Health IT, Patient Engagement

Allscripts pays $60M for care coordination startup supporting mobile communication for care teams, patients

On a conference call detailing the company's first-quarter earnings this year, Allscripts President Richard Poulton said the HealthGrid acquisition is intended to enhance the company's patient engagement services with the larger goal of supporting value-based care

Allscripts snapped up digital health business HealthGrid for $60 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The business seeks to give patients and their caregivers a window into each step of care coordination that’s designed to be more accessible than a traditional patient portal. It’s also designed to improve communication between members of a patient’s care team across acute care and ambulatory care.

HealthGrid CEO Raj Toleti claimed in a press release in February that the company had revenue growth of 70 percent last year. The company also claimed to have more than 15,000 providers across over 350 facilities serving millions of patients.

HealthGrid was cofounded by brothers Raj and Chakri Toleti. The original thinking behind the company’s apps was to satisfy Meaningful Use Stage 2 requirements, a program that’s being revamped under the Trump administration. 

One app, Care Narrative, transmits a summary of care between providers. It also offers a snapshot of a patient’s condition and provides a way for healthcare professionals to communicate about patient care by letting them create and exchange notes within the app. It also delivers a patient summary of care records during referrals.

CareNotify updates patient families with information such as patient schedules, medication lists, nutritional updates and educational content. Patients can also gain access to their care summaries. Patients and families can access discharge instructions on mobile devices.

On a conference call detailing the company’s first-quarter earnings this year, Allscripts President Richard Poulton said the HealthGrid acquisition is intended to enhance the company’s patient engagement services with the larger goal of supporting value-based care, according to a transcript of the conference call from Seeking Alpha. 

We expect to tightly integrate the HealthGrid capabilities into our FollowMyHealth platform, adding functionality that would enable providers to reach 100 percent of their patient populations by leveraging existing patient contact information rather than requiring patients to sign up for the portal…Once integrated with FollowMyHealth, we believe the platform will have the broadest reach of pre-encounter, during encounter and post-encounter patient engagement opportunities in the entire industry. Since most of our EHR clients use FollowMyHealth today, we see a meaningful opportunity to grow with this expanded offering.

Allscripts CEO Paul Black added in response to analyst questions that what’s critical about HealthGrid’s approach is that it reaches patients and caregivers where they are through their mobile phones.

“One of the things we bought into, was the usage of this technology in combination with a portal. So, standalone texting is much more highly used. And therefore, that’s a big piece of the patient engagement strategy that all of the CEOs that we talked to want to deploy.”

has been adding several different health IT services to its EHRs such as non-emergency medical transportation through a partnership with Lyft, telehealth through Vidyo, identify clinical trials appropriate for patients through the integration of Elligo Health Research’s tools. But the company has also shown an interest in making acquisitions. Earlier this year it acquired Practice Fusion, a deal not without some controversy.

Photo: maxsattana, Getty Images

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