Invitae, a medical genetics company, has agreed to buy Ciitizen, a patient-centric consumer health tech company for approximately $325 million
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Ciitizen is working to build a platform to help patients collect, organize, store and share their medical records digitally. Invitae said the acquisition would enhance its platform by providing patients a centralized hub for their genomic and clinical information.
Invitae expects the addition of Ciitizen to empower the company to add a complementary patient service that streamlines the process of collecting and organizing health information from any source and uses machine learning to transform the unstructured (and largely untapped) health information to enable better care decisions, find clinical trials, and power research using real-world evidence. In addition, as the use of Invitae testing and the Ciitizen service expands, third-party access to consented genomic and other clinical data can be democratized to power a variety of applications that can enhance Invitae's business and growth strategy.
“We believe combining Ciitizen's state-of-the-art, transparent and patient-consented platform with our technologies and services will accelerate our evolution into a genome information company that informs healthcare throughout one's life,” said Sean George, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Invitae, in a statement. “This would give us the ability to engage patients, create an innovative patient-centered data ecosystem and deliver better outcomes for everyone. Invitae views the acquisition of Ciitizen as an important part of its strategy to be the industry leader across the genetic testing, software and health information technology spaces,".
"Ciitizen has already helped patients take ownership of their medical records to optimize therapy for themselves and contribute their data towards a variety of goals, including research on rare diseases," said Anil Sethi, CEO and founder of Ciitizen. "Patients leave a breadcrumb trail of records behind them, and we believe access to this real-world data is key to personalized therapeutics in the future,” said Anil Sethi, CEO and founder of Ciitizen, in a statement. “The combination of lifelong health history together with Invitae's world-class genetic and data services would enable a digital ecosystem of personalized services for each patient. Democratization of patient-consented data is expected to improve outcomes by providing access to third-parties for whom the patient has granted consent. Unlike many health data companies, we operate on the premise that it's the patient's data, not ours."
Invitae (NYSE: NVTA) said it is working to aggregate results from the world's genetic tests into a single, easy-to-use service that makes genetic information accessible to all who can benefit from it — with patient consent. Over the past five years, Invitae has completed 13 acquisitions. It has raised more than $1.4 billion since the beginning of 2021.
Healthcare Innovation recently wrote about how Rochester RHIO in New York is deploying a new platform from Ciitizen that allows HIEs to comply with patient-initiated requests for medical records. Ciitizen’s Cures Gateway will enable HIEs to deliver data to a personal health app selected by the patient, consistent with the 21st Century Cures Act Information Blocking Rule. With this solution, the company said, HIEs simplify the process of fulfilling requests without the need to establish patient portals or to hire additional staff or require patients to show up in person to verify their identity.
