Jacksonville-based health care technology company Availity has been working for 20 years to reduce friction in the health care payments and administrative space.
To that end, it recently announced its intention to acquire Farmington, Connecticut-based Diameter Health, a clinical data quality and interoperability technology company.
While Availity continues to focus on reducing inefficiency in the health care system by connecting health care providers and payers — a process to which end Availity brings enormous amounts of data into its network — Diameter’s technology will make this process even more efficient by standardizing, de-duplicating and structuring the data.
“Clinical data is tremendously valuable, but the ability to [structure and standardize] clinical data, and further enrich and deploy that data to drive action is still an emerging capability in health care,” Diameter COO Mary Lantin said in a statement. “Diameter Health is a leader in unlocking clinical data’s full potential.”
With the data having been run through Diameter’s technology, it can then be implemented by the relevant parties’ workflows in an automated fashion, which eliminates much of the need for humans to spend time manually sifting through and organizing the raw data themselves.
To give a sense of scale for Availity’s data collection, CEO Russ Thomas said the company processes about 13 billion medical transactions a year, which comes to over $2 trillion of billed claims every year through the network.
“We’re really good at drilling for oil,” Thomas said, referring to Availity’s ability to bring vast amounts of data into its network. “But we don’t have a refinery. We just bought a refinery.”
The Diameter acquisition also complements Availity’s growth strategy, he said, which has involved investing in and achieving good organic growth over the last few years.
The new acquisition also comes just six months after Availity announced its partnership with the fast-growing Columbus, Ohio-based health tech company PriorAuthNow, which specializes in speeding up the process of getting insurer sign-off on authorizations for hospital procedures and prescriptions — a laborious process still dependent on phone calls and faxes.
With $281 billion in administrative waste in the U.S. health care system, according to a study published in January 2021 in the New England Journalism of Medicine (JEJM) Journal Watch, Thomas said there is still immense work to be done in “automat[ing] broken, dysfunctional healthcare processes.”
While precise terms of the deal were not disclosed, Thomas said the Diameter acquisition has a price tag between $100 million and $500 million. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2022.
