Another shot has been fired in the burgeoning arms race in health IT big data. The latest salvo comes from Persivia, a nascent precision-medicine and analytics firm run by the founders of Alere Analytics.
Tuesday, Lowell, Massachusetts-based Persivia said it has purchased clinical intelligence provider IHM Services Co., of nearby Burlington, Massachusetts, to give the buyer access to the hospital market.
“They are very complementary to us,” Persivia CEO Mansoor Khan said of IHM. “They focus on hospitals, and Persivia focuses more on ambulatory,” he told MedCity News.
The combined entity boasts about 75 hospital customers and more than 15,000 physician users, according to Persivia. Khan said that Persivia will be migrating IHM capabilities onto its own cloud-based platform over the next several months.
The initial push for Persivia will be in population health management, but Khan has an eye on precision medicine as genomics and proteomics take hold. The IHM acquisition helps the company bridge the care gap between hospital and ambulatory facilities.
“You have to be able to address the needs of the inpatient and the outpatient,” Khan told MedCity News.
Khan and his wife, Dr. Fauzia Khan, launched Persevia in May, shortly before acquiring clinical decision support and population health management vendor Alere Analytics from parent company Alere Inc. The Khans founded Alere Analytics predecessor DiagnosisOne in 1999.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The news of this acquisition comes a day after Qualcomm Life announced its purchase of medical device and health IT integrator Capsule Technologie and less than two weeks after IT giants Salesforce and IBM upped the competition level in data integration and advanced analytics.
Persivia also seems to be going head-to-head with the well-funded NantHealth, helmed by multibillionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong.
“From a marketing point of view, we have a lot of competition,” Khan acknowledged. But he expressed the belief that his company has a deeper and broader platform, as well as more experience, than the other, presumably richer, competitors.
Plus, the market for big data-fueled population health services appears to be wide open. “There’s a lot of room for a lot of players right now,” Khan said. “The ability to dominate one or more of these pockets is open to a lot of people.”
Khan said to expect Persivia to put a lot of energy into helping providers manage the transition to bundled payments and other value-driven reimbursement systems.
Photo: Vimeo user MedicExchange
