As seen on businesswire
Deacon Health Launches to Bring Tech-Enabled Care Coordination Services to Specialty Care
Care Navigation Technology Enables More than 13.5% in Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) Reduction
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – April 2, 2025 – Deacon Health, Inc., a specialty care management provider, today announced the public launch of its specialty care management platform supportive to polychronic patients. Deacon Health is powered by a technology that it acquired through an asset purchase that drives over 13.5% in MLR reduction.
The company is also announcing a seed funding round with $7 million in closed and committed capital from Herb Fritch, founder and former CEO of HealthSpring; Larry Cash, former President and CFO of Community Health Systems; and David Vandewater, founder and former CEO of Ardent Health Services; among other parties.
“My commitment to quality healthcare started almost 30 years ago when my mom died suddenly after not receiving the necessary quality care. This made it clear to me just how disjointed our healthcare system was. Significant progress has been made toward a connected healthcare system, but there are still plenty of opportunities for advancement in a way that improves outcomes while reducing costs,” said Kyle Cooksey, President and CEO at Deacon Health. “I’m proud to take the helm at Deacon Health to help providers better coordinate and control cost.”
Deacon Health partners with hospitals, accountable care organizations (ACOs), management services organizations (MSO), and payers to help their specialty surgeons better navigate care before and after surgery. Deacon Health also provides coordination of care focused on a conservative approach that seeks non-surgical care pathways when medically appropriate. Using evidence-based care plans and high-touch physician coordination, Deacon Health prioritizes a patient-centered model to ensure the patient has the best possible journey. Deacon Health connects patients with the right care and the right provider at the right time on that journey, ensuring positive patient outcomes while reducing unnecessary visits and costs.
“Today’s healthcare providers face a challenging shift in pay models, which takes away from their primary focus – providing quality care for their patients,” said Fritch. “Deacon Health’s underlying technology is proven to improve patient outcomes and cost efficiency resulting in savings for providers and payers alike. I’m proud to support this innovative company with such a meaningful impact on our healthcare system.”
As evidenced by the upcoming launch of the Transforming Episode Accountability Model (TEAM) on January 1, 2026, the healthcare industry continues to evolve from the traditional fee-for-service model to a value-based-care (VBC) model, impacting over 700 hospitals in the 188 core-based statistical areas (CBSAs) that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has selected for mandatory participation. Given this growing adoption of VBC, it is more crucial than ever for healthcare organizations to improve patient outcomes and satisfaction while reducing costs. Patients in VBC arrangements experienced 32.1% fewer inpatient hospital admissions and 11.6% fewer emergency department (ED) visits in 2023, according to a Humana report.
“For the past three years, the cost of healthcare has increased by more than 5% each year. Given the complexities of our healthcare system, providers and payers face an especially challenging situation – controlling healthcare costs while continuing to provide quality care,” said Cash. “With extensive experience and expertise alongside its proven technology, Deacon Health is well positioned to partner with healthcare organizations to successfully participate in value-based care, improve quality, and control cost.”
“TEAM is just another step in the ongoing shift toward value-based care models, but it marks an important milestone for the industry – value-based care is the future of healthcare,” said Vandewater.
“I’m proud to invest in Deacon Health as they address an important issue for organizations in value-based care models by providing the services necessary to improve care coordination for better outcomes without increasing costs.”
About Deacon Health
Deacon Health is a coordinated care solution provider for specialty care patient populations with a focus on polychronic specialty care. The company minimizes total cost of care while improving outcomes through precise, evidence-based care delivered through clinician-driven care and utilization management. Built on a proven, patented technology foundation that has a demonstrated ability to improve both patient outcomes and cost efficiency, Deacon Health is transforming the coordination, delivery, and connectivity of polychronic specialty care across the healthcare ecosystem. For more information, visit https://deaconhealth.com/.
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As seen on the Nashville Business Journal
Health-tech company Deacon Health launches with titan health care backers
Nashville has a new health-tech startup, backed by local health care titans.
Kyle Cooksey, who spent four years at one of the nation’s fastest growing companies, Monogram Health, on Tuesday launched his company, Deacon Health, a technology-based specialty care management provider.
Deacon Health, which also launched a platform that supports patients with multiple chronic diseases, is entering the community with $7 million in seed funding. The funding comes from Herb Fritch, founder and former CEO of HealthSpring; Larry Cash, former president and chief financial officer of Community Health Systems (NYSE:CYH); David Vandewater, founder and former CEO of ArdentHealth Services; and other parties.
“This is my first position of leadership as a CEO, so I have held off for a very long time to leverage my relationships,” Cooksey told the Business Journal. “I think both through decades of trust and my proven ability through Monogram and my leadership position there, everyone just saw the right person in the right leadership at the right time to really get behind and support.”
Deacon Health is now a player in the value-based care space, an area of health care that has been buzzing in recent years, and is “the future of health care,” according to Vandewater. The company has been built up over the past couple of months with the help of Cooksey’s investors, who helped craft the right business model after the original owners of the technology, Nashville-based Episode Solutions, began winding down their operations.
“Today’s health care providers face a challenging shift in pay models, which takes away from their primary focus – providing quality care for their patients,” said Fritch in the release. “Deacon Health’s underlying technology is proven to improve patient outcomes and cost efficiency resulting in savings for providers and payers alike”
The company — which has 40 employees, 32 of which came over from Episode Solutions — partners with hospitals, accountable care organizations, management services organizations and payers to help specialty surgeons navigate care before and after surgery. The company also works on care through non-surgical pathways when it’s appropriate. The goal is to provide patients with the right care, provider and journey so they have positive outcomes while reducing unnecessary visits and costs.
“When you think about how this is different from Monogram or CareBridge, I would say that we’re specially focused on the [muscular and skeletal] population within a supporting polychronic model of care for those comorbidities,” Cooksey said.
Deacon Health is powered by technology it acquired from Episode Solutions, where Cooksey spent roughly seven months as president and four months as CEO. Episode Solutions still exists in a winding-down capacity, according to Cooksey who transitioned from Episode to Deacon on Feb. 1.
“Their business model was broken, and they took on too much debt. And so, the company went through an Article 9 UCC process, and our senior creditor decided to support the future of the business, but in a way that was not laden with way too much debt,” Cooksey said. “We were successful navigating through that process and then launched Deacon Health as the new debt-free, well-capitalized, proven platform.”
Cooksey purchased the technology after Episode’s senior lender acquired it through public auction and gave it to Deacon Health for an equity ownership position in the company. The technology, which works with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, lowers the cost of care by 13.5%.
“There’s a lot of waste in that post discharge world, and we historically have been able to reduce that,” Cooksey said. “We believe that that number will increase because as payers focus on conservative pathways, avoiding surgery when unnecessary, then we will see that number rise even more.”
Over the past three years, the cost of health care has increased by more than 5% each year, according to Cash.
“Given the complexities of our health care system, providers and payers face an especially challenging situation – controlling health care costs while continuing to provide quality care,” said Cash in a press release. “With extensive experience and expertise alongside its proven technology, Deacon Health is well positioned to partner with health care organizations to successfully participate in value-based care, improve quality and control cost.”
The $7 million in funding will be used as runway to get the company going while it raises its next round of funding, according to Cooksey. The company currently has 18 contracts across its four key pillars of businesses teed up for completion in the next three months.