Health Catalyst Inc. (Nasdaq: HCAT) continues to broaden its portfolio of population health tools through acquisition and product development.
The Salt Lake City-based provider of data and analytics technology and services to healthcare organizations, has agreed to acquire healthfinch Inc., a Madison, Wis.-based company that provides an EHR solution called Charlie that helps automate physicians’ ability to close patient care gaps in real-time.
Before the healthfinch acquisition, Health Catalyst also purchased Able Health in February 2020 and rolled out its own Care Management Suite earlier this month. The company says the Care Management Suite features an end-to-end solution for the entire clinical care pathway, from identifying the patients mos likely to be impacted to implementing interventions and improving outcomes.
Within the Health Catalyst analytics application portfolio, healthfinch will be a new application suite category called EMR Embedded Insights and its refills, care gaps closure, and visit planning applications will continue to be available in their original configuration. The company also said the healthfinch technology would augment workflows across Health Catalyst’s product portfolio, with data and insights powered by Health Catalyst’s cloud-based Data Operating System, a healthcare-specific data platform that provides customers with a single comprehensive environment to integrate and organize data.
In 2018, Healthcare Innovation profiled healthfinch as one of our “Up-and-Coming” companies, noting that the company had been laser-focused for several years on making clinicians’ lives easier with its software that automates or re-routes routine tasks in their EHR work flow. For instance, its solution helps delegate prescription refill requests to staffers so the physician has more time to spend with patients.
In a 2018 interview, CEO Jonathan Baran identified two forces that have jump-started the company. Number one is that all sorts of routine tasks are piling up on physicians and staff, leading to high levels of burnout and negative consequences. “Health systems have really seen this problem and understand there has to be a better way to do this,” he says. Number two is a change in approach by the EHR vendors themselves. “When we started, it was a foreign concept to have an app store for the EHRs. None of them had one yet. But now we have seen widespread adoption of this model across all the major EHRs,” he says. “They now think about themselves as platforms and open marketplaces where people like us can build technology on top of APIs that allow us to integrate our technology into the workflow. That is a big piece. Without those two major forces—market awareness and enabling innovation by building on top of EHRs—this wouldn't be possible.”
Health Catalyst said healthfinch’s capabilities are already in demand from Health Catalyst customers and prospects across multiple product areas including quality measures, care management, population health, patient safety and others.
“This acquisition highlights Health Catalyst’s ability to integrate and scale software applications on top of our DOS platform,” said Health Catalyst CEO Dan Burton, in a statement. “The healthfinch technology will easily serve up actionable insights, derived from DOS and other Health Catalyst analytics applications into the EMR, at the point of care.”
Health Catalyst expects to fund the transaction using a mix of stock and cash. The parties expect the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, to close in the third quarter of 2020.
The publicly traded Health Catalyst's revenue grew 28 percent in the first quarter to reach $45 million, but it reported a quarterly loss of $17.5 million, compared to revenue of $35 million and a net loss of $13.7 million in the same quarter last year.
