Telemedicine

InTouch Health will acquire telehealth provider TruClinic

InTouch Health, a Santa Barbara, California-based company offering telehealth services, has entered an agreement to acquire TruClinic, a Salt Lake City-based telemedicine provider.

telemedicine, telehealth, telecare, doctor, technology

InTouch Health, a Santa Barbara, California-based company offering telehealth services, has entered an agreement to acquire TruClinic, a Salt Lake City-based telemedicine provider.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Through the acquisition, InTouch will add TruClinic’s software to its offering. Thus, patients at home will be able to have a telehealth visit with their own physician.

From the health system perspective, the combined solution will allow hospitals to use their own physicians or InTouch’s national network of contracted physicians to offer virtual care to patients.

In an emailed response to questions, InTouch CEO Joe DeVivo elaborated on what the agreement will mean for his company.

“By combining the TruClinic virtual clinic software with our existing high acuity solutions, health systems and providers can now follow a patient from the emergency department to the ICU to home, or offer a virtual urgent care service or specialty clinic, further solidifying patient-physician relationships and integrating care across the continuum,” he said.

DeVivo added that for TruClinic, nothing will change in the short term. But ultimately, patients wanting to use telehealth will gain access via InTouch Health’s platform.

As TruClinic founder and CEO Justin Kahn noted:

TruClinic allows healthcare providers to stand up a virtual clinic that conforms to their own unique workflows. TruClinic’s software is easy to use, affordable and scalable — which allows our customers to use the technology to conform to any use case, workflow or subset of patients. We are thrilled to become part of InTouch Health to provide a comprehensive option to customers looking to expand into direct-to-consumer solutions.

The history behind this deal has to do with InTouch noticing a gap in services for health systems. The acquisition presented a chance for the California company to expand its network.

“Health systems don’t want multiple platforms their clinicians and patients have to engage with,” DeVivo said. “Instead, they are asking for a single telehealth platform to emerge, and the acquisition of TruClinic allows InTouch Health to become that single platform partner and dramatically increase our reach.”

DeVivo declined to share details on the timeline of the deal, noting that the company hopes to wrap things up “in the very near future.”

News of this acquisition comes at the beginning of a hot year for telemedicine. According to the Center for Connected Health Policy, nine states — Arkansas, California, Colorado, Illinois, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington — have pieces of telehealth legislation that have taken or will take effect in 2018.

Photo: IAN HOOTON, Getty Images

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