UnitedHealth to Merge Change Healthcare With OptumInsight

In a deal valued at approximately $13 billion, UnitedHealth Group has agreed to purchase healthcare technology company Change Healthcare in order to  combine it with UnitedHealth’s OptumInsight analytics group.

UnitedHealth (NYSE: UNH) said Optum and Nashville-based Change Healthcare (NASDAQ: CHNG) complement each other well. Change Healthcare brings key technologies, connections and advanced clinical decision, administrative and financial support capabilities, enabling better workflow and transactional connectivity across the healthcare system. Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Optum brings analytics, comprehensive clinical expertise, innovative technologies and experience in improving operational and clinical performance.

“This opportunity is about advancing connectivity and accelerating innovations and efficiencies essential to a simpler, more intelligent and adaptive health system. We share with Optum a common mission and values and importantly, a sense of urgency to provide our customers and those they serve with the more robust capacities this union makes possible,” said Neil de Crescenzo, president and CEO of Change Healthcare, in a statement. Upon the deal’s closing, he will serve as OptumInsight’s chief executive officer, leading the combined organization.

A Bloomberg news report noted that although OptumInsight is the smallest business unit in the Optum family by revenue, it has the highest operating margins of the company’s reported segments, exceeding 20 percent in each of the last three full years.

Change Healthcare, founded in 2005, reported $3.3 billion in revenue in 2020. In 2016 McKesson Corp and Change Healthcare Holdings combined Change with a majority of McKesson’s IT unit. The company went public in June 2019.

Change is Nashville’s largest healthcare IT company, with more than 870 local employees, according to the Nashville Business Journal. The company operates more than 120 locations around the world.