What makes Verscend a “major player” in clinical and financial analytics?

A new IDC MarketScape report¹ names Verscend as a “major player” in clinical and financial analytics. We sat down with Jordan Bazinsky, Executive Vice President, Administrative Officer, for a conversation about what this recognition means, and what the future holds for Verscend’s product development. 

This report was a vendor assessment of U.S. healthcare clinical and financial analytic business process outsourcing (BPO) services. What does that mean? 

When I think of clinical and financial analytics, I think of the intersection of clinical care (measurement and identification of risks and opportunities that lead to targeted interventions) and financial performance, and how those two things relate to one another either in fee-for-service or value-based arrangements. From my perspective, the study answers this question: What are the preeminent organizations who have deep healthcare domain expertise, deep technology expertise to be able to understand and manipulate high-volume, high-velocity, high-variability data sets, and the analytic chops to point you to the next action to take to create positive and sustained financial uplift that relates to improved clinical outcomes?

As the head of Verscend’s product and strategy team, what excites you the most about this report? 

It tells me that there are very few organizations like ours in healthcare that are able to bring together the technology, analytics, and expertise in an easy-to-use fashion, managing programs on behalf of or alongside payer and other at-risk organizations. We sit at the nexus of dollar flows for the different programs that generate revenue or help contain costs for risk-bearing organizations, and we thrive on managing big data in a way that yields very real financial return for our clients. And along the way, we also point them toward clinical improvement opportunities. We’ve been doing this at the highest level for a very long time, and we were excited to see third-party validation and recognition of this.

When Verscend was recognized as “Best in KLAS” in 2017 for payer quality analytics and reporting, it was a very powerful statement about what matters most to us as an organization: analytics, data, and service at the intersection of financial performance and corollary clinical outcomes. I don’t think it’s an accident or a coincidence that we’re starting to see more industry recognition. We’ve been leading the way in a lot of these areas, and I think it’s showing. 

Verscend has now been a standalone company for about a year-and-a-half, following our separation from Verisk Analytics in 2016. What do you think has been the impact of that transition? 

We’re a more focused company and we’re less concerned about some of the distractions that come with being part of a larger conglomerate that works across multiple verticals and markets. We’re able to put investment more directly into the things that matter the most to our customers. As a standalone company, we have a dedicated executive team, board, and owner all focused on a singular mission: creating sustained financial uplift for at-risk organizations. It’s in our DNA. In the past, we didn’t have that same level of focus, purpose, and vertical and horizontal alignment across all stakeholders the way we do today.  

What do you think of the mix of vendors that IDC MarketScape examined in its report? 

What surprised me about the IDC MarketScape report was that very few of our direct competitors were on the list. I take it to mean that while we have some strong competitors, they tend to be reasonably siloed into a specific area, whereas Verscend has a broader mandate. Where healthcare organizations have very substantial financial and clinical analytic problems that affect their bottom line, we help find the answers. Most of our direct competitors aren’t able to do that across a client’s book of business, either due to lack of scale or product breadth or expertise. 

What are the major areas of focus for Verscend in the next few years? 

We are hyper-focused on creating value for at-risk organizations in the healthcare space. It’s what we do. We’re very good at helping customers identify where there is real financial return to be gained, not only for their own betterment but for that of the broader healthcare system. 

As we think about the years ahead, we will focus on several areas that are highly differentiated, very challenging to deliver on, and very meaningful to our customers: 

1. Insight-led visualization: Helping customers quickly identify the trends they should pay attention to and the next best action to achieve results is at the core of a user experience that’s engaging and intuitive, allowing clients to bring in whatever stakeholders they need to find answers. Healthcare tends to lag behind other industries in this area, but the opportunity is immense.
2. Integrated data and analytics that create exponential value: One of Verscend’s differentiators is that we work across so many of the high-value programs in which our customers are engaged. By touching all of those data points and running them through our proprietary analytics, we can help organizations balance the levers in their organization to know which ones to pull, how hard, and how fast. Very few organizations are able to do that because they don’t draw on a broad enough set of data and analytics—and they don’t work with a breadth of customers—that enables them to speak with confidence about industry best practices.
3. A true 360-degree view of member and provider behaviors and experiences: A number of organizations can show some of a member’s experience or some of a provider’s experience, but very few have access to enough data and perform enough analytic transformation with the data to really lay out for you the member’s or provider’s complete experience, the attributes of those individuals, what’s likely to happen in the future based on what we know about them today. Our ability to create aggregate meaning from these disparate, singular experiences is very differentiated and meaningful. It’s yet another way we help our customers answer the questions: Where are the problems? Who should I work with? How do I solve these?

Verscend's consulting services help healthcare organizations make data-driven decisions to more effectively manage clinical and financial outcomes. Learn more about the expert advice and analytic guidance that we have to offer.

¹ U.S. Healthcare Clinical and Financial Analytic BPO Services 2017 Vendor Assessment (Doc # US43176217, December 2017).