Iris Telehealth, a behavioral health company, has acquired telepsychiatry provider innovaTel, the companies announced on Tuesday.
Austin, Texas-based Iris Telehealth partners with hospitals, health systems and community organizations (like community health centers and federally qualified health centers) to help them deliver behavioral health services. The company connects organizations with behavioral health providers in their community, provides expertise to improve their mental health programs, and offers ongoing support to ensure their telepsychiatry solutions are sustainable. Its partners include Geisinger and Trinity Health of New England.
InnovaTel, meanwhile, is a division of Quartet Health, a value-based behavioral healthcare enablement company. InnovaTel also works with healthcare organizations to recruit and retain telepsychiatry clinicians, create telebehavioral health solutions with tight budgets, and improve telepsychiatry clinician efficiency and productivity. Its partners include primary care organizations, outpatient facilities and certified community behavioral health clinics.
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By acquiring innovaTel, Iris Telehealth will now employ over 650 clinicians, according to Andy Flanagan, CEO of Iris Telehealth. He added that he’s been wanting to make this deal for about four years now.
“InnovaTel has been a colleague in our space for 10 years,” he said in an interview. “I met their founding team on my first day as CEO. They serve many of the same states: they’re in 38, we’re in 45. [They have the] same licensure type, same patient journeys, same focus on the same segment of the market. They’re a strong company. We’re a strong company, profitable, cash flow positive, large and growing quickly. This is really a story about two strong companies coming together.”
Quartet Health CEO Christina Mainelli added in a statement that “with a clinically-led, physician-owned organization like Iris Telehealth, our partners and patients will have even greater access to the sustainable, long-term care that they have come to expect. The combined organization will offer a full spectrum of high-quality behavioral health services, suited to meet the needs of nearly any patient seeking virtual care.”
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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The acquisition comes as the country faces a severe behavioral health crisis. Almost 160 million Americans live in areas with a shortage of mental health providers, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration.
By acquiring innovaTel, Iris Telehealth ultimately hopes to scale access to behavioral health support, Flanagan stated.
“We are partnering with some of the largest health systems in the country to transform behavioral health at large, across all of their patient panels. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of patients and that kind of scale for behavioral health has never really been done,” he declared. “Bringing in innovaTel moves us closer to that vision and those contracts that we have underway today because we get scale. Scale is important. It allows for efficiency. This is really about moving behavioral health up like oncology, up like cardiology, where it’s a well-performing priority.”
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