Health IT · Quality measurement
Able Health
A Y Combinator company that turned Medicare’s quality reporting rules into software for medical groups. Health Catalyst bought it in February 2020. The measures engine still ships, under a new name.
A chronic condition, and a rule change
Steve Daniels was in his mid twenties when a chronic condition put him in front of dozens of clinicians and cut his diet and travel to nothing. The medical system did not have much for him. What caught his attention was a policy experiment: new payment arrangements that paid physicians more when their patients got healthier.
“What if doctors earned more for making their patients healthier?” he wrote later, describing the question the company was built around. “I dove headfirst into making healthcare payments work for patients like me.”
In 2015 he and Rachel Katz incorporated Able Health in Delaware and opened an office on Folsom Street in San Francisco. The company went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2016 batch and demoed that March.
Fifteen hours a week
The timing was not an accident. The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 set up the Merit-based Incentive Payment System, which scores clinicians on quality and moves their Medicare payments up or down. Every group with Medicare volume had to pick measures, calculate them from its own records, and file them through an approved registry. The cost had already been counted: research published in Health Affairs in March 2016 put the burden of quality measurement at 15.1 hours per provider per week, roughly $15.4 billion a year across the US health system. More than 2,000 distinct measures were in use, and most groups were meeting them with spreadsheets, chart chasing and faxes.
Able Health’s pitch was to pull claims and electronic health record data into one place, compute the measures nightly instead of once a year, and file them. The early product page framed it as money rather than compliance: PQRS, MIPS and Medicare ACOs on one side, risk adjusted capitation for Medicare Advantage on the other.
Two Brown graduates and an eight person culture guide
Katz came out of McKinsey and the World Economic Forum. She also, according to the company’s own team page, “studied China’s freight industry by hitchhiking 6,000 miles with truckers” before she got to any of that. Daniels had “previously led design at IBM for Watson clinical decision support and population health management” and had founded three social enterprises. Both hold BAs from Brown.
They also hired a VP of engineering from Dabo Health and a VP of quality with an MPH from Emory. At eight employees they wrote a culture guide and published it on GitHub, where changes were proposed through pull requests.
“From day one, we’ve prided ourselves on being a bridge between Silicon Valley and Healthcare,” Daniels told a writer studying startup culture in 2016. A poster on the office wall read: “Move at reasonable speeds and don’t break things.”
Becoming a registry
The regulatory credential mattered more than the code. In June 2017 CMS named Able Health a Qualified Clinical Data Registry for the 2017 performance year, the designation that lets a vendor calculate and submit MIPS data on a clinician’s behalf. By that summer it supported “both QCDR and Qualified Registry submission, including all 271 MIPS measures” and was alpha testing the agency’s new submissions API. A year later the site settled on a firmer number: “Able Health supports all 249 MIPS registry measures.”
The product widened into HEDIS reporting, HCC risk coding, Medicare Advantage and managed Medicaid, then into a payer facing version that let health plans score provider networks. Distribution came through partners: MyMipsScore in July 2017, the Greenway Health marketplace in August 2018. The service promises were specific: a 48 hour guaranteed response, a two week implementation, a support team entirely in the United States.
Ten days in February
On February 10, 2020, Able Health filed a Form D for a Series Seed Preferred round: $3,876,832 sold to 34 accredited investors, first sale dated March 20, 2019. Three days later Health Catalyst signed an agreement to buy the company. The announcement came on February 18 and the deal closed on February 21.
Health Catalyst, a Salt Lake City analytics company that had gone public on Nasdaq seven months earlier, put the aggregate purchase price at $27 million plus an earnout capped at $5 million in stock. Trade coverage split, because the release itself carried no number: Healthcare IT News took $27 million from the 8-K, while Becker’s and Healthcare Innovation wrote that terms were not disclosed.
