ReBrand ReView: Alera Health

Mike Rhoades, CEO, Kye Gardner, Executive Director of Corporate Operations & Development, and D’Erikah Carr, Director of Marketing Operations & Development at Alera Health sat down to discuss their rebrand and how it’s been received by the market. 

About the brand: Alera Health, a national leader in population health management and integrated care, works closely with healthcare payers, providers, and community partners to operationalize and manage high-performance ONEcare networks delivering comprehensive, inclusive, and informed whole-person care designed to improve health outcomes and reduce costs. Alera Health has extensive operational expertise in developing clinically integrated networks, population health analytics, care coordination technologies, and clinical quality improvement programs. Each ONEcare network is augmented by the Care Optimization Suite which allows real-time communication, referrals, and mobile patient engagement. With over three million managed lives across the US, ONEcare networks share resources and evidence-based practice to divert over 250,000 unnecessary inpatient bed days annually while lowering 30-day readmission rates by over 50%. Visit their website here.

Before the rebrand

A little over nine years ago, the idea for the Blaze Advisors’ name (Alera Health’s original name) came from an advisor and trusted colleague. It was all about “blazing new trails and blazing new environments, which fit our then current goals as a boutique consulting firm, helping area medical and behavioral health providers improve population health,” Rhoades shared. 

The company took off, and since, we have “focused our energy on building behavioral health-focused Clinically Integrated Networks (CINs) and growing our footprint, team, and impact. In 2022, we secured our Series A investment and with that investment, we were able to pursue a rebrand opportunity with Wax Healthcare.” 

The hope going into the exercise was to “ensure that our name and brand represented our growth from an advisory firm into a true population health management entity,” Rhoades added. The brand had grown out of its shell, and was ready to find its new home and identity.

How the brand transformed

The Alera Health team didn’t want to just let up on the reins.  They wanted to be fully involved in the process and had insights to share and contribute. 

In terms of process, “we gathered our brand guidelines, logo files, and the landscape and reach of our offer/services, and how we showed up [in tradeshows and conferences]. We wanted to understand what we were doing, who we’re talking to, and how we were showing up to prospects in different venues online and in-person,” Gardner shared. 

“We had a lot of information gathered from our Wax Healthcare team, including names, taglines, mission statements, etc… and there was a ton of Googling. A lot of Googling together, as a tight-knit, highly ambitious group,” he added. “The idea was to make sure that there weren’t other Aleras out there who did similar things, if the brand was easy to remember and connect with, and to make sure we conducted proper due diligence.” 

One important part about the research process was understanding where the company lived within the market, industry, and category. “There are other population health management companies that focus on different patient populations and we wanted to ensure we stood out as an expert in behavioral health and clinically integrated systems of behavioral healthcare.  More importantly, our providers and partners should feel proud of the “ONEcare” movement as a novel and innovative solution to manage health outcomes and cost.  We analyzed similar organizations and worked closely with Wax Healthcare to ensure our brand reflected our distinct offering and solution,” Rhoades shared. 

Responding to new market signals

Every rebrand has to start with the end goal in mind: the customer. For Alera Health, that meant understanding providers better, but also ushering in a new type of customer with appropriate messaging. 

“We have gone from provider-focused (think: medical, health systems, and behavioral health providers) to payer and provider-focused. Not only are we marketing to those different providers and health entities, but we are also looking to get our name out there with different managed care organizations, employers, and state/federal leadership,” Rhoades added. 

This audience expansion effort has also led Alera Health and the team to a new era of marketing that’s more focused on upstream efforts. “We are at a point where it's more about education and awareness as opposed to directly reaching out and offering services. We evolved from being in a place where we are out seeking folks, to now, where folks are seeking us out for our services, networks, or joining our different areas of collaboration,” shared Gardner.

Strategic positioning and messaging

The need to shift from “consultant” to “population health leader and player” was critical for Alera Health’s future success. 

“As far as our value proposition, we have grown into a full-service population health management organization with in-house network management, data acquisition/reporting, contracting (including actuarial), and technology services.  We provide each ONEcare network ‘soup to nuts’ support.,” Gardner added.

The Alera Health rebrand came at a time when population health management increasingly relies on AI augmented data, analytics, and reporting to inform risk stratification/segmentation, target registries, performance monitoring, and sentinel (health) event forecasting as a means of anticipating future health costs for proactive management.

Visual identity

Picking a new coat of paint along with a new logo and name for a brand is a pretty extensive process, and requires a great deal of care, consideration, and lobbying by committee. 

Here’s how the Alera team tackled it alongside Wax Healthcare:

1. Style: “We got a flavor for the style of logo and font(s) we wanted before going any further. Think about how adaptable each of those elements can be with the others.”
2. Structure: “Once we picked the overall structure of what we wanted, we started diving into shapes, more deeply into fonts, colors, and the comprehensive brand guidelines side of things. At this point, we were starting to think about primary and secondary colors, etc.” 

The old logo

The new logo

Font for thought: Alera Health uses Poppins and Roboto, but the font used in their logo is custom! The font (and its accents on the capital A and lowercase t) adds interesting appeal to the logo. The colors honor its old identity while cuing others into the future of population health management. 

Picking the colors can be a very particular process, as there may be existing biases because of the previous brand palette and industry stereotypes/patterns that emerge. 

“Looking at different healthcare systems, they rely on the usage of red, purple, or blue. We had a natural gravitation towards blue. Our blue as Blaze Advisors was a little bit more of a deep, or true blue. We knew that we wanted blue as part of our color palette, but we wanted to modernize it. This made us think about choosing colors and shades with a modern look, and while having staying power. We went with bright colors, including blue, orange, yellow, and magenta,” Gardner added. 

One of the important aspects about the rebrand, too, was what didn’t change. “Alera is who we are, ONECare is what we build and do: a way of being and how we brand the specific clinically-integrated networks.” ONECare was updated with the rebrand, however, the heart of what Alera Health does remains the same. 

See how these changes manifested on their website (above the fold section):

The colors mesh well with each other, and the orange adds a nice pop. The third call-out message being cut off a bit also signals to the reader that they should scroll down a bit, and make sure that they get the full picture before leaving the page.

How the new brand has been received

Alera Health rebranded in January of 2023, and with some time since the rebrand came out, the team was able to share some initial insights on how things have been.

“I'd say it's been received pretty well. We got a lot of compliments, especially when we first rebranded. You know, we showed up with new booth materials, new print materials, etc… It was received very well,” Gardner added. And from a performance and search standpoint, “Overall, our brand has kind of risen to the top, if you will. In terms of SEO, we are at the top of Google.” 

To learn more about Alera Health, check out their website: https://alerahealth.com/ 

Interested in seeing how a marketing partner can help you bring your health tech company’s rebrand or brand vision to life? Get in touch with Jenn today.