Outcome Health

On September 26, 2017, Rishi Shah and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced Outcome Tower, a 392,000-square-foot headquarters for Shah's company at 515 North State Street. "Outcome Health is doubling down on Chicago, and our new global headquarters gives us room to add 2,000 employees by 2022," Shah said in the company's release.

Sixteen days later The Wall Street Journal reported that some Outcome employees had provided inflated data on how well its ads performed and created documents that inaccurately verified that ads had run on certain doctors' screens, according to former employees and documents.

Shah founded the company in 2006 as ContextMedia, putting screens in doctors' offices and selling the advertising on them to drug companies; Shradha Agarwal joined in 2008. It grew from 20 people to more than 500, renamed itself Outcome Health in January 2017, and that May raised $500 million at a $5 billion pre-money valuation from investors including Goldman Sachs and Alphabet's CapitalG.

A federal appeals court later summarized the trial evidence. Outcome "told clients it had more screens than it did," under-delivered the ads while billing for full service, and hid the shortfalls, which the company called "deltas," by manipulating the data used in campaign performance studies. Misstated financial statements helped it secure $485 million in loans in 2016 and more than $487 million from equity investors in 2017.

From that money, Outcome paid a $225 million dividend to an entity controlled by Shah and Agarwal. In a 2019 non-prosecution agreement the company admitted overbilling clients by more than $6 million in 2015 and more than $25 million in 2016.

Investors sued in November 2017, and the founders settled in January 2018, giving up control. Shah, Agarwal and former chief operating and financial officer Brad Purdy were indicted in November 2019. On April 11, 2023, a jury convicted all three, Shah on 19 of 22 counts.

The fraud was "not a single mistake or out-of-character impulsive moment," Judge Thomas Durkin told Shah in June 2024, sentencing him to 90 months and ordering him to forfeit $55 million. "A lot of this I believe was driven by greed," he said. "To anyone who's listening, faking is fraud." The appeals court records Agarwal's sentence as one day plus three years of supervised release; the Chicago Tribune reported it as three years of confinement at a halfway house. Purdy got 27 months.

PatientPoint combined with Outcome in March 2021 on undisclosed terms. The appeals court affirmed Shah's and Agarwal's convictions on August 6, 2026. "Outcome still operates today," it noted, "rebranded as PatientPoint."

Sources for this story