Deerwalk made the health plan’s messy numbers useful

A health plan can tell you what it spent without telling you very much about why. That distinction is where Deerwalk found its business. The medical claims sit in one system. Pharmacy records arrive from another. Eligibility determines who actually belonged in the calculation. An insurance contract adds its own qualifications. Put a handsome chart on top of that jumble and you may simply have made confusion presentable.

The bill arrives before the explanation

Consider the questions documented by HealthEZ, a third-party administrator that completed its Deerwalk implementation in 2020. Which emergency-room visits might have been avoided? Where could a procedure have taken place at a less expensive site? Where might a generic medicine have replaced a brand-name drug? These are recognizably human questions, although the answers begin in decidedly inhuman files.

HealthEZ described Deerwalk as a way to examine those opportunities at each reporting period. The purpose was practical: help prioritize member education and inform changes to plan design. A benefits manager could move from a total-spending figure to a specific area worth investigating. The report supplied a lead. Someone still had to decide what to do with it.

That last step matters. A flagged opportunity is not a booked saving. Nor does an avoidable-use category settle an individual patient’s circumstances. The useful interpretation is narrower: the software helps an organization locate patterns, ask better questions and direct its attention. Healthcare arithmetic acquires value when someone can act on it responsibly.

Two views of the same expensive problem

Deerwalk’s product design acknowledged something that software often forgets: everyone in a meeting does not need the same amount of detail. Plan Analytics supplied the deeper reporting tools. Executive Analytics offered a simpler, higher-level view. The product sheet explicitly described the latter as leaving out some of the former’s ad-hoc query and drill-down functionality.

“Both applications work from a single source of truth”Deerwalk Executive Analytics product sheet

For a chief financial officer or an HR executive, financial trends, utilization and benchmarks might be the useful opening. An analyst investigating those trends needed more room to interrogate the records. A common data foundation made those two views compatible. Fewer controls could be a considered design choice rather than a deficiency.

HealthEZ reported that Plan Analytics contained more than 70 standard reports. Its examples included employee-versus-dependent costs, chronic-condition prevalence, emergency-room analysis, provider cost and quality measures, and predictive risk scoring using Milliman’s MARA model. It also described historical comparisons and integration with pharmacy-benefit-manager data. The appeal was breadth within a defined job: understanding a health plan.

The surrounding suite extended beyond analysis. Care Manager supported administration of care, disease, utilization management and wellness programs. Health Portal delivered individual information, alerts and goals to members. Those products put Deerwalk in the population-health software market, where the task includes organizing responses to what the data reveals.

The contract refuses to be average

In January 2020, Deerwalk added specific and aggregate stop-loss reporting to Plan Analytics. Stop-loss protection concerns exposure to claims above contractual thresholds. The release allowed users to enter a group’s contract parameters, then combine them with medical and pharmacy claims and eligibility data.

The telling details were the exceptions: members with special contract treatment, run-in and run-out provisions, and renewals occurring outside January. A generic annual total would be insufficient. The report had to respect the contract that governed the group. Deerwalk’s answer was a data-entry portal and reports built around those terms.

The company described the older workflow as gathering information from carriers, claims databases and multiple reporting tools, then compiling and reconciling it with the contract. Its new reporting brought those pieces together. This is the kind of product improvement that rarely makes a dramatic demonstration. It does, however, address work someone otherwise has to perform repeatedly.

Ed Hausman, then vice president of product, connected the release to experience with more than 45 third-party administrators, alongside brokers and stop-loss organizations. The lesson is visible in the feature itself: customers’ awkward contractual details belonged inside the product. Real life had been politely declining to fit the default settings.

Kathmandu is part of the product story

Deerwalk paired a Massachusetts base with a technology campus in Kathmandu. Founder Rudra Pandey had already worked in healthcare analytics through D2Hawkeye. Jeff Gasser, a co-founder and former president of Deerwalk, brought healthcare business experience. Company-issued accounts date Deerwalk’s founding to 2010.

The geography gave the company a distinctive operating story, but geography alone does not explain why a customer chooses analytics software. First Choice Health’s August 2020 announcement provides a better clue. After a search and vetting process, it singled out Deerwalk’s understanding of its claims-system extracts and its attention to data integrity. Here was a buyer praising the plumbing.

That announcement reported more than 115 clients and data representing over nine million members, across more than 345 suppliers and 35-plus data types. These figures describe the company at that moment. They suggest why knowing how to handle incoming records was more than a supporting skill.

The wider Deerwalk community also linked work and education. A June 2015 account described employees and Deerwalk Institute of Technology students joining earthquake-relief survey work in Dhading. Today, Deerwalk Group presents a family of educational institutions in Nepal. These connections belong in the history; they do not make the schools and the acquired healthcare company interchangeable.

A buyer for the missing piece

Cedar Gate’s December 2020 acquisition placed Deerwalk inside a broader healthcare technology business. The stated fit was specific: data aggregation, analytics and greater access to self-insured employers. Cedar Gate was building tools for organizations managing healthcare risk, including payment and administrative capabilities. Deerwalk brought employer-facing analysis to that collection.

There is a useful distinction between a platform that shows where money went and systems that administer the arrangements governing how money moves. Cedar Gate’s acquisition strategy connected those jobs. Deerwalk’s place in the deal helps explain its market position more clearly than a catalogue of fashionable technology terms.

The relationship with administrators continued after the acquisition. In May 2022, Prairie States announced a Deerwalk partnership for its self-funded employer customers and brokers. It described executive dashboards, benchmarks and reporting that could range from broad summaries to granular examination. The point was to match the information package to the customer’s preference.

Copy the question, then build the report

Deerwalk’s business model was B2B healthcare SaaS. Buyers included health plans, employers and the administrators and advisers serving them. Comparable employer-analytics providers such as Springbuk address similar buyers. Deerwalk’s documented appeal rested on an integrated data foundation, different reporting depths and features shaped by healthcare contracts.

Cost depended on the route to the user. HealthEZ said in March 2020 that its clients received Deerwalk insights at no additional charge, with reports delivered monthly, quarterly or annually according to their needs. That was a bundled customer offering. It should not be read as a universal Deerwalk price.

The approach offers a practical lesson for other software teams: choose a question that somebody has to answer, understand the records needed to answer it, and accommodate the exceptions. Then give each audience the appropriate view. A senior executive and an analyst can share an answer without sharing an interface.

Its limits follow from the same logic. Incomplete records weaken comparisons. Historical patterns require interpretation. An organization needs the staff, authority and follow-through to translate a report into a change. Buying visibility does not automatically buy an outcome. Deerwalk’s enduring interest lies in the less glamorous accomplishment: making a complicated decision possible to examine.