Lessons from Jennifer Rabiner, CPO of Pearl Health, on building sticky products to enable value-based care
Jennifer Rabiner, Chief Product Officer of Pearl Health, shares her career journey and path to building sticky products to enable value-based care
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Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we’ll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and dive into building a digital health business from 0 to 1.
Today, we're excited to get to know Jennifer Rabiner. Jennifer is the Chief Product Officer of Pearl Health, a value-based primary care enabler
Founded in 2020, Pearl Health was incubated by AlleyCorp and has raised a total of $95M in funding from 8 investors, with the latest round led by Andreesen Horowitz and Viking Global Investors. Pearl now has over 100 employees and closed a $75M Series B in January of 2023.
Pearl Health is a provider enablement and value-based care technology company that helps primary care providers and healthcare organizations succeed in value-based care, starting with ACO REACH and, soon, MSSP and Medicare Advantage. Pearl does this by helping PCPs and their staff focus attention on high-risk patients and conditions, enabling practices with insights to programs deliver high quality, holistic care to patients at the right time. In 2024, Pearl is partnering with about 1,600 primary care providers, who collectively serve more than 80,000 patients, across the US in 43 states and Washington, D.C.
With over 20 years of experience in healthcare, Jennifer started her career at Triage Consulting Group. She then served as a consultant at Deloitte for 5 years and moved on to Takeda Oncology where she was an Associate Director in Market Access. She then spent six years at athenahealth where she served in a series of roles in product management, ultimately concluding as an Executive Director for product management.
After Athena, Jennifer moved onto a VP / Head of Product role at Hint Health and finally became the Chief Product Officer at Pearl Health in 2021. Jennifer holds a BA from University of California, Berkeley and an MHA from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In this episode, we learn how Pearl Health is trying to improve primary care provider workflows in value-based care, how Jennifer thinks about product management, and where Pearl Health is going next, with their partnerships with retail pharmacies.
We encourage you to listen to our audio recording where we dive deep into all of the following sections.
Career Background
Jennifer's career in healthcare began with a focus on public health studies, leading to a hospital consulting role at Triage Consulting, where she uncovered the complexities of healthcare payments.
Her expertise expanded through roles at Deloitte Consulting, where she specialized in revenue cycle management and EMR implementations, and later in biotech, focusing on oncology drug payment mechanisms, before moving into product management at AthenaHealth.
Jennifer's journey culminated at Pearl Health, where she leverages her diverse experiences to focus on value-based care and innovative payment models, contributing to the development of new healthcare solutions.
Consulting provided Jennifer with a rich learning environment, offering opportunities to specialize in areas like healthcare revenue cycle management. The diverse experiences and in-depth involvement in long-term projects not only honed her technical skills but also developed her core competencies, particularly in building trust and influencing change without direct authority.
Key Learnings about Product
Athena invested in a transition to more outcomes-based product management. This process emphasized a shift from traditional delivery methods to a new mindset of problem exploration and solution flexibility.
This shift to outcomes-based roadmaps and solution testing moved the focus from delivery to effectively addressing business issues, promoting team autonomy within set business goals to foster innovation and problem-solving.
Jennifer emphasizes the importance of aligning product strategy with the overall company strategy, understanding whether products are designed for internal use or external customers, and influencing the product development approach based on the company's focus on services or products.
At Pearl, Jennifer drives team collaboration across several functions that all support client success in value-based care: Product Management, Experience Design, Customer Success, and Performance Operations
Intro to Pearl Health
Pearl Health is at the forefront of shifting healthcare towards value-based care (VBC), focusing on proactive rather than reactive patient care. Through participation in new payment models, Pearl supports primary care physicians with technology and partnerships that integrate seamlessly into their workflows. Their platform identifies patients needing attention and guides care coordination, allowing doctors to concentrate on proactive patient care.
Provider Workflow
Pearl Health complements practice workflows with a platform that identifies patients needing proactive care outside scheduled visits, using an "urgency score" to prioritize patient needs and guide care coordination.
The platform also operates as a supportive "sidecar" to traditional EMRs, ensuring that relevant information from the Pearl platform can be integrated into the point of care.
