Upfront Healthcare was tremendously successful in 2022 by all objective measures, despite a challenging year across digital health. Upfront was able to double in size and revenue behind very strong products, finances and team.
Importantly, on behalf of our industry leading clients, Upfront engaged more than 11 million patients, guiding them to the care they need. But we are not resting on this achievement. To further our ability to reach millions more patients, and despite digital health funding being down more than 70%, Upfront closed an oversubscribed round of financing and acquired PatientBond, with its proprietary psychographic segmentation model, to enable superior personalization in patient engagement and activation.
This accelerated Upfront’s strategic vision to be the single enterprise engagement platform for healthcare that activates patients through market leading personalization across use cases. Upfront expanded its client portfolio among hospitals, health systems and medical groups and added a significant urgent care business via the PatientBond acquisition. Upfront now serves more than 4,000 provider locations, engaging, guiding and activating patients from their first interaction across the continuum of care. Furthermore, the move created scale at a time when the market is trending away from sub-scale point solutions and looking for proven, best in class, enterprise engagement solutions.
Upfront also unveiled new advanced product features focused on several key areas: deeper personalization, superior content and patient experience, interoperability and integration, and outcomes measurement. For example, we enhanced our flagship, personalized patient microsite offering with next generation intuitive functionality and elevated visual navigation. Purpose-built analytics dashboards track important leading indicators, provide insights for initiatives such as filling care gaps, referrals and no shows, and identify opportunities for process improvement. Upfront also launched enhanced integration with systems like Epic to greatly enhance these systems’ patient engagement capabilities in a frictionless approach.
Additional evidence for the strength of Upfront’s culture is that we moved up in standing among Modern Healthcare’s Best Places to Work in 2022, as well as Crain’s Chicago Business Best Places to Work. In fact, Upfront is so dedicated to employee satisfaction and fostering an impassioned workplace that improving our standing in the Best Places to work is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) measure for the company.
2023
We learned a lot in 2022 and as we look to 2023, Upfront is well positioned to continue our momentum and lead the market for patient engagement. A key observation is that the hospital & health system market is divided into two camps: One, those who let their EMR dictate their strategy; and two, those who view patient experience and retention as a focus for strategic differentiation and growth.
The reality is that patient engagement isn’t the delivery of a digital communication and anyone can send a text or email message to patients. However, “one size fits all” messaging on the same channels won’t achieve sufficient results across a patient population made up of individuals with unique motivations and communication preferences. Upfront has proven that highly personalized, omnichannel engagement transforms and differentiates the patient experience and provides significant value and ROI for providers looking to be strategic and grow. Those stakeholders simply “checking the box” on patient engagement may settle for basic EMR communications but set themselves up with a competitive disadvantage.
We are not satisfied despite our success. Real patient engagement begins with a deep, data-based understanding of patients and their motivations, priorities and communication preferences and ultimately activates behaviors that lead to better outcomes and patient loyalty. Effective and measurable better patient engagement is the missing link across the healthcare ecosystem. Thus, Upfront is broadening into new market segments such as Life Sciences and Payers in 2023, bolstered by initial successes in those verticals.
Our team is working diligently to bring an even more advanced platform to market in ’23 that moves the industry forward in delivering superior patient engagement across the continuum of care. A few of the advancements include:
- Deepened personalization analytics
- Elevated content powered by behavioral science
- Transformed business intelligence reporting to instantly measure outcomes
- More efficient integration and data processing
After a strong 2022, I am confident that 2023 will be Upfront’s best year yet.
