Blue Shield investment accelerates higi strategy

CHICAGO — Higi on Wednesday announced an investment from BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners and the acquisition of EveryMove, a cloud-based engagement application. The new investment and acquisition accelerates higi's strategy to create expand its reach in managing consumer health through the collection and workflow integration of ambient health and lifestyle data.



As part of the investment Higi has acquired EveryMove, a pioneer in consumer health engagement that delivers incentives to health plan members to reduce costs and improve outcomes.  "This investment, along with the integration of EveryMove, further extends higi's leadership in enabling population health and our ability to help our payer, provider, retail and brand customers to drive behavior change, cost savings and improved health," noted Jeff Bennett, higi CEO.



EveryMove's proprietary technology platform, Tandem, is an analytics driven automation platform designed to target and motivate the right actions among the right members to meet healthcare sponsors' near term business goals specific to care management, utilization, quality, prevention and coding.



The investment by the BlueCross BlueShield Venture Fund validates the importance of a complete consumer data profile to drive successful engagement in areas like population health, quality and prevention. "Higi is the only network we have seen that has demonstrated an ability to integrate into the normal workflow of the consumer, whether at the retailer, the pharmacy or on their mobile phone," stated Anna Haghgooie of Sandbox Industries, which provides investment management services to the BlueCross BlueShield Venture Fund.



BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners is a corporate venture fund licensed by the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, an association of independent Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies. The fund invests in promising emerging companies of strategic relevance to Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans.



Higi collects and secures data today on behalf of more than 36 million unique users at its nearly 11,000 retail stations and through integrations with 80 connected health devices, wearables and apps. Through its secure, HIPAA-compliant data collection and engagement and workflow integration tools, customers leverage that lifestyle data to drive more targeted engagement.