Continuing the recent spate of acquisitions in the healthcare big data and analytics space, Inovalon, which provides cloud-based data analytics and intervention platforms, announced it would pay $140 million to acquire Avalere Health Inc., which offers advisory services and business intelligence solutions to the pharmaceutical industry as well as managed care companies and provider organizations.
In oher recent deals, Premier Inc. (NASDAQ: PINC) announced acquisitions of Healthcare Insights LLC and CECity Inc., while Health Catalyst purchased Health Care DataWorks.
Bowie, Md.-based Inovalon (Nasdaq: INOV), which went public and raised $600 million in February 2015, identifies gaps in care, quality, data integrity and financial performance for health plans, accountable care organizations, hospitals, physicians and pharma/life-sciences researchers. For example, it works with FamilyCare Health, a Medicaid managed care organization in Oregon, to provide solutions that improve patient disease insight, risk score accuracy, financial performance and regulatory data compliance within its Medicare Advantage and managed Medicaid membership populations.
The acquisition will allow Washington, D.C.-based Avalere to take advantage of Inovalon's data sets and technology to drive the use of sophisticated analytics in the pharma/life sciences market, the company noted. “This new partnership accelerates our ability to help you with data, by locking in unique and proprietary commercial data and proven business improvement methods,” Avalere said in a blog post explaining the deal to its customers.
According to the companies, the merger could provide pharmaceutical firms with access to the data and technology needed to track how certain drugs work for individual patients. Inovalon maintains one of the industry's largest independent data sets, representing more than 9.6 billion medical events from more than 123 million patient, including information ranging from prescriptions to lab tests to clinical diagnostics.
Avalere CEO Dan Mendelson will join the executive leadership team of Inovalon and will continue to lead the day-to-day operations of the core business of Avalere, which will operate as a subsidiary of Inovalon.