Katz stayed on as Senior Vice President for Able Health Product Solutions. The application was folded onto Health Catalyst’s data platform and now sells as MeasureAble. The registry kept the old name: in February 2024 the Able Health Registry was again approved by CMS as a Qualified Registry, for the 2024 performance year.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Acquisition agreement | Health Catalyst 8-K, agreement dated Feb 13, 2020: all equity interests in Able Health, Inc. “for an aggregate purchase price of $27 million, plus a potential earnout described below”, with 290,073 HCAT shares to be issued at closing. | Public record |
| Closing and accounting | Closed Feb 21, 2020. Consideration transferred $21.5 million: $15.2 million net cash, $3.3 million of stock, $3.0 million contingent. Goodwill $14.725 million; developed technology $7.5 million; customer relationships $600,000. | Public record |
| Headline versus accounts | The $27 million and the $21.5 million measure different things. Two trade outlets reported no disclosed terms at all. | Figures differ |
| Earnout outcome | Period ended Dec 31, 2020. “This Able Health earn-out contingent consideration liability was settled during the three months ended March 31, 2021.” The only contingent consideration settled that quarter was $1.009 million, against a $5.0 million cap. | Public record |
| CMS registry status | Qualified Clinical Data Registry for 2017. At the time of sale, “a Qualified Registry for data submission under the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS).” Approved again for the 2024 performance year. | Independent and company |
| Scale at exit | “Serving over 30,000 providers” in the acquisition release. Daniels later wrote the company “managed clinical quality and regulatory compliance for tens of thousands of clinicians and tens of millions of patients.” Unaudited. | Company-stated |
| Revenue | $0.4 million recognized between Feb 21 and Mar 31, 2020. The fiscal 2020 10-K declined a full year figure, calling it not significant. Deferred revenue assumed at closing: $762,000. | Public record |
| Named customers | Two appear in archived company material: Peninsula Orthopaedic Associates and Chinese Community Health Care Association IPA. | Thin record |
Read plainly: a small, capital efficient software company got a real regulatory credential, sold real subscriptions, and exited to a public buyer inside five years. The buyer’s numbers are the revealing part. Health Catalyst assigned $600,000 of the price to customer relationships and $14.7 million to goodwill, which says it bought a measures engine and the people who built it, not a locked in book of contracts. The earnout, tied to incremental billings in 2020, then settled at about a fifth of its cap.
What to watch
- Whether MeasureAble survives Health Catalyst’s product consolidation. Able Health, LLC was still a listed subsidiary in the Exhibit 21.1 filed in March 2026.
- Annual CMS Qualified Registry approvals, renewed each performance year, the clearest public signal that the registry still operates.
In their words
“What if doctors earned more for making their patients healthier?”
Steve Daniels, co-founder and president, on his own project page · Founder-stated
“From day one, we’ve prided ourselves on being a bridge between Silicon Valley and Healthcare.”
Steve Daniels, to Mollie West Duffy, 2016 · Interview
“Looking toward 2018, it will be critical that eligible clinicians and groups have one single best-in-class solution for succeeding in every aspect of MIPS”
Rachel Katz, CEO, MyMipsScore partnership release, July 2017 · Partner release
“We evaluated more than 40 companies for MIPS reporting. With Able Health the data work has become substantially less.”
Megan Davis, data analyst, Peninsula Orthopaedic Associates, on the Able Health website · Customer testimonial
“Of particular importance and excitement is the strong mission and cultural alignment with our respected colleagues at Able Health.”
Dan Burton, CEO of Health Catalyst, acquisition release, February 2020 · Acquirer release
“The combined Health Catalyst and Able Health solution will further reduce the administrative burden of quality reporting and allow care teams to focus on patient care, a key to making value-based care work for providers and patients.”
Rachel Katz, CEO of Able Health, acquisition release, February 2020 · Acquirer release
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D, Able Health Inc., CIK 0001644097
- Public recordHealth Catalyst 8-K, Item 3.02, Able Health acquisition agreement
- Public recordHealth Catalyst 10-Q, Q1 2020, Note 2
- Public recordHealth Catalyst 10-Q, Q1 2021, earnout settlement
- Public recordHealth Catalyst Exhibit 21.1, list of subsidiaries, fiscal 2025
- IndependentHealth Catalyst acquires Able Health for $27 million
- IndependentHealth Catalyst to purchase San Francisco-based Able Health
- IndependentHealth Catalyst acquires quality-tracking software company
- InterviewHow startup Able Health developed a culture guide
- IndependentAble Health company profile, batch W16
- IndependentAble Health profiles: founders, investors, deal history
- CompanyHealth Catalyst announces agreement to acquire Able Health
- CompanyHealth Catalyst launches quality measures application
- CompanyAble Health Registry receives CMS Qualified Registry approval, 2024
- CompanyMeasureAble product page
- PartnerMyMipsScore partnership with Able Health
- CompanyAble Health site: company, product, registry, HEDIS, payer pages
- FounderAble Health project write-up
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
