Comcast-Backed Accolade Buys Health-Care Data Firm

Accolade, a start-up in the Philly suburbs that helps manage health care for big employers, has acquired a California firm with data on 13 billion medical claims coming from 250 million patients, the company said Thursday.

The data will be used by Accolade personal health-care assistants to help covered employees and family members make better choices on which doctors and medical facilities to use for health care, Accolade said.

Umair Khan, an Accolade vice president, said Wednesday that Accolade had acquired MD Insider Inc., based in Santa Monica, in mid-July, and that it would be used as a new product offering at Accolade, which employs about 1,000. About 500 employees of those employees are based in Plymouth Meeting.

MD Insider data does not identify the patients, but only the doctors, medical facilities, and procedures, Khan said. Its machine learning platform scours large data sets for actionable, personalized information. Terms were not disclosed.

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