A Baltimore County health care payment management company has acquired a Nashville artificial intelligence firm as part of a push to integrate A.I. into health care financing.
Cockeysville's TREND Health Partners, whose clients include Johns Hopkins Medicine, MedStar Health and LifeBridge Health, paid an undisclosed amount for Tennessee's Advent Health Partners. The acquisition will give TREND the opportunity to use artificial intelligence to review medical records to make claims denials management, bill reviews and other parts of the medical system easier, company officials said in announcing the deal on Dec. 15. Advent's platform CAVO is focused on the health care reimbursement industry.
Financial services firm William Blair & Co. served as the financial adviser and Tampa Bay law firm Holland & Knight LLP acted as legal counsel to TREND during the deal. TREND Health Partners is backed by California private equity firm Lone View Capital.
The Advent acquisition is not the first time TREND has used acquisitions to add A.I. technology. The company this year also acquired PrecisionGx, a Philadelphia company that uses the technology to automatically review health care claims for inaccurate payments.
TREND works with over 750 hospitals and 50 health insurance plans to resolve credit balances, occasions where the provider or insurance company overcharges for a service or when there is some other error in the health care billing process. These credit balances are relatively common, with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reporting billions of dollars in improper payments a year. TREND identifies and fixes these mistakes to make sure health care providers receive the correct payment for providing services and make sure insurance companies are not overcharged.
“Rarely do you come across two companies with such complementary capabilities and aligned visions as what we found with TREND and Advent. CAVO will help us extend our existing platform, TRENDConnect, to solve an even broader set of challenges for our payer and provider clients," TREND CEO Sarah Armstrong said in a written statement. "We are very excited to welcome the Advent team into our organization,”
TREND's efforts to increase its A.I. capabilities are timely. The Greater Baltimore Committee is hoping to attract and start more companies that blend the A.I. and health care through Baltimore’s status as a federal tech hub.
