Telehealth provider American Well has agreed to acquire Avizia, a provider of telehealth services in hospital settings.
Boston-based American Well, which has built up a network to provide video-based doctor visits, said the acquisition would enhance the options it can offer to health systems and health plans, allowing customers to choose one comprehensive single platform solution for treating all of their patients across the continuum of care, from low- to high- acuity cases.
Founded in 2006, American Well has grown to offer services to 75 health systems and 55 health plans covering 147 million lives.
Founded in 2013 and spun out of Cisco, Reston, Va.-based Avizia uses Cisco’s TelePresence technology to enable HD, real-time video collaboration in hospitals amongst patients and professionals. Last year it acquired Carena, a Seattle-based virtual care provider.
Avizia’s solution, which serves more than 1,300 hospitals, includes telemedicine devices, workflow management software, store-and-forward capabilities with EHR integration and a line of peripherals, such as digital stethoscopes and examination cameras. It features workflows for more than 40 clinical specialties, including telestroke and telebehavioral health.
The acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, was announced at this week’s American Telemedicine Association meeting in Chicago.
Ido Schoenberg, M.D., chairman and CEO of American Well, noted that Avizia’s team has built world-class solutions that complement his company’s offerings. “Our merger will allow us to create the most comprehensive solution for our clients: an exceptional, singular, end-to-end offering,” he said in a prepared statement.
In a 2017 interview with Healthcare Informatics, Mike Baird, Avizia’s CEO, said that one big challenge for his company was to work closely with different EHR vendors to try to make its solution as integrated as possible with the workflows in the hospital. “If we are going to try to mirror an in-person experience in the digital world, that means we have to fit in very tightly with how that in-person experience is evolving—we need to know the way doctors are doing their jobs when it comes to any use case,” he said.
