and services to enable “Consumer Health Integration” and drive increased medical outcomes and decreased administrative costs. However, the solutions and services appear to be siloed in different business units.

HfS believes this situation is an example of the increasing opportunity for service providers to step outside of traditional operating models and focus on the business outcome, and what capabilities can deliver that outcome for clients.

This situation is ripe for exploring a Business Cloud solution – platform-based business process as-a-service (see Searching for the Target Operating Model for Business Cloud). Healthcare organizations are increasingly interested in BPaaS when it addresses a new growth area or challenge such as this one, according to our research (see Can BPO Providers Make “Business Cloud” More than a Dream in Healthcare?).

This is a strategic move by Xerox, bringing in tools and resources to address a growing need in a changing market. The key, however, will be for Xerox, which has a very structured environment, and clients sometimes feel moves quite slowly, to bring this capability together in its client base. Consumer / member / patient engagement is a critical puzzle for healthcare organizations—payer and healthcare provider just to name two—to solve for driving better health and medical outcomes. Xerox has a number of pieces to sort out and align to help deliver on the promise of Consumer Health Integration.