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Gov Tech Company Acivilate Expands App to Health Care

The startup has traditionally served the process of re-integrating the incarcerated into society. Now it’s jumping into health care with an initiative in Arizona, and hoping to sell to state Medicaid agencies.

Acivilate, a startup that makes an application to help manage the re-entry process for people returning to society from incarceration, is expanding into health care with an eye toward serving state Medicaid agencies.

The company recently announced a partnership with Golden Health Initiative and others in Arizona, called the Healthy Communities Collaborative, with a special emphasis on diabetes. Starting with Commonwealth Primary Care ACO in Tempe, physicians, patients and other care providers will begin using Acivilate’s Pokket app to coordinate care.

The app is built as a kind of central hub where a network of people in different organizations who are responsible for the same person can connect. In the company’s traditional role, that would mean that a parolee could easily communicate, schedule appointments and file documents with their parole officer, along with agencies that deal with housing, transportation, employment and other concerns.

In the health context, the idea is to make it easier to monitor people who, for example, have a diabetic episode and put them into a continuous care program to avoid more episodes in the future.

The app was designed not to store information on mobile devices; users log in through a Web browser and all data is stored elsewhere for privacy and security concerns. The app lets users upload and store documents, then share them selectively with whoever needs to see them.

The initiative will also work with VitalTech, a remote patient monitoring solution, as well as the diabetes management app Diasyst.

“The Pokket collaborative care platform makes it easy and safe for all partners to work together to serve an individual,” said Acivilate CEO Louise Wasilewski in a statement. “Most importantly, Pokket empowers the patient by giving them access to their own plan, and helps them to stay on top of everything they need to do to be successful.”

As such, Pokket will necessarily have a wide array of users in different roles and organizations. But Acivilate is hoping to specifically sell services to state Medicaid agencies. The company is hoping for passage of a bill in the Arizona state Legislature, HB 2885, which would require that the state’s Medicaid agency “provide patients, community coaches and clinicians with a mobile-friendly application to empower the patients to develop self-management skills and habits regarding their own well-being, to improve clinical adherence and to improve communications with community service providers and health care professionals, at no charge to the patients or community service providers.”

The expansion into health is a natural one for Acivilate. Not only is health care part of the re-entry journey for the formerly incarcerated, it involves many of the same issues such as splintered care and privacy requirements.

Acivilate, launched in 2014 and based in Atlanta, is currently operating in at least six states.

Ben Miller is the associate editor of data and business for Government Technology. His reporting experience includes breaking news, business, community features and technical subjects. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, and lives in Sacramento, Calif.