For more than two decades, we’ve watched our care model work.
We’ve seen it in the patients who walked in barely able to bend over and walked out a few visits later, back to their lives. We’ve seen it in the providers who built their careers around resolving pain rather than managing it. And we’ve seen it in the conversations with employers and health plans who came back year after year because the outcomes spoke for themselves.
When you live inside a model that works, conviction comes easy. The harder thing is proving it to someone who doesn’t.
That’s the gap we set out to close when we partnered with Optum Advisory.
Why We Needed to Step Outside of Airrosti
Internal data has a ceiling. No matter how clean the methodology, no matter how compelling the results, there’s a moment in every payer or employer conversation where someone politely points out the obvious: of course our numbers look good. They’re our numbers!
We’ve spent years navigating that ceiling. We’ve published research. We’ve shared outcomes data. We’ve leaned on independent work to make our case. At some point, we knew the next step had to be a fully independent analysis from a partner whose name carried weight in the rooms where MSK decisions actually get made.
We needed someone who would design the study without our input on the methodology, run the numbers without our hand on the scale, and report whatever they found.
Why Optum:
Optum Advisory is the consulting arm of one of the largest and most respected health services organizations in the country. Their actuaries and analysts work with the health plans, self-funded employers, and integrated health systems whose decisions shape the healthcare landscape. They speak the language of payer medical directors and CFOs because they’ve spent careers in those rooms.
When Optum puts their name on a finding, the people who decide which solutions make it into a network or a benefits package take it seriously. That’s exactly the bar we wanted to clear.
So we handed them the data and stepped back.
How They Built the Study
The hardest part of any outcomes study is proving that what happened can be attributed to the intervention rather than to the patients themselves.
If Airrosti patients turn out to be younger, healthier, or more engaged in their care than the average MSK patient, then any savings we show could just be a reflection of who chose Airrosti, not what Airrosti did for them. You have to control for that, or your findings don’t hold up to scrutiny.
Optum’s approach was propensity score matching, the gold-standard methodology for exactly this kind of question. In plain terms, they built a control group of non-Airrosti patients who looked nearly identical to Airrosti patients on paper. Same age range. Same gender. Same comorbidities. Similar prior healthcare spend. Same urban or rural setting. The only meaningful difference between the two groups was where they went for MSK care.
Then Optum tracked both groups for twelve months and counted every dollar.
A few markers of rigor worth noting: the study achieved an 81% match rate, which falls squarely within the range considered strong in outcomes research. The covariate balance plot confirmed that after matching, the two groups were statistically comparable across every key variable. And the results carried a p-value of less than 0.0001, meaning there is essentially no probability the findings occurred by chance.
This is the kind of methodology that holds up when an actuary asks hard questions.
The Findings and What They Represent for Us
The control group’s average allowed costs increased by $4,928 per member over the year following their MSK episode. The Airrosti group’s costs increased by $1,321.
The gap between those numbers is $3,607.
The savings held up under pressure too. When Optum narrowed the analysis to MSK-specific claims only, Airrosti patients still generated $2,329 less per member per year. Even under the most conservative read of the data, the advantage held.
For Airrosti, the Optum study is the kind of validation we’ve been working toward for a long time, delivered by a partner whose findings can stand up in any room.
We’ve always believed our model produces meaningfully different outcomes at meaningfully lower costs. The patients who’ve come through our clinics knew it. The providers who deliver the care knew it. The employers who renewed with us year after year knew it.
Now there’s independent, actuarially rigorous evidence that meets the standards of the people we’re asking to trust it.
