Press Release

Intelligent Health Marketplace Acquires Organization to Improve Transparency and Drive Affordability

Issued by MacroHealth

Aug. 1, 2025

MacroHealth Acquires ClearCost Health to Further Improve Healthcare Access, Cost and Quality

KIRKLAND, Wash. -- MacroHealth, a healthcare technology company offering an intelligent healthcare marketplace for payers and their vendor partners, today announced the acquisition of ClearCost Health, a leader in provider search and price transparency solutions. This acquisition will empower health plans, third party administrators (TPAs), employers, and their partners with enhanced tools for transparency in healthcare pricing and network optimization, ultimately aiming to lower care costs.

Serving over 3.5 million users on its platform, ClearCost Health provides payers, plan sponsors, and consumers with personalized insights into access, cost, and quality when choosing care. Historically, consumers have faced a fragmented experience when searching for providers and trying to understand actual costs. This complexity stems from the significant technical and data integration challenges payers face when trying to build such solutions on their own.

Unlike other provider search and transparency solutions, ClearCost Health offers a highly customizable solution that supports narrow networks, carve outs, direct provider contracting and more. Built with configurability and compliance at its core, ClearCost's tools integrate seamlessly into complex health plan environments.

By integrating ClearCost Health's transparent pricing tools, machine-readable file (MRF) analytics, and member-facing healthcare shopping solution, MacroHealth will enhance its Intelligent Health Market platform and support clients with:

• Enhanced Network Optimization: ClearCost Health's price transparency analytics will strengthen MacroHealth's optimization capabilities, helping health plans design tiered networks and select the most effective partners for their unique populations.
• Improving Member Experience: With ClearCost's intuitive healthcare shopping tool, members gain access to a single, unified provider directory and can easily identify high-value providers based on price and quality, eliminating the need to go to multiple provider directories for disjointed searches and enabling smarter care decisions.
• Maintaining Regulatory Compliance: ClearCost Health's tools support payers and plan sponsors in meeting transparency regulations by delivering accurate, real-time pricing data directly to members.

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, price transparency initiatives could reduce healthcare costs by 27% across 500 common shoppable services. With total national healthcare expenditures projected to reach $5.4 trillion in 2025, this underscores the critical role transparency solutions play in driving affordability across the U.S. healthcare system.

"Healthcare is at a tipping point. The cost of care is simply unsustainable," said Virgil Bretz, the co-founder and CEO of MacroHealth. "By combining our platform's market optimization and connectivity capabilities with ClearCost Health's transparency data and software, we empower enterprise payers with the insights and tools needed to significantly lower costs and improve access to quality care."

Payers working with MacroHealth have already achieved significant savings by optimizing their provider network connections. On average, health plans connected to MacroHealth save an incremental $312 per member per year off billed charges. With the addition of ClearCost Health's MRF analytics, that savings figure is expected to grow substantially. This enhanced capability enables payers to more accurately steer members to high-value providers and drive even greater financial returns across their total healthcare spend.

"Recognizing the urgent need for more affordable healthcare, ClearCost Health has always championed transparency. Joining MacroHealth is a natural evolution of our mission to bring clarity to healthcare," said Chris Santas, Co-Founder and CEO of ClearCost Health. "Together, we will enable payers to move beyond static insights toward dynamic, actionable decision-making, improving outcomes for the health plans and individuals they serve."

In June 2025, MacroHealth acquired Foundational Pharmacy Strategies to enable health plans, employers, and benefit advisors to identify opportunities to optimize their pharmacy and medical spend through one unified platform and turn insight into action through marketplace connections. Both acquisitions underscore MacroHealth's commitment to delivering measurable improvements in healthcare access, cost, and quality for everyone— now providing payers, plan sponsors, and consumers with personalized information at the critical moment of choosing care.

About ClearCost Health:

Founded in 2010, ClearCost Health is a healthcare technology company focused on price transparency, provider search, and consumer decision support. Its tools serve payers, employers, and members by delivering personalized insights into provider access, cost, and quality—supporting compliance with federal transparency regulations and improving the healthcare shopping experience.

About MacroHealth:

Trusted by leading healthcare Payers and enterprises, MacroHealth is modernizing the healthcare marketplace to measurably improve access, cost, and quality. MacroHealth's Intelligent Health Market-as-a-Service (IHMaaS) platform leverages data science and industry standard interoperability to enable Payers and Health Market Partners to optimize and connect their unique healthcare ecosystems. 

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