Walgreens partners with primary care tech startup Pearl Health

Pearl Health, a health tech startup that helps primary care providers get paid for the quality of care they provide, just inked a partnership with Walgreens.

The partnership aims to help the pharmacy giant expand its reach beyond where it has primary care offices and pitch itself to health systems as a way to get paid to help keep patients healthier. That’ll happen by identifying people who might need more attention with New York-based Pearl’s software, then connecting them to Walgreens’ services to help them track medications, or get care at home through Walgreens’ recent CareCentrix acquisition.

“It’s the technology that they bring, plus the Walgreens service suite that makes this so powerful,” Steve Wogen, chief growth officer for Walgreens’ healthcare business, told Endpoints News. 

Steve Wogen

The new partnership comes as Walgreens’ healthcare services strategy is under scrutiny from investors. At the end of August, CEO Rosalind Brewer departed, and the stock $WBA is down more than 40% since the start of the year. Walgreens has traditionally started by setting up partnerships, then making more equity investments, like it did betting big on primary care provider VillageMD and investing in CareCentrix, which it later acquired fully.

“I would anticipate that over time you’d see us continue to take baby steps towards our strategy and potentially some large leaps,” Wogen said. “For now, partnership is a great way to get started.”

Pearl Health has raised more than $100 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, AlleyCorp and Viking Global Investors for its approach to working with primary care providers on value-based care arrangements.

Pearl CEO Mike Kopko said the hope is to show that Walgreens and Pearl can together take on more of the risk of caring for patients on behalf of large health systems, given Walgreens’ financial position.

“We’re gonna see a lot more conversations of big organizations considering value now, with the options that are out in the market,” Kopko said, referring to health systems.

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