Seven years after it bought PatientKeeper, HCA is selling the physician workflow business to healthcare technology startup Commure. The two companies, both of which are focused on solving challenges with interoperability, plan to close the deal at the end of the month.
“When the digitization of healthcare came about, it was supposed to help us with our workflows and make our lives better so we could spend more time with patients. But as you’ve seen over the last few years, everybody talks about burnout,” said Commure President Dr. Ashwini Zenooz, who recently joined the company after being chief medical officer for Salesforce. “We really need to focus on the provider experience as we think about interoperability, because it’s not just sharing data, it’s how do you share data in a way that’s useful.”
Commure has a FHIR-based developer platform, which makes it easier for health systems to build and deploy their own healthcare applications. It was founded in 2017 as a portfolio company of General Catalyst.
PatientKeeper, meanwhile, has been around since 1996. Its software is currently in use at more than 2,000 HCA locations, and lets physicians view relevant results all in one place, tailored to their specialty. They can also place orders and send secure messages from its platform.
The acquisition would combine PatientKeeper’s technology to streamline physician workflows with Commure’s capabilities for building healthcare applications.
“They have 20 years of this deep knowledge of how to work with healthcare IT. You bring a newer company like us which is focused on the modern tech stack and bring a company that has so much depth on working with providers and optimization of the provider tools,” Zenooz said. “To us, this redefines our tech stack and what we’ll be bringing to the market. That was really exciting.”
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.
PatientKeeper will still keep its name and leadership, with its CEO, Phil Meer, reporting to Commure’s CEO. They’ll initially operate as two entities before starting to combine some of their offerings. The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal, but HCA will keep a minority stake in the combined company and a spot on its board of directors.
“PatientKeeper in the last 6-plus years as owned by HCA has grown tremendously, in the way we support the 12,0000-plus HCA physicians a month that are using our mobile solutions alone,” Meer said. “HCA will continue to be our largest customer and have a large stake in the success of Commure. We expect to continue the momentum we built with HCA as we proceed with the acquisition.”
The deal is expected to close on August 31.
Photo credit: mediaphotos, Getty Images