Pearl Health’s Differentiator
Pearl Health differentiates itself by shaping its product development around simplifying user experiences for practice staff, focusing on actionable, patient-centric insights over complex data analysis.
The company's product structure is layered: foundational data and analytics for essential insights, advanced data science for predictive measures like the “urgency score”, and a user-centric top layer that translates complex data into practical suggestions for patient care, embodying Pearl's commitment to actionable, patient-centered solutions.
Actionable Data Insights
Pearl Health transforms patient data into actionable insights by developing signals for patients to ensure regular care team engagements, using a color-coded system to prioritize care actions for patients based on their health status.
To improve data timeliness and relevance, Pearl connects to CMS's Beneficiary Claims Data API for pre-adjudicated data, and admission, discharge, transfer feeds. Pearl plans to integrate additional data sources like, prescriptions, labs, and clinical data from EMRs, enriching the actionable insights for patient care.
"We want there to be movement, we want it to be action-oriented and not a static view... you can click on a hexagon, you can see why it's red, you can take that action, and then you can watch that hexagon kind of flip and move on the chart so that you can see that what you just did had an outcome."
Pearl Health's platform employs an "urgency score" to efficiently prioritize patient care, using color-coded statuses (red for immediate actions, pink for proactive tasks, and blues for informational alerts or no action needed) and behavioral design elements to encourage user engagement and accomplishment. The system is designed to minimize alert fatigue by focusing on critical tasks and continuously refining alerts to maintain relevance and effectiveness in patient care management.
"What we're building in the product is something that we call co-management view, where we're taking the same information, the same signals, but figuring out how we delegate and route some of those so that there can be co-management of the patient."
Walgreens partnership
The partnership between Pearl and Walgreens validates Pearl's approach to scalable primary care enablement, focusing on co-managing patient care with pharmacists to enhance care delivery.
This collaboration aims to create adaptable functionalities in Pearl's platform, leveraging pharmacists' expertise for support services like discharge management and medication reviews, centralizing the concept of co-management for more comprehensive patient care.
Industry Insights
Jennifer observes the evolution from some of the first VBC models like MSSP and Pioneer ACOs to newer approaches focusing on population-based risk and proactive payment models, moving away from the traditional fee-for-service systems.
She notes a trend towards simplifying quality management in VBC, with newer models like ACO REACH streamlining quality measures to reduce complexity, alongside a shift towards prospective and capitated payment models to address the limitations of fee-for-service structures. Jennifer is optimistic about the adaptive nature of entities like CMMI and commercial payers in making VBC more achievable for providers.
The ACO REACH program also introduced a health equity component aimed at reducing healthcare disparities, which Jennifer sees as an exciting development.
"REACH has been successful in... aligning the model rewards more directly towards patient outcomes, reducing the administrative burden and increasing incentives for accountable care organizations to engage with providers in underserved communities."
Despite its successes, the REACH program has faced some challenges with financial predictability for ACOs and participating providers. However, Jennifer remains optimistic about its future, viewing it as a large-scale hypothesis testing opportunity to refine and improve based on the program's evolving experiences.
Advice for Product Officers
Understand the Business: Highlights the importance for product leaders, like Chief Product Officers, to deeply understand their company's goals and priorities to guide effective decision-making in product development and resource distribution.
Practical Problem-Solving & Customer Insight: Suggests a practical approach to tackling challenges by identifying a starting point and emphasizes the importance of knowing customers well by engaging with them to understand their needs and challenges.
Strategic Focus & Problem Clarity: Advises on concentrating efforts at the intersection of business priorities and customer needs, often referred to as the "Jen Venn" at Pearl, and underscores the significance of accurately identifying the problem to avoid misallocating resources.
Learning from Mistakes: Reflects on a lesson from Athena where solving the wrong problem (workflow integration) instead of the true problem (data integration) between the need for data versus workflow integration led to some user confusion, illustrating the value of clear problem identification.
Interested in learning more about Pearl Health? Learn more on their website and LinkedIn.
Sponsor note: This is the Pear Healthcare Playbook podcast. This season is brought to you by Banc of California.